Governor won’t send back parole case of Chowchilla school bus hijacker

As the Chronicle reports, Schoenfeld, his brother, and a friend spent 18 months planning the crime; the trio hoped to get a $5 million ransom.

The governor was given until Thursday at midnight to decide whether to provide parole to 63-year-old James Schoenfeld or return the case to the board that endorsed his discharge.

Although the 26 children and their bus driver all survived the ransom plot, kidnapper James Schoenfeld, now 63, has been in prison for 37 years for the 1976 abduction in the Central California town of Chowchilla.

The hostages were taken from Chowchilla as they returned from a swimming trip and driven to a quarry near Livermore, where they were kept inside a partially-buried ventilated trailer filled with mattresses, food and water.

SACRAMENTO – The governor of California on Thursday allowed parole for one of three men convicted in the 1976 kidnapping of 26 children and their school bus driver who were held captive in a buried trailer. They eventually managed to dig their way out and escaped unhurt.

All three men were given life sentences after pleading guilty to kidnapping charges.

The panel recommended parole for Richard Schoenfeld in 2011 and he was released from prison in June 2012.

In April, victim Jennifer Brown Hyde, who was nine at the time of the kidnapping, told The Fresno Bee newspaper the men should not be released.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman Luis Patina said the prison agency has up to five days to process the departure of an inmate who’s being paroled but for security reasons it doesn’t disclose the exact time, date, or location of a parolee’s departure in advance. The third man convicted, Fred Woods, has not yet been granted parole.

The men left the bus camouflaged in a creek bed and drove the children and bus driver Ed Ray about 100 miles to the California Rock and Gravel Quarry in Livermore in Alameda County.