One of the country's most bizarre yet relatively unknown criminals just got sprung from prison today after nearly fifty years behind bars:
[T]he last of the imprisoned kidnappers in the July 1976 [Chowchilla bus kidnapping], a crime partly inspired by a climactic plot element in the movie "Dirty Harry," has been granted parole.
A panel of the California Board of Parole Hearings voted last week to approve the parole application of Frederick Woods, Dana Simas, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said in an email on Tuesday.
It was the 17th time that Mr. Woods, 70, had sought his release since pleading guilty for his role in the kidnapping, which generated intense television coverage across the United States.
The Chowchilla incident was perhaps the most bizarre and ridiculous crime of the 20th century. If you've never heard of it, Vox (yes, Vox) ran a fantastic retrospective of the whole affair last year:
When [the bus driver] turns onto Avenue 21, he sees a white '71 Dodge van blocking the road with its door open.
He tries to weave around the empty van when a guy in overalls with pantyhose covering his face jumps out in front of the bus with a revolver. The man walks to the driver's side window and asks Ed, with no intimidation in his voice, "Would you open the door, please?" Ed opens it
Two more identically dressed figures jump in, one with a rifle, which is quickly pointed at Ed. Everybody goes to the back of the bus. The one without a rifle starts to drive, and the one with the revolver hops in the van to follow them. They drive about a mile and park the bus in a bamboo thicket. Nobody's yelling. It's so calm, it's violent. Twelve kids are ushered into the white van. Ray and the other 14 kids get into the back of a second van, this one green. There's a partition behind the driver's seat and the windows are sealed. It's hotter than hell, and pitch black. Some of the kids sing songs to cheer up, like "If You're Happy And You Know It" and "Boogie Fever" and "Get Down Tonight."
Trust me---the story gets even more incomprehensibly weird as it goes on. The kidnappers hid the kids inside a buried truck at a quarry, but couldn't call in their ransom demands that night because the phone lines were too jammed by parents and the media. By the time they woke up the next morning, the children had managed to free themselves!
The kidnappers, meanwhile, all went to prison for a long time.
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