Word: chowchilla
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...Richard Schoenfeld, turned himself in to authorities in Oakland. But the other two men were still missing. Also missing was a clear motive for the bizarre crime that prompted the police sweep-the kidnaping two weeks ago of 26 schoolchildren and their bus driver from the sunbaked town of Chowchilla...
...captives were driven 100 miles from Chowchilla to a quarry in Livermore, Calif. There three kidnapers wearing stocking masks forced their victims down a small tunnel into a buried 25-ft.-long moving van. Sixteen hours later the prisoners dug themselves out. The elder Woods-who was cooperating fully with investigators-owns the California Rock & Gravel Co., site of the quarry where the mass abduction ended. On his estate, 29 miles distant, police found a virtual junkyard-100 vehicles, including several wrecked police cars, a fire engine, assorted trucks and vans, and a tractor that could have been used...
California authorities quickly rejected several other suggested motives for the bus hijacking. They found it inconceivable that Ed Ray, a kindly, well-liked man who had been driving buses in Chowchilla for 26 years and had hauled many of the parents of the missing children, could be involved. Police also discarded the notion that a lone psychopath could control 27 captives. There was nothing to indicate that somebody bearing a grudge was responsible. Finally, police concluded that no ransom demand was likely to be received. In Chowchilla, a town of 4,550 in the midst of citrus orchards, dairy farms...
Around 7:30 the following evening, 24 hours after the empty bus had been found, a startled watchman at a gravel quarry near Livermore, 100 miles northwest of Chowchilla, saw a bedraggled group-all in their underwear-approaching him. The kidnaping victims had been found, and all were well...
...next morning, a red, white and blue Greyhound bus escorted by two highway patrol cars wheeled into Chowchilla with the 26 weary pupils and their driver. A couple of hundred joyous parents, friends and reporters greeted them with cheers, whistles and applause. Meanwhile, the police issued bulletins for three white males traveling in two vans...