Politics & Government
Chowchilla Bus Kidnapper Paroled to Mountain View
Richard Schoenfeld is now 57, but his part in the bizarre 1978 case when he was 21 earned national noteriety.
In 1976, three young men from well-to-do families transfixed the nation with a bold and bizarre kidnapping scheme—abducting an entire school bus of 26 children and its driver.
Their "perfect crime" of quickly reaping $5 million in ransom with no one harmed unraveled spectacularly 36 hours after holding up the bus in the Central Valley, transporting children and driver more than 100 miles north in Livermore, and placing them inside a buried moving van in a rock quarry owned by one of the young men's parents.
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One of them, 21-year-old Richard Schoenfeld, is now a 57-year old man. He was paroled Wednesday and is living with his mother in Mountain View, the city announced Friday.
The crime was notorious, but Schoenfeld, whose older brother, James, is still held in prison for the crime, is not considered a high-risk offender by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the city's news release said. As a condition of his parole, Schoenfeld wears a GPS monitor 24 hours a day.
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Mayor Mike Kasperzak had this to say:
"The State and the courts have determined Mr. Schoenfeld no longer poses a threat to society. I am confident of our police department and know they will appropriately monitor him to ensure the safety of our community."
The Mountain View police department were in touch with parole agents over the past week in preparation for Schoenfeld's release, Mountain View Acting Police Chief Mick Hamlin said in the statement.
“The MVPD will continue to work closely with parole in monitoring Schoenfeld to ensure the safety of our community members,” Hamlin said in the release. Schoenfeld’s parole term is three years.
The city said that in keeping with standard procedures applied to all released parolees, the exact address where Schoenfeld will be living would not be released to the public.
A Mercury News reporter knocked on the door of a condominium in Mountain View and reported that Schoenfeld's mother declined to talk. At the time of the crime, Schoenfeld's older brother, James, and their friend, Frederick Woods, were from Atherton and Portola Valley. Woods has been described in some accounts as the one who goaded them into executing an idea that had been an elaborate exercise dreamed up by kids from well-to-do families. The rock quarry was owned by Woods' father at the time.
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