Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Kidnapped from trailer 12ft under way out ...but the
As they were being driven along, the 26 pupils burst into song. If You’re Happy And You Know It echoed around the van, as did their clapping.
But after almost 100 miles and more than 11 hours of driving, the lyrics changed to “If you’re sad and you know it...”
The children weren’t on a happy outing. They were terrified after becoming hostages in what would be known as America’s most notorious mass kidnapping – and singing to chase away the fear.
They were to be buried alive and certain they were facing death during the terrifying ordeal.
For decades they’ve all tried to put the experience behind them yet this week the group has been forced to relive those traumatic events of July 15, 1976 as the criminal mastermind behind it made a bid for parole.
On that summer day the schoolchildren – aged from five to 14 – had been enjoying an excursion to a swimming pool as part of their summer classes at Dairyland Elementary School, Chowchilla, in central California.
At 4pm the bus driver, Ed Ray, was forced to stop on a deserted dusty road outside of the farm town by three armed men.
The kidnappers, disguised with tights over their heads, ordered Ray, then 52, along with his passengers – seven boys and 19 girls – into two white vans before driving for hours north-west to a remote rock quarry west of Livermore.
During the journey, some of the terrified youngsters soiled themselves and threw up from motion sickness.
To help them, the older kids began the singing, belting out songs such as Love Will Keep Us Together and If You’re Happy And You Know It. It was an attempt to cheer them up but nothing could shake their growing sense of dread...
Speaking to the Daily Mirror, one of the victims, Larry Park, now 49, says: “At first we kids thought it might have been a joke carried out by some parents but it quickly turned to horror.
“One of the men had a doublebarrelled, sawn-off shotgun that he pointed at us. I remember that gun being pointed at me as though it was going to eat my soul.
“That’s when I realised it was very bad and very real. I have a nearphotographic memory, so there is nothing about the kidnapping that I don’t remember.”
Victim Jennifer Brown Hyde, who was nine at the time, said she “felt like an animal going to the slaughterhouse.”
After arriving at the quarry at around 3am, the hostages were marched at gunpoint into the trailer of a removal to demand £4million in ransom. The young hostages were forced to climb down a ladder into the trailer. Inside they found several stained, filthy mattresses and containers of water.
Meanwhile, above them, they heard their kidnappers throwing dirt over the trailer, along with two tractor batteries to keep the hatch shut. Ray and the children were being buried alive.
The men had equipped the trailer with battery-powered fans that sucked in fresh air but the stifling heat was still intense.
The children began wailing in the trailer’s oven-like temperatures. Driver Ed Ray tried to comfort them but he was crying too, convinced that the roof was going to cave in.
Ray, who died in 2012 aged 91, later said: “I remember children just screaming and crying. The sides of the van were bowing in. I knew that I was going to die. I knew it.”
Eventually, the oldest child, 14-yearold Michael Marshall, announced that he wasn’t going to die without putting up a fight.
So, he, Ray and the other older schoolboys began to stack the mattresses on top of each other.
They then climbed on top and used wooden slats to try to push away a steel plate on the roof of the van.
Working furiously in the overwhelming heat, the boys poured what little water they had left over their heads to fight heat exhaustion and kept pushing until the hatch was open, before digging away the earth so they could all escape.
Larry, who was then six, and with his sister, Andrea, then eight, says: “When we were placed underground there was terror, hopelessness. I remember wondering what it was going to be like to die. Soon, the sides of the van were buckling with the weight of the earth, as if they were caving in.
“I thought we were going to be crushed to death. I remember the darkness inside. There were a couple of flashlights but when they were off it was pitch black. I could taste the darkness it was so thick. It was horrifying. “Andrea prayed. We had grown up in church and she prayed non-stop. I helped the other kids dig us out. Michael was leading the digging. He