Las Vegan Mike Marshall remembers his role helping children escape the terrifying Chowchilla kidnapping

Lisa Ferguson

Thursday, July 15, 1999 | 9:51 a.m.

Did he or didn't he?

It's the question that has trailed Las Vegan Mike Marshall for more than two decades.

Was he -- on July 15, 1976, at age 14 -- responsible for conceiving and implementing a plan that saved the lives of 25 youngsters who, along with himself and a school bus driver, were buried alive for more than a dozen hours in a moving-van trailer by a trio of gun-toting kidnappers in Chowchilla, Calif.?

Or should credit have gone to the school bus driver, Ed Ray, who reportedly helped Marshall and some of the other boys execute the escape?

The debate continues today, 23 years after the much-publicized crime landed the small, central-California farming community in the media spotlight.

In the first few years following the kidnapping Marshall -- a longtime rodeo rider who these days divides his time between his home in East Las Vegas and a construction job in Phoenix -- couldn't have cared less whether his heroics were lauded.

But as time passes, and peoples' queries about the events of the kidnapping continue, 37-year-old Marshall wonders if the truth will ever be known.

"I thought during the years that it really didn't bother me," he says by phone from Phoenix.

Having competed on the professional rodeo circuit from 1980-92 (and being the son of rodeo rider Bob Marshall), he says people in that industry were familiar with his story as a victim of the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping.

But occasionally news programs and magazines will profile Ray, who subsequently purchased the Dairyland School bus involved in the kidnapping.

"They'd see (Ray) on some tabloid show and they'd say, 'They didn't even mention (Marshall's) name,' " he says.

To hear Marshall tell his version of the events -- he was the subject of a People magazine profile and a feature on NBC's "Dateline" this spring -- it would seem the then-teenager took it upon himself to bring the schoolchildren, Ray and himself back alive.

The abduction

It's ironic that Marshall wasn't even supposed to ride the bus home from summer school that day. But that was the punishment ordered for him by his mother (who usually picked him up from school) after she caught him and a friend sneaking beers the night before.

"I remember I didn't even know what bus to get on," Marshall says.

He ran over to one of the buses and recognized the driver as Ray, whom Marshall says was also a Chowchilla farmer. Most of his passengers were between the ages of 4 and 10.

"I asked him if he could drop me off and he said, 'Hop on.' "

After dropping off a few of the children, the bus continued on its way down the small town's roads before encountering a white van parked on a center divider, partially blocking the road.

Ray slowed the bus down to go around the van, Marshall says, "and the guy stepped out" wearing a nylon stocking over his head and carrying a sawed-off shotgun.

Ray stopped the bus. Another man, also wearing a stocking and brandishing a gun, emerged from the back of the van "and told the bus driver ... to open the door and go to the back of the bus. Then they hopped on and they told everybody in the first three or four seats to go to the back of the bus."

The kidnappers, it was later learned, were Fredrick N. Woods and brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld, all in their early- to mid-20s, who came from well-to-do San Francisco Bay area families.

The bus started rolling again, followed by the van. The kidnappers ran the bus into a slough, a marshy area that was shrouded by tall bamboo, obscuring it from view. There, another van, into which half of the children were later loaded, was waiting.

After driving around for about 11 hours, both vehicles arrived at a Livermore, Calif., rock quarry owned by Woods' family, about 100 miles from Chowchilla. There, the kidnappers had buried a moving-van trailer where they planned to hold the children hostage while trying to secure a $5 million ransom.

Marshall says he was the last of the children to be removed from the van.

"That was probably the hardest part for me right there because all of these little kids were clinging on to me, wanting their mommy and stuff, and I didn't know what was going on when they'd take these kids out, if I'd ever see them again," he says.

The kidnappers "asked me my name, age, phone number, who my mom and dad were, stuff like that," and took a piece of clothing (in his case, a cap) from each child and Ray.

Marshall says he, like the others, was lowered by ladder through a hole in the roof of the trailer. He experienced "a glorified feeling of happiness climbing down in that hole because I saw those other kids." Up to that point, "I didn't know what was happening to them. I'd had visions of (the kidnappers) taking them into the woods and doing away with them."

After he was inside the ladder was "jerked" from the hole, which was then covered with what he calls "an iron plate" which was secured with a pair of truck batteries. A makeshift plywood box was placed over those, topping off what Marshall estimates to have been a couple feet of rock and dirt.

The escape

For all the children and Ray knew, they had been left to die.

Marshall says the 27 victims were forced to rely on a single air vent. Some rations -- water and a bit of food -- and a few mattresses and box springs and a pair of crude toilets were provided. Meanwhile the trailer's roof began to collapse from the weight that had been placed upon it.

As Marshall tells it, "The bus driver totally freaked out. He told me it looked like we were gonna have to stay down there and kick the bucket. ... I noticed he wasn't handling the situation very good, but I thought, 'Well, if this guy thinks we're gonna kick the bucket, what the heck am I doing down here?' "

At that point, Marshall says, he kicked apart one of the box springs and used pieces of its wooden frame to wedge up the iron plate covering the hole far enough to get his fingers around it and move it out of the way. Then he claims to have moved the truck batteries and crawled inside the plywood box (actually five pieces of wood that were not nailed together).

Using a piece of wood, he dug at the plywood until he created a hole; dirt began falling down the sides and inside the trailer. He figures the process took six or seven hours.

"I didn't know where I was going or what I was doing," he recalls. "... And the whole time, the bus driver is yelling, 'Pretty please, don't hurt him, pretty please, don't hurt him. He don't know what he's doing.' He thought (the kidnappers) were still up there."

Marshall thought they might have been, too. "I didn't really know what I was doing but I figured it was better than doing nothing. God, you know, Jesus or whatever gave me the power," he says.

All the while, he says, the other children cheered him on, saying, "Go Mike. You can do it, Mike."

Larry Park, 6 at the time, was one of them. He was on the bus that day with his 8-year-old sister, Andrea.

"Mike was the one (who) initially started digging. Mike was the one (who) took the initiative," Park, now 29 and living near California's Yosemite National Park, says.

Marshall says he was finally able to move the the top panel of the box enough to get his fingers underneath it and lift it up, exposing the group once again to the outside world.

"I didn't even hesitate, I just stuck my head up through (the hole) and (saw that) we were in the mountains," he says. "There were trees and stuff. It was great not seeing anybody there, too."

Soon after, he says, Ray began handing him the children from the trailer. After they were all outside, Ray came up through the hole and pulled Marshall out last.

As the rest of the group headed toward the rock quarry, Marshall says he ran into the nearby woods. "I thought, 'Everybody's out, but if these guys are hanging around here, and if they're gonna get them, at least I'll be free to get some help or whatever.' "

Marshall says he stayed in the woods for about 30 minutes, until he saw police helicopters and SWAT officers approaching, and figured it was safe to join the others.

So, what exactly was Ray's role in the mechanics of the escape?

According to Park, "Ed Ray was pretty much a lost cause" inside the trailer. "He basically had his head in his hands and was pretty much mumbling to himself, saying we were gonna die. He didn't give us much of a chance, really."

Ray denied such claims in a People magazine article earlier this year. Sarcastically, he said, "Oh yeah, (Marshall) done it all, I cried boo-hoo and didn't do nothing." (Attempts to reach Ray for comment for this article were unsuccessful.)

Park admits, "Once Mike started making some headway Ed Ray joined in. I guess in his own right, Ed Ray is kind of a hero, because without him we probably never could have gotten the (iron plate) up high enough for Mike to scoot the batteries off of it. He was there towards the end of it with Mike."

Still, "If it wasn't for Mike, we'd probably still be down there," he says. "Mike's my hero."

San Francisco psychologist Dr. Lenore Terr has interviewed most of the Chowchilla kidnapping victims as part of an on-going study, the results of which are scheduled to be released in two years, on the 25th anniversary of the crime. She also penned a book, "Too Scared to Cry" (Basic Books, 1992), about the subject.

Terr says that during her interviews the children were "virtually unanimous in mentioning two boys, Mike Marshall being the leader of those boys, who dug them out and who got the idea of digging them out." (She did not divulge the name of the second boy.)

The aftermath

"When I look back on it," Marshall says, "I just kind of knew everything was going to be OK. I didn't really have that feeling until I went down in that hole, and you think it'd be the opposite. But when I got down there, it was like I was connected with God."

While in the trailer, Marshall says, "I didn't know if I was gonna live or not ... but I remember I wasn't afraid of dying." He was most upset by the thought of not being able to have a few final words with his family. "That's all I really wanted to do was say goodbye."

When the children and Ray arrived safely back in Chowchilla -- some 30 hours after they had been abducted -- they found themselves in the midst of a media frenzy. Reporters from throughout the country had converged on the town and tied up phone lines so that even the kidnappers had been unable to place a call to demand their ransom.

The media, Marshall says, "jumped on me and I started telling them what happened." But, he says, the Dairyland School's principal, Lee Roy Tatom, and Marshall's father quickly called them off.

Marshall instead spent the next few days retelling his tale to FBI officials. "It was kind of weird because they didn't really want to talk to anyone else, just me."

But as soon as his interrogation was through Marshall says he headed out of town with his father -- passing on the town picnic and trip to Disneyland that were awarded to the other kidnapping victims.

A press conference was held the day after the kidnapping victims returned, where Ray explained the events to reporters. Tatom oversaw the gathering.

"That's the time that Ed explained what happened, but I don't remember him telling (reporters) that he was the one responsible" for orchestrating the escape, Tatom says. "I don't recall Ed saying, 'I did this' or 'I did that.' "

In fact, Tatom says "there's no doubt in my mind that Ed Ray" was responsible for the executing the escape.

"They type of person he is, the man that he is ... it took a lot of power and a lot of muscles to do such" heavy lifting, Tatom says. While he doesn't doubt the children helped in the escape, he says, "I think because of Ed Ray that things came out a lot better than if an adult had not been there."

Marshall says it seemed like the media "ran with this Ed Ray thing without even finding out what happened. It was like there was nothing I could really do."

So he did what he could: He tried to forget. "I don't know, I didn't think anybody really cared," he says.

Later that month one of the kidnappers turned himself in and the others were caught in California and Canada. They were each sentenced to life in prison.

After graduating high school in Chowchilla Marshall traveled the rodeo circuit and won cash prizes and titles in the United States and Canada in calf- and team-roping and steer wrestling events.

It was during his rodeo days that he was approached by the family of one of the kidnappers: They wanted Marshall to appear before the parole board on the kidnapper's behalf.

"They thought I might be the deciding factor," in whether or not parole would be granted, he says. "But I thought to myself, 'what they put me through was hard enough, but what they put my family through, as far as I'm concerned, I don't care what they do with those guys. ... They made a stupid mistake ... and they're gonna have to pay for it.' "

(James Schoenfeld, now 47, was recently denied parole for the 11th time by the parole board at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Richard Schoenfeld will be eligible for parole again in September.)

Marshall continued competing in rodeos after moving to Las Vegas 17 years ago. Since then he's also dealt blackjack at the Stardust and the now-defunct Landmark hotel-casinos, tended bar at a pair of local taverns, worked for a plumbing company and fathered a daughter, 6-year-old Kasey, who also lives in Las Vegas.

Besides his current construction work, Marshall resurrected his rodeo career last year and is searching for a local sponsor to help further his endeavors in the sport.

He says he "very seldom" thinks about the kidnapping or his heroic efforts. His fiance, Sherry Bozek, recently reminded him: " 'You saved these kids' lives. They wouldn't be alive today' " if it wasn't for him.

"I don't think of myself as a hero at all," he says. "I think that God had me in (the trailer) for a reason, and anybody else probably would have done the same thing."

Nor does Marshall resent the attention Ray has received over the years for his reported role in the escape.

"It just kind of blows me away," he says. The kidnapping has been "like his whole life, and it was the last thing in my life that I wanted to remember. So, I figure one day he's gonna have to answer for it and I really try not to judge."

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