What happened to Chowchilla is the story of a generation-defining crime that briefly shook the world, and the ripple effects it had on the state’s heartland. It was a crime so perverse and unbelievable that it sounds like, for lack of a better phrase, utter bullshit. It’s hard to blame the town for sidelining it, because Chowchilla was not just the site of the largest kidnapping for ransom in American history, but also of one of the most idiotic crimes ever visited upon the state of California. It offers only a couple hundred words on the only interesting fact about Chowchilla to anyone without roots there. It talks about palm trees and the Chowchilla Pacific Railroad. The website also goes on to list things like cookouts everybody remembers and, you know, that time ol’ Larry won a pie-eating contest. Meanwhile, Hotel Chowchilla “suffered through several fires,” but held on long enough to become a furniture store. The first custom grain elevator in California was built there in 1916, but it eventually burned down, too, although the website doesn’t say when. It says there was an arch built there in 1913, but it burned down in 1937, possibly as a result of hobos. The official Chowchilla city website has an “Interesting Facts About Chowchilla” section. If you stand out in a field and squint, you can imagine a time not terribly long ago when there was just dust and a horizon line. It’s got a roadhouse where you can get a steak and whiskey, it’s got a pizza parlor, a taco stand, plenty of churches, and it’s real sleepy. These days, around 20,000 people live there. It mostly sprang up during the Great Depression because of Dust Bowl refugees heading west. Common in a good way, like an old country song. The median annual family income there is just over $6,800. It was a seven-hour drive that cost either $400 or $1,000, depending on who you heard it from. Months later, people could still remember the New York reporter who got off a plane in Los Angeles and took a cab to Chowchilla. To hear the people of Chowchilla tell it, the reporters and newsmen who descended on their quiet town treated the kidnapping like a winning lottery ticket, and they’d have trampled over their own mothers for a piece of the horrific and eminently marketable tragedy: 26 children and one adult man, vanished into thin air. Put 2 1/2 million dollars in each of the suitcases, total 5 millionįurther instructions pending until 10:05 PM Sunday The heartland, then as now, is almost a different state, with different fears. Fault lines are cracking all over the state, and Californians are bracing for “the big one.”īut all that is happening out in the cities, a million miles away from the inland farming town of Chowchilla, where our story takes place. Charles Manson has only been in prison for five years, and the Zodiac Killer is still at large. Whittier’s own President Richard Nixon has resigned and had to negotiate a pardon from his former vice president. Two years ago in Berkeley, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst. In recent years, California has become the national shorthand for sensationalism. In a rarity for summer in the Central Valley, a thunderstorm is rolling in, and lightning streaks are firing across the sky. It is the largest kidnapping ever in the United States. Parents keep an all-night vigil at the police station. Pac-Bell has brought 60 press phones and operators. The Salvation Army has brought a food truck from San Francisco. There are about 400 reporters, one for every 10 people in the whole town. Unidentified state trooper’s wife, 1976 People formed a search posse on horseback, and it was just a fear that we were going to find bodies.” “There was great fear of a serial killer. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him ĭo not fret because of him who prospers in his way,īecause of the man who carries out wicked schemes.
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