Parole granted to last Chowchilla school bus hijacker Frederick Woods
CBSN
The last of three men convicted of hijacking a school bus full of California children for an attempted $5 million ransom in 1976 in what a prosecutor called "the largest mass kidnapping in U.S. history" is being released by the state's parole board.
Gov. Gavin Newsom asked the board to reconsider its decision to parole Frederick Woods, 70, on Tuesday after two commissioners recommended his release in March when previous panels had denied him parole 17 times. But the board affirmed that decision. The governor couldn't block Woods' release because he's not convicted of murder, and could only urge the parole board to take a closer look.
Woods and his two accomplices, brothers Richard and James Schoenfeld, were from wealthy San Francisco Bay Area families when they kidnapped 26 children and their bus driver near Chowchilla, about 125 miles southeast of San Francisco.
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