(FOX NEWS) – The third of three men convicted of hijacking a school bus full of children in Chowchilla, California, in 1976 – in what a prosecutor called “the largest mass kidnapping in U.S. history” — is being released by the state’s parole board.
The California parole board decided this week to release 70-year-old Frederick Woods, after two members recommended the move in March despite that previous panels had denied him parole 17 times.
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, Ed Ray, near Chowchilla in 1976. The town is about 125 miles from San Francisco.
