zodiac and chowchilla

Zodiac and Chowchilla

If you partake of any media source whatsoever, then you know that a

movie called "Zodiac" about the Bay Area's Zodiac killer opened

yesterday. That was (is?) one creepy guy. Killing five people and then

sending the newspapers encoded messages about it. Threatening to shoot

up a schoolbus. Talking about how there should be a movie about him.

Never getting caught.

It is little wonder that there is still a lot of interest in the case

something like 35 years after the last murder. There always has been.

When I was in high school, my group of friends discovered that one of

the San Francisco police officers who had worked on the case had

retired to run a trailer park in my home town. One of my friends used

to say that he wanted to call the guy up and say "This is the Zodiac

speaking." Luckily, we never did that. Wow, we would have been working

that karma off for a long time.

One of the things that I have found interesting about all of the

Zodiac hype lately is that the director remembers being a kid in Marin

County and having his bus evacuated one day because people were

worried about the Zodiac. That's something that will stick with you. I

think that everyone has something like that, some crime or disaster

that you heard about when you were a kid that imprinted itself on your

brain and still gives you the heebie-jeebies when you think about it.

My thing is the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. You probably know something

about this, but, basically, one day in 1976 or 1977, three young guys

from wealthy Bay Area families stopped a school bus with about 20 kids

in it at gunpoint and forced the driver to drive the bus to a quarry

in the outer Bay Area where they had some kind of container thing

buried underground where they shut up the driver and the kids. They

then demanded a big ransom. The whole thing fell apart quickly, with

the bus driver and some of the older kids figuring out how to escape

not long after the kidnappers made the first ransom call. The

kidnappers got caught pretty quickly, are still in prison and seem

pretty unlikely to ever get out.

This scared the S**T out me when I was a kid. I used to ride the bus

to school through the fields every day. Being a kid, I thought this

could happen any time. It didn't, of course. Anywhere, to the best of

my knowledge. That being said, when I drive through Chowchilla on

Highway 99, I think of the bus kidnapping every single time. It's so

strong a memory that I don't even think of the time that I had to stop

in Chowchilla because The Mermaid got sick and needed to throw up.

Wow, that was fun. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, the bus

kidnapping is so imbedded in my mind that I always think of that