Incident at Beban's Coral

The foolish young men who in 1976 kidnapped a bus load of twenty-six school children and their bus driver, and locked them all in a buried truck body were, it was said, planning to use the five million dollar ransom to finance a movie project.  The really sad thing is that what they did, how the kids escaped, and how the idiots were captured really was the movie.  I covered the story for the San Francisco Examiner from the first day so in a way I was in the movie too.  

Press Conference after Children Escaped

The kidnapped bus was from Chowchilla, California, a small agricultural town in the Central Valley.  So when the first kidnapper was arrested, the fine newspaper I worked for sent me back to Chowchilla to cover his arraignment, the first court appearance of the many that would send him to prison where he spent more than thirty-five years.

So, in Chowchilla, waiting for the alleged to arrive from his first cell a couple of hours drive away.  Spent that wait with my pal Wayne King at Beban’s Coral, a bar on Robertson Blvd, the main drag of Chowchilla.  Wayne worked for the New York Times, usually in Atlanta, but he’d been in San Francisco for a bit helping out and we’d covered stories together before.  So we were sitting at the bar mostly, and then Wayne went to the back to use the pay phone and I was sitting at the bar by myself.

Face of a Contract Killer?

And a another guy from the bar moved to my end and sat next to me, leaned over, and offered me a thousand dollars to kill the alleged kidnapper’s lawyer.

   

Now a word about this poor, dusty, little town. The five million dollar ransom the kidnappers had apparently planned to extort for the lives of the 26 children and one bus driver was insane.  There wasn’t close to that much money total anywhere around and never had been.  The thousand dollars this guy would give me for a murder was a lot of money in Chowchilla.  The local reasoning was that the three kidnappers, now known to be from the sophisticated Bay Area, would probably get themselves expensive lawyers and get away with their crime, skate on kidnapping and terrorizing 26 children and the bus driver from their town.  This was in fact not a particularly far fetched idea and might have occurred to any American who watched TV news or knew a bit about the inequities of our system of criminal justice.  Anyway, in Chowchilla they expected the worst and this guy and his friends were trying to head it off with a thousand dollars to assassinate the expensive lawyer.

Well, now.  One does not know what to say.  I got my stuff together off the bar and went outside.  Wow.  

Shortly Wayne King followed and I told him about the thousand dollars and the thinking behind it and Wayne said I had immediately to tell the Chowchilla police.

A word about the 1970s.  Generally speaking around this time relations between reporters and police were, with exceptions, tense.  The cops didn’t much like us and we didn’t much trust them.  Certainly, and with good personal reason, I did not like police.

So I was hesitant about crossing the line and telling the Chowchilla police about the offer in Beban’s Coral.  Wayne, who had plenty of reasons to be suspicious of police himself, was, however, without hesitation.  I remember exactly what he said.  “No. No. No.  Where I come from, this is exactly how it happens.  He’ll find somebody drunk enough and they’ll do it.”  Wayne was from the US South where targeted homicide was more common than in my world.  So he kind of marched me to the Chowchilla police station where I told Chief Brown the main points of the story I’ve just told you.  He thanked me.

And nobody killed Attorney Bill Gagen, or as far as I know even tried to.  And Gagen, who was (and is) in fact an expensive lawyer, no doubt did his best for his client.  However, as I said, he was convicted anyway.  All three of the kidnappers were sentenced to life in prison.