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 instead.