In the summer of 1976, a busload of children, together with their bus driver, Ed Ray, were kidnappedbus and allfrom a country road in Madera County in California. The abductors ditched the bus, hiding it in a drainage ditch nine miles west of Chowchilla. They drove the kidnap victims (19 girls,7 boys, and Ray) around for eleven hours in two vans, finally putting all of the children and the driver into a moving van that was buried in a rock quarry. The moving van was 8 feet by 16 feet.

After 16 hours underground, they dug their way out and were eventually found and returned to their homes in Chowchilla. Ed Ray was hypnotized and eventually was able to remember five of the six numbers on the license plate of one of the vans used in the abduction, which led to the arrest of three young men who were tried and found guilty. A draft of a ransom note had been found in the home of one of the young men along with other evidence tying them to the crime (Terr, 1981, 1983).

This case marked the increased interest of law enforcement personnel in the use of hypnosis as a tool for helping witnesses to remember crime details. Unfortunately, this case is the exception to the rule: memories recovered under hypnosis cannot be assumed to be accurate without some other kind of evidence that the memories are real. In the Chowchilla case, the ransom note and other things found in one of the kidnapper's homes were that evidence, but those things might not have been found if not for Ray's hypnotically aided recall. (In this instance, hypnosis helped Ray relax enough to recall the memory of the number that he had actually tried to memorize. If he hadn't made that initial effort to remember the number, hypnosis would not have helped his recall.)

Questions fordiscussion:

2. 'What are the pros and cons of using hypnosis to enhance memory in court cases?
4. How might hypnosis have been used to help the children who were kidnapped recover from their ordeal?