On July 15, 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver vanished from a rural road outside Chowchilla, California. Hours later, the bus was found hidden in the brush—empty.

More than a hundred miles away, the missing children were being taken to a place prepared months before: a moving van buried beneath a rock quarry. Sealed underground with no way of knowing whether anyone was coming back, the 27 hostages faced a terrifying choice—wait for their kidnappers, or find their own way out.

Buried Alive: The Chowchilla Kidnapping is the story of one of the largest kidnappings in American history, the extraordinary escape that brought every hostage home alive, the elaborate ransom plot behind the crime, and the consequences the survivors carried long after they climbed back into the daylight.

On August 28, 2003, pizza delivery driver Brian Wells left a restaurant in Erie, Pennsylvania, to deliver two pizzas to an isolated location near a television tower.

About an hour later, he walked into a bank with a homemade weapon in his hand and an explosive device locked around his neck.

What followed was a bank robbery, a bizarre scavenger hunt, and one of the most unusual criminal investigations in American history. But as investigators began uncovering the people behind the plot, a disturbing question emerged:

Was Brian Wells simply a victim—or did he know more about the robbery than anyone initially realized?

In the first episode of Story of a Crime, we follow the evidence through the collar-bomb case and the question at its center that remains disputed more than two decades later.

Every crime has a story. This is Story of a Crime.