Baby kidnapped in Chicago, got to the bottom thanks to DNA

When the newborn Paul Joseph Fronzak was kidnapped from a Chicago hospital in 1964, newspapers throughout America wrote about this horrible story. Two years later, a boy abandoned on the street was identified as a missing baby and returned to the burning parents.

Photo: YouTube / ABC News frame

Years later, Paul began to investigate what happened, and he was shocked by what he had learned.

Find in the subfield

Once, when Paul Fronzak was 10 years old, he began to rummage around the house in search of hidden Christmas presents and climbed into the basement, pushing the couch aside. There he found three boxes with some strange letters, newspaper clippings and postcards of condolence.

One newspaper headline read: “Two Hundred Operations in Search of Stolen Child.” Another was: “Mother asks kidnapper to return baby to her.”

He found out on the photo of his parents: they looked younger, and they looked distressed. He then read that their just-born boy, Paul Joseph, was abducted.

"Wow! It’s me!” he thought.

The story is really amazing.

On April 26, 1964, Dora Fronzak gave birth to a boy in the hospital. Michael Reese in Chicago and spent the whole day with him - in those hours when he was awake with the other babies in the neonatal ward.

But the next morning, a woman in the form of a nurse came to Dora's ward and took the child to be referred to a pediatrician. No one else has seen this woman.

When the hospital staff realized that there was something wrong, the desperate search for the baby began. However, the hospital administration for several hours did not report anything to the law enforcement agencies or the parents of the child.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, they finally called Dora Chester Fronzak to the factory where he worked as a mechanic.

“My father had to leave work, go to the hospital and tell his wife their baby was missing,” Paul says. “You think you’re safe: you’re in the hospital.” But that’s where your child is kidnapped.”

One of the largest search operations in Chicago history began, involving 175 thousand postal workers, 200 police officers and the FBI. By midnight they had searched 600 houses to no avail.

The find in the subfield, of course, shook Paul, and he ran upstairs with newspaper clippings in his hands to ask his mother if all this was really written about him?

Dora reacted indignantly, telling him to stop poking his nose into things that weren't his own business. Then she admitted: “Yes, you were kidnapped, we found you, we love you, and that’s the most important thing.”

Paul realized that it’s not worth talking about it anymore, and stopped talking for the next 40 years. However, this story still aroused his keen interest, and often, when he was alone, Paul went down into the underground and read newspaper clippings about himself.

Photo: YouTube / ABC News frame

Kidnapped found?

And it was from the newspapers that he learned the next chapter in this story - how exactly he ended up in the Fronzak family.

After kidnapping the baby, Dora and Chester stayed for a week in the hospital awaiting news. When they returned home, journalists began to hunt them.

Despite such wide coverage of events in the press, the police did not have any versions. The child disappeared without a trace, and gradually the investigation turned.

Then, in March 1966 of the year, almost two years after the abduction, Dora and Chester received a letter from the FBI that a baby was found in Newark, New Jersey, similar in description to their son.

This boy was left in a stroller in a populous shopping center in July of the previous year, and he was given up for foster care, to Eckertz. They baptized him, called him Scott McKinley, and became so attached to him that they thought about adopting him.

But while they haven’t done so yet, a New Jersey police investigator decided to check if this child is the missing baby from Chicago.

The FBI began to check this guess. They did not have any particular data: in the Chicago hospital there was not a record of the blood type of the baby Paul, nor fingerprints of the arms or legs.

All they had was the only photo taken on the day he was born, and the shape of the ear in that photo looked like the ear of a boy brought up in the Eckertz family.

“They ended up testing over 10 boys trying to find the kidnapped baby, and I was the only one who couldn’t be completely ruled out,” says Paul.

The Fronzaks were ecstatic at the news. “Back then, the FBI was an elite agency, and if they reported something, they were believed,” Paul explains.

Three months after receiving the letter from the FBI, they got into the car and drove to Chicago to see the boy, who may have been their son, in the children's social service in New Jersey.

All three had a series of psychological tests before the meeting. Dora and Chester were also to receive official permission to adopt a child, who now bore the name Scott.

“The FBI guy brought me into a room and they gave us time to get used to each other,” Paul says. “After all, my mother spent less than a day with her son before he was stolen.” And suddenly a few years later she sees her baby!”

Dora later confessed to Paul that she had the feeling that the whole world was following her.

"She could say, 'I'm not sure,' and then the child would be placed back into the foster care system, or she could say, 'Yes, that's my son.' And even if it wasn’t, she would have saved the child from a terrible fate,” explains Paul.

Dora said this is her son.

“She did what she thought was right, and I’m glad she did it,” he adds.

Spouses Fronzak went with him to Chicago and officially adopted him.

Good childhood

They were loving parents, maybe a little too caring, which is understandable. Sometimes this led to clashes.

Paul was sent to a Catholic school, where there were strict rules, and he loved rock music and grew his hair.

One day, when they were arguing about the length of his hair, Dora said: “I wish they never found you!”

Paul couldn't forget it. “Even today, when I think about it, it makes me very sad,” he admits.

After graduating from school, Paul left his parents in Arizona and became a bass player in a local rock band. Five years later, when the group broke up, he returned to Chicago, wandered there without work, and a year later he joined the army.

Demobilized, he traveled the country, worked as a salesman, a fashion model, and even an actor, and eventually settled in Las Vegas.

“I moved from place to place at least fifty times, worked in a hundred places. And wherever I went, wherever I was, those newspaper clippings were always with me,” admits Paul.

In 2008, Paul got married a second time, and soon he and his wife, Michel, who worked as a teacher, waited for the birth of their daughter. Paul was in seventh heaven.

However, when the obstetrician began to ask about family history, Paul suddenly realized that he did not know what to say, because from the moment he learned about the abduction, he wondered: were his parents really his real parents?

"What I was really thinking was, 'What are the odds that I'm actually the baby that was stolen in Chicago?' They found me so far away that it seemed unlikely,” he says.

Paul always felt like a bit of a stranger. It seemed that his parents were closer to his younger brother Dave. The three of them were quiet, calm, and Paul liked to listen to loud music and ride a motorcycle. And outwardly, they were not similar.

“Dave looked like an exact copy of my father: the same gestures, facial expressions, physique - literally everything. And I didn’t look like either of my parents,” Paul admits.

Photo: YouTube / ABC News frame

“Am I Really?”

Now he was haunted by the question: is he the same kidnapped child?

“For many years I wanted to do a DNA test and compare it with my parents,” admits Paul. “Not because I was unhappy, I just wanted to know the truth.” But I always found some excuse. I did not want to offend them. But then the moment came when I just needed to find out. ”

He was also discouraged by the cost of this procedure, but once in 2012, Paul saw a homemade DNA analysis kit sold in the store and bought a few. And when his parents somehow came to him from Chicago, Paul picked up the courage to talk about it just before they left.

“Have you ever wondered if I am really your son?” he asked them. Taken by surprise, the parents admitted that yes, they had thought about it. “Do you want to know the truth?” Paul asked them.

A few minutes later, each of them took a swab from his mouth, and they sealed the samples in test tubes. Then Paul took his parents to the airport.

However, a few hours later, when their plane had already landed in Chicago, Dora and Chester changed their minds. They called Paul and asked him not to send out the test tubes: he is their son, and that's that.

“I kept these test tubes in a drawer for two weeks. Every day I fought with myself because I love my parents, I wanted to respect their request. But sometimes you have to do what you think is necessary. Is there anything wrong with trying to find out the truth?” says Paul.

In the end, he sent the tubes to the lab.

Paul was at work when he was called to report the results of the check. He answered a series of test questions, and then he was told that there was no, even the most distant, probability that he was Paul Fronzak, the biological son of Dora and Chester.

“I suddenly felt that the ground was gone from under my feet, that the blood had drained from my face. My thoughts were confused, I broke out in a sweat,” Paul recalls. - Everything that I knew about myself - my birthday, my medical history, the fact that I am Polish by blood, Catholic, even that I am a Taurus by horoscope - everything suddenly evaporated, and for a moment I simply did not know who I".

Photo: YouTube / ABC News frame

DNA Detectives

The result of the DNA analysis immediately raised two important questions: who were the parents of Paul, if not Dora and Chester Fronzak? And what happened to the real Paul?

Even before Paul reported this news to his parents, he contacted local investigative journalist George Nappa and asked for help. Soon the name of Paul Joseph Fronzak was again in the news headlines across the country.

His family, who avoided the press, was furious, and more than a year no one of them spoke with Paul.

“You have to understand that the main reason I did this was to find my parents' real child,” Paul explains. “They were wonderful parents.” So the best gift I could give them is to find their missing son. And I couldn’t think of a better way than to go to the press.”

One of the consequences of appealing to journalists was that the FBI again resumed the old investigation into the abduction of a child from the Fronzac spouses.

In Chicago, they found 10 folders with investigative materials, but Paul was legally unable to review them due to the fact that DNA analysis confirmed that he was not the stolen child.

He was able to talk to Bernie Carey, the retired FBI employee who was originally involved in this case, and he confirmed that some of his team doubted that they had found the kidnapped child.

Paul was more fortunate in his search for his biological parents.

A group of volunteers called the DNA Detectives (DNA Detectives) began to be engaged in his business, and completely free of charge.

Under the guidance of genetic genealogy analyst Sisi Moore, the genealogy volunteers conducted a whole search based on Paul's DNA data.

They searched for all sorts of mentions in newspapers and records of acts of civil status, combed social networks and spent hours of telephone conversations.

Although Paul was found in New Jersey, detective genealogists discovered his family in a completely different state - Tennessee. DNA analysis also revealed that Paul had Ashkenazi Jews in his family.

“I was sure there had to be a Jewish ancestor in one branch of his family,” Moore says.

The investigation was progressing slowly, and only after many months the team suddenly made a breakthrough after talking with one of the possible relatives of Paul, who mentioned that there were missing twins in the history of his family.

“That’s when we realized we were moving in the right direction,” admits Moore.

3 June 2015, two years after the start of the investigation, Sisi Moore called Paul.

-What do you think about the name Jack? - Sisi asked.

“It’s a good name, solid,” Paul replied.

“So that’s your name,” she said.

So Paul found out that he was born Jack Rosenthal, and that he was actually six months older than he thought, because 27 was born on October 1963 of the year.

But that was not all: he had a twin sister, Jill. But she, too, like him, has disappeared.

So now Paul has another person who needs to be found.

"I don't think you can find out you're having a twin and not start looking for that person," CeCe Moore says.

Not just a coincidence

At first, the meeting with his relatives pleased him.

Paul, who was passionate about music, was terribly glad that his cousin Lenny Rocco was also a musician. In the 1950s, he was a doo-op vocalist.

“For me, this best proves that in order for your abilities to manifest themselves - such as a penchant for music, for example - it is not at all necessary that you were raised by your real parents. We never listened to music in my house, but I was always into it,” says Paul. “I’ve been playing in rock bands all my life, so when I finally met my real relatives, I immediately sat down and played with Lenny’s team.”

Sisi Moore, who managed to reunite thousands of relatives, admits that she constantly observes this phenomenon.

“People who grew up in families with different lifestyles meet, and they have so much in common! - says the detective geneticist. “And it’s not even about how they look outwardly. The point is what actions they did in life, who they married or married, what they named their children, what profession they chose - down to such strange details as choosing a password for a mobile phone.”

“I am absolutely sure that there is much more written in our DNA than we realize. These things can't just be coincidences," she says.

However, not all relatives of Paul welcomed him with open arms, and soon he found out that his biological family has an unattractive side.

His mother, Marie, was an alcoholic, and his father Gilbert returned from the Korean War, angry at the whole world.

There were also signs that Paul and his twin sister Jill did not receive proper care from their parents, who had two older daughters, as well as a son who was younger than twins.

Family members recalled that the twins were constantly crying, and one of the relatives said that he had seen how the children were caged.

No one knows exactly what exactly happened, but every time a relative asked for twins, their parents said that one of the relatives was looking after them, although in reality this was not the case.

Paul believes that something terrible must have happened to Jill, and this prompted their parents to get rid of Jack, because, he said, they could not explain why there was only one twin left.

Persistent Search

In his book “The Foundling” (The Foundling) Paul describes all the details of his relentless and sometimes even risky search for answers to all these questions.

At one point he even dug up the whole garden in the house where Rosentali had once lived, hoping to find the remains of his sister there.

“My real parents were not very nice people. I am grateful to them for leaving me, because as a result of this I ended up in the Fronzak family. They saved my life,” admits Paul.

Paul made peace with his adoptive parents two years after he found out the results of the DNA test, and then the three of them were able to calmly discuss everything for the first time.

“Now I know that all those events changed my mother. She still carries that guilt about putting her Paul in the hands of that “nurse,” Paul explains. “Even though she understands that in a hospital you usually obey when they tell you to do something.” The nurse says, “I need to take your baby,” and you hand him over. But this is something she cannot come to terms with all her life.”

Dora also gave Paul an album with photographs and letters that were given to her by the Eckerts, the foster family who raised Paul for a year after his parents abandoned him and gave him the name Scot McKinley at baptism.

“My mother had this album all my life, but she never told me about it. I feel sad because these are my very first photographs. Even my real family doesn't have any photos of me as a child. My grandmother has an album with all the children in chronological order, and the page with the twins is torn out,” says Paul Fronczak.

Paul's father, Chester, died last August, but Paul speaks with his mother several times a week. October 27 Dore turns 82 of the year. As it turned out, he and Paul had a birthday the same day.

She has mixed feelings about the book he has released.

“She wouldn’t want me to be so frank, but I wrote everything honestly,” Paul admits.

And yet Paul does not give up and intends to get to the bottom of what happened to the child of his adoptive mother Dora. He still pays for the services of a private detective investigating this crime, and says that the next step will be to exhort the body.

In fact, even two bodies.

Paul explains: "We have a very strong theory about the real Paul, and another theory may lead us to my twin sister."

Exhumation is a complex and expensive procedure, but this does not stop Paul, since there are too many blind spots in this case.

“This investigation is far from over,” he says.

He is now divorced from his second wife, but they have maintained friendly relations. Paul admits that his obsession with investigating his past may have been the indirect reason for their divorce.

“At some point I simply could not do anything else, I only did what was related to the investigation,” says Paul, adding that he has no regrets. - It's something I have to do. It’s easier for me to live this way.”

The investigation also helped him to better understand himself and why he could not resist anywhere.

“Those first two years of my life shaped me: I can break up with anyone, leave any job, leave any situation and not even look back. I think it's because I had three childhoods, three different selves, at such a young age. It's all about my adaptability to the situation in order to survive. So that I have a tomorrow,” explains Paul Fronczak.

Sisi Moore also thought more than once about how all these events influenced Paul in infancy and what happened to him in the months when she was examined by the FBI.

“Why did they decide that this was Paul Fronzak? “Was there any signs of physical trauma on the boy that could have been mistakenly interpreted as meaning that he was the same kidnapped child and not some baby from a dysfunctional family?” she asks.

Daughter of Paul Emma, ​​who is now nine years old, was taken with humor by the news that her dad was actually called Jack, and sometimes calls him that, making fun of him.

However, Paul decided that he would not change his name yet.

“I will be Paul until I find the real Paul. The day I find him, I will give him his birth certificate and then I will apply for my own.”

The FBI declined to comment.

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