The Taking

She heard footsteps outside her hospital room, the soft squeak of white shoes on polished linoleum. A woman in a crisp nurse’s uniform appeared in the doorway, smiling warmly. “The doctor needs to examine your baby,” she said, reaching for the newborn swaddled in Dora Fronczak’s arms.

It was April 27, 1964, at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. Dora had given birth just one day earlier to a healthy baby boy, Paul Joseph Fronczak. She had spent the morning nursing him, watching his tiny fingers curl and uncurl, memorizing every detail of his face. When the woman in white asked for him, Dora didn’t hesitate. Hospitals were safe places. Nurses were trusted.

She handed over her son.

The woman turned and walked down the corridor, the baby cradled against her chest, wrapped in a receiving blanket. She stepped into an elevator, crossed the lobby, and walked out the front doors into the Chicago morning. She climbed into a waiting taxi and disappeared into the city.

The woman never came back.

The Nightmare Begins

By midmorning, hospital staff realized something was wrong. The baby hadn’t been returned. A frantic search swept through the maternity ward, then the entire hospital. Nurses checked every room, every nursery, every closet. There was no sign of the newborn or the woman who had taken him.

But the hospital didn’t call the police. Not right away. They didn’t notify Dora or her husband, Chester, either. They waited, perhaps hoping the confusion would resolve itself, perhaps fearing the scandal. It wasn’t until three o’clock that afternoon that they finally made the call.

Chester Fronczak was working his shift as a machinist when the phone rang. The voice on the other end told him his one-day-old son was missing. He left the factory immediately, drove to the hospital, and walked into his wife’s room to deliver the news no parent should ever have to speak: their baby had been kidnapped.

Dora had lost a child the year before, a stillborn son. Now, just twenty-four hours after bringing a healthy baby into the world, she learned he had been stolen from her arms.

The devastation was so complete that doctors had to sedate her.

A City Searches

Chicago exploded into action. The FBI arrived within hours. An artist’s sketch circulated—a woman in her forties, five-foot-four, graying brown hair, white uniform, last seen climbing into a taxi heading southwest.

Chester Fronczak went on television and begged. Not for justice—for mercy. “Take care of him,” he pleaded to the kidnapper. “Just take care of him.” Newspapers printed baby formula recipes with instructions: feed the newborn three ounces every four hours.

The FBI had almost nothing. A one-day-old baby has no birthmarks, no scars. Only blood type and the shape of his left ear. Over the next two years, they would examine ten thousand babies across America, searching for the one who had been taken from Michael Reese Hospital.

It became the largest manhunt in Chicago history.

A Child Found

July 1965. A toddler abandoned in a stroller outside a Newark, New Jersey department store. The boy appeared to be around eighteen months old. Authorities tried to locate his parents, but no one came forward. The child was placed in foster care and given the name Scott McKinley.

The FBI began comparing this boy to the missing Paul Fronczak. The age matched. The ear matched. The blood type matched. They couldn’t rule him out.

In early 1966, the FBI sent a letter to the Fronczaks. They explained that a boy had been found in New Jersey, abandoned under mysterious circumstances. He was the right age. They couldn’t say for certain he was their son, but they also couldn’t exclude him. The Bureau wanted Dora and Chester to come see the boy for themselves.

The Fronczaks drove from Chicago to New Jersey. They met with caseworkers, looked at photographs, and then were brought into a room where the toddler was waiting. The FBI hoped that when Dora saw him, something would click—a mother’s instinct, a flash of recognition.

Dora looked at the boy. She studied his face, his eyes, his ears. After nearly two years of anguish and unanswered prayers, she wanted desperately to believe. Chester stood beside her, searching for any trace of the infant who had been taken from them.

They told the FBI this was their son.

The boy was returned to the Fronczak family and raised in a loving Chicago home. Dora and Chester adopted him legally and called him Paul. They enrolled him in school, celebrated his birthdays, watched him grow. They never forgot the nightmare of 1964, but they tried to move forward. They had their son back.

Or so they thought.

A Nagging Doubt

Paul Fronczak grew up feeling like something was wrong. Even as a child, he sensed he didn’t quite fit. He looked different from his parents. His mannerisms, his personality—everything felt slightly off. He couldn’t explain it, but the feeling never went away.

When he was ten years old, Paul found boxes in the basement crawl space while hunting for Christmas presents. Inside were newspaper clippings about a kidnapping. Sympathy cards. Letters addressed to his parents, filled with condolences about a missing baby. One headline read: “200 search for stolen baby.” Another: “Mother asks kidnapper to return baby.” He read the articles, his hands trembling. The stolen child’s name was Paul Joseph Fronczak.

He confronted his mother. Dora reacted angrily at first, scolding him for snooping. Then she admitted the truth: “Yes, you were kidnapped, we found you, we love you, and that’s all you need to know.”

Paul listened, but the doubt only deepened. He would sneak back into the crawl space when he was alone, reading the clippings over and over, trying to understand. If he had been kidnapped and returned, why didn’t he feel like he belonged?

The question haunted him for decades.

The DNA Test

In 2012, at the age of forty-eight, Paul Fronczak decided he needed answers. He asked his parents to take a DNA test with him. Chester and Dora agreed, though the request must have reopened old wounds. They had already lost their son once. Now Paul was asking them to prove he was really theirs.

The results came back a few months later. Paul sat down to review the findings. The words came out blunt and final: he was not biologically related to Chester and Dora Fronczak.

Paul Fronczak was not the son of Chester and Dora Fronczak.

The man who had spent forty-eight years believing he was a kidnapping victim, who had grown up in a home filled with love and lingering grief, who had carried the weight of his parents’ tragedy—he was not Paul Fronczak at all.

He had no idea who he was.

Reopening the Case

The FBI reopened the investigation immediately. If the boy returned in 1966 wasn’t Paul Fronczak, then two children were still missing: the real Paul, kidnapped in 1964, and the unidentified boy who had been abandoned in New Jersey.

Paul—or whoever he was—refused to let the mystery go unsolved. He went public with his story, appearing on national television, sharing his DNA results with genealogy websites. He reached out to a group of volunteer genealogists called the DNA Detectives, experts who used genetic testing and family trees to solve cold cases. They agreed to take on his case for free.

For the next three years, Paul uploaded his DNA to every genealogy website available: Ancestry.com, 23andMe, FamilyTree DNA. He waited for matches, studying each new name that appeared in the database. Slowly, distant relatives began to emerge—third cousins, second cousins, people with pieces of a puzzle he didn’t yet understand.

In 2015, the DNA Detectives called him with an answer. They had identified him. His name wasn’t Paul Fronczak. It was Jack Rosenthal.

He had been born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1964. He had a twin sister named Jill.

And in 1965, both of them had vanished.

The Rosenthal Twins

Gilbert Rosenthal came back from Korea with demons. Marie drowned hers in bottles. They had four children: two older daughters, Linda and Karen, who were dressed beautifully, fed well, loved openly—and twins named Jack and Jill.

The twins were different.

Family members noticed the circular burns on their skin. The screams coming from upstairs. One relative asked her doctor what to do. “Mind your business,” he said. “You don’t live with them.”

A young cousin pushed open a closed door during a visit. Inside, the dark room held a wooden crate—a cage. Jack and Jill were inside, crying.

In late summer 1965, a fourteen-year-old babysitter arrived. Marie and Gilbert, dressed in their finest, gave instructions about the older girls. Then, almost as an afterthought: “The twins are upstairs. Don’t bother with them.”

The babysitter didn’t know there were twins. After they left, she went upstairs and opened the door. The room reeked of urine. Two toddlers sat in a filthy crib, wearing soiled pajamas. Jill stood staring. Jack cowered in the corner, whimpering. He had a black eye.

She spent the night caring for them. When Gilbert and Marie came home in the morning and found her in the twins’ room, they were furious. She could smell alcohol on them.

She never came back.

The Disappearance

Shortly after, Jack and Jill vanished. When family asked, Gilbert and Marie gave vague answers. The children were somewhere else. Don’t worry about it.

One relative told his daughter never to mention the twins again. He believed Gilbert and Marie had killed them and buried them in the yard. “If you talk about this,” he warned, “it’ll start a war.”

But Jack wasn’t dead. On July 2, 1965, someone left him in a stroller outside a Newark department store—two hours north of Atlantic City. Authorities found him, searched for his parents, and eventually placed him in foster care.

In 1966, the FBI, still searching for the kidnapped Paul Fronczak, compared Jack to the missing baby. They concluded he might be a match. Jack was returned to Chester and Dora Fronczak and raised as their son.

But Jill was never found.

 

The Real Paul Fronczak

After discovering his true identity as Jack Rosenthal in 2015, Jack—still going by Paul—intensified his search. Now there were two missing people: his twin sister Jill and the real Paul Fronczak, the baby kidnapped from Michael Reese Hospital in 1964.

Jack worked with genealogists, law enforcement, and private investigators. He uploaded DNA to every database. He followed every lead, no matter how small. He appeared in documentaries. He created a website. He became obsessed with finding answers—not just for himself, but for Chester and Dora, who deserved to know what happened to their biological son.

In 2019, investigators caught a break. New DNA matches pointed toward rural Michigan. They traced the lineage back to a woman named Lorraine Fountain, who had moved from the Chicago area to Michigan shortly after the 1964 kidnapping. Lorraine had raised a son she claimed was hers. She never married. She kept to herself. She died in 2004, taking her secrets to the grave.

Authorities believe Lorraine Fountain was the woman in the white nurse’s uniform who walked into Michael Reese Hospital on April 27, 1964, and walked out with a newborn baby.

Her son’s name was Kevin Baty.

Kevin Baty was the real Paul Joseph Fronczak.

A Son Found Too Late

Kevin Baty was fifty-five years old when investigators found him in 2019. He had lived his entire life in Michigan, never knowing he’d been stolen. Lorraine Fountain had raised him alone, telling him she was his mother. She never explained why there were no family photos from his infancy. She never talked about where they came from. When she died in 2004, Kevin thought he had no other family.

Now, in 2019, he learned the truth: his name was Paul Joseph Fronczak. His parents were Chester and Dora Fronczak. He had been kidnapped from a Chicago hospital fifty-five years earlier. His parents had spent decades searching for him. His father had died two years ago. His mother was still alive—eighty-three years old, living in Chicago.

But Kevin was dying.

He had been diagnosed with cancer. The disease was advanced. He didn’t have much time left.

Dora Fronczak learned that her biological son—the baby stolen from her arms in 1964—had been found. Chester had died in 2017, never knowing. Dora had already buried her husband. Now she learned her son was alive but dying.

Kevin and Dora spoke by phone several times. A mother and son, separated for fifty-five years, connected across the distance by voices alone. They talked about his childhood, her memories of that April day in 1964, the life they could have had together. Dora told him she had never stopped looking. Kevin told her he wished he had known sooner.

They made plans to meet in person. But time ran out.

On April 25, 2020—what would have been his fifty-sixth birthday according to hospital records—Kevin Baty died.

Chester Fronczak never knew his son had been found. Kevin Baty never met his mother in person. Dora spoke to her son only by phone before he was gone forever.

The Search for Jill

Jack Rosenthal—still known to the world as Paul Fronczak—had found the real Paul. But he still hadn’t found his twin sister.

Jill Rosenthal disappeared in July 1965, around the same time Jack was abandoned in Newark. Authorities believe Gilbert and Marie Rosenthal, unable or unwilling to care for the twins they had abused, disposed of them separately. Jack was left in a public place where he would be found. Jill vanished completely.

Family members assumed she was dead. One relative believed Gilbert and Marie had buried her in the backyard. But Jack refused to accept that. He believed his sister was alive, that she had been given away or adopted, that somewhere she was living under a different name with no memory of her past.

Jack has spent over a decade searching for Jill. He works with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He maintains a website. He shares age-progression photos created by forensic artists. He speaks at conferences, appears in documentaries, grants interviews to anyone who might help spread the word.

The age-progression image shows a woman in her sixties with graying hair and gentle eyes—a scientific guess at what Jill might look like today, based on Jack’s face and genetic modeling. No photographs of Jill exist. The Rosenthals never took pictures of the twins.

Jill would be sixty-one years old now. If she’s alive, she may have no idea she has a twin brother. She may not know her real name. She may feel something missing but not know what.

Jack checks his DNA matches every day. He follows every tip. He never stops looking.

Three Children, Three Tragedies

This is not the story of one missing child. It is the story of three.

Paul Joseph Fronczak—kidnapped April 27, 1964, from Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. Raised as Kevin Baty in Michigan by the woman believed to be his kidnapper. Found in 2019. Died in 2020 at age fifty-six, before he could meet his mother in person.

Jack Rosenthal—born October 27, 1963, in Atlantic City. Abused by his parents. Abandoned in Newark in July 1965. Mistakenly identified as Paul Fronczak and raised by Chester and Dora. Discovered his true identity in 2015. Now searching for his twin sister.

Jill Rosenthal—born October 27, 1963. Twin sister of Jack. Abused and then disappeared in July 1965. Never found.

The FBI investigation remains open. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists Jill as an active case. Case number 1419009. Born October 27, 1963. Missing since July 1965, age twenty-one months. If alive, she would be sixty-one years old.

Somewhere, she may be living a normal life. Somewhere, she may have a family, a career, a home. Somewhere, she may look in the mirror and wonder why she feels incomplete.

A Hospital’s Failure

Michael Reese Hospital never fully accounted for how a woman walked in, took a baby, and walked out without being stopped. In 1964, hospital security was lax. Maternity wards were open. Visitors came and went freely. Nurses wore uniforms that could be purchased at any medical supply store. No one checked credentials. No one asked questions.

After Paul Fronczak’s kidnapping, hospitals across America began implementing security measures: ID badges, locked maternity wards, infant abduction alarms, footprinting newborns, matching wristbands for mothers and babies. The Fronczak case became a catalyst for change in hospital security nationwide.

But for Chester and Dora, those changes came too late.

Michael Reese Hospital closed in 2009. The building where Paul was taken was demolished. The records remain sealed. Lorraine Fountain, the suspected kidnapper, died without ever being charged. Gilbert and Marie Rosenthal died without ever being held accountable for what they did to their twins.

Living with Uncertainty

Jack Rosenthal—born Jack Rosenthal, raised as Paul Fronczak, discovered to be someone else entirely—has spent the last decade living between identities. He legally changed his name back to Paul, not because it’s his birth name, but because it’s the name he’s known for most of his life. He considers Chester and Dora his real parents, even though they are not biologically related.

He doesn’t blame them for the DNA test or the revelation that followed. He understands they were victims too—a couple who lost their son twice, first to a kidnapper and then to the truth.

Jack’s relationship with his biological family—the Rosenthals—is more complicated. His older sisters, Linda and Karen, were loved and cared for while he and Jill were locked in a room. They remember their childhood differently. Some family members refuse to speak about the twins. Others have shared painful memories, hoping it will help find Jill.

Jack has forgiven his biological parents, not because they deserve it, but because holding onto anger wouldn’t bring Jill back. Gilbert and Marie Rosenthal are dead. Justice, in the traditional sense, is impossible. All that remains is the search for his sister and the hope that she is alive.

A Case That Changed America

The Fronczak case is one of the most complex missing persons cases in American history. It involves:

• A baby stolen from a hospital

• An unidentified toddler abandoned in New Jersey

• A case of mistaken identity that lasted forty-nine years

• Twins who were abused and separated

• A kidnapper who was never caught

• A victim who died before reuniting with his mother

• A twin sister who remains missing

It exposed the vulnerabilities in hospital security in the 1960s and led to nationwide reforms. It demonstrated the power of DNA genealogy to solve decades-old cold cases. It showed how a single act of violence can ripple across generations, destroying multiple families in different ways.

But most of all, it’s a story about people who refuse to give up.

Chester and Dora Fronczak never stopped searching for their son. Even after they brought a boy home in 1966, even after they raised him and loved him, they must have wondered. When Paul asked for a DNA test in 2012, they agreed, knowing it could shatter everything.

Jack Rosenthal never stopped searching for answers. He could have accepted the life he was given, but instead he demanded the truth. And when he found it, he didn’t stop. He kept searching—for the real Paul, and then for Jill.

Kevin Baty learned his entire life was a lie at age fifty-five, while dying of cancer. He could have been angry, bitter, withdrawn. Instead, he reached out to Dora. He called her “Mom.” He told her he loved her, even though they had never met.

The Search Continues

Every day, Jack checks his DNA matches on genealogy websites. Every day, investigators follow up on tips about Jill. Every day, her age-progression photo circulates online, reaching people who might recognize her, might remember something, might hold the answer.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children keeps her case active. Forensic genealogists continue analyzing DNA results. True crime podcasts tell her story. Documentaries feature her brother’s search.

Jack believes she’s out there. He has to believe it. Because if he stops looking, who will?

Three Lives, One Mystery

Three children. Three families. Three tragedies woven together by a woman in a white nurse’s uniform who walked into a Chicago hospital in 1964 and disappeared into the city.

Paul Joseph Fronczak—stolen, found, and lost again.

Jack Rosenthal—abandoned, misidentified, and now searching.

Jill Rosenthal—missing for sixty years.

The case remains open. The search continues.

Jill is still out there.

And her brother is still searching.