On a crisp spring morning in 1964, the city of Chicago was just waking up when tragedy struck the Fronczak family. Dora Fronczak, who had already known the pain of losing a child, was basking in the joy of holding her newborn son, Paul Joseph, at Michael Reese Hospital. In those days, new mothers were separated from their babies shortly after birth—babies were kept in the nursery, mothers in postpartum recovery, a practice that seems foreign now but was standard then.

Dora’s happiness was interrupted not by the usual hustle and bustle of hospital life, but by the arrival of a woman in a nurse’s uniform. She wasn’t familiar to Dora, but when she said the pediatrician needed to see the baby, Dora handed over her son, trusting the system as any new mother would. But this nurse was a stranger, and she walked straight out of the hospital, down four flights of stairs, and into a waiting cab, disappearing into the city with baby Paul.

The manhunt that followed was one of the largest Chicago had ever seen. Two hundred police officers, the FBI, and even 175,000 postal workers were called to action. The city was plastered with flyers, and a sketch of the suspect—a woman with graying brown hair, between 35 and 45, dressed as a nurse—was circulated. But the trail was cold; the hospital’s proximity to highways, a train station, and an airport meant the abductor could have been anywhere within minutes. Leads fizzled, and the Fronczaks’ phones were tapped, but no ransom call ever came.

Fifteen months later, a toddler was found alone in a stroller outside a department store in Newark, New Jersey. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon for mothers to leave babies outside stores for a bit of fresh air, but this child had been left for hours. The police took the boy, who was wearing a blue suit and had a runny nose, to the hospital. He became a ward of the state, given the name Scott McKinley, and placed with a loving foster family, the Edgars, who fell in love with him and hoped to adopt him.

Detective Joseph Ferrell, who had worked on the infamous Lindbergh baby case, was assigned to the foundling. He followed every possible lead, and eventually, a hunch led him to the Fronczak kidnapping in Chicago. Photos were compared, blood and bone tests were done, and the FBI even made clay molds of the boy’s ear to match with the baby Paul’s hospital photo. The results were inconclusive—nothing ruled out the possibility, but nothing proved it either. In the absence of DNA technology, the best they could do was to ask Dora and Chester Fronczak to travel to New Jersey and see if this was their son.

The meeting was tense, but when Dora saw the boy, she cried out, “Oh my God, that’s my baby.” The Edgars were heartbroken to lose the child they loved, but they packed his things with care, including a letter for his new parents, and sent him off to Chicago. The Fronczaks adopted him legally, and Scott McKinley became Paul Joseph Fronczak.

Paul grew up believing he was the miracle baby returned to his family. He had a happy childhood, with a loving mother and father, and a younger brother, David. But a secret lurked beneath the surface. When Paul was ten, searching for Christmas presents, he stumbled upon a box of old newspaper clippings and sympathy letters in the basement. He learned the truth: he had been kidnapped, found, and returned to his family after two years. His mother, caught off guard, told him, “You were kidnapped. We found you. We love you, and we’ll never talk about it again.” And they didn’t.

But Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. He didn’t look like his family, didn’t act like them, and felt like an outsider. When he grew up, he drifted from job to job, never settling down, always searching for something. It wasn’t until he married and became a father himself that the questions about his identity became urgent. When his wife Michelle asked about his family medical history, Paul realized he might not even be who he thought he was.

In 2012, Paul finally bought a DNA kit and convinced his parents to take the test with him. But as soon as they left Chicago, they called and begged him not to send the samples. Torn between loyalty to his parents and the need to know, Paul eventually mailed the kits. The results were clear: there was no possibility that Dora and Chester were his biological parents. Paul Fronczak was not Paul Fronczak.

The revelation set Paul on a journey to discover who he really was—and to find the real Paul. He went public with his story, and the media frenzy led to the FBI reopening the case. Genetic genealogists worked for years to build a family tree from Paul’s DNA. The process was slow, with dead ends and heartbreak, but eventually, they found a cousin, then another, and finally, the truth.

Paul was born Jack Rosenthal, one of a pair of twins born in Atlantic City in 1963. His twin sister, Jill, had vanished along with him. Their family history was dark—stories emerged of neglect, abuse, and the twins being kept locked away, hidden from the world. Paul’s biological parents had died years earlier, taking the secrets of what happened to the twins with them. Relatives remembered the twins being there one day and gone the next. Some said Jill had health problems and was sent to an institution; others recalled rumors of injury and neglect.

Paul, now Jack, was left with more questions than answers. What happened to Jill? Why were the twins abandoned? Why did their parents keep some children and discard others? The search for Jill continues to this day, with age-progressed photos and missing person reports, but no trace of her has ever been found.

Meanwhile, the search for the real Paul Fronczak took an unexpected turn. A woman in Michigan, researching her family history, discovered a DNA match that led her to the story of the kidnapped baby. Her father, Kevin Batty, had grown up believing he was the son of a single mother named Lorraine. But Lorraine had abruptly moved from Chicago to Arkansas in the mid-1960s, returning with a baby who became Kevin. When DNA confirmed that Kevin was the real Paul Fronczak, he was stunned. He had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided to keep the news private. Before he died, he spoke to his biological mother, Dora, over the phone. She later told Jack that while she was glad to have spoken to her biological son, the boy she had raised was her real son.

But the question of who kidnapped Paul remains unsolved. Suspicion fell on Linda Taylor, the infamous “welfare queen” of Chicago, whose life was a web of aliases, disguises, and scams. Her own son, Johnny, claimed that his mother brought home a baby in 1964, whom they called Tiger. Linda was a master of disguise, known to have nurse and doctor uniforms among her costumes. She was eventually convicted of welfare fraud but never charged with kidnapping. Johnny believes his mother was capable of anything, including stealing a baby, but Tiger disappeared one day without explanation.

The Fronczak case is a story of loss, hope, and the relentless search for truth. It is a story of two families, both forever changed by the actions of a stranger in a nurse’s uniform. For decades, the Fronczaks cherished the boy they believed was their son, while the real Paul grew up unaware of his origins. Jack Rosenthal, once Paul Fronczak, found love and acceptance in the family that raised him, but he will always wonder about the twin sister he lost and the life he might have lived.

And so, the strange case of Paul Fronczak remains, at its heart, a mystery. It is the story of a mother’s love, a child’s search for identity, and the enduring power of family—both the one we are born into and the one we find along the way. The answers uncovered have only led to more questions, and the search for Jill continues, a testament to the hope that even in the darkest of stories, there may yet be another miracle waiting to be found.