A baby snatched from his mother's bedside at just one day old, a nationwide manhunt and a man desperate to find his missing sister. We speak to the man at the heart of an incredible story with twists and turns at every point
WEARING a nurse's uniform as a disguise, the woman crept into the maternity ward and snatched one-day-old baby Paul from his cradle.
The abduction, from a Chicago hospital, sparked a manhunt which captivated America, but it took two years before the FBI could finally call the baby's distraught parents with the news they had been praying for.
An abandoned toddler had been found in a shopping centre in New Jersey, and investigators had a hunch it could be the same child who was taken by a still-unidentified kidnapper two years previously, in 1964.
With no record of Paul's blood type or fingerprints, it was hard to prove the baby really was him, but facial similarities with the lost baby were enough proof to hand him over to the relieved parents, Dora and Chester Fronczak.
The Fronczaks said that the toddler's ear was the same shape as baby Paul's - based on the one photo they had of him, taken on the day of his birth - and so they took him in and tried to move on from the abduction.
It looked like the saga was over... but it was only just beginning.
Having been adopted by Dora and Chester Fronczak, Paul never found out about the kidnapping until he was ten, when he stumbled upon a box of newspaper cuttings about the case.
His parents explained that he had been abducted as a baby, but that they had found him in the end, and that they loved him.
That was all he needed to know, they said.
Speaking today, Paul told Sun Online: "There were no accurate DNA tests back then, so there's nothing the Fronczaks could have done to be 100 per cent certain that the boy they were given was their actual son Paul."
But as he grew up, Paul couldn't help but notice that he was very different to the rest of his family; his parents and younger brother, Dave, were a conservative, Catholic bunch, while he was a long-haired rocker and motorbike fanatic.
As an adult, Paul worked a series of jobs all over America before settling into life as a model in Las Vegas - but he could never quite shake his suspicions about the kidnapping which defined his childhood.
Paul couldn't get rid of the nagging doubts about whether he really was Paul Fronczak, which were growing by the day.
His curiosity was piqued in 2008 when, expecting a daughter with his second wife, he realised he had no idea what to say to doctors asking him about his family history.
Paul didn't talk to his parents about his suspicions until 2012, when he picked up an over-the-counter DNA testing kit and asked if they'd like to know the truth: was he really their son?
All three swabbed their cheeks and vowed to accept whatever they found out, but Chester and Dora later decided that they'd rather not know.
Paul, then 47, couldn't resist sending the samples off anyway, and when they came back, he learned there was no chance at all that he was really Paul Fronczak.
His parents were furious with him for ignoring their wishes, and didn't talk to him for a year.
Meanwhile, Paul enlisted the help of genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, to trace his DNA and find out who his real family is.
"This was certainly one of the most difficult cases I have ever worked on," CeCe, from the , told Sun Online.
"The first step in all of my cases is getting the DNA testing done. With Paul, we needed as much data as we could possibly get to unravel the mystery of his origins."
CeCe then matched this DNA to an enormous database - made up of the users of popular testing kits like 23andMe and AncestryDNA.
"From there, we worked with the family trees of those who share DNA with Paul," she says. "By studying their trees, we were able to start to reverse engineer his family tree.
"It was a huge relief when we were finally able to give him an answer. He had worked so long and so hard to get it."
Paul was stunned when CeCe came up with an answer. In 2015 she concluded that his real identity was that of Jack Rosenthal, and that he was six months older than he thought.
While the extended Rosenthal family was delighted to get to know him, he unearthed some dark secrets about his real parents: an alcoholic mother and a disturbed, veteran father, who are both now dead.
The family told him that he also had four siblings including a twin sister, Jill, who had also gone missing after allegedly being neglected by his parents.
One cousin shared their horrifying memory of seeing the babies sitting "in a cage", while other family members say the twins were always crying - another sinister clue to his mysterious childhood.
Faced with these distressing discoveries, Paul believed the only explanation was that something "tragic" had happened to Jill, and that he had been abandoned by his biological parents so they wouldn't have to explain why they only had one twin.
"I had expected to feel absolute elation when I finally learned my true identity," he says.
"But that's not what happened, because in the very next breath I learned that I also had a twin sister who was missing.
"The only reason I started this journey was to find my parents' kidnapped son, Paul. If I found out who I was in the process, that was a bonus.
"I never imagined that this mystery would only get bigger as we found more answers."
Jill's whereabouts are still a mystery today, but he has devoted his life to an obsessive search for answers, even digging up the garden where his biological parents used to live in search of his twin sister's remains.
Paul, now 54 and the father of an nine-year-old daughter, has even written a book, The Foundling, about his struggle to unearth the truth about who he is and how he got there.
He has also made peace with his adopted dad Chester, who died last year, and mum Dora, 81, whose kindness he hopes to repay by finding out what happened to her real son.
The private investigator assigned to his case believes he may have tracked down the bodies of a possible Jill and a possible biological Paul, and he is planning on exhuming them to find the truth.
"Our best lead regarding the real Paul Fronczak involves someone who unfortunately passed away many years ago in Texas," Paul says.
"We also have new leads that come in every week, and we're just going to keep tracking them down until we find the real Paul. We are also running down some serious tips on Jill."
Until the search is over, he's keeping the name Paul, but he hopes that one day he can hand over Paul's birth certificate and live out the rest of his life as Jack Rosenthal - the man he really is.
Paul Joseph Fronczak is co-author with Alex Tresniowski of The Foundling - The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and my Search for the Real Me.
