Lived someone else’s life without knowing it: the amazing story of Paul Fronzak

Do you remember yourself at two years old? And at an earlier age? Most people will answer these questions with a resounding “no”. Just like Paul Fronzak from the USA – a man whose story shocked the whole world. After all, even the most talented Hollywood screenwriters cannot imagine such a thing.

How did an American live someone else’s life without even suspecting anything? Talks about it program “Incredibly interesting stories” with Alexei Korzin and Sergey Dolya on REN TV.

Mysterious baby abduction

It all started on April 26, 1964 in Chicago, when the firstborn was stolen from the Fronzacs right in the maternity hospital. Baby Paul was carried away by a woman in a nurse’s uniform. No one saw her or the child again. In all the newspapers of the state, the mother’s appeal to the kidnappers appeared: she begged to return her son. The boy was searched for by 175,000 postal workers, 200 police officers and FBI agents. By midnight they had checked 600 houses, but all without result.

“Two years pass, and they find a child who looks like their son. They adopted him and continued to raise him. They didn’t even care if it wasn’t their child, because they tried to remove it as much as possible, to remove from understanding even that this could happen”– said the psychologist Olga Savskaya.

Here Paul is happy running down the stairs on Christmas morning – such movie shots his parents often filmed. He was a beloved child, but it always seemed to the boy that something was wrong in his family. He realized what it was when, at the age of 10, he found newspaper clippings in the basement. From them, he learned about the very abduction.

“When he found notes and newspaper clippings that he was kidnapped, he was very much alarmed. But his mother said: “It’s all in the past, we found you, let’s forget about it and close this topic”says the psychologist.

Stranger in your family

The story was never discussed again in the house, but Paul couldn’t forget about it. From that moment on, it always seemed to him that he was not at all like his parents. And, quite possibly, he is completely alien to them. Today, this problem is easy to solve: a DNA paternity test can be done in almost any clinic and even at home. But then there was no talk of such technologies. Scientists began deciphering the human genome when Paul Fronzak was already 26 years old.

Only in 2000 did scientists release a working draft of the genome structure, and the full genome three years later. Then Paul was already 39. He almost forgot about the story of the kidnapping and remembered it only 10 years later, when his second wife was expecting a child.

“They asked him when the child was born:” Do you have any hereditary genetic diseases? “That’s what prompted him to still do the test”Savskaya noted.

“All life has been a lie”

Then Paul offered to test his parents. And when I saw the results, I was horrified.

“My whole life has been a lie. We are not even distant relatives. I understood why I was always so different from them”Fronzak says.

Paul didn’t really look like his parents at all. Their outlook on life was also very different. In his youth, he was a rebel, and his loving family was religious quiet. But they loved him.

After the test, Paul’s life changed forever: he gave interviews, talked about him on TV – was invited to various TV shows. And the FBI resumed the investigation: now the experts were looking for the real Paul and the fake family at once. The best geneticists worked on the case, Cece Moore is one of them.

“We found his biological family in Tennessee. It turned out that Paul’s name is actually Jack Rosenthal, he is six months older than we all thought. He had a twin sister who disappeared”she said.

Did Paul manage to find his relatives?

Paul-Jack rejoiced, but it turned out that not all relatives are in a hurry to get to know him better. The history of the biological family shocked him: his own mother drank a lot, his father went through Vietnam and returned angry to the whole world. Nobody liked children – noisy twins were even locked in a cage, and then they simply disappeared. Only his cousin by blood agreed to communicate with the found Jack. But he couldn’t really explain anything.

“He said they were always told that the twins were distant relatives. But I think something terrible happened. Maybe my sister is even dead.”said Paul Fronzak.

Since then, Paul, who never changed his usual name, continues to search for his blood sister. He even dug through the entire garden in the backyard of the Rosenthals – looking for the remains of the twin. And he was also looking for the biological son of the Fronzacs, although he does not hide: Chester and Dora will forever remain real parents for him. After all, it was they who raised him and were close to him all his life.

“Recently, we found the real Paul. He lives near Michigan and is fighting cancer. He never knew that he was stolen. He does not want to communicate with journalists and share the details of his life”– said Cece Moore.

A sentimental meeting 60 years later did not work out either. Chester Fronzak died before geneticists found his biological son. And Dora until the last refused any meetings with journalists and talk about the fact that her Paul is not Paul. To her, he was her only son, period.

The most mysterious and interesting places on our planet, the amazing customs of peoples, incredible stories and much more – in the program “Incredibly Interesting Stories” on REN TV.