The FBI said I was my parents' stolen baby - but I found the truth

When a one-day-old baby, Paul Joseph Fronczak, was stolen from a Chicago hospital in 1964, the terrible story made headlines across America. Then, two years later, an abandoned boy was identified as the missing baby and handed over to the relieved parents. Years later, Paul began to investigate what had happened - and was shocked by what he found.

Paul Fronczak was 10 when he went hunting for Christmas presents in his parents' basement. He pushed aside a sofa to get into the crawl space. There, he discovered three mysterious boxes full of letters, sympathy cards and newspaper clippings. One headline read: "200 search for stolen baby." Another: "Mother asks kidnapper to return baby." He recognised his parents in the pictures, looking distraught and much younger. Then he read that their baby son, Paul Joseph, had been kidnapped.

"Wow, that's me!" he thought.

It was a sensational tale. On 26 April 1964 his mother, Dora Fronczak, had given birth to a baby boy in the Michael Reese hospital in Chicago. She had nursed the baby throughout the day - when he wasn't sleeping with other babies in the nursery. But the following morning a woman dressed as a nurse came into Dora's room and took him to be examined by a doctor. She never returned.

Hospital staff realised something had gone wrong, and a frantic search was soon under way. However, the hospital didn't notify the authorities - or the baby's parents - until that afternoon. At 3pm they called the father, Chester Fronczak, at the factory where he worked as a machinist.

"My dad had to leave work, go to the hospital and tell his wife that the baby was missing," says Paul. "You think you're safe - you're in a hospital - and that's where your baby is kidnapped."

The biggest manhunt in Chicago's history was then launched, involving 175,000 postal workers, 200 police officers and the FBI. They had searched 600 homes by midnight, but to no avail

Then, in March 1966, nearly two years later, Dora and Chester received a letter from the FBI - a toddler had been found in Newark, New Jersey, who matched their son's description.

The boy had been abandoned in a pushchair in a busy shopping centre the previous July and had been placed with a foster family, the Eckerts. They had baptised him Scott McKinley and were so fond of him they were considering adopting him.

Before they could, however, a New Jersey police detective had the idea that the boy might be the missing baby from Chicago.