Federal law enforcement officials have reopened a nearly 50-year-old case of a baby kidnapped from a Chicago hospital that was presumably solved only a year after it took place.

The boy, named Paul Joseph Fronczak, was snatched, 16 hours after his birth, from Michael Reese Hospital on April 27, 1964, by a woman posing as a nurse. A toddler abandoned in a stroller in Newark, New Jersey, fourteen months later looked enough like the missing child that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded the boy belonged to Chester and Dora Fronczak.

The Fronczaks raised the child believing he was theirs. But it turns out he was not the missing baby after all, once Paul Fronczak had a DNA test performed that revealed he was not related to his parents.

The FBI said it would reexamine old evidence from the case, whose files were thought to be lost until the bureau rediscovered them.

Fronczak says his parents support his desire to solve the mystery, but don’t want to be involved in the investigation, saying it is too painful to revisit the incident.

He added that he doesn’t care how long it might take to finally solve the case and find out what happened to the real baby, and who his real parents are.

“I’m in this for the long haul. I'm not going to quit,” Paul Fronczak told the Chicago Tribune. “I think that the perfect ending would be to find the real Paul, see that he's doing well and then on the same day find my real family. It would also be nice to have an actual birth date that I could believe in.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff

To Learn More:

FBI Reopens Case of Chicago Infant Kidnapped in 1964 (by Ellen Jean Hirst, Chicago Tribune)

FBI Reopens Mystery Missing Baby Case after Man Discovers from DNA that he was Returned to Wrong Parents FiftyYears Ago and was not Snatched from their Arms (by Michael Zennie and Louise Boyle, Daily Mail)

 Twice Disappeared: Paul Joseph Fronczak Realizes he’s NOT Kidnapped Baby Claimed by Parents (by Nina Golgowski, New York Daily News)