This is Jeppar Roberts with 2020. For more than four decades, 2020 has brought you an incredible variety of compelling stories. Well, now we're going to bring you back to some of the most heart-stopping ones from the 2020 true crime vault. And we're going to give you updates on what happened to the people involved. Thanks for listening.

Coming up. I don't.

Know anything about myself, I don't know how old I am, my heritage, my birthday. Everything I thought was my.

Life wasn't. The shocking story of a baby stolen at birth by a mysterious woman disguised as a nurse.

The baby.

Was.

Kidnapped. The baby was gone. Then suddenly, 14 months later, he's found.

Or is he? This is my life, and this is my only shot at solving these mysteries. -is this.

The room? -barmary Walters with a 50-year-old case that suddenly turned red hot.

Is couldn't be an easy case.

Couldn't be a problem. A grown man's obsession with finding out if he's the wheel's baby, Paul. Hundreds of new.

Leads pouring in. The crib was over.

By the window. Dna clues, stunning age-progression images. If he's not the real Paul, is this man?

It's ghostly to see it.

In person. And finally, the shocker that changes everything.

Do you know who.

Stole this baby?

Yes, my mother. Is there finally an answer? Who was really stolen at birth? I'm John Quineones. It was a story that made sensational headlines. A day-old baby snatched from the maternity ward. Police and FBI agents searching for the lost infant. Then, more than a year later and hundreds of miles away, a little boy was found abandoned. The FBI said they believed he was the missing child, but was he? Fifty years later, that boy, Paul Fronsac, said the FBI had it all wrong. And with the help of ABC News, a new search was launched. Barbara Walters first unraveled this mysterious tale in 2013, and now there may finally be an answer to the question, Who was stolen at birth?

I want to show you some photographs. Looking at old family photos with Paul Fronsac is a strange experience because the baby in his baby pictures is not him. How do you feel when you see this picture? I feel.

Like I want to find him and hug him and make sure he's okay.

Paul has a wife, Michelle, a daughter, Emma, and a fish named Blue. Say hello, Blue. A perfectly ordinary life. The problem, as he recently discovered, it is not his life. This mystery, born of a terrible crime, was supposedly solved nearly 50 years ago. But today it is a paradox, so strange even his name is not his own. Who is Paul Fonzac?

That's what I.

Hope we can find. The crazy, amazing story begins with a villain, an evil woman dressed in white and a baby stolen at birth half a lifetime ago in 1964. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House leading a nation, still reeling from the assassination of President Kennedy. A young journalist named Barbara, or something or other, was breaking into television, appearing on The Today Show. And the original boy band was shaking up America. We're taking.

Taking.

Taking, baby. We're taking them, baby. In Chicago, Chester and Dora Farnzac married two years living in an apartment in his parents' home, were starting a family. Her first pregnancy ended in stillbirth. But on Sunday, April 26th, Dora gave birth to a healthy nine-pound boy. They named him Paul Joseph.

He was a very cute, alive, sparkly baby, and she was thrilled.

Mary Trinshed-Petrie was a 19-year-old student nurse at Michael Vie's Hospital in Chicago. She was in the maternity ward with Dora Fransac the day after her delivery.

That whole thing is like a movie in my brain. I see myself in my uniform and as a student nurse. I see the joy that was when they brought the baby to her the first time, how thrilled she was.

But soon the thrill and the baby would be gone. It was the last time Dora Fransac would hold her son. Earlier that day, a woman dressed like a nurse, all in white, had come into her room. She looked at baby Paul and left without a word. The woman had been seen elsewhere in the maternity ward several times that day and the day before. No one questioned her or raised any alarm. Former FBI agent and ABC consultant Brad Garrett has looked into this case.

For us. My sense is she was looking for what child she.

Wanted to take. That afternoon, the woman in white returned to Doris Fransac's room.

As I was leaving the room, a woman came into.

The room. This time, she did more than just look. Did Mrs. Fronsac give her her baby?

The woman said to her, The doctor wants to see her baby. She said, Okay, and handed the baby to her.

The fake nurse was able to whisk Paul Fronsac out of the maternity ward, down several flights of stairs, and out of the hospital.

Apparently, she got in a cab and took off. Easy. Easy.

Very easy. Just like that, Paul Fonzac, less than two days old, was stolen from his mother's arms and vanished. The baby was kidnapped.

Baby was gone.

Mary Trinshard says 45 minutes passed before the baby was missed.

They said, Do you have the Fransac baby? And I said, No. And she said, Well, then the baby's gone. I was like, Gone where? And she said, You go back to Mrs. Fonzac's room and stay with her. The baby's been taken.

There was a frantic search. Nurses turned the hospital upside down. But astonishingly, for several hours, no one told Dora Fonzac, the one person best able to describe the kidnapper that her baby had been taken. Your heart must have been in your mouth.

It was awful.

Finally, authorities came empty handed to the maternity ward to deliver their stunning news.

They told her, Mrs. Fransik, your baby's been taken.

Is.

There anything you'd like to.

Add, Mr.

Fransek?

What would you like to tell the person who took the baby? We uncovered rare archival news photographs and film footage of the case. Here is Chester Fransek, the day after learning that while he was at work as an aircraft machinist handing out celebrity sagas, his boy had been stolen.

Do you have an appeal to the kidnapped? I pray that you'll take care of the baby and return them. I don't know.

What words to say. A distraught Dora Fransac with Chester, kneeling by her side, made a public appeal for the kidnapper to return their son.

Do you have any reason to.

Think why.

She might.

Have taken the baby?

The only.

Thing I can think.

Of, she must have been desperate for a baby that she would come and take someone else's baby away from them where she couldn't have.

Her or she lost hers or something. But even losing the.

Child, I don't think you're that desperate to take.

Another woman's baby.

If the kidnapper, seen in police sketches, heard the Fransac's plea, she was not moved by it. But others were. Fbi, agents, and police, many working on their day off, searched the city for the phony nurse and the kidnapped baby. They threw out a dragnet, pursuing hundreds of leads and tips from the public.

So where do you go from here all the time? We're still checking out.

All the leads we have that we're.

Receiving.

By telephone and.

Other checks that we are making. Authorities had another problem. If and when they found the baby, how would they positively identify him? There was no DNA testing and blood testing was inexact.

Particularly if you go.

Back to 1964, '65.

Extremely challenging trying to match up. Is this the child? The biological child of the fronsax?

There was another identification method that involved the shape of an ear.

Basically, it's the dimension, size, and the folds of the ear.

Authorities were about to get a chance to put the ear theory to the test. 14 months after the kidnapping, a child was found. A boy, apparently the right age, halfway across the country. Was it possible? Might this be the face of Paul Fronsac?

I.

Heard the ladies say, Oh, my God, this is my child. This is my baby. Stay with us. It was the biggest kidnapping since the Lindberg baby, Paul Fonzac, stolen at birth by a fake nurse. His angelic face peering from the front page was the last anyone had seen of him. Left behind were an empty crib and two broken hearts. A year passed, and then one day their phone rang. Eight hundred miles away in north New Jersey, a boy had been found.

The FBI contacted my parents and said, We think we found your son. My parents had to.

Drive to New Jersey. They said, This is our baby.

This is Paul.

We recognized him. Yes. Whoever abandoned the baby had dressed him up, wheeled him to a department store in a new stroller, and walked away. You have.

Someone who places a child in a place that's.

Going to be found.

And found quickly. It's not somebody that wants this child to die or be harmed.

In any way. This is a picture of you when you were found in Newark after you were abandoned. How do you feel when you see yourself?

That's my first baby picture. That's all I have so far. This is it. That's it.

This is the boy New Jersey authorities called unknown male number one in the arms of a nurse from a Newark hospital. Somebody wheels a stroller, puts you here, walks away.

And never looks back.

-and never looks back.

It's crazy.

We return to Newark, New Jersey with Paul Fronsac. Back to the very place where someone left him sitting in a stroller 48 years before. -is it emotional for you to be here?

-it is. I feel eerie. I feel anxious. I feel excited. I feel sad.

All.

Those things.

Paul Fronsac, back on the New Jersey Street, a crossroad in his life.

I wish these walls could talk. Maybe we could learn something. I don't know. I can't believe that this actually had happen. I can't believe it's my life.

New Jersey authorities temporarily placed the abandoned boy with an unidentified family. That period was a mystery until Janet and Garcia came forward. She says it was her family who had cared for the boy as they had for nearly 100 other foundlings over the years. He was.

An adorable little boy. He really was.

The FBI is now investigating the little abandoned boy. They came several times.

And they took different, like a.

mold of this ear.

That was sent up to Chicago. Authorities compared the shape of the left ear of the boy in New Jersey with the baby photos of Paul Fonzac. One day, Janet's family was summoned to a meeting. They were told to bring the boy. He was led to a room where Dora and Chester Farnzac were waiting.

I heard the.

Ladies say, Oh, my God, this is my child. This is my baby. Everybody's such.

An, Oh, my God. The woman found her baby and this baby.

Found his mother.

In the summer of 1966, the Farnzacks believed their family had been miraculously reunited. The FBI ordered a series of blood tests on the abandoned boy and compared photographs of his left ear with that of the Farnzack baby, eventually, confident enough that they informed the Farnzacks who said they had no doubt that the child was there. They brought him home to Chicago, and for the second time, named him Paul Joseph Fonzac. Your parents were convinced. Why were they so convinced?

I feel it's the FBI. The FBI is like the epitome of authority. And when they say, This is your child, I would believe them. That's it.

And that ended the search at that point. Everyone stopped looking for Paul Farnzac. That was the end of the story. Yes. Tell me about your childhood. Was it happy? Yeah, it was.

A great childhood. Barbecues, family get-togethers, family vacations.

The family so often filmed in Heartbreak, now recorded home movies of their own. The star of every celebration, of course, was Paul. They had missed his first step, first word, first birthday. But Paul was now back where he belonged, blissfully unaware of his past until years later. When you were 10 years old, you had a shocking discovery. Tell me about it. I was looking.

For Christmas presents and stupid around the house, and I found all these boxes. And it turned out it was a box of clippings and a bunch of cards and letters all about a kidnapping.

Did you ask your parents.

About it? I did. I asked them, What is this? And they said, Well, you were kidnapped. We found you.

He'd say, Just like that, you were kidnapped?

We found you. And that's all that matters. You're our son. We love you.

How did your parents explain what happened to you?

They really didn't talk about it. It was something that we really didn't bring up in the house. It was a very touchy subject.

Did you ever feel that there was anything out of the ordinary when you were.

Growing up? Well, I did notice that I didn't resemble anybody in my family.

You had a brother? Correct. And he looked like your parents?

Exactly like my dad, 100 %.

And you didn't at all?

Not at all.

When he grew up, Paul pursued a career as an actor. I told.

You we were nice. We're really nice.

His resemblance to George Clooney got him work as a stand-in in Oceans 11 movies.

Ready.

Ready, go. Today, Paul works for a college in Nevada, where he lives with his wife, Michelle, and their daughter, Emma. Good job. Yeah, Daddy. Do you remember how you felt when Paul said, I'm not really sure who I am?

The first time he told me, I thought he was joking. I thought he was just kidding around. But then once I realized it was true and I saw the newspaper clippings, I felt very sad for his parents and sad for him.

How do you think it has shaped him?

I think as a 10-year-old boy, when he first saw those newspaper clippings, not realizing who he was, I'm sure that that has somehow shaped him, and that's done something to him over the years. It's sad.

Was it there in the back of your mind, this.

Peculiar thing? It was really a big part of me through my whole life, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

Who am I? Who am I?

Yeah.

Then Paul happened to see a DNA test kit for sale at a local drugstore. At last, an easy answer to the question that had followed him all his life, the hard part, asking his parents for a DNA sample, forcing them to travel back in town to the most painful part of their lives.

It's something I wanted to do for a long time, but I never really had the nerve to ask my parents.

Still ahead, will the Fronsac family agree to end decades of doubt? Paul is determined to find the truth, but his parents seemed just as determined to keep it hidden.

They said, Paul, please don't send it in. We don't want to know.

From his home in Las Vegas, a city defined by luck and loss, Paul Fonzac took the biggest gamble of his life. After decades of wandering, of suspecting that he might not be the baby stolen from his mother's arms, he asked his parents for samples of their DNA. I think I.

Got him off guard a little bit because I mentioned to my mom, Did you ever really wonder if I was really your child? She said, Yeah, we thought about it. I said, Well, what if we can find out a way? And they said, Well, yeah, we'd like to know. And then I went and got the DNA kit and it was all done in five minutes.

But later, second thoughts. Were you ready to handle whatever secrets might come out?

Yes.

Were your parents ready to handle the secrets?

No. They called me and they said, We don't want you to have that test done. And if you do it, we don't want to know. I had the packet ready to go on my desk in my house for about three weeks, and I would pass it every day fighting with whether to do it or not. And finally, one day I told my wife, I said, You know what? I have to do this. I really need to know. It was.

The answer that he had anticipated and feared the results were in, the test that would tell him if he'd been living a lie. Describe the moment when you got the results of the DNA test.

I got the phone call. I found out that there was no remote possibility that I was a Fronzac child. And all of a sudden, I felt the color drain from my face.

And I said, Are you okay? And he said, I don't know. He said, I feel a little dizzy. I need to stay in my chair right now.

And all of a sudden, I started thinking, I don't know anything about myself. I don't know how old I am, my heritage, my birthday, all these things that people take for granted, everything I thought was my life wasn't.

He said, I don't know anything about myself. And I said, Well, you do. You're my husband. You're Emma's dad. You know who you are.

But who he is is not this baby boy. For Chester and Dora Fernzag, the fairy tale ending to their family tragedy was revealed to be just that, a fiction. How does a loving son say to his parents, You are not my biological parents.

That was another hurdle I had to go through. My dad's 82. He has a hard time hearing on the phone. And my mom, I knew she would be very upset. So I really thought the best way would be to send them a letter.

Would you read it?

Sure. All right. So it's Dear Mom and Dad. First, I am your son and always will be. I love you both and that will be forever. I am not the kidnapped baby that you had stolen from your arms on April 27th, 1964. This means that the real Paul Joseph Fronzac may still be out there alive, not knowing who he is. I know this is hard for you, but this is also about me at this point.

What was the reaction of your parents?

My dad called me, and he called me a name that he never has called me before in my life.

How did you feel?

I was speechless. And then my dad hung up. In their heart, I was their son, and that's all that mattered.

Did you think maybe you shouldn't have taken the DNA test?

I struggle with that quite a bit. I love my parents, and I always do what they ask, but this is something that I really felt I had to do.

But the truth hurts. The Franzac's prayers to find their stolen baby had actually never been answered.

I feel like the fransics, it's like their baby has been kidnapped again, like they're going through it all over again.

For Mary Tranchard-Petrie, the student nurse who witnessed their grief firsthand, it is still a heartbreaking development. We have a film to show you from 1964. It's your parents at a press conference just days after their baby was stolen. Let me show it to you. Okay.

The only thing I.

Can think.

Of, she must.

Have been desperate for a baby that she would come and take someone else's baby away from them. What are your thoughts when you see this?

It just really hits home with how my mother-in-law felt. And then it hits home that the pain that she went through then, I'm sure she's feeling it now.

For Paul, foreign memories have become bittersweet, tainted by the knowledge that he was not kidnapped and found. He had been abandoned, most likely, by a parent.

The toughest moment for me is when I watched the home movies of when I was first brought back from Jersey, and I see how a young boy was running around that someone had just left. And it kills me every time I see that. I look at my daughter, she's four years old, and the thought of leaving her behind, that's what really hurts me the most.

Paul is now determined to solve the two mysteries in his life. Who is he and what happened to his parents' stolen baby?

My main goal is to find the real Paul. My parents raised me and they did a great job. And I feel that if I don't do everything I can to help find the real child, then I'm not doing my job as a son.

Don't you also want to find out who you are?

It'd be a great bonus.

To help Paul solve these mysteries, we introduced him to Brian Ross, our chief investigative correspondent, and ABC news consultant Brad Garrett, a former FBI profiler.

We're starting to pull together anybody who touched the case in your game.

I mean, it's for.

The long haul. To crack open a cold case that is five decades old, we hit the airwaves.

I'm in Chicago for the hunt for a stolen baby.

Asking viewers to test their memories and send in tips. If you know anything about this case, let us hear from you. Next, the search for a 49-year-old man who could be the stolen baby. Is this a glimpse of the real Paul Fransac? 2020's investigation, when we return.

Dna testing has finally proved Paul Fransac was not the infant stolen from a maternity ward years ago. But if not him, then who is the real baby Paul? And who are Paul Fronsac's true birth parents? Abc news chief investigative correspondent, Brian Ross, stepped in to help him find out. When we.

Arrived in Chicago, the case was as cold as could be in a city notorious for its Lake Michigan windchill. The hospital on the South Side, where Paul Fronsac was stolen, has been shuttered. Its records long gone. Do you have any further clues? No, sir, not at this time. And the key detectives, even most of the reporters assigned to the story back then, are all dead. But there is one clue and really only one clue left. This hospital photograph taken the morning the baby was stolen at a day and a half old. So that's how we began our investigation. With artists at the National Center for Missing and exploited children trained in criminal forensics who create what are called age progression images, Steve Lofton runs the unit. We've had good.

Success.

Especially with the long-term.

Missing kids that have been gone about.

10 years or more. What was the challenge when you got the assignment with Paul Franset? Obviously, being an infant, that was the only picture we had available, and it was the awkward angle of.

That image.

Artist Colin McNally was assigned the task. Working from family photos of Paul's parents and brother, it became a jigsaw puzzle, fitting distinctive features from each of the family members into a blank face. And then, for the first time, what the real Paul Fransac could look like, 49 years in the making, from blank face to a handsome man in a dark shirt who was stolen from his mother's arms and does not know it. I feel good about it. I think it is in the.

Ballpark.

Yes, sir. That if he's alive, there's someone who.

Looks like that. Yes, I would bet on it. The last.

Known sighting of the baby and the kidnapped was at this intersection in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport, where a cab driver told police he had dropped them off after picking them up at the hospital. The search went on for days. In 1964, hundreds of police officers and FBI agents were involved. Our consultant, former FBI Agent Brad Garrett, says it is likely the kidnapper had some ties here given past infant abduction cases. They tend.

To be from.

The community where they take the child. So we did our own door-to-door cameras with the image from the center for missing and exploited children, and another one produced by artists, commissioned by ABC News from the Michigan firm, fojo. Com. Some of the old timers in Bridgeport remembered the case. I do remember that baby being stolen. You don't recognize these pictures. But that was about all. So then on the air on our ABC station in Chicago, channel Seven, to show the new Age progression photos. We have an idea of what he might look like. Within hours, the tips began to roll in. One viewer said the stolen baby was a Chicago fireman, and we'd find him at the station house on the South Side. Another viewer thought the owner of this suburban restaurant was the stolen baby. Why don't you take your hat off there? What have you seen? No? No. But another lead gave us new insight into the woman who kidnapped the baby. She may have tried to steal another baby a few weeks earlier from the backyard of this home, also on the south side of Chicago.

And all of a sudden, I heard my mother scream. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, that's her. And Mom was pointing.

At the old black.

And white TV set saying that's the woman who was in.

Our yard.

Trying to take Nicole.

Joan Rome was a teenager at the time, and her niece, Nicole, was 10 months old in a baby carriage while Joan's mother took down the sheets from the laundry line. The woman.

Had taken the mosquitoeset off Nicole's buggy and had her hands in the buggy, ready to grab Nicole.

She says her family called the local police precept, but that there was never any follow-up. But now, after almost 50 years, there is new life in the stolen baby investigation that the FBI closed out in the 1960s.

We're going to do everything that we can to follow up to see if that baby is out there. They're going to keep looking through it and analyzing it.

Fbi Agent Robert Shield says the case was reopened after Paul Fransac's DNA revealed he was not the stolen baby.

We believe there's someone out there that has information.

And so far, three separate individuals have come forward, each of them 48 or 49 years old, about the right age range. Joe Lang and his wife, Joni, contacted us after they saw the age progression images on the ABC news website.

It is shocking at the similarities.

The hairline.

Everything is a match.

Rub it around.

In there. Lang volunteered to have his DNA tested, telling us that he learned at the age of eight he was adopted under what he called suspicious circumstances. It was much the same story with Cody Hall of Loveland, Colorado. His wife, Pamela, contacted us after seeing the story on television.

The baby picture really reminded me so much of.

Cody that.

It gave me chills.

Hall said he wanted to take a DNA test because he never knew his birth parents and was told he was just found somewhere by a relative.

He just.

Said she found me.

But I don't know how that was done.

And.

Then there is David Fisher who lives outside Fresno, California. I do.

Believe there's a chance that I am the stolen baby.

As he provided us with his DNA sample, he told us how his wife and children saw the ABC news stories. And when.

They saw the picture pop up, they said, Dad, that looks like you.

And when his family added facial hair to the age progression images, there was a distinct resemblance.

I was totally shocked when I saw the resemblance. If I had no mustache, they would be me.

Despite the similarities, none of those three was a match for the missing baby. Then Paul Fransact visited Barbara Walters on The View to cast an even wider net.

For our search. So tell us what your.

Quest is. The main quest is to find out what happened to Paul because a tragic thing happened.

To my mom. The real Paul, John Jack, the real baby who was kidnapped.

And a viewer thought she knew the solution to this five decades-long mystery. A friend of hers in Dallas by the name of Sam Miller.

There she sees this picture come up on TV, and she called me. She goes, You're going to think I'm out of my mind.

This is the picture?

Yes. It's ghostly.

To see it in.

Person.

That large. Yeah. Not only does Miller look a lot like one of the age progression images we had produced, but look at the baby pictures.

It looks like me, and it looks like my son.

Miller, a 49-year-old Microsoft executive, is the right age to be the stolen baby. Grew up in a suburb outside of Chicago and did not learn he was adopted until doctors told him his kidney disease had taken a serious turn for the worse. He called a cousin for information about the family's medical history.

I'm end-stage renal disease, and I need a kidney. She started the sentence with, What kidney disease? You mean you don't know you're adopted?

So for Miller and his wife and two children, the prospect of finding his real family could be a matter of life and death.

So here I am, and hope that I'm able to find a kidney, find my family, and go on with my life because I'm near the end.

Miller was eager to provide swabs with his DNA sample to be tested and made contact with the FBI. This must be quite an emotional moment for you.

I look like that guy, and I have no idea where I.

Came from. And then, as Miller was showing me pictures from the family album.

Karin Mosak, my mother.

The phone ringing in the kitchen. It was the call he had been waiting for. This is Sam. The phone call that would resolve it all from the government office in Chicago that had his original adoption papers, which 2020 helped to get unsealed.

I appreciate it.

I would like to know who I am.

It was a 92nd phone call full of nervous anticipation. I see. As Miller learned what was found in the adoption files. Okay, there. That had been kept secret until this moment.

My birth mother.

Was.

Sheila. If true, that meant that Miller had not been stolen, but given up for adoption legitimately. Nothing was stolen, baby.

No, they found my.

Original birth certificate.

For Sam and his family, hugs and tears and disappointment.

-are you okay? -yeah, I'll be fine.

And a new search for a family he now needs to find as he faces a kidney transplant to keep him alive.

I have a brand new search.

For us, it was back to Chicago, and the discovery on the 2020 tip line of what amazingly would turn out to be an even more intriguing lead about who the kidnapper might be. Do you know who stole this baby?

My mother.

Your mother stole the baby?

Yes.

His name is Johnny Harbaut, and what he told us about his mother may seem far-fetched, but it most definitely is not. It's a pretty serious charge that your mother kidnapped a baby.

Right. But she was arrested a few times for suspicion of kidnapping babies.

His mother's name was Linda Taylor, a notorious figure in Chicago in the 1970s and '80s, dubbed America's welfare queen and vilified by President Ronald Reagan. Her name is Linda Taylor, the Illinois Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Assistance, investigated. Came up with 82 charges of welfare, fraud, perjury, and bigotry. Among other things, they discovered 100 aliases and 50 false addresses. We began to look for her after our 2020 tipline provided this clue. The baby was stolen by a lady known as the welfare queen. She had many, many schemes to get money and would have most likely sold the baby. Linda Taylor died in 2002, but we found her son living in a Chicago suburb, prepared, he said, to finally tell what he knows about his mother and the stolen baby. Did he have a name?

He had a name, but we called him Tiger.

Warbau said he was a teenager living in this house in Chicago when he came home to discover a new baby. Was your mother capable of stealing.

A baby? My mother was capable of anything. Not only stealing a baby, but she could steal you. She was just that woman. She done however what it took for her to survive.

Warbau said his mother was a master of disguise, could pass as white or black, Puerto Rican, or in her schemes to collect fraudulent welfare payments, sometimes posing as a doctor or.

A nurse. She had a room with nothing but wigs and nurse dresses and shoes.

In the 1970s, when Linda Taylor was put on trial for welfare fraud. Ms. Taylor, can we talk to you for a moment? She actually came under investigation for stealing the Fransac baby. From one newspaper account, one of her ex-husbands told agents that Ms. Taylor appeared one day in the mid-1960s with a newborn baby, although she had not been pregnant. It would not surprise me. Isiah Gantt was Linda Taylor's lawyer at the time. Until 2020, she never admitted anything, but he wouldn't put it past her to snatch a baby. The woman was just a chameleon. She could be anything. So I couldn't rule out the possibility.

That she could be involved in something like that.

Her son, Johnny, says he came home from school one day and the baby was gone, taken, he believes, by one of his mother's boyfriends to Tennessee. But you're sure.

About this? I'm positive.

Harball said the man who took the baby worked at what was then the American Rivet Company. A former employee there confirmed to 2020 the name Harball gave us and said the man indeed had moved to a small town in Tennessee. Our 2020 investigative team went to Tennessee to the town of Severeville, but we could find no current record of the man who supposedly took the stolen baby here so many years ago. What would you say to the Fronzac parents, Mr. And Mrs. Fronzac, who had their baby taken away day and a half old?

Back then, I was young, a baby, and I seen so many of them. There's nothing I could say to them. I couldn't apologize enough for not turning her in.

Cold comfort for the Fronzac parents so many years later.

Paul's search for his birth family gets his first big break, a DNA match.

This is close.

This is good. But will it be enough?

This couldn't be an easy case.

Stay with us.

For Paul Fronzac, a mission has become an obsession. Can I go again? Between breakfast, and ballet lessons. We're going to dance class. He is on the hunt.

I work a full-time job. I have a family, but this is my life, and this is my only shot at solving these mysteries. So I put as much time as I can. Everyone goes to bed at night. I'm online researching. This is my first actual baby picture.

Right here. His focus is finding his parents' stolen baby, but he is still searching for clues to his own identity.

I feel like an imposter because I'm using his birth certificate. Paul is out there, and I have his birth certificate, and I want to give it to him. And then I want to find mine.

Desperate to find any connection to his biological family, Paul sent DNA samples to three genealogy sites: 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and Ancestryry. Com.

We took the sample that you gave us, and we put it on a chip.

What that does is.

It gives us a unique DNA signature that only you have. We compare your DNA to DNA from populations all over the world. You're like CSI, but you work with DNA.

It's family history. The results were Paul's first indication of who he is and where he's from. There were surprises about his ethnic roots.

You are 37 %, according to our analyzes, of European Jewish descent. Is that new? Well, I was raised a Roman Catholic. This is interesting. Now I've been twice baptized, and I'm actually Jewish. So it's cool. I have to learn a whole new religion now. I'm excited.

About that. Even more exciting, a major development in Ancestry. Com search. Finally, a link to his first blood relative, a third cousin.

I saw a third and I'm like, Oh, this is close. This is good, right? Yeah, it was like a lottery when I saw that. If you communicate with her and she wishes to work with you and help with you looking at her family tree could actually be.

Very informative. You have been in touch with that cousin?

I have. And she got back to me and said, Wow, how can I help?

And how has she helped?

She sent me a list of her relatives. I believe that once we actually had that family tree, we can start looking for where my DNA overlaps with their family.

If any of her relatives lived in or near New Jersey, where Paul was abandoned, and they could be the key to unlocking the mystery of who he is.

We have to work on that path.

To see if anybody really does know who you are or what happened.

Right. But then.

Another step, make that a leap closer. Paul got another match on Ancestry. Com, this time a possible second cousin.

Finding a second cousin match is substantially better.

Than finding a.

Third.

Cousin match. For C. C. Moore, a genetic genealogist helping Paul with his case, it was a Eureka moment. I was.

Extremely excited. I thought.

We might be able to have a very quick resolution to this case. That cousin's name, Alan Fish, a 57-year-old from New York. A second cousin could unlock the mystery. Allen and Paul's parents could be first cousins, their grandparents, siblings. But there is one ironic obstacle. Turns out Alan was himself adopted. So just like Paul, he was searching for his biological parents. To find that his closest match turns.

Out to be.

Adopted was just unbelievable, incredibly disappointing.

This couldn't be an easy case.

Couldn't Barbara. Exactly. I said that. And then a tragedy. Days before Alan would see court records revealing details about his birth mother, he died of a sudden blood clot. Alan's children and widow, Randy, are determined to carry on Alan's search and to help Paul with his.

Hi. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to meet you.

We know this must be very different. In this very sensitive time, you still came in to meet Paul and help him on his journey. Why did you want to do this?

All four kids at the same time said they want to honor.

Alan's memory and.

Finish this.

He was so excited to.

Meet you.

To have this happen.

With my father passing away just days before he meets him is just surreal.

I can't believe it.

Was your husband very curious about Paul? Yes. What did he want to know?

He wants to know everything.

About him. This is amazing. Thank you for continuing this because it's going to be an interesting journey for you to know. The next.

Step in that journey, tracking down Allen's birth mother. With 2020's help, the family got her name.

Age.

16, born November 18th, 1940. If found, she would be Paul's closest relative so far. Paul's hope is that every clue brings a tragic mystery closer to being solved.

Look at all these people. This is all your family.

Are you getting to be more hopeful that you'll find out who you are, who Paul from? Zach is the whole story?

If it's possible to be more hopeful because I'm really, really a hopeful guy. I still think we're going to solve both these mysteries.

Wouldn't that be great?

Yes, it's going to happen.

This is Deborah Roberts with an update to this story. With the help of Cece Moore and her team, Paul Fronzac did eventually learn the name he was born with and the identity of his birth parents, both of whom are now deceased. He also found out that he had a twin sister. But as of 2023, her whereabouts are unknown. Meanwhile, publicity from his story finally led to the infant stolen so many years ago. Kevin Bady living in Michigan was identified in 2019 as the real baby, Paul. Although he died only a year later, he was able to speak by phone with Dora Fransac. As for Sam Miller, who looks so much like the age progression drawings, he was able to find a donor and he received a kidney transplant. Thanks for listening to the 2020 true crime vault. Tune in Friday nights at 09:00 PM for all new broadcast episodes of 2020 on ABC.