In April 1964, a woman dressed like a nurse walked into a hospital room in Chicago. She told a new mother that the doctor needed to see the baby for more tests. The mother handed the baby over. The nurse walked out of the room and then vanished without a trace. I set off one of the largest manhunts in Chicago. And that's only the beginning. I'm Paul Fronczak. I was that baby. And I'm Tracey Hastings.
This season, the Fronczak Files will take you on a journey following the twists and turns of Paul's story. Many of you may have heard my story. Another podcasts or other TV shows and things like that. But at the end of the day, you really don't know, Jack. Welcome to the Fronczak Files. You know, I don't want the show to be just another audio book, you know, spitting out facts about what happened. The story was very tragic, and people know that.
But what they don't know is what really happened behind the scenes. How did it affect people? How did people feel? What, like my parents when they went through this? What what do you think is going through someone's mind? All those things you can't get with just the facts. All right. So are we going to start with 1974. All right. So Tracey from 1974 can you set the scene. Sure.
Watergate. Big story that year. The break in at the Democratic National Convention, at the Watergate Hotel, people trying to wiretap phones and steal information to assist Nixon in his reelection campaign, Yeah, yeah. movie guy. I know you watch a lot of films. Got a background in acting. Top films of 1974. The Godfather, Part two. Oh. Yeah. Excellent. And so right about this time, you're you're what, like I was 10 in 1974. That's where this journey really started.
This is where my life kind of took. There was a movie called Sliding Doors a while ago about how your life could change in a matter of seconds if you just take a different, different route. And I decided to take a route that changed my life forever. And it's still being changed today. Well All right. So in 1974, we already set the scene, but it was Christmas time. My street was like a Rockwell painting. I grew up in Oklahoma, on the south side of Chicago.
You know, mostly working class Irish, Polish. And Christmas time was like, I used to get up early after a fresh snow because it was cold out, but just to, you know, walk up and down, you know, be the first footprints in that snow. Look at all the other lights, because the sun hasn't come up yet. And it's just those memories are forever ingrained. And that to me is what Christmas still is to this day. Except I live in Las Vegas and there isn't much snow. That lights. Okay, so My dad was at work.
He was a machinist. He worked for Foot Brothers. They made transmissions for helicopters and things, you know, for the for the military. I a, you know, Department of Defense contracts. My mom was upstairs doing something dishes, cleaning. She was always cleaning. I mean, the house was. But I mentioned a Rockwell painting. It was really like that. So I was downstairs looking for Christmas presents. I thought, this is a great time to maybe sneak inside that crawl space. Kind of a scary crawlspace.
I actually had pictures on my my board behind me, and actually, I think we'll put them on the website. I moved the couch. I opened a little three by four crawl space door, and I kind of scanned the entire room. It was dark, but I thought if they have presents for us, they're going to be in here. Had you had. Had you looked in there before? And now for Christmas presents. You know, I'm I'm like, yeah, I've always been kind of a snooper. You know, I like to I don't know why.
Maybe as I guess we'll get to that later. Right. I turn on the light and I scan around, looking in the back. I saw a bunch of boxes and I thought, this is it. This is the big score for Christmas. So I kind of low crawled because the ceiling was really low and there were spiderwebs and, you know, nails sticking out of the the floor, which scary, right? But I'm like, you know what? Spiders are Christmas presents. I think I'll take the I'll take the heat. Yeah.
So I crawled back and I found the boxes and I open the first box and I didn't see Christmas presents. I saw newspaper clippings and I was like, well, this is not Christmas. What is this? Right. So I grabbed one. I started looking at it and it was these things on the wall right behind me, all these headlines from papers all over the country, but mostly in Chicago, because that's where this whole event happened that I was going to read about.
So I look at the first headline, it's, Sad City Hunt drags on for missing kidnaped child 10,000, FBI agents or police, all looking for his kidnaped child. I was like, okay, so something someone was kidnaped. And then I saw a picture of my mom and dad, and they looked really, really sad. They were, you know, crying. And they looked like they hadn't slept in a long time. And it said the hunt for Paul. Joseph. Fronczak drags on and I'm like, okay, wait a minute. That's me, Paul, Joseph Fronczak.
And those are my parents in that picture. So I got real excited. Okay, I kind of forgot about the Christmas presents. I grabbed one of the headlines and I ran upstairs to my mom, and I was all excited, and I just like, mom, what is this? I mean, I read the headline. She stopped what she was doing. She turned around. She looked at me, she saw what was in my hand, and her face went from, you know, a normal, kind person to this rage. And she simply said, how dare you stoop around his house?
Those aren't your things. I said, well, wait a minute, this is about me, right? This kidnapping Paul Joseph Fronczak. She said, you were kidnaped. We found you. We love you. That's all there is to talk about this. And I was, like, completely deflated because I was like, excite. I'm ten years old. This is like the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I know my parents. When they said something, they meant it and I wasn't going to talk back. And I thought, okay, so I walked away.
We never talked about it again, but I never forgot. And I kept those paper clippings with me. Yeah. I'm looking at some of these newspaper clippings that I'm imagining you saw while you were going through those boxes. And I want to read some of it, but first, why don't we hear a little bit about your mom and dad, since they're a big part of this story this season. And tell us about them. What kind of people are they?
So my mom was from a little town called Escanaba, Michigan, in the U.P., the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She was in a family of ten children. They had two bedrooms. They had an outhouse. And if you Google, if you Google the weather in Escanaba in the winter, it's winter for like nine months a year with nothing but snow and torrential, wind and just horrible.
So my mom told me stories growing up as a little girl, having to run outside in the middle of the night to go, to go to the bathroom, and that outhouse. And then she said later in life, when they upgraded, they actually put in a bathtub in the basement. But it wasn't a running water bath, so they had to fill it with jugs of water. My, no. I tell my daughter that and she's like, get out of here, you're making this up. Here's a little house on the prairie.
So my mom was lucky because she was the youngest out of ten, so she got to take her bath first. But they they weren't changing the water. So at the time, you were the 10th, you were probably like, you know what? I think I'm good. I don't need to get in there, you know? Yeah. So it was, it was a different, different time. So my mom grew up with those values. My dad, both his parents were from Poland, so he grew up in Chicago's South Side.
He went in the military, came back, and he worked as a machinist. And one day he grew up in Brighton Park, which is, you know, kind of a cool a little, little side note, what was his name? Ron Howard shot a movie called shot shot, a movie called Backdraft, two blocks from my grandma's house. They used the firehouse that was right there. And my grandma would sneak over there and sneak into the craft service area and get all the food.
And she actually befriended Ron Howard and his wife, which I thought was pretty funny. So it was a quaint little neighborhood, Brighton Park. My mom worked in the bank there. She had moved from from Escanaba to Chicago as quick as she could. As soon as you get out of high school, because nobody wanted to grow up in Escanaba, right? So her and her older sister moved to Chicago. My mom got a job as a and working in the bank there.
And my dad, who lived about a block and a half away, we do all his banking there. And one day he walked in the bank and he saw Dora, and he's like, wow, this is, I gotta I've gotta go out with this girl. So he asked her out and of course she said, no, no, no way. Right. So my dad, being the persistent guy that he is, he did that for five years, kept trying to get her to go out with him right. And my mom said that one day she was like, you know what? What is that guy Chester?
He hasn't. I've seen him a couple of days. He hasn't asked me out. So she had just bought a new car. She was driving down the street. She saw him crossing the street, so she pulled over and yelled at him. Hey, do you want to go out? And Chester said, oh my God, yeah. And they have been together ever since. Okay. I love your mom. What a strong woman. Like she. She bought her a car, her off room all by herself.
At this time, when, you know, it was not easy for women to buy things on their own without having a man on alone, Yeah. Yeah. She's, She's stronger than you'll ever know. Yeah. So, Tracy, I think you actually have some of the clippings that I pulled out of the box. one that I'm looking at here. Dated Chicago, April 28th. Headline baby stolen at a hospital.
And it reads, hundreds of policemen combed a Southside neighborhood house to house today for a two day old baby boy abducted from his mother's arms. And Michael Reese hospital, the mother, Mrs. Dora Fronczak, at 28, told police she was feeding her baby when a woman dressed as a nurse entered and took the infant, saying it had to be returned to the nursery. When a nurse asked Mrs. Fronczak for the child. A short time later, the abduction was discovered and the police were called.
The infant is the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Chester S. Fronczak Junior of Chicago. Fronczak, an aircraft machinist, broke the news to his wife that the baby, Joseph, had been stolen. The hospital does not make a practice of making footprints of newborn infants that could handicap police. If the infant is missing for some time. All right, so that pretty much takes us into what really happened. So I think, Tracey, we should go back to 1964. Sure will go back even a decade further. The 60s.
Who wasn't confused in the 60s, right? Time of profound change. Social and political ideals were shifting. The country is moving more from a traditional way of living into a more modern way. And growing pains are always hard. And so the civil rights amendments allowed for integration in schools. It made employment discrimination illegal and started us on the path to equality in this country. We were also in the middle of the Cold War. And I remember this.
I remember as a kid doing, Yeah, I remember that. hallways and put your head up against the wall and shelter in place, like, yeah. So, you know, we're giving getting this false sense of security from the adults around us that if there's a nuclear war, you'll be fine. Hide under your desk. And and music. Number one song on Let me guess. I'm going to say the Beatles. Which one? Of course.
on April 26th at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Paul Joseph Fronczak was born to Chester So of course, Chester and Dora, one of the start a family. So they decided to have a child. And when they had their first child, it was a stillborn. So they were devastated. I mean, nobody wants to to not go home with the child right after, after, you know, giving birth.
So they related to be pregnant and to be having Paul Joseph, this is going to be like their my mom later said they put all their hopes and dreams into this child. So my mom gives birth. It's a healthy, healthy boy. She was 28. Chester was my dad was 33. Paul was 7 pounds, two ounces in room 418. Everything was fine. April 26th April 27th. Paul was in the nursery as what they. But you know, back then when I had my daughter out here, we never left the room. We kept her.
And, you know, the next day we we took her home and we knew that she was our child back then. They would take the baby away, put it in a nursery with all the other babies. And I mean to me right there, what could go wrong, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. A lot of things can go wrong with that situation. And ironically, they had no security right? Yeah, yeah. So it was April 27th. Paul was less than a day old. The nurse brought Paul from the nursery to Dora to, you know, for feeding time.
Everything's happy. You know, Dora with my mom was extremely happy. You know, this is this is everything she's wanted, right? So she's feeding the baby. This nurse walks in and tells her that the doctor needs to see the baby for more testing. My mom thought it was strange that a nurse would want to take the baby away during feeding, because it's such a precious time and the baby needs to to eat right? So she handed the baby over because it's a nurse in a hospital and that's what you do.
She handed the baby over. The nurse took the baby, left that room, went down a few flights of stairs, and then jumped into a cab that was waiting outside and vanished without a trace. The hospital was totally unaware of what's going on. As a matter of fact, it was almost an hour or so before that. They noticed the baby was even missing. And then to make it worse, they thought the baby was just misplaced. So they decided to not tell Mrs. Fronczak.
They decided to just spend a few hours looking for the baby, and the baby was taken about 10:00 in the morning. They didn't notify the police til three in the afternoon, and they didn't even tell Mrs. Fronczak. They called my dad at work and told him, your baby's gone. You need to come and tell your wife. My dad was at work and the machine shop because back then there was no such thing as paternity leave. He had to go and do his shift.
He was handing out cigars with his buddies, and then he gets this call. So he has to race down to the hospital to tell his his wife, who's totally happy because she's waiting, you know, for her child to come back for the next feeding, that the baby's not coming back, the baby's gone. And then as soon as she said that, all the FBI and the police just charged into the room, you know, reporters just snapping pictures and, you know, screaming out questions and, you know, all this.
And my mom didn't know what the hell was going on. She had just been told the most horrible news that you can ever imagine. And then she's flooded with the media. And to this day, she really hates the media. But now I don't. I don't blame her. You know, it's ironic how we actually use the media later down the road, but it's the whole thing happened and it was just it was bizarre, you know, within a couple of hours, the FBI had scrambled all these police officers.
The postal workers took 120,000 letter carriers. They had them going door to door, knocking on doors, trying to find this kidnaped baby. Lee Kelsey was the cab driver that happened to be the unlucky one to pick up the Kidnaper. When she had ordered the cab, she had told him to meet her by a different, different wing, different name. He said that's not Michael Reese Hospital. So then she corrected herself and said, meet me at the back doors. She came out.
The baby, wrapped in the blanket, jumped in the cab. He took her down to like 35th and Halsted. She got out and he said he saw her get into another car and take off and that was it. She just vanished. Later when he was interviewed. This poor guy, I mean, he ended up being dragged in for all kinds of whenever they they found someone that they thought was the kidnaper they'd brought him in to do a and I witness you know it, you know, what would they call it when you recognize the person you know?
Is that the person? And he's like, no, right. So and anyway, so he said that he had seen this lady numerous times around that neighborhood. So she must have had something to do with that area, whether she lived there or was staying with somebody. But I think back on, Lee Kelsey, I feel bad for him because that really changed his life, you know, plus probably the feeling that he had inside, knowing that he picked up a kidnaper. That's just all, baby.
You know, that's it's something that it's been really it's been on my mind lately and it's kind of hard to shake. I mean, this this whole story has affected so many people over the years. And I found that the people never really got over it. It's always been a part of them. And that's that's what I was talking about. When this is a journey, not just like an audio book full of facts, but how it actually affects people and the human emotion that's tied into something like this to a tragedy.
so in addition to the human element of having your child kidnaped and everyone else that's involved with it, how about the failure of the institution? very blatant and very obvious. When we look back on it from through our lens from today, as a high risk obstetrical nurse for 18 years, I have seen security, for instance, evolve. Just in the last 18 years, it has changed and improved. It was nonexistent in 1964. Today, babies are but printed within their first hour of life. Babies are banded.
We have double bands on babies. One goes on a wrist, one goes on an ankle. We do that because babies tend to lose weight in the first few days after they're born, and they could wiggle themselves out of one of those ID bands. So we never want a baby that's not identified in some way. Parents are given matching bands or the mom, and then someone of her choice has a matching band numbers, match names, match. Everything has to line up.
And in order for us to hand a baby over to a mother, and as far as culturally for a labor and delivery, we no longer have nurseries and most of our hospitals. Babies stay at the bedside. Now, everything is done at the bedside. Bathing medications assessment. And if the babies do need to go somewhere for more invasive testing, a person is allowed to go with them. An adult who has the band can accompany that baby to whatever procedure it might be, whether it's an X-ray or to the operating room.
Any of those type of things. So, babies are also given a security device on the opposite ankle, which is a Bluetooth device that is hooked up to a security system. And, babies have to be cleared to go down certain hallways, near certain doors, like, all stairwell doors are a trigger. If a baby is wheeled near a stairwell door, it will start sounding a very loud alarm. Everyone on the floor scrambles, to find what's called a code pink location.
Every hospital has plaques on the wall that identify where those Code Pink locations are, and staff members are drilled regularly for how to find those places And Tracey, can I ask what prompted Code Pink? interesting story here is the kidnapping Which one was that? The Fronczak kidnapping. started this whole process of slowly evolving security for babies in the hospital. And it was still slow. This stuff didn't happen overnight.
It was still a slow process because I think most people thought this was an anomaly. This is something that is unusual. This is not the common, normal thing. So it was still slow at that point. And so hospitals are very diligent about this now about keeping babies safe. All labor and delivery units are locked. We have badges that we have to badge in with and the doors will unlock. People are interviewed essentially before they come on the floor. Who are you here to see?
What room are they in? We want names. We want location so that we know that people that are coming on to the floor are actually family members, are people that So you're saying out of this horrible tragedy, something good actually came out of it? Yeah. That's fantastic. there's some statistics, from the, center for Missing and Exploited Children, about babies that are abducted. They consider an infant abduction to be the abduction of any child under one year of age.
And this, abduction can take various forms from, being abducted from, like, a non-custodial parent, to a stranger abduction, to being abducted from the hospital, from their home or in a public place.
And there are several, numbers that they have compiled, total abductions of infants related to health care confirmed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from 1964 to January of 2025, in the US, 1964 being this case, there's been 148 children taken from health care facilities in that Well. you think about the thousands and thousands and thousands of babies have been born since then, 140 isn't a lot, but it's 140 Well said. Yeah. So thanks for those. Those facts, by the way.
It's very eye opening. It's very sad, but at least there's hope. And I like that. So the funny thing about the nurse, a lot of people saw her, but the hospital never really bothered to try to get descriptions of her right away. They were just they just thought the baby was misplaced.
So when the police came in, they had their sketch artist, Otis Raffel, come in and do a quick sketch of what, a couple of people that saw the the kidnapper what she might look like 35 to 45 years old, around five, three. Kind of brownish, grayish hair, graying hair, no scars. Just a regular person. Could be anybody but Joyce Doane, who was the patient next to me? Dora, my mom in the hospital so that she looked like a very uncaring person that probably didn't like children.
And I thought that was that was pretty interesting, right? And a lot of times people go, well, maybe it's someone who just wanted a child, but someone with that description to me isn't somebody that wanted a child. And she was seen for a couple of days before the kidnapping looking at different babies, almost like she was shopping for that perfect one.
And then when she said she found the one that she thought would fit the bill, Paul, then she decided, okay, I need to just grab this baby and run. yeah, at the time, there was no such thing as profiling criminals. That was not a done thing. So people were relying just on their physical attributes to, to see if people would recognize them. But today, after, you know, years of of study in this field and profiling, what type of a person would take a baby?
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, they've released some information about what type of a woman could be an abductor, and they typically are all of childbearing age. They are most likely compulsive. They rely a lot on manipulation, lying and deception to get what they want, which I'm sure describes a lot of people. They and. And and people will say that they hear these women talk about the they've lost a baby or they're incapable of having one.
This becomes a big theme in their life. They either have had a stillbirth or a miscarriage, or have been told that they're infertile, and this could drive their need to adopt a child. Oddly enough, they're often married, or they're often collaborating with someone else. And this can feed into their desire to give their companion a child if they're unable to do so, they could be driven to take a baby in order to please their partner. This is something that the partner wants.
Oftentimes, they live in the community where the abduction has taken place. That's very common, which makes sense. They would know the streets, they would know the ways to get away. They would be able to watch comings and goings. They were frequent visitors to their nursery or the maternity units at more than one health care facility in the area prior to the abduction. And they were asking a lot of questions.
And we know that this nurse had gone into more than just your mother's room to look at baby Paul. She it was reported that she was in other rooms as well, taking down blankets, looking at babies, turning on her heel and walking out and saying nothing. Like you said, I'm shopping for a baby. Like They even had sightings from different hospitals of the same lady.
Yeah. right into that profile that they are scouting out other hospitals as well, which is the place that's going to be the easiest for me to take a baby. They ask a lot of questions about procedures, about the maternity floor layout. They use fire exit stairwells, to escape because these are not guarded. They're easy ways to get out. And occasionally these babies are ejected from the home setting as well, but predominantly from a hospital. And the abductions are usually well planned.
This is not something that is done on the fly. They have usually has targeted a baby, and they're just going to wait for their moment to take them. And though this can describe a lot of people, a lot of women, in the setting of security on a labor and delivery floor, this is a very dangerous person. And I mean, just ballsy. Alone, right? Just to be able to do that to me. To talk to the mother face to face. I need to take your baby. And then just walk out. Right. And I still feel bad.
There's Lee. Kelsey's in the picture. He's the cab driver right there. I mean, I really feel bad for him and his family that he had to go through that. And he was just an innocent bystander just doing his job, you know, trying to pay, trying to pay his bills, you know, picking up a fare. Right. And who knew that that little thing would change his life and the way it did? It's so crazy.
Yeah. It's hard to imagine what your parents must have been feeling at this point in time with, losing a second baby. And, you know, from what I understand, your dad wasn't a very. Didn't seem like a very emotional guy. He didn't talk about his feelings very much. From what I understand about him. But there's some really touching quotes in the newspaper that he was able to give when reporters were asking him how he felt about all of this and what was happening.
And simple and to the point, he says, please take care of the baby and return him, almost begging to please bring that child back. He also is quoted as saying, I just want to plead for the kidnaper to take care of the baby and to return him. She should give him formula. There's a recipe for that in the newspaper. Please take care of our baby. So it just sort of speaks to a parent's desire to care for their child. And the child is not present.
And they're still agonizing over You know, when one reporter in a story actually said that she was a mother for the second time, going home with no children and just heartless to even even put that in print, you know? So Dora stayed in the hospital for five days after the kidnapping. Five days. She kept hoping that that whoever took Paul would bring him back to the hospital. And then eventually she said, you know what? I've got to go home. I've got to start living my life again.
Even though she didn't want to. So I can't even imagine just being in the hospital for five days, you know? You know, the thing that really got me was when Paul was taken in the hospital, knew they had a student nurse. Mary transferred. She was a student nurse, and they told her the baby's gone. But do not let Mrs. fronczak know. Take her through all the classes, business as usual. Because the baby's probably just misplaced. We'll find him and everything will be fine.
But she knew her baby was gone, and I got to meet her and she hugged me. And you could feel. You could still feel it with her. This has been with her her whole life that she did that. And you can't you can't shake something like that. You know, once again, when something like this happens, it just doesn't affect 1 or 2 people. It affects everyone. It's a chain reaction.
And when you're starting out your nursing career and you're told to lie to a patient and then cover it up like that, that's that's insane. And she she stayed a nurse and she retired, you know, an amazing nurse, which is so fantastic. And I was hoping to get her on the show, but it just didn't work out. But just to meet her, you know, someone that was actually there living through this, it's incredible, you know, and it gives you hope and humanity. I. I really feel for Mary as a nurse myself.
I feel how devastating that must be to feel like you took part in something like this. That you didn't know enough to stop it. You didn't realize it was happening. And as a young nurse just starting out, like you said, to be asked to lie to a patient that does not set a good precedent for a career as an and, also that, you know, that whole subterfuge just to keep up the lie, to keep, keep it propped up so that they could try to recover this baby, that would never happen today.
And, you know, I mean, what you tell me about Mary. I wish that I had been able to meet her. I wish she was able to come on the show and be able to talk to us herself and tell us your story. If I could speak to her, I would just like to tell her thank you.
Because even though she experienced the trauma of being a part of this event, and it carried it with her her whole life, she was also an integral part of the change that took place in caring for moms and babies and their safety, and that cannot be replaced. And so it's, it's a lifelong burden that she has carried to have been part of it. But it's also been huge for change. Yeah. It's, You're making me tear up a little bit here. Yeah. You know, and then you have to have that aspect of it.
And then you actually have the whole city of Chicago coming together, right? Trying to find this baby that was kidnaped from a hospital. 200 police and FBI descended upon the city. Thousands of homes were searched. They, I can't believe how much manpower they invested into actually trying to find this, this child. You know, as a matter of fact, Susan Nolan reached out to me. Her dad was actually John Norris. He was a beat cop in Chicago, and he became a desk sergeant his whole career.
I mean, he dealt with thousands of cases throughout his career. There was only one case that he actually made part of his life. He actually took it home with him. And she actually, I'm going to show you this. She actually gave me this file that he kept in his in his home, because this is the actual police file on the front of that kidnapping. And inside, it's just I mean, this is the original pictures that the hospital took apart.
They didn't have time to blood type home or get a footprint, but they had time for this glamor shot, right? Yeah. And, yeah, more on that later. But I just to me, I spent a whole day just going through these files, you know. And here's the thing. This isn't like today's police work. Everything is handwritten. Everything. Or typed very poorly. You know, just the typing. I mean, just the the time alone that they took to just to type this stuff. And you can see, I mean, there's just pages and pages
of all these accounts. It they had fake ransom notices going in. You know, the, the cops said they were chasing down people that, you know, were trying to get ransom money. People would phone in tips about, you know, this woman was found in a subway platform and subway, you know, they had the, the, the the trains in Chicago. And of course, whenever they brought someone in to a station, they had to bring Lee Kelsey and the cab driver again to, to do I try to identify them.
Yeah. Over and over and over and all these things. It's just it's to me, it's just mind boggling how much effort they put in it to try to find this. This kidnaped child.
Yeah. When I was reading about it, you know, I was reading like, numbers, like, that, they were looking at like 2600 hospital employees or something crazy like that, looking for people with like mental health issues, nurses who had maybe lost a child or were unable to have children of their own, assuming that this woman might actually have been a nurse because she seemed to know so much about how the hospital functioned.
And, you know, thinking about taking a baby out of a glassed in nursery, it's far easier to take a baby out of a mother's arms in the room. So this had all been thought out. So they were looking at who would have known, who would have had this information, going through 18 months of hospital records of women who had had stillborn babies at the hospital, wondering if maybe one of them might have disguised themselves and come in to take the baby.
Just. And it was almost like all of Chicago was mobilized. So when Dorian Chester finally went home, they had the FBI staying with them. They had two really good agents. They had Bernie Carey and Ronald Minter, and they were there to tape calls, any ransom phone calls that might come in, any tips? Just to be ready for anything. And my parents had a small apartment so they would stay towards the back or downstairs. And the and my dad's parent's house.
And whenever something would happen, they'd run upstairs and talk to him. And I remember I actually got to talk with Bernie Carey before he passed away. Him and my parents became really good friends. I mean, how could you not bond over something like this, right? I mean, if he can't bond over a kidnapping, what can you bond over? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But I remember him saying that my mom would. You know, he said that it was.
It was the most, most despairing, just the saddest atmosphere he's ever been in in his entire career. And he said he had a feeling back then that they would never find that child. But remember that even through the that emotional sadness that my mom would bring him food downstairs, you know, she'd bake cookies or bring them something. And he said he loved that part. You know, though, those fleeting moments of a I'm not going to say happiness, but less despair.
Well, I think your mom is a caregiver. And this was helping her to channel her grief because she was able to care for someone. Yeah. Yeah, I agree totally. And then after time went by, you know, Mother's Day came and went nothing. No ransom calls, no tips. A year goes by, nothing. The FBI has pulled back. They're they're working other cases. Now the headlines. Stop talking about it.
You know, after the first year, they said, you know, that the papers talked about the anniversary one year since the kidnapping, you know, stuff like that. It just, you know, kind of reopening that wound from my parents. And then after a year or so, it kind of just faded away. No one talked about it. My mom never gave up hope. You know, she just kept hoping one day something would happen, but nothing did. Two years go by? Nothing.
Shortly after two years, they get a phone call and that became something bigger than we ever thought. A phone call. I'm glad you asked that question, Tracy, but unfortunately, we're out of time, and the files are closed. week and through the rest of the season, we are going to be on a journey where we're going to be introduced to a lot of different topics that pertain to this case. Genetic genealogy is one of a new and emerging science in finding people that have gone missing.
And we have a team members who are outstandingly good genetic genealogists who are going to be helping us as we move forward and helping people solve their mysteries. Just when you think you know what's going to happen next, you don't. There are so many twists and turns in this story. Even I can't believe it. And it's my story. I'll see you next week. And. The project files is created and hosted by Paul Jack Fronczak, co-hosted by me, Tracey Hastings. Produced and edited by Gavin Boughner.
Lead genetic genealogist Emily Ripper. Lead historical researcher Colleen Neuhart. Social media manager Amy Morris. original theme music written and produced by Paul Jack Fronczak and Rick Holland. Thank you for joining us on the journey. And please remember to subscribe.