Manton — By all accounts, Kevin Ray Baty was as average a fellow as we’ve ever had in Michigan.
He grew up in Manton, about 15 miles north of Cadillac, where he played basketball in high school in the early 1980s, fathered three daughters, worked at a machine shop in town, and spent most every night drinking at the local Shamrock Bar.
Nothing much remarkable except this: He was one of the most famous kidnapped babies in American history.
Baty’s real name was Paul Joseph Fronczak, and he was kidnapped from a Chicago hospital in 1964 when he was a day old. A woman posing as a nurse came in and told his mother, Dora Fronczak, that the doctor needed to see the baby, and she handed him over. That was the last time Dora Fronczak ever saw little Baby Paul.
The kidnapping set off the largest manhunt in Chicago history. At one point, there were 200 police officers and dozens of FBI agents looking for the baby, along with 175,000 postal workers who had volunteered their services.
The world didn’t find out what happened to him until 2019. Thanks to DNA testing, the kidnapped baby was revealed to be living in Michigan as 55-year-old Kevin Ray Baty. He died of cancer a year later.
And now, 61 years after the kidnapping, the FBI has confirmed exclusively to Michigan Enjoyer that they’re still actively investigating the case. They want to know how a very famous kidnapped baby from Chicago was able to live anonymously for decades in Northern Michigan without anybody knowing who he really was.
Most importantly, they want to figure out who kidnapped him and why.
The Fronczak kidnapping was once the most famous whodunit case in America, and six decades later, the investigation is still playing out, with Manton at the center of it all.
It’s a fascinating true-crime case with more twists and turns than a Cedar Point rollercoaster and a credible theory surfaced recently that says the Chicago mob might have been behind it all.
Let’s start at the beginning.
Chester and Dora Fronczak were a Chicago couple who had a stillborn baby in 1963. A year later, Dora was pregnant again, and on April 26, 1964, they were at Walter Reese Hospital in Chicago, with 28-year-old Dora ready to give birth to a baby boy.
Paul Joseph Fronczak was born at 1:20 a.m. on April 26. Dora and Chester were over-the-moon in love with their little baby boy, and the hospital photographer came in to take his picture a few hours later. The hospital people never did get around to getting his fingerprints or footprints, though.
Just 36 hours after the baby was born, a woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit came into Dora’s hospital room. The Chicago Tribune reported what happened next: “In a convincing voice, the woman said that she had to take Paul Joseph from the room because a hospital pediatrician wished to examine him. Mrs. Fronczak reluctantly parted with her son, but she felt secure in the knowledge she would hold him again later that afternoon.”
Instead, the fake nurse walked out of the hospital carrying Baby Paul, and that’s the last they were seen.
The Fronczak kidnapping was front-page news across the country, and it set off a massive manhunt in Chicago and beyond. The FBI took control of the case as hundreds of police officers and agents combed the city. Every postal worker in the state promised to help look for clues, too. More than 600 homes were searched.
They found nothing.
Two years later, though, the FBI got involved with the case of a 2-year-old boy who had been found abandoned a year earlier at a shopping center in Newark, New Jersey. The boy was living in a foster home under the name Scott McKinley.
One of the FBI agents got a hunch this this child might actually be the baby who was kidnapped in Chicago in 1964, so they contacted Chester and Dora Fronczak and flew them out to New Jersey to check him out. Dora took one look at little Scott McKinley and said, “That’s my boy!”
There was no way to scientifically prove this, because DNA testing wasn’t invented and the baby hadn’t had any fingerprints or footprints taken. But Dora and Chester convinced the authorities that this was their child, so they let the Fronczaks adopt him. They gave him back his original name, Paul Joseph Fronczak.
The Associated Press reported on it in 1966: “The Fronczaks have prayed daily for the safe return of their child. They feel their prayers have been answered, that a miracle occurred.”
But a miracle did not occur. This child was not the real Paul Joseph Fronczak.
In 2013, the man who had been raised as Paul Joseph Fronczak was now a 49-year-old man living in Henderson, Nevada, working as a college administrator and part-time actor (he had been a stand-in for George Clooney in “Ocean’s 11”). He had learned many years earlier about the kidnapping, but his parents always told him that he was the real Paul.
He never fully believed it. He couldn’t figure out why he didn’t look like his parents or his younger brother, David. He didn’t look like any of his relatives.
He finally got up the nerve to ask his parents to take a DNA test in April of 2013, and when they did—reluctantly—it revealed he was not related to these people. His name was Paul Joseph Fronczak, but he was not the real Paul Joseph Fronczak.
“The important thing to me is to locate the real Paul Fronczak,” he told a reporter in 2013. “If I’m lucky enough to figure out who I am during the process, that’s a benefit.”
Who was he? His adoptive parents, Dora and Chester, were furious with him for digging into the case. They would have much preferred to keep living the lie.
But he kept digging, and the FBI also agreed to reopen the case.
Paul found out his true identity in 2015, thanks to the help of some genealogy sleuths who were helping him with the case. They discovered he was actually Jack Rosenthal, a New Jersey boy who had seemingly vanished in 1965. He had a twin sister named Jill, and to this day, nobody has found out what happened to her.
Rosenthal is the hero in this story, because thanks to his work—helped by a genetic genealogist named Tracey Hastings and some others—he’s been able to uncover most of the truth in this case. The FBI might also be working on the case behind the scenes, but Rosenthal’s work has revealed so much.
He’s written a couple books about the case, and in 2021, he helped produce an excellent documentary for CNN called “The Lost Sons.” He and Hastings recently released a podcast, “The Fronczak Files,” which contained a lot of new information, including the bombshell revelation about the Chicago mob.
Which brings us to Kevin Ray Baty and Manton. Kevin had moved to Manton sometime in the mid-1970s, but his parents had a different last name—Robert and Lorraine Fountain. Nobody in Manton ever thought too much about that.
Kevin lived his average life in Manton, graduating from Manton High School in 1982, getting married a few times, having three kids, working as a machinist.
Lorraine had a few friends in town, but none of them seemed to know anything about her shady past. She had been married several times, spent time in prison in the 1950s, and lied frequently about her age and even her race (she was listed on one of her marriage licenses as being black). Relatives say she was dating a doctor in Chicago about the time of the Fronczak kidnapping, and then disappeared and moved to Arkansas, and when she resurfaced again, she had a little baby boy with her. In 1975, she married Robert Fountain.
Michigan Enjoyer contacted a woman in Manton who said she did Lorraine’s hair for many years (she didn’t want her name used) and said she knew nothing about any of this.
Much of the information about Lorraine’s sketchy background was unearthed by Rosenthal and Tracey Hastings, who also claim that Lorraine worked for a time for the Chicago mob.
“She was a high-priced escort who did a lot of different things for the mob, whatever needed to be done. And she had a record,” Rosenthal said on his podcast.
Only one known photo can be found of Lorraine and Kevin together, which appears to have been taken when Paul was 4 or 5 years old.
Lorraine died in 2004, and her husband had apparently died a few years before that. The entire time she lived in Manton, nobody had a clue that her son Kevin was one of the most famous kidnapped babies in American history. Had that fact been known, there would have been a whole long line of cops and media people wanting to talk to her.
The truth didn’t come out until 2019, when Kevin was 54 and in very poor health. A heavy drinker, he had gotten a cancer diagnosis and knew he didn’t have much time left.
Dora and Chester’s only biological son, David, had taken a DNA test, so his DNA was in the Ancestry.com database. One of Kevin’s daughters also took a DNA test, and it showed that David Fronczak—a man she had never heard of—was her uncle.
That meant Kevin Baty was very likely David Fronczak’s brother. Kevin’s kids convinced him to take a DNA test to find out for sure, and bingo. It came back positive.
Kevin Ray Baty was the real Paul Joseph Fronczak. That part of the case had been solved.
Michigan Enjoyer went to Manton, and friends and acquaintances said that even Kevin himself had no clue who he really was. We spoke with some people who worked at his “second home,” the Shamrock Bar, and they said that when the news came out in late 2019, it shocked everyone—including Kevin.
“Kevin came in all the time,” a female bartender at the Shamrock told us. “Everybody in Manton knew Kevin. We were all surprised when the news came out. Nobody had any idea. He was a very quiet guy, and even after it all came out, he never wanted to talk about it.”
With the help of Rosenthal and Baty’s daughters, Kevin Ray Baty was able to talk to Dora—his biological mother—on the phone a few times before he died in April 2020. The early days of the pandemic prevented them from meeting in person, but they were at least able to speak on the phone.
“COVID happened, and then his health happened,” Rosenthal said on his podcast. “It was just a perfect storm of not being able to meet face-to-face, but thank God for the telephone. It’s such a blessing that that happened, but then it’s also devastating that there wasn’t so much more than that.”
So who was the kidnapper? Lorraine Fountain desperately wanted a baby in 1964, so she went into the Walter Reese Hospital and stole one, right?
Probably not. According to the theory that Paul Jack Fronczak and Tracey Hastings put forth on their podcast, Lorraine was involved in the kidnapping, but she wasn’t the actual kidnapper.
Instead, they contend, it was a woman named Alice Baty, who also worked for the Chicago mob as an escort. Black-market baby-stealing was a real thing back then, and in various cities around the country, the mob was often involved.
Their theory is that the mob had a customer who was going to pay good money for a baby, and they put in an “order” for the exact kind of baby they wanted. They commanded Alice Baty to go into the hospital, find that baby, and steal it.
“Other moms in the hospital had mentioned that they had seen this same woman who’d come into their room, examined their babies,” Hastings said on the podcast. “It seemed like she might have been baby shopping, like she was looking for a baby with a specific set of physical attributes who might match to a couple who are looking for a baby and wanted the baby to have a certain skin type, eye color, hair color, so that the baby would look like it belonged in that family.”
After she kidnapped the baby, she fled to Arkansas to wait for the heat to die down before they turned over the baby to the client. Alice and her husband, Ray Baty, named him Kevin.
When the heat never died down, though, the mob called off the delivery to the client. Instead, they told Alice and Ray Baty to keep the baby.
“The theory that we have was that they weren’t expecting all the heat on this kidnapping. Letter carriers, FBI, every cop in Chicago going door to door trying to find this kidnapped baby. We ascertain that the original buyers backed out. That nobody wanted to touch that baby,” Rosenthal said on his podcast.
This is where Lorraine Fountain comes in. She was also living in Arkansas at the time, also working for the mob, so Alice and Ray pleaded with Lorraine to take the baby herself. By this time, Kevin was old enough that he knew his name, so she just decided to keep calling him Kevin Ray Baty.
Lorraine was originally from Michigan (born in Muskegon), so she evidently figured that a small town in Michigan would be the perfect spot for them to blend in. That’s how they ended up in Manton.
So while Rosenthal and Tracey Hastings just dropped this wild (but highly plausible) theory on their podcast a few weeks ago, they’re quick to point out that it’s still just a theory. Just like the FBI, they’re looking for anyone who knows anything to come forth.
There are still so many stones that have been left unturned in this case. Where is Jill Rosenthal? Whatever happened to Alice Baty? Did Lorraine Fountain know who this baby really was? Is there anyone from the mob still around who might talk? Thankfully, plenty of people are seeking the answers now.
Manton is a beautiful little town, if you visited, you’d be tempted to call it “sleepy.”
Once you learn all the things that happened in the shadows here, the adjective doesn’t really fit.
The truth is out there. If you know anything, now’s the time to speak up.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
