Every year in the United States, roughly 600,000 people are reported missing. The overwhelming majority are found quickly, but a small fraction vanish for years, even decades. In the mid-1960s, two such disappearances in the American Midwest would go unsolved for over four decades, until a single phone call finally revealed what had happened. On September 24, 1965, eighteen-year-old Jacqueline “Jackie” Reinke left her two children in the care of her parents in Columbus, Ohio.
She was headed to a wedding in Glenwood, Iowa, with her roommate, and expected to return in a few days. She never came back. When her parents contacted her roommate, the woman admitted she had dropped Jackie off somewhere but refused to say where. For years, authorities did little.
Jackie’s sister later recalled that police in 1965 showed almost no interest in the case: “I really don’t think there was an investigation. If there was, it didn’t amount to much. ” Jackie was not even formally reported missing until the 1990s. At the time of her disappearance, Jackie was going through a divorce.
She had married at sixteen and had her first child soon after, but she and her husband had separated earlier in 1965. Her sister noted that Jackie packed two suitcases for what was supposed to be a short weekend trip, and her car was later found outside her home with the suitcases gone. Exactly one month later, on October 24, 1965, thirty-one-year-old Melvin Uphoff vanished from Rising City, Nebraska. He had spent the day with his wife and four children and dinner with his parents.
That night, as his wife was putting the children to bed, he said he was going out to get beer. He never returned. Melvin left with his coin collection and his 1954 Oldsmobile, which was never recovered. He was declared dead in the 1970s.
For years, local rumors suggested the pair had run off together after having an affair, but no one knew the truth. That changed in May 2009, when authorities tracked both Jackie and Melvin down and spoke with them by phone. They had, in fact, left their families behind to start a new life together. Nebraska State Patrol spokeswoman Deb Collins confirmed the pair had committed no crimes and left of their own free will.
She declined to reveal where they were living, noting they had asked for privacy. After forty-four years, the mystery was finally solved. A different kind of disappearance began in a Pittsburgh suburb in 1996. Fourteen-year-old Tanya Kach was a student at Cornell Middle School in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, when she was caught skipping class by the school’s security guard, Thomas Hose, a man twenty-four years her senior.
Hose promised not to report her, and grateful for his kindness, Tanya warmed to him. Over the next few months, he pulled her out of class to talk, gave her gifts including sweets, flowers, and money, and slowly convinced her that she should leave home and move in with him. Tanya was vulnerable. Her parents were going through a bitter divorce, and she had started skipping class because she was being mercilessly bullied.
When she told Hose about her troubles, he began grooming her, and after he kissed her in a stairwell, she believed she was in love with him. On February 10, 1996, she arrived at his house in McKeesport, just a few miles from her own home, believing she was starting a fresh life. Instead, she walked into a nightmare. Hose lived with his parents and adult son, and he went to great lengths to keep Tanya hidden.
She was confined to his bedroom, forced to use a bucket as a toilet, and locked in the room every day. She was not allowed to leave the house, even for school. He subjected her to regular sexual abuse, fed her leftover scraps from his meals, and made her keep written journals of the abuse so he could brag to friends and co-workers. “He had me keep a calendar book of our sex acts so I knew the dates,” she later said.
Fear kept her inside. “He threatened to kill me in my sleep,” she explained. “He threatened to throw me in a garbage bag and throw me in the river. ”
It was only when she turned eighteen that Tanya realized she was officially a missing person.
She saw her own name and photograph in a local newspaper. Around the same time, Hose began allowing her out of his room. He gave her a new name, Nikki Allen, and introduced her to his family as his girlfriend who would soon be moving in. He even let her leave the house, trusting that she was too brainwashed to run.
“He trusted me to go out because he knew I was brainwashed,” she said. She had strict curfews and had to keep track of time wherever she went. Being back in the world made Tanya realize her situation was not normal. She took a job at a local deli, JJ’s Deli Mart, run by Joe Sparo, a few hours a day.
She developed friendships there and later said, “I saw how a family should be and I said that’s what I want. ” In 2006, ten years after she vanished, she told Joe the truth, telling him that if he went to a missing children’s website, he would find her picture. Joe contacted his son, a retired police officer who knew of the case. Investigators soon arrested Thomas Hose.
In 2007, he pleaded guilty to statutory sexual assault, corruption of a minor, and aggravated indecent assault, among other charges, and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. At the hearing, Tanya read a victim impact statement, telling Hose he had taken away her innocence and childhood and had made her believe no one cared about her. “For ten years you controlled me,” she said. Hose was released from prison in 2022 and is a registered sex offender.
Tanya, meanwhile, rebuilt her life. In 2017 she co-wrote a memoir, and in 2018 she married and became a stepmother. She credits Joe Sparo with saving her from an awful situation and has remained in contact with him. The third case began not with a disappearance from home, but from a hospital.
Paul Fronczak was born on April 26, 1964, at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. Days later, a woman dressed as a nurse entered his mother Dora’s room and told her the doctor wanted to examine the baby. Dora handed her son over, and the woman walked out of the hospital, never to be seen again. The search for Paul Fronczak became the largest manhunt Chicago had ever seen.
It involved 175,000 postal workers, 200 police officers, and the FBI. Six hundred homes were searched in under twenty-four hours, but no trace of the baby emerged. Dora made desperate public pleas, saying, “We just want our baby back and hope she will please take care of him. ” Police told the parents that blood type and the shape of the baby’s ear were about the only leads they had.
The shape of an infant’s ear was then thought to be as individual as a fingerprint, and authorities investigated around 10,000 babies, but none matched. Then, in 1966, the FBI contacted the Fronczaks about an abandoned baby. The boy, named Scott McKinley, had been found in July 1965 in a pram in the middle of a busy shopping center in Newark, New Jersey. He had a black eye.
Authorities expected his parents to claim him, but nobody ever came forward. He was placed in foster care, and investigators suspected he might be the missing Paul Fronczak because he was the only boy they could not entirely rule out. Dora and Chester traveled to New Jersey and took the toddler home. For years the family lived in harmony, but when Paul was ten, he found newspaper clippings about the kidnapping in a crawl space while searching for Christmas presents.
When he confronted his parents, they admitted he had been kidnapped as a baby but told him, “We found you, we love you, and that’s all you need to know. ” Paul began to wonder about his real identity but never discussed it with them again. In 2012, Paul finally decided he needed answers. He asked his parents to take DNA tests with him, and to his surprise, they agreed.
But after the tests were taken, Dora and Chester called and asked him not to submit them. He did anyway. The results showed there was no possibility he was their biological son. “I just felt like my life as I knew it was ended,” he said.
“I felt the color drain from my face… everything I thought I knew about myself went out of the window. ”
The following year, a group of volunteer genealogists called the DNA Detectives took up his case. In June 2015, they announced that he was actually Jack Rosenthal, born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1963, and missing since 1965. He also had a twin sister, Jill, who was also missing.
Relatives said the twins’ parents, Gilbert and Marie Rosenthal, always had excuses for why the children were unavailable. The twins had been badly neglected. One relative claimed to have seen them sitting in a cage, and a babysitter found them filthy in an empty room with only two cribs. The room smelled of urine, and Jack had a black eye.
Paul later said his biological parents were not nice people. “I’m thankful they abandoned me because it allowed me to be with the Fronczaks,” he said. “They saved my life. ”
Paul initially believed something tragic had happened to Jill and that he had been abandoned because the parents could not explain the disappearance of only one twin.
He later changed his mind, saying he believed Jill might still be alive. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created an age-progressed image of what she might look like, but she has never been found. Both Gilbert and Marie Rosenthal died in the 1990s and were never held accountable. In 2019, the real Paul Fronczak was finally located.
He was identified as Kevin Ray Batty, and the announcement came the following year after his death on his fifty-sixth birthday. Before he died, Kevin spoke with Dora Fronczak several times by phone, but they never met in person. He had been raised by a woman named Lorraine Fountain, who had been dating a Chicago doctor when she moved to Arkansas for a year and returned with a baby. Lorraine died in 2004, and it remains unclear how she came to have the missing boy.
Many questions remain unanswered. Who took Paul from the hospital, and what happened to Jill Rosenthal, are still unknown. As of 2024, inquiries continue, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children still asks anyone with information about Jill’s disappearance to come forward.