Three Identical Strangers: Separated at birth, reunited years later- but the truth behind the tale is even stranger

Nature or nurture? Which matters most? How far would you go to find out?

In 1980, 19-year-old Bobby Shafran rolled up for his first term at college, near New York. He was surprised to find himself greeted, even kissed, by other students, saying “Welcome back, Eddy!”

One of Eddy’s friends shakily asked him if he was adopted and had been born on July 12, 1961? Yes. And yes. And that meant he had an identical twin he knew nothing about. That same night Bobby drove to Long Island to meet Eddy Galland. They immediately recognised each other as each other’s duplicate.

This story of twins, separated as babies and reunited by chance, made it into the papers. The story then went from amazing to incredible. A third brother, an identical triplet, David Kellman, recognised himself in the newspaper pictures of Bobby and Eddie.

The three discovered they had ridiculous amounts in common, more like clones than brothers. Not just their appearance but their gestures were the same. They had all been wrestlers at school. They smoked the same cigarettes (Marlboros). They had the same taste in women (older). They were all delighted to find each other.

They went on chatshows, acting up gleefully. They became a thing in New York, partying, appearing together in a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan, gawping at Madonna. They moved into a shared apartment — “the most bachelor apartment, times three” — and opened a successful steak restaurant, Triplets, in SoHo. Their lives were like a weird fairytale. Then it turned bad.

How could it have happened? Bobby, Eddy and David and their families learned that they had been separated at six months and placed for adoption by the Louise Wise Agency, under the auspices of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, a charity. The adopting families were never told that the boys had identical brothers.

Ostensibly, separating them was done to make it easier to place the babies. In fact, they were part of a monstrous experiment, masterminded by child psychoanalyst Peter B Neubauer, apparently designed to reveal whether genes or environment mattered most.

The families they had been placed with had been selected for their different educational and income levels and parenting styles. The boys were often assessed and filmed as they grew up by researchers who knew they were triplets but never disclosed this fact. The families were told it was a normal research project into adoption.

Neubauer, who lived until 2008, never published any results from his experiment and he locked all records away at Yale until 2066. Perhaps he belatedly realised how cruel and abusive it had been, how similar to the Nazi experiments on twins? Or perhaps he found the results unacceptable?

As more of this story emerged, including the fact that an unknown number of other identical twins had also been recruited for the experiment, the boys and their parents became angry and upset, realising they had been tricked, treated no better than lab-rats. Even as babies, the boys had been disturbed, suffering from separation anxiety, tormented by the loss of each other.

Speaking now, Bobby and David have the most haunted faces. “It’s unconscionable - who would think somebody would be evil enough to come with something like this?” Bobby says.

Made by British director Tim Wardle, Three Identical Strangers won a documentary award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. It combines interviews, archive footage and dramatic reconstructions to take us as close in to the story as possible, not coming to any conclusions. You won’t be able to look away.