Netflix
The identical twins Robert, David and Eddy were born in a suburb of New York in July 1961 and were delivered for adoption for different families.
Grow Not knowing they had brothers Biological – By the way, not even the adoptive parents knew.
When they met, totally by chance, the story became news and had great repercussion. But what looked like a happy ending story turned out to be much more complex and dark, when it came to light that the twins had been separated as part of a psychological experience.
The story of the reunion begins in 1980, when Robert “Bobby” Shafran, 19, reached the first day of classes at college, Sullivan Community College in New York.
“When I arrived at college, everyone was greeted me. ‘Hi, Eddie’. ‘Welcome back, Eddie. ‘ ‘Eddie, what are you doing here? You came back? ‘… ”
Eddie Galland had studied in the Sullivan Community College the year before, but had given up on the course. As soon as he started attending college, Bobby caught the attention of the people who knew Eddie, including a close friend of him, named Michael Domnitz ,.
“I was in college the year before with Eddie,” said Michael, “And I knew he wouldn’t come back“.
“But Bobby had the same smile, the same hair, the same expressions. It was his double. The first thing that came out of my mouth was: ‘You were adopted?‘. And he said yes. Then I asked, ‘Is your birthday on July 12?’ And he answered ‘Yes! July 19, 1961 ‘. ‘My God!’, I said, ‘You won’t believe it. You have a twin brother! ‘
Bobby and Michael called Eddie and, a few hours later, went to his house.
“I found myself“Bobby reported on the meeting with Eddie.” It was as if I had been introduced to me … It was great, it was weird and at the same time fantastic. “
“We started asking all kinds of question to each other. Trivian things like ‘Facies with very bad lips all winters?’. And the answer was ‘yes, always, every year’. And almost everything about us, even these little details, was the same. It was very crazy. No one thought of why we were separated for all this time. Everything was joy. We were living an adventure.”
The story of this unexpected meeting of twins who did not know about each other’s existence in New York’s newspapers and caught the attention of another 19 -year -old named David Kellman, who had the same birthday date.
“Someone showed me an article from a newspaper titled ‘identical twins gathered after more than 19 years,” David told the Outlook program. “The picture was a little granulated. There was a resemblance, but it seemed very exaggerated. And I kind of discarded the whole thing.”
“But the same day, a little later, I found a friend who had another newspaper, the New York Post, who had a much clearer photo. This friend knew me very well and he immediately said that They were my face. There was no discarding that. ”
“When I got home, my mother was waiting for me. She had another newspaper in her hands. There was no photo, but the article mentioned the adoption agency, the hospital and their birthday. Which was the same as mine. And we learned that I was a third twin.”
The following weekend, for the first time, the three brothers met.
They approached so much and so quickly that decided to live together and study the same college. At this point, they were celebrities in the country, from appearing on TV shows to tell their story.
Bobby, eddie a david opened a restaurant Called Triplets (Trigemeos) to capitalize on the enormous interest in them.
But it was working together that the differences between them began to surface. After several disagreement, Bobby decided to leave the restaurant’s business.
The relationships were tense. Eddie, who faced mental health problems, entered a deep phase of depression and, in 1995, committed suicide.
When they learned of their children’s biological brothers, the first reaction of Bobby, David and Eddie’s foster parents was to share their enthusiasm. But then they were ask for satisfactions from the adoption agencyto the. They wanted to know why they had not been warned that their baby had two twin brothers.
And the reason given to the separation was that it would have been much harder to find a family willing to adopt the three brothers.
By this time, the three couples had already adopted a child – a daughter in each case. They were waiting for the opportunity to adopt one more baby, and when it appeared, about two and a half years later, it came to one condition: that the baby would need to be accompanied and observed as part of a study on the development of adopted children.
The parents accepted the condition and their residences began to receive periodic visits of investigators who conducted a series of tests.
“We were filmed to test with objects, letters or numbers, or recite back phrases,” recalls Bobby. “Then we were filmed to do things we wanted to do, whether they are bicycle, rollerblading, whatever. Then, again, they put them to solve puzzles, tests and answer questions on various subjects.”
These visits lasted until the boys were 10 years old, and the study would have fallen into oblivion, were it not for a discovery made, much later, by a journalist named Lawrence Wright.
In a calculation on studies with twins, Wright found a scientific article which made a reference to a secret study in which identical brothers had been separated shortly after birth as part of a scientific experience.
Shortly after Eddie’s death, when David and Bobby tried to fix their relationship, they were sought by Wright, who put them aware of their discoveries.
He found that Bobby, David and Eddie had been separated so they could be studied. They were identical babies placed in families of different classes and income as a way of researching The weight of genetics and the environment in the way each one developed.
The study was directed by a psychoanalyst of Austrian origin called Peter Neubauer. He and his team monitored young people over the years without ever revealing to families the real reasons for the investigation.
“We knew we were treated as laboratory rats“Bobby said.” But now we know the names of the people who did it. “
For both, they also began to make sense some of the memories of childhood and things their parents told them about their behavior when they were small.
“We all had problems at the same time when we were babies,” said David. “We bathed our heads against the cribwe had aggressive behavior for a child. ”
“And when our mothers first gathered and started talking about how we were when babies and children, they saw that we had this same behavior. Our parents had consulted pediatricians to try to know why we had this kind of behavior. Not knowing that we were separate twins and that we could be suffering from separation anxiety.”
It is not known for sure how many children were involved in the study of Neubauer, but at least four pairs of identical twins that were part of them were identified.
Everyone had been adopted by the same New York agency, the now extinct Louise Wise Services.
Peter Neubauer died in 2008. As for the data collected on the children, they were never published and all documents related to the study are locked at the University of Yale and sealed to be open only in the year 2065.
Bobby and David regret that they will not know if the study has produced any kind of scientific knowledge.
“It would be good to know If some conclusions were useful. So that all this had not been in vain. If you produced something that helped children who need additional help to get this help. We would like to see something positive to get out of it, ”Bobby told BBC.
In 2019, a documentary was released telling their extraordinary history, called Three Idental Strangers (‘Three identical strangers’), directed by Tim Wardle.
