Dark secret that kept triplets apart

Wreathed in smiles of disbelief, the identical triplets made headlines worldwide, toured chat shows and signed a movie deal.

They appeared in Madonna’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan and TV sitcom Cheers, and vowed to make up for their lost years.

“We’re going to have a damn good time,” gushed Eddy Galland. “We are one big happy family. We all love each other.”

Fifteen years later Eddy was dead having committed suicide to escape the depression that descended after they discovered that their years apart had not been an accident.

It emerged that the trio had been given up for adoption hours after birth in 1961 and researchers had separated them as part of a scientific experiment.

“How can you do this to a little baby?” asks one of the triplets, Robert Shafran. “Innocent children being torn apart at birth?”

Now Robert and his brother David Kellman are finally telling their story in the documentary Three Identical Strangers, coming to the UK this year.

The brothers were each placed with widely different families: one wealthy, one middle-class and one struggling to get by.

Scientists tested them every month for years, hoping to learn whether heredity or environment was the more powerful influence on their development.

“I’m sure it all started with some distinguished psychiatrist and a roomful of people and the brilliant idea arose of a new way of studying nature versus nurture: ‘Okay, we’ll separate these kids and watch them grow’”, says Robert.

David rages at the researchers: “They refer to us as participants. We weren’t. We were victims. We were robbed of 20 years together.”

The surviving brothers, now aged 56, recall the trio’s happy reunion and the horror of discovering that they were guinea pigs.

Given up by their mother, the brothers had been farmed out to three different adoptive families at the direction of scientists through America’s National Institutes of Health.

Researchers monitoring the triplets never told them that they had brothers.

It was by chance that Robert Shafran, aged 19, enrolled at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York in 1980 and found everyone there spontaneously called him “Eddy”.

“Guys were slapping me on the back and girls were hugging and kissing me,” he recalls.

It was a fellow student called Michael Domnitz who solved the riddle. He discovered that Robert had the same birthday – July 12, 1961 – as his friend Eddy Galland, who had just transferred to another college.

Not only that but in addition to looking alike they were both adopted. There could be only one conclusion: they were twins.

Reunited, Robert and Eddy found that they talked and laughed alike, had identical birthmarks, identical IQs of 146 and even both lost their virginity at 12.

The third member of the trio came on board after 19-year-old David Kellman saw the twins’ photo in a newspaper and phoned them to say: “You’re not going to believe this!”

Together at last the triplets discovered that they all smoked too many Marlboros, preferred Italian food despite being raised in Jewish homes and liked older women.

All were 5ft 9in with thick curly brown hair and dark complexions. “It was like I had something missing all my life,” says Robert.

Re-uniting with his brothers “was like I was given the instruction manual”.

But even as they adjusted to their new-found celebrity, the dark side to their enforced separation emerged. It was revealed that Robert had been convicted of manslaughter just months before their reunion when an 83-year-old woman was beaten to death with a crowbar during a robbery.

Testifying against his accomplice Robert was given a reduced sentence of five years community service. And they learned of the tragic loss of a fourth brother, who had died at birth.

Angry at being torn apart, the trio were told that the adoption agency, which specialised in finding homes for children given up by single Jewish mothers, had a psyhiatrist-designed policy of separating twins and triplets, to avoid them competing for their adopted parents’ affections.

The boys’ adoptive families were supposedly chosen at random and yet alarm bells rang when they found that each went to a home with an adopted daughter two years older.

Their adoptive parents kept pressing for answers but were met with dismissals.

It was only when Robert’s adoptive father returned to the adoption agency after a meeting to collect a forgotten umbrella and found the staff celebrating with a bottle of whisky “as if they had managed to defuse the situation” that he realised the truth.

And finally the dreadful details were exposed: the triplets were unwitting test subjects in an experiment by psychoanalyst Dr Peter Neubauer aimed at discovering whether environment or genetics shaped a child’s development.

Up to a dozen sets of twins had also been separated at birth in the same clinical study.

Though unethical by today’s standards, in 1961 it was legal to separate siblings and was actually mandated by the Louise Wise adoption agency where the boys were taken.

Dr Viola Bernard, the agency’s chief psychiatric consultant at the time, confessed: “In those days we were playing God but we had to do the best we could.”

Cashing in on their newfound fame, the brothers opened the restaurant – naturally named Triplets.

Despite sharing many similarities, while working together they discovered that they also had some crucial differences.

Eddy proved a volatile personality while David was more cool-headed and the trio clashed over their dissimilar work ethics.

Robert left to become a lawyer, Eddy killed himself at 33 leaving behind a wife and daughter and David eventually closed the restaurant to sell insurance.

The brothers lament that the Jewish Board of Family And Children’s Services, which oversaw the now defunct adoption agency, has not apologised or offered any compensation.

“It was cruel,” says David. “It was wrong.” Yet despite everything Neubauer’s experiment may be the best long-term test ever of the effect of nature versus nurture but its results have been lost.

The study was sealed and never published and only heavily redacted extracts have ever been released.

“It would help us to know what came out of it,” says David. “It would help us if we knew the study may have even done some good.”

Seeking compensation from the Jewish Board, David adds: “They can’t give us back our childhoods but they can find ways to show us they are sorry.”

The documentary was acclaimed at the Sundance Film Festival in January where it won a special jury award.

But celebrating with the surviving brothers the film’s British director, Timothy Wardle, told them the hard facts they know all too well: “You still don’t have the truth.”