The incredible and tragic story of full -backs separated by a secret study

Bobby was surprised that several students called him “Eddie” on the first day of college lessons; Thus began the story of the meeting by chance of separate full -backs after birth.

The identical twins Robert, David and Eddy were born in a suburb of New York in July 1961 and were also delivered for adoption for children to different families.

They grew up without knowing they had biological brothers – in fact, not even adoptive parents knew it.

When they met, totally by chance, the story became news and had a great repercussion. But what looked like a story of happy ending proved to be much more complex and dark, when it came that the twins had been separated as part of a psychological experiment.

This fantastic case is told in an episode of the fourth season of the Podcast What a storyFrom BBC News Brazil, which can be heard on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, Castbox, Deezer and other streaming platforms.

Their story of their meeting began in 1980, when Robert “Bobby” Shafran, 19 years old, arrives on the first day of school at college, the Sullivan Community College in the American state of New York.

“When I got to college, everyone greets me. ‘Hi, Eddie’. ‘Welcome back, Eddie.’ “Eddie, what are you doing here?”

“And there were many people. And it was like one after the other. And I replied: ‘They are not Eddie!’ View from the BBC.

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 attracted the attention of the people who knew Eddie, including a dear friend of his, named Michael Domnitz.

“I was at college the year before with Eddie,” said Michael, “and he knew he wouldn’t return.”

“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:” Have you been adopted? “And he said yes. Then I asked:” Is your birthday on July 12th? “And he replied” Yes!

Bobby and Michael called Eddie and, a few hours later, they went to his house.

“I found myself,” Bobby reported during the meeting with Eddie. “It was as if I had been introduced to me … it was fantastic, it was strange and at the same time fantastic.”

“We started asking all the kinds of questions. Trivian things like” Do you get bad lips every winter? “And the answer was” yes, always, every year “. And almost all of us, even these small details, was very crazy.

The story of this unexpected meeting of twins who did not know of mutual existence came to New York newspapers and attracted the attention of another 19 years named David Kellman, who had had the same birthday.

“Someone showed me an article by a newspaper entitled” the identical slopes collected after more than 19 years, “David said to the program View. “The image was a little granulated. There was a similarity, but it seemed very exaggerated. And in a certain sense I discarded everything.”

“But the same day, shortly after, 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 immediately said that they were my face. There was no way to discard him.”

“When I went home, my mother was waiting for me. He had another newspaper in his hand. He had no photos, but the article mentioned the adoption agency, their hospital and their birthday. They were the same as mine. And we knew I was a third twin.”

Through the telephone information service, David was able to find Eddie’s number and called his home. “He wasn’t at home, but I spoke with his mother. ‘Who are you?’, He asked, and he seemed a little dry, I think he was flooded with print calls at that moment.”

“Then I explained I saw the photos in the newspapers and that Eddie and Bobby were the same as me.” I think I was the third, “I said. I remember that he dropped the phone.”

The same night David and his adoptive parents went to meet Eddie’s family, who lived in half an hour by car. A few minutes after meeting, Eddie and David called Bobby, who was at college.

“Eddie had Bobby on the phone and wouldn’t let me talk to him! He wouldn’t stop saying:” Yes, it’s the same, “It’s all the same.” We had the same musical taste, the same taste in clothes and food, in what we were doing, in the way we spoke, in everything. “David reported.

“When I finally talked to Bobby on the phone, it was a very short conversation because Eddie had already told him everything!”

The following weekend, for the first time, the three brothers met.

“We looked like a pile of puppies playing together. We rolled along the floor. These were moments of pure joy and happiness,” said David. “It was as if we knew each other for a lifetime. There was a trust there that it should not have been built.”

They approached so much and so quickly that they decided to live together and attend the same college. At this point, they were celebrities in the country, to be appeared in TV programs to tell their story.

Bobby, Eddie and David have opened a restaurant called Triplets to capitalize on the enormous interest for them.

But he was working together that the differences between them began to emerge. After several disagreements, Bobby decided to leave the restaurant business.

The relationships were tense. Eddie, who was facing mental health problems, entered a deep phase of depression and, in 1995, committed suicide.

When they learned about the biological brothers of their children, Bobby, David and Eddie’s first reaction on adoptive parents was to share their enthusiasm. But then they went to satisfy the adoption agency. They wanted to know why they hadn’t been warned that their child had two twin brothers.

And the reason given to the separation was that it would have been much more difficult to find a family willing to adopt the three brothers.

At this point, the three couples had already adopted a son – a daughter in any case. They were waiting for the possibility of adopting another child and, when he appeared, about two and a half years later, he was associated with a condition: that the child should have been accompanied and observed, as part of a study on the development of the children adopted.

The parents accepted the condition and their homes started receiving periodic visits from researchers who conducted a series of tests.

“We were movies by testing with objects, letters or numbers or acting phrases,” recalls Bobby. “Then we were shot by doing things we wanted to do, that they are bicycles, skating, pogo stick, whatever. Then, once again, they put us to solve puzzles, tests and answer questions about various topics.”

These visits lasted until the boys were 10 years old and the study would have fallen into oblivion, if it were not for a discovery, much later, by a journalist named Lawrence Wright.

In an investigation into studies with twins. He found a scientific article that made a reference to a secret study in which the identical brothers had been separated shortly after birth as part of a scientific experiment.

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 discovered that Bobby, David and Eddie had been separated so that they could be studied. They were identical children placed in families of different classes and income as a way to seek the weight of genetics and the environment in the way each developed.

In other words, the research has tried to answer a very common question in science: human beings are modeled by the environment in which they live or is it the DNA that determines who they are and who they will be?

The study was directed by an Austrian psychoanalyst called Peter Neubauer. He and his team have monitored young people over the years without ever revealing the real reasons of the investigations to families.

“We knew we were treated as laboratory mice,” said Bobby. “But now we know the names of the people who did it.”

“How would you feel if I discovered that someone deliberately made a decision on your life to collect data on it? And not only do we do it, but there were other people involved in the study,” added David.

For both, they also began to make sense of some of the memories of childhood and the things that their parents told them about their behavior when they were young.

“We all had problems at the same time when we were children,” said David. “We triggered our head against the crib, we had aggressive behavior for a child.”

“And when our mothers gathered for the first time and started talking about how we were when infants and children, they saw that we had the same behavior. Our parents had consulted the pediatricians to try to know why we had this type of behavior. Not knowing that we were separate twins and that they could suffer from separation anxiety.”

It is not known for sure how many children have been involved in the neubauer study, but at least four identified couples of identical twins were identified that were part of them.

Everyone had been adopted by the New York Agency itself, the now extinct Louise Wise Services.

Peter Neubauer died in 2008. As for the data collected on children, they have never been published and all the documents relating to the study are blocked at the University of Yale and sealed to be opened only in the year 2065.

Bobby and David regretted not knowing if the study has produced any kind of scientific knowledge.

“It would be nice to know if some conclusions were useful. So all this was not in vain. If I produced something that would help children who need further help to get that help. We would like to see something positive to get out of it,” Bobby said to the BBC.

In 2019 a documentary was released by telling their extraordinary story, called Three identical strangers (“Three identical strangers”), directed by Tim Wardle.

Source: Terra

Rose

Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.