Doco tells tragic story of triplets separated at birth in cruel experiment

Their story shocked the world, and now a new documentary film will recreate the moment these triplets discovered each other for the first time after being separated at birth as part of a cruel social experiment.

Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman grew up thinking they were only children, adopted shortly after being born. In actual fact they were triplets, being raised within 100 miles of each other.

Three Identical Strangers, directed by Tim Wardle, will tell the story of the long lost siblings finally reuniting, spending several years together, creating a business, before their story eventually ended in tragedy, divorce and even suicide.

The truth first came out when Shafran began college in New York and noticed people he’d never met before were greeting and high-fiving him, with some even calling him “Eddy”, as if they’d known him for some time.

He eventually realised why after meeting Michael Domitz, who had been friends with Galland before he had dropped out of the college shortly before.

“He had the same grin, the same hair, the same expressions — it was his double,” Domitz recalls in the trailer for the documentary. 

They soon discovered they were both born on July 12 on Long Island, in 1961. As the story was published, a third man, David Kellman, who had the same birthday and appearance got in touch – and all three realised they were triplets.

“Once we got together, there was a joy that I had never experienced in my life and it lasted a really long time,” Shafran says on camera.

It took a very bizarre turn shortly after however, as the brothers did some digging and discovered they had been part of a decades-long psychological experiment by a New York psychiatrist named Peter Neubauer. He ordered for several twins and triplets to be separated at birth, before watching how each child grew up in different households.

According to the New York Post, the adopted families were told the kids were part of a “routine childhood-development study,” meaning they’d need to welcome a visitor periodically to see the children, as well as make them undergo intelligence, behaviour and personality tests. None of the families knew about the other brothers.

Interestingly, according to their adoptive parents, all three would bang their heads against the bars of their cots as babies – and Kellman says: “It was absolutely separation anxiety.”

All three boy began to suffer mental health issues as they grew up, with Kellman and Galland in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and Shafran connected to the manslaughter of an 83-year-old woman who was beaten to death in a robbery he was involved in. A judge reportedly ruled his involvement was minimal, and he was sentenced to community service in a disabled children’s home for five years.

Knowing that the researchers had seen all this, and not stepped in, all three brothers were left furious.

Following their reunion, they went into business together and opened a restaurant in SoHo called Triplets. Despite initially celebrating their new family, tensions began to grow over the years, and tragically following a battle with depression, Galland killed himself at the age of 33.

His two brothers left the restaurant behind, with Shafran retraining as a lawyer and Kellman becoming an insurance consultant. Sadly, Shafran and Kellman slowly drifted apart and Kellman since went through a divorce from his wife.

Shockingly, after all they went through, the study into the triplets was never published and the findings shelved. According to the publication, upon Neubauer’s death in 2008, all documents were placed with Yale University and restricted until 2065.

Three Identical Strangers is out on Friday, June 29.

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