Robert Shafran, Edward Galland, and David Kellman all rose to fame when they met again at the age of 19, but their story hid a terrible truth that persists to this day.
Robert, David and Eddy were born in the suburbs of New York on July 12, 1961, but until the age of 19 neither of them knew of the other’s existence: they were separated at birth and given up for adoption to three different families. The idea was to do a secret social experiment, which the brothers discovered long after they met. The brutal story, full of pain and horror, even deserved a documentary.
Robert Shafran went to his first day of class at university when his classmates confused him with another student named Eddie Galland. On insistence, he decided to contact this person to see what was going on. “His eyes were mine and my eyes were hers. It was true,” he told the BBC.
the third brother, David Kellman, he realized it was the third piece of the puzzle when he saw the diary photo of two identical students, who were meeting for the first time. “Everything was new, everything was a party. For the first time we were swimming together in the ocean or riding the roller coaster,” Kellman said, referring to their first adventures together.
The triplets behaved like babies during their first encounters, as they hadn’t had a childhood together. In this way they became a media phenomenon and even appeared in several television shows and in a film in which Madonna starred.
Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman all rose to fame when they met again at the age of 19. Then life took them on different paths and they made tragic decisions.
The story of the three brothers made headlines in national newspapers and they decided to move together to New York, opening the ‘Triplets’ restaurant in Manhattan in 1980.
The experiment
After several investigations to find out why they had been separated, it emerged that the children were part of a dark social experiment secretly hatched. Louise Wise, an adoption agency that no longer exists, assigned each infant a different family, to be part of a study conducted by the Child Development Center, an organization that later merged with the Jewish Board, an agency of social services.
Peter Neubauer, the psychoanalyst at the time in charge of the Child Development Center, led the study with one goal: to investigate how genetics and education affect people’s development when they grow up in different socioeconomic. Neubauer worked with Sigmund Freud’s daughter.
In partnership with an adoption agency, the psychologists gave David to a family of working classto Eddy in a house of middle classwhile Bobby ended up with a considered family upper middle class, in a sort of utterly grim “social lottery”.
Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman met again at the age of 19 and experienced a late second childhood filled with games and anecdotes.
His job was to periodically monitor the three boys over the years. Although the three adoptive families knew the boys were siblings, they did not know the real reason they had not given all three up for adoption together.
When the brothers discovered the experiment, they described Neubauer’s attitude as “cruel” and compared him to the Nazisthe BBC said. “They followed me when I was a kid, when I was a kid, and one day I told my mom I didn’t like people asking me questions,” Shafran revealed.
He added: “I don’t know why they decided to do it, I can’t see it as something human. You can’t play with human lives. We were supposed to be together and they separated us for scientific reasons. ”
Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman had a restaurant in Manhattan after their meeting and made more than a million dollars. Then differences appeared between them.
Before the revelation of what was the story of the three, their psyche was changing and headed in different directions.
the three children they struggled with their behavior as they grew up and both Eddy and David had spent time in mental health hospitals.
Robert was on probation after pleading guilty to charges related to murder of a woman in a robbery in 1978.
Roberto, David and Eddy. The idea was to do a secret social experiment, which the brothers discovered long after they met.
David told the New York Post: “It was absolutely separation anxiety. Those who were studying us saw that there was a problem “.
The tragedy was not long in coming: even if the reasons are not known, Galland He committed suicide in the 1990s.
The documentary
Director Tim Wardle made a documentary about this story called “Three identical strangers”. There he says the experiment was initially kept secret to ensure the effectiveness of the research results.
Shafran and Kellman, along with the documentary’s director, Tim Wardie. Photo: AP
Indeed, before he died in 2008, Neubauer, showing no remorse for the cruelty of his experiment, left the information of the study preserved in the archives of Yale University, with the limited access until the year 2065therefore the results are unknown.
Source: Clarin
