American Gothic
A new documentary reveals a psychologist’s secret study of triplets, and the devastating effect on its subjects
documentaries often boast “unbelievable” tales, but they rarely deliver. Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers, which opens nationwide July 13, actually lives up to its billing. It’s “the single best story I’ve ever come across,” says the director.
If you lived in New York City in the 1980s, the first half-hour of his film may be familiar. Three 19-year-old men became local celebrities after they discovered they were triplets separated at birth: Bobby Shafran met his mirror image, Eddy Galland, after he was mistaken for him at Sullivan County Community College in 1980. (Galland had dropped out the previous semester.) Once introduced, they assumed they were twins—until David Kellman saw their photo, his face times two, in a local paper reporting on Shafran and Galland’s reunion.
The media and public were entranced by the story. Wardle’s film shows their cameo opposite Madonna in 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan, as well as clip after clip of the brothers on talk shows in matching clothes. Shafran and Kellman are interviewed extensively, but something is off: Where’s Galland?
The answer comes in the film’s second half: Their brother killed himself in his New Jersey home in June 1995.
Two months after Galland’s death, a New Yorker reporter, Lawrence Wright, exposed a secret study, conducted in the 1960s and ’70s by psychologist Peter Neubauer. The triplets had been among a larger group of multiple births in New York in which the siblings had been separated from one another, without informing the adoptive families, who had all used the same Jewish adoption agency, Louise Wise Services. When the outraged parents demanded an explanation, agency officials told them the separations were kept quiet because of the challenge of finding parents willing to adopt three children.
The real reason was Neubauer’s study, and the goal, according to former researchers on the project, was to answer an age-old question: Is human disposition predestined by genetics or shaped by environment?
Kellman and Shafran are now 56. When Wardle first approached them about the film, they were hesitant. “The lights went out when Eddy died,” says Shafran, a Brooklyn-based attorney. “When we first reunited, we got a lot of press and partying. But what started as a happy story had ended. We were weary of media people.”
“This film would go deeper than anything we’ve ever done,” says Kellman, who lives in New Jersey and works as an insurance consultant. “We weren’t telling our story. We would be opening up our lives.”
Wardle, who previously directed the 2016 documentary One Killer Punch, spent nearly four years earning the brothers’ trust. “Their relationship was more fractured than it used to be,” he says. “Even during filming, we never knew if they were going to suddenly pull out.”
It was challenging to form lasting bonds with two virtual strangers, says Shafran. “At first we had nothing but joy and love. Then, the bickering began. We didn’t grow up as a family—we didn’t know how to argue and then make up.”
Their initial fame had led to a joint business—a restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side called Triplets. When Shafran quit, Galland took it hard. “Eddy was obsessed with being a part of this family. He used to follow Kellman wherever he moved,” says Wardle, a detail he left out of the doc. When he killed himself, he was living across the street from Kellman, whose then wife, Janet, found him.
The film unfolds like a mystery. It seemed one element of the study was economic: Shafran went to an upperclass couple, Galland to a middle-class family and Kellman to working-class
parents. All three remembered being observed by researchers as they grew up (their parents were told it was part of a study of adopted children), and each spent time in psychiatric hospitals as teenagers, suggesting a shared predisposition for mental illness. (Kellman—who reveals in the film that he used to beat his head against his crib as an infant—attributes it to subconscious separation anxiety.)
And they weren’t alone. Wardle includes other long-lost siblings—also placed by the now-closed Louise Wise Services—who have discovered each other. Many suffered from depression and anxiety, and at least three committed suicide. Some theorize that the children were selected from parents with a history of mental illness, but according to Kellman, the triplets’ birth mother had no known diagnosis.
Wardle found two people who worked with Neubauer and managed to uncover a few previously
“When Eddy died, the lights went out. What started as a happy story had ended.”
unknown clues (no spoilers), but essential questions—who else was an unwilling subject? What were the results?—have never been officially revealed. “There are a number of people still practicing psychiatry who were more involved in the study,” says Wardle, “but they wouldn’t talk to us.”
“This is like Nazi shit,” says Shafran in the film, but Wardle thinks that’s going too far. The low-level researchers he interviewed “aren’t evil,” he says. “It’s easy to judge the past by today’s standards.”
Once the New Yorker piece came out, journalists tried to get Neubauer
to speak about the study; he refused, claiming the results would be published. But they never were, and after he died in 2008, the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services— where Neubauer served as director for over 30 years—placed the research in the Yale University archives under a seal until 2066, only to be released with authority from the board.
For years, victims, including Kellman, requested access and were denied. In one of the film’s most shocking revelations, a research assistant claims that at least four people— out of an unverified estimate of 15 subjects—still don’t know they are an identical twin or triplet.
Three Identical Strangers has provoked some movement. Over 10,000 pages were released after it was completed, but all, according to Kellman, were heavily redacted. And after the filmed debuted at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, winning a special jury award, Shafran and Kellman received an apology from the president of the Jewish Board, Alice Tisch.
Kellman is seeking much more than that. “We want the study in its entirety, in a clear fashion, shared with the people that were involved,” he says. “Then they should compensate everybody that they hurt.”
Since Galland died before the New Yorker piece, he never knew he was part of a study. His surviving brothers have lived with that knowledge for over 20 years. “If the movie affects you at all, just cube that,” says Shafran. “This is my life, which Tim captured with sensitivity and insight.” The film accomplished something else, too. “It absolutely brought Bobby and I closer together,” says Kellman.