Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland & David Kellman

The reunion

In the autumn of 1980, Bobby Shafran arrived as a freshman at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York. Strangers greeted him as “Eddy” — slapping him on the back, asking how his summer had been. Eddy Galland had been a student at the school the previous year. A friend of Eddy’s, Michael Domnitz, who was returning to Sullivan and met Bobby on his first day, was the first person to put it together. Domnitz drove Bobby to the Galland family home that night. Eddy answered the door. They were identical.

The story made the local papers. A photograph of the two ran. David Kellman, then a student at Queens College, opened the newspaper and saw himself twice. He called the Galland house. Within days the three young men had met. They were, in the public imagination of that fall, instantly famous: identical-looking, identical-mannered, finishing each other’s sentences. They went on talk shows. They appeared together in Desperately Seeking Susan as a brief on-screen presence. They opened a restaurant together — Triplets — in SoHo.

What they were not told

The triplets’ reunion was treated as a heartwarming coincidence. It was not a coincidence. They had been deliberately separated by the agency that placed them, and they had been observed throughout their childhoods by researchers from the Child Development Center who had been visiting all three homes for years, asking the parents questions, administering tests, filming the children, and never disclosing that the visits were comparative or that the boys had brothers.

The triplets’ adoptive parents — three sets of parents who had been told, in three separate placements, that they were taking on a single child of a single birth — pieced this together in the months after the reunion. They went together to confront Louise Wise Services. The agency’s response, as the parents have described it, was a mixture of bureaucratic apology and refusal to engage with the substance of what had been done. The study itself was not, in 1980 or 1981, publicly described in any detail. The triplets did not, at first, know what they had been part of. They learned that piece slowly, over decades.

What followed

The fame was difficult. The bond was real. The brothers built a life together for a period and then began to come apart in private ways. Eddy struggled with mental illness through his twenties and thirties. He died by suicide in 1995 at the age of thirty-three. The surviving brothers and their families have been clear, in the years since, that they consider the separation and the study contributing factors in his loss; the documentary made about the triplets in 2018 treats the question with care and without simple causation, and the reader is encouraged to attend to how Bobby and David themselves describe it rather than to any third-party summary.

The 2018 documentary

Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2018, where it won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling, and was released theatrically that summer. It is the most widely seen treatment of the study to date and is, by some distance, the reason this archive’s questions reach the public at all.

The film’s core is the surviving brothers’ testimony — extended, careful, and not always in agreement on every detail — about what was done to them, what their parents were not told, and what they have been able to recover from the records. It is, in the most basic sense, the triplets telling their own story. This archive treats it as a primary source for the public account of their lives and refers readers to the film itself for the texture and the timing of what they choose to disclose.

See: the documentary’s entry in the Media section.

Where they stand on the records

Bobby Shafran and David Kellman have been public, in the documentary and in interviews since, in support of opening the records. They have described receiving redacted portions of their own files in the years following the film’s release — partial, slow, and limited to material about themselves rather than about Eddy or about the study’s overall design. The position of this archive aligns with the surviving brothers’ stated position: the records should be released to the surviving subjects and their families, in full, on terms the subjects rather than the institutions set.