Bobby Shafran walked onto his college campus in New York in 1980 and total strangers greeted him like an old friend, calling him by a name that wasn't his. It turned out that name belonged to Eddy Galland, a student who'd attended the same school the year before and looked exactly like Bobby, because they were identical twins separated at birth. Except they weren't twins. They were triplets. A third brother, David Kellman, saw their photo splashed across a New York newspaper covering the story and recognized his own face staring back twice. He called the paper. Within days all three had met for the first time since infancy. What none of them knew for years afterward was why they'd been split up in the first place. A prominent psychiatrist had arranged their separate adoptions as part of a secret nature versus nurture study, sending each boy to a different kind of household and tracking them without ever telling the families what they were really part of. The brothers spent their early years together as minor celebrities, opening a restaurant and appearing in a movie scene with Madonna, before the weight of what had been done to them pulled their relationship apart. Eddy died by suicide in 1995. The other two eventually turned their story into a documentary rather than let it stay just as data in a filing cabinet somewhere.

Bobby Shafran walked onto his college campus in New York in 1980 and total strangers greeted him like an old friend, calling him by a name that wasn't his. It turned out that name belonged to Eddy Galland, a student who'd attended the same school the year before and looked exactly like Bobby, because they were identical twins separated at birth. Except they weren't twins. They were triplets. A third brother, David Kellman, saw their photo splashed across a New York newspaper covering the story and recognized his own face staring back twice. He called the paper. Within days all three had met for the first time since infancy. What none of them knew for years afterward was why they'd been split up in the first place. A prominent psychiatrist had arranged their separate adoptions as part of a secret nature versus nurture study, sending each boy to a different kind of household and tracking them without ever telling the families what they were really part of. The brothers spent their early years together as minor celebrities, opening a restaurant and appearing in a movie scene with Madonna, before the weight of what had been done to them pulled their relationship apart. Eddy died by suicide in 1995. The other two eventually turned their story into a documentary rather than let it stay just as data in a filing cabinet somewhere.