What would you do if you found your doppelganger in the wild? That’s the question that opens the Netflix thriller series Triptych. When forensics agent Becca Fuentes arrives at a crime scene to find the dead perpetrator, Aleida Trujano shares her birthday and face, she’s sent down a twisty path toward the truth. Along the way, she’s helped by stripper Tamara, who also mysteriously has the same face and birthday as Becca. With the realization that she and the other two women are triplets separated at birth, Becca and Tamara set out to solve the mystery around their lineage and the sinister forces that conspired to tear the family apart.

While the Netflix show takes a turn toward the fantastic, the basic story of Triptych is, as the opening suggests, based on the true story of real scientific experiments conducted in New York in the 1960s and ’70s. Under the umbrella of the Child Development Center at the Jewish Board of Guardians, child psychiatrist Dr. Peter Neubauer and psychiatric consultant Viola Bernard teamed up with a prominent Brooklyn adoption agency, Louise Wise Services, to conduct a controversial study of identical twins and triplets raised apart.

The study was classic nature vs. nurture, aiming to discern the psychological effects of different home lives on people who were otherwise genetically the same. The problem? None of the adoptive parents were informed that their child was part of the study. In adulthood, many of these separated children reunited with their identical siblings, revealing the intense and unintended psychological cost of this study where researchers were playing God.

Three Identical Strangers
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Over the decades since the controversial study, more and more twins have come forward about finding out they’d been part of it. One of the most well-known stories, and likely the one that most strongly influenced Triptych, comes from identical triplets Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman. As shown in the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers, the triplets met by happenstance in 1980 when Shafran, on his first day at college, kept getting mistaken for Eddy. The two determined they were twins separated at birth. When their story came out in the news, David came forward to reveal they were actually triplets.

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The three were an overnight sensation, making appearances on talk shows like The Phil Donahue Show and delighting audiences with their strange story. Audiences couldn’t get over the fact that the three men, raised completely apart, shared mannerisms, tastes, and habits. They all smoked Marlboro cigarettes, loved wrestling, and had similar tastes in women. The three became inseparable, their every move captured in the newspapers.

Together, Shafran, Galland, and Kellman sought answers about the study they’d unknowingly been a part of; what they discovered was that the twin study participants were biological children of people suffering from mental illness. They concluded that the study, then, was to figure out the heredity of said illnesses.

The Fairytale Becomes a Tragedy
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Their rising star allowed the brothers to open their own restaurant, a thriving steakhouse in Soho, New York fittingly named Triplets. Unknown to everyone, this would be the beginning of the end. Though the three had lived together and become fast friends, they weren’t suited to working together, and especially not to running a business. Upset, Bobby left New York, leaving his brothers to run the restaurant on their own.

All three men suffered mental health problems over the years, most notably Eddy, who was diagnosed in 1995 with bipolar disorder. Following the diagnosis and immense stress of his crumbling relationship with his brothers, Eddy Galland tragically took his own life.

That same year, the study’s participants would learn the true reason behind their separation. In an article in The New Yorker, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright revealed that Neubauer was trying to find a definitive answer to the age-old question of nature vs. nurture. With the help of Louise Wise Services, an unknown number of triplets and twins were separated and placed in homes of varying classes.

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For Kellman, Shafran, and Galland, that meant growing up in blue-collar, middle-class, and wealthy families, respectively. For years the study’s researchers regularly monitored and studied the children, something that parents had been told was simply to observe how the adopted children were progressing.

What Came of the Neubauer-Bernard Study?
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In the end, all the work and sacrifices that went into the controversial study were for nothing. Neubauer died in 2008 never having published his findings; instead, all of the study’s records remain sealed in Yale’s archives until 2065. Since Galland, Shafran, and Kellman met, countless other twins and triplets from the Neubauer study have reunited for better or for worse.

Among these reunited twins are Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, who recount their story in the memoir Identical Strangers. Doug Rausch and Howard Burack appear prominently in the documentary The Twinning Reaction. Most recently, twin studies expert Dr. Nancy Segal wrote about the study in her book Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart. In it, the author identifies 23 cases from the Neubauer study: those spoken to include twins Allison Kanter and Michele Mordkoff, Melanie Merzel and Ellen Carbone, and Sharon Morello and her anonymous sister.

Three Identical Strangers ends with David and Bobby receiving 10,000 heavily redacted pages of the study from the Jewish Board of Guardians. The pages revealed little, showing no concrete results or formal conclusions. Yale’s seal on the records is set to expire in October 2065, when the youngest subjects reach age 99. Neubauer’s stated reasoning for this was to protect the participating children, which effectively takes away that choice from those now-adult participants; as Segal questions in a 2005 paper, “Who is being protected by waiting so long?”

You can stream Triptych on Netflix.