Three Identical Strangers

In 1980, teenager Robert Shafran arrived for his first day at a small community college in upstate New York, where people he had never met warmly greeted him as “Eddy.” It turned out that Eddy Galland was a former student at the school, and that the similarities between Robert and Eddy went deeper than their identical faces, voices and builds—they were twin brothers separated at birth and adopted out of the Louise Wise Agency by different Jewish families. When New York resident David Kellman read that already astonishing story in the pages of Newsday, he saw two doppelgangers who shared his birthday and adoption agency and realized that he was the third sibling. Thus, the separated twins turned into separated triplets, with the brothers eventually becoming tabloid sensations and pre-viral celebrities. If their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain’t heard nothing yet.