Watch the trailer of the documentary below.

Video credit: Movieclips Indie

There is a lot of debate about whether people’s personalities are the result of nature or nurture. While this question has been the subject of several studies, some parties went to extreme and unethical ends in the pursuit of answers.

One group of triplets soon shot to fame because of this in an incredible story of how they were reunited and the tragedy that struck after.

Triplets Eddy, Bobby, and David became famous in the 1980s because although they were triplets, they all group up in different families.

But the sobering truth is that they weren’t separated by chance but by design. Part of the reason was that the adoption agency realized that it would be more difficult to convince families to adopt three babies at once.

Yet there was also a darker reason. The three became part of a study that wanted to find out if they would end up with similar personalities even if they grew up in different environments. If that was already disturbing, what’s even more shocking is that this experiment had been going on since the 1950s.

Their birth mother was a teenager when she gave birth to them but after six months of raising them, she decided to give them up for adoption.

Bobby was sent off to affluent “workaholic” parents, Eddy was adopted by parents who were “uptight” and lower-middle class, while David ended up with middle-class parents who were described as quite affectionate.

While they grew up not knowing each other, a quirk of fate brought them back together again.

Bobby started studying at Sullivan County Community College in New York. While he hoped to get along with people there, it was strange that everyone seemed overly familiar with him and one person even kept calling him Eddy. And they were confused why the guy they knew as Eddy was now calling himself Bobby.

As it turned out, Bobby had ended up enrolling in the same community college where Eddy was and they were just one year apart. And talking about coincidences, Bobby even ended up in Eddy’s old room when he moved in.

When one person suggested that he must have a twin, Bobby started digging until he found Eddy’s number.

After meeting up, they soon realized that they were both from the same adoption agency. The story made the local newspaper and that grabbed the attention of David who was shocked at the two people who looked just like him.

The trio’s story went viral and soon they were making appearances on TV talk shows and even had a part in Madonna’s movie Desperately Seeking Susan.

Eventually, they opened up a restaurant named Triplets.

But tragedy soon followed when Eddy killed himself following a breakdown. His two brothers were devastated and Bobby wondered, “I wonder if I didn’t teach him how to live life. I’d rather it had been me than Eddy.”

Upon finding out that they were part of a long-running experiment, David and Bobby were horrified and said they felt like “lab rats.”

Their incredibly strange yet compelling journey has now become the subject of a documentary on Hulu called Three Identical Strangers.

 

 

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