Separated at birth: How a film about long lost triplets helped me find the twin sister I never knew existed

On June 26 2018, Michelle Mordkoff’s alarm went off at 6am as usual. She took her phone from the bedside table, sleepily scrolling through Facebook, mustering the energy to get up and face a busy day at the school where she worked. A movie trailer caught her eye - Three Identical Strangers - and she began watching. Two and a half minutes later, she was sat bolt upright, her heart pounding. 

The film, which opens in UK cinemas today, tells the remarkable story of David Kellman, Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland, triplets who were unknowingly separated at birth only to find one another by chance in 1980, when Bobby pitched up to his first day of university to find unfamiliar classmates greeting him as Eddy. 

The two boys (who were 19 at the time) met and were interviewed by the local newspaper. Before long they had been contacted by David, whose adoptive mother had noticed the story about these ‘twins’ who looked exactly like her son. 

At the time, it turned the boys into celebrities. They did the rounds on talk shows, dressed in matching clothes and finishing each other’s sentences. They even had a cameo alongside Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, and opened a Manhattan steakhouse called Triplets. 

In a quest to find out why they had been separated, the boys made a shocking discovery. They had been adopted via a New York agency called Louise Wise Services, which had declined to tell their new parents there were three babies. The triplets and their families had unwittingly been the subjects of a secret psychological experiment that rocked America, and is still largely under wraps today. 

What is known is that psychologist Peter Neubauer separated a number of twins and triplets, with the aim of answering the age old question: is the human condition predetermined by genetics, or shaped by environment? The triplets were sent to families 100 miles apart, but all with two parents and an older sister. David was placed in a wealthy home, with a doctor father, Eddy was adopted into a middle class family, while Bobby was raised in a working class household.

Sadly their miraculous reunion became strained. The boys had identical looks and similar ways of talking, but they had also experienced parallel struggles with mental illness (Eddy took his own life at 33). Today, David and Bobby, who both play a role in the film, are still searching for answers about the study they were forcibly made a part of. 

To most, it seems so far fetched it could be fiction. But to Michelle Mordkoff, it felt all too real. She had been adopted at five months, in 1964, from the same New York agency, Louise Wise. When a similar story had come out years before, about twins who had been separated by the agency, it had planted a seed in her mind. Her adoptive parents, though, had always dismissed the possibility that she might have a long lost twin.

But that day, after watching the trailer, Michelle decided to dig deeper. A friend had mentioned that, despite family records being closed in New York State, the birth registry was open. Michelle - and any twin - would still have the same registry number. 

“The next day she called me up,” Michelle tells me over the phone from her New Jersey home. “She goes, ‘only seven baby girls were born in Staten Island on your birthday. But - are you sitting down? - there are two with the same last name. And they’re one digit apart.’ I just lost it.”

Michelle immediately went out and bought a home DNA kit. That weekend, the 54-year-old mother-of-two went to her adoptive parents’ house and they logged onto Ancestry.com with her results. What happened next was nothing short of astounding.

“Up comes a match [with the initials] ‘AK’,” says Michelle. “It said ‘immediate family’, so it had to be a sister or half sister. Then all the ball started rolling”. 

Underneath Michelle’s DNA match, there was an entry saying that ‘AK’ was care of Kyle Kanter. 

“I go onto Facebook, find Kyle and on his friend list there she is: ‘Allison Rodnon Kanter’,” recalls Michelle. “I see myself in her face. And then I see my birthday, May 12 1964. And then I fall to the floor.” 

Michelle messaged Kyle, saying ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but I think I might be your mum’s twin sister’. 

“I just wanted to speak to her,” she says. “Up until the moment she texted me her birth certificate number, I still didn’t believe it was true.”

By the following Thursday, Allison was boarding a plane from Los Angeles to New York. 

They now know that, like the triplets, they had been separated at five months and placed in different families, all part of Neubauer’s experiment. Stranger still, unlike the boys, Allison and Michelle were put in homes with similar economic circumstances, in New York. They believe this may have been because they were fraternal twins, rather than identical, and that their story could reveal yet another layer of the sinister study. 

But before they attempt to pursue the truth, the twins have a lifetime to catch up on. “We FaceTime almost every day,” says Michelle. “I feel this insane connection, which is hard to come by at this age.”  

“We had very similar upbringings and our personalities are very similar. Her son reminds me so much of my son, it’s uncanny,” she adds. “I never had a feeling that I’d lost anything, but I did always crave that sisterly relationship.” 

“I always wondered where my birth parents came from and who I looked like”, says Allison, a mother-of-three, who is meeting Michelle in Miami next week for a family holiday. “I did think about my birth mother every year on my birthday, imagining she must be thinking about me. I never imagined she would have been thinking about two babies.” 

A short film, which followed Allison and Michelle’s reunion, shows two women with the same athletic physique and coiffed hair, meeting a Manhattan hotel suite. As they break away from their first hug, Michelle looks at Allison and exclaims: “you have my arms!”. 

Both have a remarkably calm take on it all. “When the triplets met they were 19, which is such a pivotal age,” says Allison. “I can’t imagine how that affected them. If that was when Michelle and I had met it would have been more difficult.”

Any anger isn’t directed at the childhood they could have had. Rather, it’s the fact that they have had to discover the truth on their own. 

“In 1992, Louise Wise had the opportunity to tell us, because I had written a letter to ask about my medical history,” explains Michelle. “At that point, the triplets had been discovered. The cat was out of the bag and they intentionally denied me that information. I lost another 24 years because of them protecting themselves.” 

“What was done was done back in 1964,” agrees Allison. “But it would have been really nice to have known in 1992. We lost having a childhood together, but it would have been wonderful to have had our whole adulthood together. When I think about what they did for their own benefit and for a scientific experiment, it’s disgusting. It’s just so immoral and unethical.”

The news has hit their adoptive parents, too. “They feel like they were duped,” says Michelle. “Why weren’t they told? There was no reason why they wouldn’t have taken in two healthy baby girls.”

The idea that there are others who still don’t know they are a twin or triplet, weighs heavily on the two women. “But what’s important now is the two of us learning about each other,” says Allison. “We’re making up for lost time.”

Three Identical Strangers is released in cinemas nationwide on 30 November