Identical Strangers: Twins ripped apart in same vile experiment that separated triplets

Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein lived almost identical lives and followed the exact same career paths - without knowing the other existed.

Two identical twins have told how they were deliberately separated at birth as part of the same vile social experiment that saw a set of triplets ripped apart.

The story of Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman, who had no idea they were triplets until a chance encounter at college, was told this week in Channel 4 documentary Three Identical Strangers.

They had been placed in three different homes less than 100 miles apart after prominent child psychologist Dr Peter Neubauer decided to study the effects of separating identical siblings.

But they weren't the only children used as guinea pigs in Neuabauer's cruel study.

Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein claim they too were separated at birth in the name of scientific research - and only found out about each other, and the painful truth about their lives, more than three decades later.

The twins were both born in New York on October 9 1968 and, after a period of foster care, were given up for adoption.

But despite both growing up in the same city, neither ever imagined she would have a sibling after both sets of adoptive parents were told they were the only children of the mother who gave them up.

In fact they had been chosen for a cruel plot to study the impact of separating identical siblings, involving Dr Neubauer’s team abetted by the Louise Wise adoption agency that handled both their adoptions.

Like the triplets’ parents, their adoptive mum and dad were only told they were part of an ongoing development study and were visited and filmed by psychologists during their upbringing.

Despite being unaware of each other, however, the two girls’ took almost identical paths.

They both edited their high school newspapers, they both graduated from film school and they both embarked on careers as writers.

It was only at the age of 35 that they discovered each other after Elyse, who had been living in Paris, decided to look for her birth mother.

She said: "When I reached the age my adoptive mother was when she died, 33, the desire to know more about my origins really surfaced, and I said I wanted to know answers."

After contacting the New York state adoption registry she was told that her mother didn't want to meet her, but was then informed she had an identical twin, Paula.

With the help of social workers Elyse managed to track down Paula within days, and the two women met for the first time in 2004 at a cafe for lunch.

Paula recalled: “We had 35 years to catch up on. How do you start asking somebody, 'What have you been up to since we shared a womb together?' Where do you start?"

But their elation at finding each other soon turned to anger when they began to ask why they had been separation and never told about each other for so long.

Elyse said: “I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘how is that possible? A twin study?’

“We felt that our lives had been orchestrated by these puppet masters, like The Truman Show.

“These scientific researchers put their scientific needs, their career interests, before the needs and interests of us and other twins.

“Who would think about separating children for this purpose? If it hadn't happened to us, we wouldn't believe it.”

Recalling the moment Elyse broke the news that they had been separated for a social experiment, Paula said: "It was like something out of a movie, I broke down in tears.

"Nature intended for us to be raised together, so I think it was a crime we were separated.”

Elyse said finding out she had a twin helped her to reconcile some of the unexplained feelings she’d had throughout her life.

She said: “There was a great feeling of relief, because it did respond to a lot of my questions about the way I dealt with others, my relationships with others.

“A lot of things began to make sense to me.

“My brother is mentally ill, and we were close growing up.

"When I would speak to others about missing him in my life, I would tell people that I felt like I was missing a twin.

"I think that loss echoes the primal loss that happened to me and Paula.”

Paula, however, admits she has struggled more with the emotions of finding a long-lost twin she never knew she had.

She said: "There were periods when I wished I hadn't been found. I was at the stage in my life when I didn't want this kind of complication.

“I had my family, I had my career. I wasn't looking for an intense, difficult relationship and I didn't really know her well enough to tell her that.

“Suddenly my life made less sense, whereas for Elyse, it was the answer to a longing and a mystery.

“When people saw me not long after we were reunited they said ‘My God, what has happened? You look awful.’ I was in shock.”

For triplets Robert, Edward and David, the separation proved tragic as each suffered mental ilness and behavioural problems, with their troubles continuing after they had rediscovered each other.

Spiralling into depression, Edward committed suicide in 1995, aged 35.

But Paula and Elyse decided that the cruel manipulation of their lives would make them stronger, and combined their mutual skills in writing a book about their childhoods and how they found each other again.

In Identical Strangers , they write: "Imagine a slightly different version of you walks across the room, looks you in the eye and says 'hello' in your voice..."

"Looking at this person, you are able to gaze into your own eyes and see yourself from the outside.

"This identical individual has the exact same DNA and is essentially your clone. We don't have to imagine."

The sisters also confronted the Austrian scientist behind the experiment, Dr Neubauer, who refused to speak at first then agreed to meet them as long as their conversation wasn’t recorded.

They said he showed no remorse and offered no apology.

Before his death in 2008, Dr Neubauer reportedly locked his study - which was never published - in an archive at Yale University, not to be opened until 2066, by which time all of the separated children will be dead.

Through painstaking library searches and other leads they also found out who their mother was, and their real names - Paula was called Jean, while Elyse’s original name was Marian.

Their mother, Leda Witt, they discovered, was a bright young with a history of mental illness who at he time of their birth was a voluntary patient at a psychiatric hospital after attempting to commit suicide.

She must have believed that she could not cope with the responsibility of being a mother.

Sadly, Leda died in 1978, never knowing what had happened to her baby girls who, by then, would have been nine.

The twins said that discovering who their mother was, and why they were given up for adoption, was the most painful but most important part of their journey together.

Paula said that knowing that she didn’t live to know they had found each other again is her “main regret”.

Elyse added: “When I look in the mirror, I not only see Paula, but Leda. I feel my existence is to pay homage to this woman who had a hard life.

"The best of her lives on in us.”

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