The seemingly happy story of reunited triplets separated at birth has a dark and cruel underbelly.
In the US, Robert Shafran, Edward Galland and David Kellman were separated at birth, part of a grim science experiment. All three of the men suffered mental health problems and Eddy tragically took his own life after a sad battle with depression.
They became part of a study when their teenage biological mother gave birth to them on July 12, 1961.
Said study was conducted by Dr Peter Neubauer, who visited the boys every year for the first 10 years of their lives.
He did not tell them he was visiting the brothers mere hours apart and has become widely criticised for the apparent cruelty and callousness of the experiment.
In a partnership with an adoption agency, psychologists gave David to a working-class family, Eddy to a middle-class home, while Bobby ended up with a family considered upper-middle class in some kind of grim social lottery.
Details on the study are minimal and won't be fully published until 2065, long after anyone involved is likely to have died.
Dr Neubauer, who once worked with Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, passed away in 2008 and is reported to have shown no remorse for his experiment. He also revealed to the journalist Lawrence Wright that other children had been separated.
A heavily redacted part of the study was eventually released to them. They were with filmmaker Tim Wardle when they were allowed access.
Wardle said: "One of the most shocking these was that these psychiatrists are sitting around saying, ‘Oh, it’s really strange, the children all seem to have these problems.'
"The answer is obvious - you’ve ripped them apart from their siblings."
The three boys all struggled with their behaviour growing up and both Eddy and David had spent time in mental health hospitals.
Robert was on probation after he pleaded guilty to charges relating to the murder of a woman in a 1978 robbery.
David told the New York Post: "It was absolutely separation anxiety. Those who were studying us saw there was a problem happening.
"And they could have helped. That’s the thing we’re most angry about. They could have helped . . . and didn’t."
Growing up within 100 miles of each other, each of the triplets never knew of the existence of their other two biological brothers until a chance encounter brought them all together.
At the age of 19, Bobby started Sullivan Country Community College, near New York, and students would come up to him calling him 'Eddy'.
It took the ingenuity of a fellow student to work out what had happened and the two were reunited.
Bobby said: "Guys were slapping me on the back, and girls were hugging and kissing me. It was very welcoming, except that they insisted on calling him Eddy."
Bizarre coincidences regarding their characters emerged including the fact they had the same college wrestling techniques and lost their virginities at the same time.
Biological similarities included their birthmarks and identical IQ scores of 148.
At this point, the tale seemed a remarkable chance occurrence, but they soon bumped into the third brother, David.
He had noticed his lost brothers when a local paper covered the story and saw his own face pictured.
He got in touch with the college and two became three.
The three brothers' story made the headlines of national news and they decided to move in together in New York, opening the Manhattan restaurant 'Triplets' in 1980.
As their fame grew, they even had a cameo in the Madonna film, Desperately Seeking Susan.
David said: "We were sort of falling in love. It was, ‘You like this thing? I love that!’ There was definitely a desire to like the same things and to be the same."
Bobby said: "All we wanted to do was be joyful and play and catch up."
Behind their success lay a darker truth when the boys began questioning why they had been separated.
Around the same time, their relationship had begun to turn sour as the truth of their separation.
Eddy sadly took his own life in 1995.
Bobby spoke of the cruelty of the experiment and said: "I can’t think of anybody else in modern times that has done anything like this.
"The other comparisons I can think of would be the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where they let them all get syphilis and let it go untreated, and they died horrible deaths."
Bobby and David now live separately and are married with families of their own.
