Dark Twinning

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Of all the trippy and uncanny and wondrous things in this world, identical twins are high on the list. Two human beings, each a near perfect mirror of the other. Most of us have a womb all to ourselves. We're born into this life entirely alone. How can we ever really understand what it means to share our world with the perfect doppelganger?

To have a bond so profound with another human soul that it may feel nearly impossible to know where you end and your twin begins. This is a story about twin brothers who grew up to be acclaimed doctors, leaders in their field. Brothers who found themselves objects of fascination from the very beginning. Brothers whose identity rested as much on their twinship as it did on their accomplishments.

Twin brothers who led what looked to be dazzling lives but whose deaths were shrouded in strangeness and mystery. The posh apartment a wreck of trash and garbage. The door locked from the inside and no sign of forced entry or foul play. What in the world happened to the Marcus Twins? Twins play a huge part in the mythology of cultures all around the world.

Like in ancient Egypt, Nut and Geb, twin gods of the sky and the earth. In ancient Greece and Rome, the twins Castor and Pollux and Romulus and Remus and Artemis and Apollo. And that's just the tip of the mythological twin iceberg. So, so, so many twins in our mythology. Twins make a handy symbolic shortcut when it comes to understanding duality.

Night versus day, good versus evil, creation versus destruction. The true object versus the shadow it casts. The ancients were fascinated by twins and so are we moderns. We smile at how the ancients believed that Apollo was the god of the moon and his twin Artemis was the god of the sun. How quaint. We see ourselves as so much more advanced, so much more scientific in our outlook.

Yet we are every bit as fascinated by twins as our ancestors ever were. We don't think of twins as gods anymore or as omens of doom. But I'll remind you that we live in a culture that has breathlessly followed the lives and careers of the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen for nearly 40 years now. You know it's true. From their babyhood on the TV show Full House to the creepy and gross online clocks counting down to their 18th birthday.

Did you know there were actual hordes of grown-ass men dripping digital drool over the prospect of the teen twin phenoms turning the legal age of consent? Ew. I mean, really. Ew. It wasn't just that they were beautiful young girls or famous young girls. It was the twin thing that really turned up the heat. Double the fun and all that.

Anyway, everyone has about the same chance, 1 in 250, of having identical twins. That said, identical twins are pretty rare. Out of 1,000 births, maybe 3 or 4 might be what the doctors call monozygotic twins. One egg splitting into two identical babies. And if it seems like there are more twins today than you remember ever seeing when you were a kid, you might be right.

It kind of depends on how old you are. The rate of twin births held steady at about 2% for decades and decades. Then came the 1980s and assisted reproduction technologies. That 2% jumped to 6%. But it's since leveled off a bit. Some people think that the increase in twins is all down to IVF and IUI and other interventions.

But there's another factor at play too. The age of the mother. Experts say that at least a third of the jump in twins is due to that. Delaying having children increases the odds of having twins. And right around the same time that assisted reproduction came on the scene, women began delaying childbirth. So you could say that those two factors are kind of twinned.

Just don't say it on social media because you'll immediately be besieged by a horde of ranting edgelords who don't even understand how tampons work. Much less the rest of human reproduction. It was June 2nd, 1930 when Anna and Jack Marcus welcomed their baby boys into the world. It must have been a big surprise for them to become the parents of twins.

There was no ultrasound back then. No way to know if you were carrying a boy or a girl. Much less more than one of either. So imagine Anna and Jack's surprise when just a few minutes after Stewart's birth, Cyril arrived. That dynamic, Stewart taking center stage, Cyril more in the background, followed them throughout their lives.

They grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey. And it was clear from an early age that the twins were very intelligent kids. Good students. The Bayonne High School newspaper published a little story about the twins, noting that they didn't dress alike. They instead wore matching outfits, but in different colors. Light colors for Stewart.

Dark colors for Cyril. Both boys made the National Honor Society. Both graduated at the top of their class, with Stewart, as usual, just a step ahead of Cyril. Stewart Marcus was named valedictorian. His twin, salutatorian. The brothers headed off to college together at Syracuse University. Then medical school together, also at Syracuse.

Both graduating with honors in 1954. By that point, it seemed as though the two brothers were committed to living their lives forever entwined. So little is really known about the early years that you can only wonder what drove them to take the exact same path. Their relationship was super competitive, with Stewart taking almost every lead.

Was it Stewart who dreamed of a career in medicine? With Cyril following along as he did in all things? Or maybe it's not even that complicated. Their father was a physician. Were the twins following in his footsteps? The question may have been as impossible for them to answer as it is for us. What we do know is that the world they'd shared so intimately for their entire lives was about to be cleaved in two, separating them for the very first time.

It was another twin, ironically, who split the brothers apart that very first time. His name was Dr. Alan Guttmacher. He was the director of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The twins had successfully completed their internships at Mount Sinai and their medical residencies in gynecology. They were counting on spending three more years together at Mount Sinai.

Guttmacher wasn't having it. Though he wasn't a psychologist or psychiatrist, Guttmacher had strong opinions about twins. He'd written a few very negative articles about twin psychology. I mean, remember, he was a twin himself. He had strong feelings on the subject. The word he chose to describe the Marcus twins was taken from an 18th-century manual for midwives, a word that at the time was actually a medical term or maybe a quasi-medical term.

It was a word used to describe conjoined twins. It's a word you won't see in medicine today, not to describe infants or any human being. The word Guttmacher chose was monster. All separate identical twins may be regarded as monsters who have successfully escaped the various stages of monstrosity. Harsh, but Dr. Guttmacher didn't like what he saw when he studied the Marcus twins transcripts.

He'd spent years immersed in research on twins, and to his trained mind, Stewart and Cyril Marcus were as conjoined as if they shared the same flesh. Guttmacher believed that what he called their psychic conjoinment was ruinous to their development as individuals, that they had to be forcefully separated, had to be forcefully prevented from becoming monsters.

They had attended the same college, joined the same fraternity, earned the same academic honors, attended the same medical school. They even shared the same cadaver in their first year anatomy class. Guttmacher believed that the only option in their best interest was to separate the brothers. He made it clear that he would prevent them from continuing their residencies together at Mount Sinai and anywhere else they might apply. He flatly refused to provide any recommendation that would land them at the same hospital. He insisted that they apply to separate programs and wouldn't budge on the issue. And Guttmacher had plenty of colleagues who supported his decision, like Dr. Joseph Ravinsky, chief resident at Mount Sinai, who said this about Stewart and Cyril Marcus.

They were arrogant, resentful of criticism, disobedient of orders. There were tremendous conflicts with the other residents. It seemed that the Marcus twins just couldn't get along with anyone but each other and had no real reason to try because they had each other and that appeared to be enough. They had no incentive to even learn how to cooperate or accommodate or negotiate or even just tolerate other people.

They were stunted, thought Guttmacher. It had to end and it would end here on his watch. Guttmacher didn't just separate Stewart and Cyril. He put thousands of miles between them. Cyril found himself at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York. Stewart headed west to Stanford University Hospital. And if Guttmacher hoped that a continent between the twins would be the fix, he was about to be disappointed.

They barely made it a year before Stewart left Stanford. He was vague about where he was headed an orthopedic hospital, he declared. There's a puzzling hole the size of that year in Stewart's resume, which is intriguing. Equally intriguing is why and how he found himself back at Stanford at the end of the year. Some people think Guttmacher got wind of the Marcus twins reuniting at the Hospital for Joint Diseases through an unholy fit and sent Stewart back to California in a rage. There's no way to know for sure though, because Guttmacher died not long before the Marcus twins and took whatever he knew about them with him to his grave. But we have to hand him this. Separation number two stuck for a little while. It stuck pretty good. Almost good enough for Cyril Marcus to create a whole life of his own, separate and distinct from his twin. Almost.

Twin brothers, closer than close. Twin brothers who become gynecologists. Does this story sound maybe a little bit familiar? The 1988 David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers is based on the true story of the Marcus twins. And the movie does follow the real story but takes a hard turn left into fiction at the end. In real life, one Marcus twin didn't kill the other with some highly peculiar homemade gynecology tools. But it says a whole lot about the true story that even Hollywood didn't feel the need to dress it up all that much. Thought I would mention this just in case your brain is glitching. Trying to figure out where you've heard something like this before. Oh yeah, and Amazon turned the story into a series. Recently, this time flipping the gender and casting Rachel Wise as the twins. But let's leave Hollywood here for now and get back to the real life story. Cyril Marcus struggled with his brother's absence. But he eventually began to create a life for himself. By 1958, he was on staff at New York Hospital and the Cornell Medical Center.

In 1960, he married a woman named Corinne Stein. Things were going very well for Cyril. With the support of his boss, head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at New York Hospital, Cyril was even able to bring Stewart home from California to be his coworker. Because unlike Guttmacher, Cyril's new boss was fine with the twins working together. Sure, why not? It was like time had passed at all. The twins fell swiftly and easily back into their familiar pattern.

Two bodies, one shared vision, one shared ambition. When you look at how they worked, how productive and successful they were, you think, oh, it might be kind of handy to have another you right beside you dreaming the same dream. Once again, Stewart was out front, charismatic and charming. He was in his element in the lab doing research that made him an in-demand speaker at medical conferences all around the world. He was skilled at winning grants, a natural at the kind of schmoozing that his twin brother was practically allergic to. But it was Cyril's work that made it all possible. Cyril who sacrificed his own dreams of research to build the Marcus Brothers OBGYN practice. Cyril who was hauled out of bed at all hours to deliver babies.

Yet there was no denying that the brothers were an unstoppable two-headed machine. What Cyril learned from his patients often inspired new avenues in his brother's research. What Stewart learned in the lab, Cyril could put into practice in the exam room. The Marcus twins were beginning to make a name for themselves in the medical world, publishing paper after paper. Then came 1967 and the publication of the book that put them on the map. It was called Advances in Obstetrics and Gynecology. That success led to New York Hospital putting Stewart and Cyril Marcus in charge of its fertility clinic. And now they were in the big time. That fancy hospital appointment boosted their private practice. It grew and it flourished attracting the wealthy and the famous.

The field of infertility treatment then was brand new and the Marcus twins were right out in front. The brothers combined their research and their medical training with a dogged determination to succeed. And they did. Many of their patients had exhausted every other avenue in their hopes of becoming pregnant. Yet under the Marcus Brothers care, hundreds and hundreds of families welcomed babies that would otherwise never have been born. There are adults alive right now who were named after the famous twin fertility doctors. That's how grateful parents were to Stewart and Cyril Marcus.

And then came an offer for a full-time professorship from Cornell Medical Center. An offer for Stewart, not Cyril. That must have stung and the timing was bad. Cyril's wife Corinne had just given birth to the couple's second daughter. Stewart taking the job at Cornell meant that now Cyril would have even more responsibilities at their shared infertility practice. Cyril had to all but abandon his own research and was still being called at all hours to race to the hospital to deliver babies. Plus he had his own children now and an increasingly strained marriage to manage. Is it any wonder that he began reaching for a little boost?

Amphetamines. And as a doctor he had plenty of access. The pressure on Cyril must have been overwhelming. Every single one of the patients who treat it were there because they'd been unable to conceive. All were anxious. Some were near despair. They looked upon Cyril, upon both Marcus brothers, as their very last chance. Their last hope. The doctors who could make the miraculous happen.

At home Cyril's wife Corinne was frustrated and unhappy. She was alone with the children more often than not and complained that Cyril was too much of a perfectionist to ever be happy or at Meanwhile his twin Stewart had freedom to spare. Instead of seeing patients every day he packed his bags and traveled the world speaking at conferences and enjoying the respect and applause from the medical community. Hadn't it always been that way for Stewart and Cyril? The older brother, older by a handful of minutes, overshadowing the younger. The spotlight and acclaim for Stewart.

The daily grind for Cyril. The end of 1969 saw the end of Cyril's marriage. Corinne wanted a divorce and Cyril found himself bounced from the family home. He ended up alone in an apartment. Alone for only the second time in his whole life. He got a dog hoping it would give his daughters a reason to to come visit. Which honestly is so heartbreaking but so relatable. It was just too bad that the neighbors complained endlessly about the barking. The dog was gone almost as soon as it came.

Cyril didn't thrive in solitude. This isn't the part of the story where he discovers that he was his own person. Separate and independent from his twin. This wasn't the moment where he seized the chance to truly explore who he was all by himself. The opposite seems to have happened. Cyril, already the quieter of the two Marcus brothers, the one more comfortable in the shadows and in the light, began to retreat more and more into himself. Acquaintances and those who worked with him could see it. They understood that he was depressed. Deeply depressed. The divorce, they thought.

He works too hard, they said. He worries obsessively about his patients. But no one had any idea how to help or intervene. Cyril took to confiding in his patients. Even calling them sometimes late at night, confessing his misery. This went on into 1970 and 1971. Cyril unraveling. Stewart modestly accepting. Accolade after accolade.

Not that things were good or healthy or appropriate before Stewart took the Cornell professorship or before Corinne peaced out. For all the glowing reviews of the twins infertility practice, there were disturbing incidents as well. The kind of incidents that have a way of staying quiet for a long time. People are afraid to challenge authority. Afraid to make waves. To risk life.

Losing a job. Maybe being blackballed forever. Yet slowly enough bad news made its way to the board of New York Hospital that it became impossible to ignore. From an article published in Esquire magazine in 1976. Patients began reporting instances of bizarre even terrifying behavior. There were the mutual impersonations for instance. One twin would leave his patient in the middle of an examination and the other would return to the stirrups to complete the job.

Once Stewart confided to a patient whom he had failed to fool with a Cyril impersonation that the two of them had played the impersonation game with 14 patients so far that day and that they'd be able to fool nine of them. Our mother has trouble telling us apart, he said. It gets worse. One patient who had been hospitalized towards the end of her ninth month of pregnancy recalls complaining to Cyril that her intravenous needle gave her pain. He picked up the bottle of intravenous fluid and he slammed it down on the tray. When another patient disobeyed Cyril's orders and got out of bed subsequently suffering a miscarriage, he berated her almost vengefully.

Vengeance. Old testament style. Literally. The Marcus brothers apparently went so far as to tell their patients, thou shalt have no gynecologist before us. And if being thundered at in biblical terms while suffering through a pelvic exam isn't off-putting enough, there was the very strange day that Cyril shared a rambling anecdote with a patient about how he'd recently treated a woman experiencing unpleasant side effects after having had sex with a dog. The way I would have bolted for the door wearing nothing but that flimsy paper gown and a look of pure horror on my face. But you know how it is. We're socialized to be polite, especially when dealing with a powerful man who's behaving in an erratic or threatening or frankly unhinged way. Stay quiet. Stay polite. Stay safe. It's hard to even imagine with that woman who just wanted so desperately to become pregnant made of Cyril's story. Guys, you just don't know what it's like. How vulnerable you feel on that table in those cold metal stirrups and there's renowned gynecologist Dr. Cyril Marcus casually discussing bestiality while he cranks the speculum. Anyway, even this wasn't enough to merit any kind of real investigation into the Marcus practice. What finally got them was paperwork. Insurance paperwork. Stewart and Cyril Marcus hated paperwork. They hated it so much that eventually they stopped billing certain patients.

Yes, they passed on getting paid just so they wouldn't have to sign forms, which worked about as well as the toddler who covers his eyes and thinks that because he can't see you, you can't see him. Because the hospital did like filling out paperwork. The hospital did enjoy billing patients and the insurance companies very much enjoyed refusing to pay claims or reimburse patients until the doctors Marcus turned in the forms. What a mess. Isn't it fun how all the bizarre and unethical shenanigans Stewart and Cyril pulled like tricking patients, lying, throwing little fits that went unchecked until the insurance companies were like, what in the hell is going on with this infertility clinic at New York Hospital? You know, it's almost like patients didn't matter as much as profits. What a crazy thought. I must be out of my mind even think it.

You know what it took to bring this whole circus to a halt? A pissed off housewife from New Jersey. Her name was Evelyn Chait. How many times have we warned you not to mess with people from New Jersey? They're just built different. You don't want it with a garden stater, especially not one as furious as Mrs. Evelyn Chait. See, all she wanted was her stupid medical forms to be completed. So her stupid insurance company would pay the claim and get off her back. The ordeal began in 1971.

Evelyn gnawed on the Marcus brothers like a junkyard dog working a bone. Letters she lost count of how many letters she wrote, how many times she packed her husband off to the Marcus practice, the administration at New York Hospital, to agencies in both New Jersey and New York. Days, weeks, and months melted into years. Years Evelyn Chait spent pursuing Cyril Marcus until she finally hit paydirt in 1974. The New York State Department of Professional Conduct assigned an investigator to her case and boom, Marcus brothers were finally facing accountability.

The timing of all this was terrible for Cyril. The amphetamines he'd been taken to help empower through his endless days of seeing patients and delivering babies were making it impossible for him to sleep. He began taking barbiturates, drugs like Nembutal, which might help insomnia or might cause paranoia and suicidal ideation. And the drugs were affecting him in increasingly obvious ways. Cyril was unsteady on his feet. He'd taken a very bad fall earlier that year, in April 1974, that sent him to the ER. The fall had occurred right outside the hospital's operating room and it was Cyril who was scheduled to perform surgery.

Stewart raced to his twin's side, almost as shaky and agitated as Cyril, and the decision was made then. Both brothers were placed on a medical leave of absence from New York Hospital. When they returned to work in August, the chief hospital administrator ordered them kept under a tight watch. The brothers sensed it and resented it and responded by seeing fewer and fewer patients at the clinic. They devoted their time to their private practice where things were getting weirder by the day. One of their nurses reported that the paperwork phobia had only gotten worse if that was even possible. The office rent was no longer being paid. The AC broke and it went unrepaired. Stewart and Cyril frequently called out sick in voices that were thick and slurred.

There was a shocking incident involving a patient who checked herself into the hospital during a miscarriage. The woman's husband, a doctor himself, bluntly questioned whether or not Cyril had made critical errors that led to the miscarriage. And as the woman lay there bleeding profusely, Cyril, wobbling a bit on his feet, studied her and asked if she wouldn't just like to go home now. Shocking because the woman so clearly needed treatment immediately.

The nurse who'd been reporting events at the practice was so dismayed that she tried to resign. But the chairman of the hospital persuaded her to stick around for the sake of the patients who were still under the Marcus Brothers care. Meanwhile, the investigator for the New York State Department of Professional Conduct struggled to get in front of the twins.

He got a taste of what Evelyn Chait and so many other patients had. Phone calls went unanswered and unreturned. He threatened Cyril with a subpoena, which did bring a chase in Dr. Marcus to a meeting. But it was clearly the wrong Dr. Marcus. Stewart once again impersonated his brother that day in October 1974. Very cordial, very polite, very obviously not Cyril. In May 1975, the twins were ordered to take a medical leave of absence from their clinic work at New York Hospital. They were informed that colleagues suspected them of having a serious drug problem, which they forcefully denied. It didn't matter. The medical leave was part of an ultimatum.

Accept a medical leave for treatment or voluntarily resign or do nothing. And we will be forced to recommend to the hospital's medical board that you be dropped. You have two weeks to decide. Those two weeks passed in a bitter haze. The twins barely showed up for work and the news kept getting worse for them. The conduct investigation against the twin gynecologist had racked up another dozen allegations. Both twins were subpoenaed this time, neither appeared. They asked for a postponement and then another. What few patients Cyril did see reported how thin he was, how sick he appeared, how lonely and sad he seemed.

Just days before the twins 45th birthday, Cyril had an odd exchange with a patient. It started with him talking about the loss of TV legend Ozzie Nelson, whatever would become of his other half, wife Harriet Nelson. How was she to go on? The conversation took an even darker turn into cancer and death. He got into this cancer business and he said, do you know who dies of same thing? And I said, what? And he said, twins. He said identical twins often come down with the same thing, cancer or whatever, and die together or close. Identical twins or even twins are very joined emotionally and whatever. The hammer came down on June 27th, 1975, when a special panel of doctors voted unanimously to charge Stewart and Cyril Marcus with unprofessional conduct.

At the same time, the New York County Medical Society Board of Censors have been conducting their own investigation. They had the same struggle in getting the brothers to cooperate until finally Cyril Marcus presented himself at the office of the board, except the Dr. Marcus who strolled through that door was relaxed and friendly.

Far, far from the pale, sweaty, emaciated man that Cyril Marcus had become. Because of course, it wasn't Cyril. It was Stewart again posing as his twin. The chairman of the Medical Society Board, a Dr. Steinhardt, called Stewart Marcus on the phone afterward, strictly informal. He asked Stewart if Cyril was unwell or had some sort of medical issue. Stewart denied that. He insisted his brother was fine. But he must have known that he was busted. What he didn't know was the extent of the investigation into the Marcus practice. And ultimately, it didn't even matter. When the New York Hospital Medical Board met on July 10th, 1975, neither of the twins appeared. The decision was finalized. The Marcus brothers were dropped from the hospital staff.

With the state agency indictment all but a given, it was clear to everyone involved that the medical careers of Stewart and Cyril Marcus were over. But by then, Cyril Marcus had disappeared into his 10th floor apartment on York Avenue. His twin Stewart followed him shortly after. Behind the locked double doors, the twins regressed into a sort of drug-addled childhood.

Empty bottles of sugary soda and rainbow flavors were scattered throughout the place. Cakes, cookies, ice cream, chicken bones, plates and bowls and cartons strewn everywhere. About a hundred empty prescription bottles of Nembutal, loose pills, piles of paperwork, including notices from the IRS. Cans of right guard deodorant, shaving cream, instant tanning lotion.

The place was a chaos of trash and garbage and rotting food. Clothing and paper covered the floors. Human feces were piled on one antique armchair. And we know this because neighbors had begun complaining of a foul, awful smell coming from the apartment. On Thursday, July 17th, 1975, the building custodian, a man named William Terrell, headed up to the 10th floor to investigate.

Terrell had prior experience in the military. The smell coming from that apartment was familiar. It was the odor of human decomposition. Terrell unlocked the door. He saw the disarray, saw piles of cash lying scattered on the floor. He saw Cyril Marcus lying on the bed, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, one knee-high dress sock dangling from his foot.

Terrell backed out and called the police. It was the cops who found the body of Stewart Marcus, naked, lying face up on the floor near the bed. The medical examiner found no signs of violence, no signs of foul play. But the brothers hadn't died together. Stewart had been dead for at least four days, Cyril for at least two days. Their bodies were in shocking condition. Both six feet tall, Stewart's body weighed less than 120 pounds, Cyril less than 100 pounds.

The empty bottles of barbiturates suggested that the twins had died of a drug overdose. But shockingly, the toxicology reports came back clean. What had killed the brothers wasn't the drugs. It was the withdrawal. Quitting an addiction to barbiturates cold turkey is dangerous and can be deadly. It's speculated that Stewart and Cyril thought they could pull it off because they were doctors. They knew what to do. And in fact, Cyril had suffered a barbiturate overdose three years earlier in 1972 and had been quietly and discreetly treated by his twin. But this time was different.

Stewart endured days of convulsions racking his wasted body. He died sometime on or just after July 10. A few days later, Cyril followed his twin into that fate as he had followed his twin every day of his life. He followed him into death. One tragic theory that's been floated is that the drugs were only a symptom of what killed Stewart and Cyril Marcus.

The Dr. Alan Guttmacher had been right about the Marcus twins all along, that they were so deeply enmeshed that neither had a functioning individual self. Guttmacher's use of the word monster feels ugly, but his assessment rings true. And remember, Guttmacher was himself a twin, an identical twin, as it turns out. His determination to separate the tangled up Marcus twins might have been as personal as it was professional. We can never know what Guttmacher made of the awful scene police found in that 10th floor apartment. Because remember, Guttmacher passed away in March 1974, more than a year before the Marcus twins. So what were those last hours like for Stewart and Cyril? Pigging out on junk food and sweets, on the furniture, the grooming products scattered around, the self-tanning lotion. Those who knew the twins thought that perhaps they were trying to pull themselves together to cover the ghostly pallor of their skin. They had always been such impeccable dressers, such immaculate gentlemen.

The doorman at Cyril's building may have been the very last person to see him alive. The man reported that on July 14th, Cyril stumbled into the lobby heading for the street. Looked terrible, said the doorman. So sick, skeletal. Cyril stood on the sidewalk for a minute, maybe two. Then he turned and reentered the building. He took the elevator back to the and bolted the doors. He shoved a heavy-armed chair up against the door, making a barricade.

He took off the clothing he'd worn to the street, dropping it as he moved through the clutter and fill. He slid a piece of white paper into the typewriter on the desk. He typed the address of his wife Corinne. The rest of the page was left blank. Then he made his way to the bedroom, where the body of his brother Stewart lay curled on the floor, cold and lifeless now.

Cyril took the bed. It might have been the only time in the twins' lives that Cyril enjoyed the more comfortable position. When death came, it came raw and unfiltered. Cyril, who had been followed Stewart into life, now he followed him into death. We're born alone, most of us. How can we ever understand what it means to be doubled in life and then halved in death?

Maybe when Cyril Marcus stumbled onto the street that afternoon on July 14th, the noise deafening, the press of people, the heat radiating up from the sidewalk. Maybe it was just all too much. Where to begin? How to explain? How to even put one foot in front of the other and go forward? Alone, truly alone. And for the very first time in his 45 years on earth. Is that why he turned back? Why he laid himself beside his brother in what became their tomb? It's a startling phenomenon that identical twins often do die within hours or days of each other. It's something that we really don't understand. Like so many things in this world, the bond between twins transcends what we can see and measure and analyze.

Blood and bones and DNA can only tell us so much because most of who and what we are is a mystery, even to ourselves. Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg's 1988 movie, played the Marcus story like horror. Twin gynecologists descending into addiction and madness. One enjoying the services of a pair of their first names for the evening would be his own and his brother's. The other crafting obscene surgical tools for the treatment of the mutant women he swore had infiltrated their practice.

Both doctors swathed from head to toe in surgical gowns the color of fresh blood. Neither man willing or able to exist without the other. Why don't you just go on with your very own life? Do you remember the original Siamese twins? Chang and Eng, they were joined at the chest. Remember how they died? Chang died of a stroke in the middle of the night. He was always the sickly one.

He was always the one who drank too much. When Eng woke up beside him and found that his brother was dead, he died of fright right there in the bed. Does that answer your question? Next time on True Weird Stuff, let's take a little trip to a place you're not really allowed to visit. A place with a history so dark and so terrible that today only birds call it home.

There are ruins and mysteries and maybe even a few ghosts waiting for us there. All aboard. Next stop, the Forbidden Island. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Don Morgan and Kary "Doc" Bowser. In addition, well let's just say Max, in addition to thanking our voice talents on this episode, we must also thank my cat Charles who has been...

Max will not probably be able to edit out all of the yowling and meowing that was going on in the background. Apparently he doesn't care for diabolical twin gynecologists. So I'm interested to know how you stumbled upon this story. So when the movie Dead Ringers came out in the in the 1980s, I didn't see it. I don't think you saw it either, right? I didn't see it but I knew about it because the commercials on TV for it were so stylized. I started paying attention. I love the actress Rachel Weisz and when Amazon rebooted the story casting Rachel as the Marcus twins, I thought well that's interesting. I think this is true though. I think these are real people.

And so when that Amazon series launched, I did a little dive and was astounded by the real story of the Marcus brothers. You can make it fantastical and you can make it like a horror show just because look what we're dealing with here. They're identical twins. They're gynecologists. They're going slowly mad. They're hopped up on the goofballs. It doesn't take very much to turn that into like melodrama. But the real story was so desperately sad, you know, and scary in ways that have nothing to do with torture instruments and speedjags.

Scary because these were two people who were not two people. For 45 years they were a monster, to use Dr. Gottmacher's word. And they knew that. I mean, I think that this was probably known all along, but they got by with the fact that they were really smart. I mean, I think that sometimes when you become Dr. Whoever, people hold you in much more reverence and they give you a lot more latitude with a lot of your behavior.

They were brilliant and they were identical at a time when identical twins were more rare than they are today. So I made myself a deal that I would watch the Cronenberg film after I wrote the episode and not before because I didn't want the Hollywood version of it to get into my head. So I did all the real stuff, like all the research on their parents and how they grew up.

Their medical careers were so fascinating. I mean, these guys were the toast of the town. You have to remember that when infertility treatment first became available, it was expensive, it still is, and exotic and you couldn't just get it anywhere. So the rich, the famous and the desperate flocked to their practice in New York City. They were famous.

They were celebrities in the day, in the 1970s in New York. I mean, they were like a big deal, late 60s, 70s. And so, you know, the movie version of it is really focused on, look at them. They can fool women because you can't tell them apart. And the movie created this whole love triangle that didn't exist in real life and all of that. But the truth of it was like, wow, they got away with everything except for murder because, Max, to your point, they were smart and fascinating. And so my guess is they exhibited these behaviors all along.

I don't think they just developed them in adulthood, that they were this way all along. Isn't there a name for when two people together do something that's evil, but they might not have otherwise done separately? It seems like there's a, there's a... Are you thinking like Foley idea? Yeah. The craziness of two? Yes, that's it. And I would say this is probably on steroids because the fact that they are twins.

I think very much so. And they were each incomplete. Each man was an incomplete person. There was always a missing puzzle piece shaped like the twin for each of them. And yes, okay, so going back into their early life, which you have to remember, so they were born in 1930. And even though they were identical twins, and that was pretty exotic, there was no reason to pay that much attention to them. They were good students. They weren't juvenile delinquents. So they weren't in, they didn't land in law enforcement. But by the time they hit high school, the strangeness that Dr. Guttmacher saw was very pronounced. I mean, listen to that little one nugget. They dressed alike every day, but in different colors.

Like, if you know identical twins, we have twins in our family, we have fraternal twins and identical twins. And typically, you reach a point with twins where they push forcefully against it, they want to differentiate. They want you to understand they are their own person. And that never happened for the Marcus twins. They were not pushed to differentiate, and they had no desire themselves to differentiate. So by the time they graduated from high school, everything that we saw at the end was blindingly apparent at that point.

Um, I also thought it was very interesting that both of them ended up in drug addiction. Now, you we had taught you talked about cereal with the amphetamines early, early on, but somewhere along the line, Stewart must have thought that was a good idea, too. And then they both fell into the throes of that. You know, it's super interesting. So in the Cronenberg film, which I, I, like I said, I waited till after I was finished and then watched it.

And I just have to say, I often think this about movies that are based on true stories or books or whatever. Sometimes I'll watch a movie and I'll think, if you didn't read the book, or if you didn't know the true story, how did this even make sense to you? Because Dead Ringers, while it's a very stylish and elegant film, and Jeremy Irons is flat out amazing in the dual role. I don't know how the movie made a damn bit of sense if you didn't know the true story of the Marcus twins, like if you didn't really understand what you were looking at there. In the movie, Cronenberg sort of suggests that Stewart seeing his brother sliding into addiction felt morally obligated to join his twin there. Which is interesting, isn't it to think about?

It is. And that's kind of, that's a kind of bond that I don't think I'll ever understand. Same. And, and because what we know about the end of the Marcus twins career and lives comes largely from other people, you know, hospital administrators, the nurses that worked, handful of patients, the investigations, we can only like sort of guess at what really happened there. Because the brothers themselves didn't say like, hey, I saw that Cyril was going down the rabbit hole and I felt like I had to follow him. So between the drug addiction and the behavior, it's not surprising that Cyril's marriage didn't last. I mean, you have to figure, these two guys don't seem like they would be able to have any kind of meaningful relation with anybody other than each other. And that was the, that was the thing that Guttmacher saw when they were applying for their residencies. So let's talk a little bit about Cyril.

I think he had a chance. I do. When Stewart was sent to California and Cyril began to kind of met and married somebody, they had two daughters. Like if, if Stewart had stayed in California or gone in a different direction, how different might this story be? And you, you can't know, right? Like maybe after a few years, Cyril would have found it unbearable to be separated from his twin. Maybe, and this was kind of the point of Dead Ringers, the movie and what Dr. Guttmacher felt was maybe the destiny was too much for either of them to overcome. That they were, they were fated and then doomed to live their lives entwined like this. But my heart was really broken for Cyril because he, I had compassion for him too. I had more compassion for him than, than Stewart. Yeah. I didn't like Stewart. I don't know why, I don't know why that came through in the story to me, but, but I did think Cyril was a little bit more of a sympathetic character. I felt like Stewart was manipulative and used, used the power, I guess, that he had over his brother to his own benefit because Cyril was the workhorse of the Marcus Twins practice.

He made the sacrifices and Stewart swept up the acclaim. He was the one left behind to, to do the actual work of running this infertility clinic. And because of the, the nature of some of these pregnancies were extremely like, what's the word I'm thinking of? Fraught, you know, these were challenging pregnancies, risky. Of course, Cyril was going to get out of bed at two o'clock in the morning and go to the hospital to deliver the baby. His wife was resentful.

Corinne was resentful because when you marry somebody, you think you're marrying that person. How many of us have the experience of getting married and then there's an extroversion kicking around with more sway over your spouse than, than anything else? So it caused a lot of problems. And I agree with you, Stewart. Stewart was the, the not so great guy in this story.

You know, a lot of times when you hear about people who are sociopathic or psychopathic, there is a thrill that they get from getting over on people. And I wonder if there was an element of when they were changing places with the patients and posing as each other, you know? Oh yeah. And let's like, okay, let's sit with that for a second. It's one thing when you're a kid to try to like fool the teacher or the babysitter. You guys, these are pinnacle specialists. These are the leading experts in a brand new exploding field of medicine, dicking around with women on examining tables. The ethics of it take your breath away. Like what? And they didn't do it just once for a laugh. This was all the time. They were constantly doing this. And by the point in their lives where, you know, they were running this infertility clinic out of New York hospital, they were still identical, but they were different. And patients were able to spot the difference in the same way that you had more warmth and concern and care for Cyril than you did for Stewart. Don't you think other people picked up on that too? Yeah, I'm sure.

And of course, it's not just, okay, so it's not just that Cyril was abusing the bejeebers out of amphetamines because he was. And then Zonkin himself clearing the next week with downers at the end of the day. Chronic continued use of those drugs changes you. You're not the same person than you are. And, and so that's where you see Cyril, like literally, this woman is on the table, the speculum is cranked. He's, you know, heading for her cervix, talking to her about another patient fornicating with a dog. There is no universe in which you can make that like, okay.

And his, it shows you, I think that goes to how like, impaired he was at that point, how impaired his judgment was, how impaired his thinking was, how little of a sense he had of where he was in any given moment. Because the Cyril Marcus, who began his career, would never, ever have behaved that way. In any setting. I mean, these were very proper gentlemen. So that, you know, you just see there's so many things in this story. There's the failure of these two human beings to become their own people. And then there's the addiction and the impact that those drugs have on you. A lot, there's a lot of malpractice in this story, that frankly, they got away with, right? Because it was so damaging to the institutions that they operated inside. They got away with things that they shouldn't have gotten away with. Well, I think once you're in the throes of drug addiction like that, you have carved out some sort of an alternate universe and you have an alternate reality. It's not the multiverse.

But you have an alternate reality and what you believe to be true isn't true at all. And your justifications for the actions that you have, have no justifications at all, not in the real world where the rest of us are living. But when you're in, when you're cocooned in that little, little area, you believe that all of this is absolutely fine behavior. I mean, I think that it's very interesting that they were brought down by insurance. And wouldn't you think, yeah, you're in the throes of drug addiction, but you need money and you gotta have money coming in. And the fact that they seem to be uncaring about that, I guess you reach a point where you're so into your drug addiction, you don't care about all those details like that.

I mean, we all hate dealing with insurance companies. Oh, this is a level. This is a level. And of course, this was before computers and the internet and stuff, right? So imagine what a colossal pain in the ass some of that paperwork must have been. And this was a highly specialized elective medical procedure that insurance companies today don't necessarily want to cover. So they really were doing battle, I'm guessing, on behalf of those patients and just didn't want to. And clearly weren't willing to hire somebody whose entire job would be fill out the paperwork. It reminds you of gangsters who go down, not for murder and mayhem, but for tax evasion. That was the thought that I had.

So I knew a little bit about this story. And the part that I knew is the end of the story, where you had these two guys who were doctors who were in this apartment in unspeakably appalling conditions. And that somehow their lives of privilege and education all came down to that. I remember that was the thing that I went, whoa, when this was when I first heard about this story.

If the scene that their bodies were found in was shocking, unimaginable, the depravity of it, and you know, the doors locked and barred from the inside, which because the first thought was, oh my gosh, this is murder or murder, suicide or something. And then an overdose. And then, one thing that kind of made me sad, and you bring yourself to any story that you listen to or hear or read. I know a thing or two about stimulant addiction in my family of origin. And I know a little bit about what that looks like. And it just felt real familiar.

What, what ripped my heart up was the way that the men were found. And the partial, like the one fancy sock and all of that, the shaving cream, the deodorant, the self tanning lotion. One theory was that they had gone through withdrawal together. They had gone through all that process, which is horrific. And they were shaving and getting themselves cleaned up to reenter the world. When they died, when Stewart died, and then Cyril just gave up.

Cyril, you know, he left the apartment, got fully dressed, and he left the apartment. And you know what New York City's like in July, hot, muggy, loud. And he's looking around, probably half blinded by the sunlight, and just thought to himself, Nah, I can't. And turned around and condemned himself to die when he went back into that apartment.

But it's sad when you think about that, the two of them gripped each other's hands and and said, we're gonna, we're gonna get clean. We're gonna start over. And of course, that's not how it ended. The tanning lotion was the funny detail. And of course, you explained why they thought that when you when you did that, you had this and you had this and tanning lotion.

But I guess because you know, their skin color was so awful. They were gray and ghostly. And think about it. So those guys were a couple of inches shorter than you. Cyril died weighing 100 pounds. And Stewart died weighing just under 120 pounds. Yeah, my left thigh, my left thigh was 100 pounds. That's skeletal. And they were, there's so many things in this story that break your heart.

And one of them for me is, and we don't know that that's the other thing, like, we don't really know what happened in those last few days in that apartment. On the 10th floor, we don't know. But when you look at what the evidence that's left behind all the circumstantial pieces, you can tell yourself a story about two brothers hopelessly tangled up in each other, completely unable to live separately, realizing that they've pushed it almost to the limit, and making an agreement that they were going to fix it. And they were going to get it right. Only to die. In squalor. At the age of 45.

45. Yeah. And I don't know, Max, I don't know enough about withdrawal. Do you get the munchies when you're withdrawing? I don't know, it depends on what it is that you're withdrawing from. Mostly, some of your typical drug addictions that you would think are really, and while heroin withdrawal and narcotic withdrawal and all of those things, they're bad withdrawals.

Really, your chances of dying are much greater from alcohol withdrawal than those. Well, maybe because this had been going on for years, and they were so thin, right? Maybe their heart was just strained to the breaking point. Yeah, you'll find that a lot of times people who have abused things that are stimulants, through the course of time, by the time they get to be, let's say, 50 years old, it's like they have a heart of an 80 year old because they've done so much damage to their body.

That's all I could think, right? Was like, okay, these were fairly big guys, and they were wasted. They were skeletal when they died. And maybe the strain was just too much on their hearts. But you know that part about identical twins and identical twins dying within hours or days of each other. So, I didn't put it in the episode because otherwise, it would be like the winds of war, an eight part series starting tonight.

I did a little bit of a dive into identical twins dying, and looked at obituaries from all around the country, multiple different decades. And it was wild. It was wild. How many times, you know, Grace passed on Tuesday and her sister Sophia followed her two days later. And these would be people in their 40s and in their 90s, dying of completely unrelated causes, sometimes in the same town, sometimes hundreds of miles apart. Who knows, right?

So, it's not just something that made news just because it happened a few times. It is definitely a thing. It's a pattern. It's a weird. Now, it's not like if you're listening to this, and you're a twin, and you just broke it out in a cold sweat. There's no empirical. Don't pay attention to us. I believe in Bigfoot. What are you doing listening to me?

Don't say you weren't warned. But even though we can't point to a cause, and we don't have a real clear data set, we have an interesting pattern. And I think in this story, and maybe it's just I wanted for this to make sense. In this story, for me, Cyril knew Stewart was gone, because Stewart died two days before Cyril. He knew his brother was dead, and that he would have to reenter the world alone, fully alone for the first time. And he tried. He got dressed. He went downstairs. He stood on the street. And he made the decision that he'd rather die than live without his twin. He turned around and went back upstairs and did that. And in some of the twin obituaries that I read, an obituary very seldom says anything beyond the glowing facts. It's only in very recent history that people are posting obituaries that are like, Uncle Ben would tell you he was a good guy, but he was a complete asshole. We've all seen those, right? None of these twin obituaries said, Aunt Sarah was fine. And then she just decided she didn't want to live anymore without her twin.

They don't say that. But you do wonder, because some of these people, it's a twin, and they married twins, and they had twins. And their whole sense of identity was wrapped up in being a twin. And maybe that was more true in earlier generations than it is today. I don't know. They weren't twins. But I'm just reading about the Menendez brothers, the guys who killed their parents back in 1989. And they may be getting out of prison sometime soon. Certainly, they've made steps in that direction. But they talk about the fact that they are like twins to each other.

As far as each other's concerned, their bond, despite the fact that they were born, I don't feel their bond is like that of twins. And I think about this horrific thing that they did, and they did it together. They had a very enmeshed bond, Eric and Lyle. And they still do. Yeah. And you know what I wonder about that?

So this is just my take on it. But here's what I think about the Menendez brothers, because they are as enmeshed in some ways as Stewart and Cyril Marcus were. I think what caused that enmeshment was the abuse. I think that the only safe person for Lyle was Eric and vice versa. And I think that they probably had an unhealthy degree of entanglement because they were these two helpless child victims and nowhere to turn. And there are people who think that that whole abuse story on the part of the Menendez brothers is complete bullshit. And you're certainly free to think that. I believe that they were abused, and I think that's why they were so enmeshed.

I believe that they were too. I think at the time when the trial came up, it seemed like a story because these two guys went and killed their parents and then went on a spending spree. And it just looked a certain way at the time. But now upon closer examination, you can see what you're saying is they were the only safe person for each other. And just like with the Marcus twins, one was dominant over the other. Lyle was dominant over Eric.

Yeah. Parentified is the fancy word we would use when a child is forced to assume that parental and responsible and protective role for a sibling. Like my big brother was very parentified. And I tell anybody and have told him that without him, my other brother and I would not have our childhood. That without my big brother being so parentified, we wouldn't be here.

That does not make it okay for all of the impacts that had on him that echoed all the way forward into the present. But you do see that in environments where kids are unsafe and unstable. You see these warpings and distortions happen. And I think your point about the Menendez brothers is so dead on. I think they were enmeshed in the way and are enmeshed in the way that Cyril and Marcus were, or Cyril and Stewart Marcus were. And if the Menendez brothers are to be released, which aren't we still in the process that they postponed that? The judge postponed it recently?

Postponed, yeah. If they are released, it'll be, I hate to say interesting to see because that makes it like, we're just going to watch this suffering and see how entertaining it is. It's terrible. I think it'll be interesting to see if those two Menendez brothers are able to separately and independently. Because my guess is not, no.

That's my guess too. Because there is no other person in this entire world has had the same exact experiences that each of them have had in that place. Well, I mean, in all, like from the very beginning of their lives, and then they end up, you know, in prison, it's just hard to imagine that the judge could go, okay, boys, you've paid your debt to society. And then Eric goes one way and Lyle goes the other.

And why do you feel in the same way that you didn't like Stewart Marcus very much, but you understood he was the one more capable of functioning? You're like, Eric is the Menendez brother more capable of functioning. It's Lyle that will struggle the way Cyril struggled. Or maybe the two of us just need to get out more. I don't know. Maybe we need to get out more.

That's also possible. I think that's what it is. I think that's a given, actually. What am I saying? So if you get a chance, I'm trying, I watched it on, I think I watched it on Amazon Prime Video for free. It was included. I say free, like anything Jeff Bezos gives us is free. It's included in your membership. And it's not super, you know, some 80s films are like super dated. This is not. It's not. But when you watch it, Max, because I have a feeling that you will, I think you'll have the same reaction I did, which is like, how the hell did this make any sense to anyone who didn't know the rest of the story? Because it's like very style, less on substance. Yeah.

But the 80s were a different time. It was a wild time. We were in a different, actually, Max, as you know, and as our fellow true weirdos know, we were in a different universe. That's right. That's right. So the movie probably made more sense in our old universe than it does in this one. So. I just see neutrinos go through my hand. I'm sorry.

I know you'll never really be right. I apologize. So if like we said, if you're a twin, take a deep breath. We don't know anything. And and be like, be so awed by the walking, talking miracle. That is a pair of identical twins. That's cool stuff. If you're a twin, don't listen to us. But we know it's in the back of your mind.

And we apologize. I apologize. But keep in mind that you just you just broke out into a cold sweat based on information given to you by two people who read their horoscopes every day and are like, yeah, man, Bigfoot is super real. That's true. Yeah. So next week, we're going to pay a visit to a forbidden island. I love an abandoned place.

Fascinated by abandoned places. I love an abandoned place. And if the abandoned place is forbidden, I love it even more. Oh, I'm so excited to visit the forbidden island next week on True Weird Stuff. Thank you so much for listening and for mostly not taking medical advice that you've heard on this podcast. See you next time.

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