The world's least alike twins

Ann Curry • Profile

They are like any two 11 1/2 year-old-boys. Best friends that aren’t above the occasional fight, the bond that Koen and Tuen share goes deeper than squabbling.

Looking at them, it might surprise you to learn that not only are they brothers— they’re twin brothers.

Dateline has been following their story since they first arrived in 1993.

The two boys are growing up in a world that sees color everywhere, but in a family that says it’s color blind.

Wilma Stuart, mother of twin boys: We are so used to it we don’t see that they are different in color.

Ann Curry, anchor: But you live in a world that does.

Wilma: Yes.

Curry: And therein lies the problem.

Wilma: Exactly.

How they got to this place is its own remarkable story. The Stuarts, Wilma and Willem are Dutch.  He’s an engineer, she’s a nurse. Theirs is an extraordinary story that began in the most ordinary way: They married in 1984 and assumed children would follow, but they didn’t. After six years they tried invitro fertilization.

The Stuarts were lucky. On April 2, 1993 Wilma learned she was pregnant, and soon after, they discovered they were having twins— exactly what they had hoped for. 

Wilma settled in to enjoy her pregnancy, but the delivery was not as easy. On December 1, 1993, two boys were born by emergency caesarian section. Koen, short for Conrad, arrived at 2:55 a.m.                                        

Wilma: He was beautifully pink. He had blue eyes and dark hair.

The second twin, Tuen, was born just three minutes later. He was not as robust as his brother. He went to an incubator on another floor of the hospital, while Koen was placed in a bassinet at his mother’s side.

It was three days before the Stuarts saw their new babies together.

Wilma: At that time the difference was so big that I immediately said "He is brown, he’s very brown." I knew immediately that something went wrong. 

And she started asking questions and looking for an explanation.     

Wilma: We would ask nurses, "How come that Koen’s so brown?" They would say that newborn babies have sometimes liver problems, and that they turn yellow. So they would check that in his blood and the level would always be normal and they didn’t talk about it any more, so we didn’t either.

If not the jaundiced condition that so many babies are born with— what was it?

Wilma: I descend from  French gypsies and he descends from Mongolian people so a little brown could be somewhere in the  family. But it never eased my mind. It never did. He was too different.    

With every possible explanation as to why was one of their babies was so dark, there remained the one nagging fear that no one wanted to say out loud.

Wilma: You don’t want to hear someone else say, “Well, we think that’s not your baby. You don’t want to know that.”

Wilma had long ago fallen hopelessly in love with her baby boys, and was haunted by the prospect that one of the boys might not be hers. But not a single doctor had ever raised a question, and in fact many doctors say that it is often impossible to identify the race of a newborn by skin tone. Pigment melanin, which determines skin color, may not fully  develop until well after birth.

But what doctors in the Netherlands missed— strangers didn’t. 

Wilma: They would say to me, ‘Are these your children?’ and I would say ‘Yes.’ ‘Is this a twin?’ ‘Yes, it’s a twin.’ ‘You must have gotten the scare of your life when he was born.’  And I would say ‘Why? He has two arms,  two legs, he has a beautiful face.’

People felt obliged to share their surprise. Whether white or black, people would speak up.

Wilma: We were walking downtown, and there came a black woman looking in our baby carrier, looking at us.  And she would say, “Where did you get such a brown baby? How’s that possible?”  And we would say “I don’t know.  But he’s ours.” 

When the twins were six months old, Koen developed a bronchial infection. The Stuarts took both boys to a new pediatrician. 

Dr. Brussel: I said,  ‘I see two children and one is very white and one is very black.  I’m puzzling how that’s possible?’                                              

Wilma: He asked us if it had occurred to us that they were so different in color.  And we said, “Yes, of course.”     

Dr. Brussel: And when I started the subject she starts crying immediately, Wilma.

Hospital makes a 'regrettable mistake'
After half a year of worrying and wondering, the Stuarts where about to find out if their children, who’d been side by side since life began, were biologically related at all.  

Wilma: We didn’t know either what was going on. Was he my child?  Was he Willem’s child?  Wasn’t he either one of ours?                   

The possibilities were staggering: Had the lab mixed someone else’s sperm with Wilma’s eggs? Had someone else’s egg been mixed with Willem’s sperm? Or had some other couples fertilized embyro been implanted in Wilma’s womb?

Only DNA testing would answer those questions. 

The twins were nearly a year old when the tests came back: The news was at once reassuring and devastating.  One of the children Wilma nurtured for nine months in her womb was theirs. But the other was not.

As far as Willem was concerned, Koen was still his child, but as painful as it was, there were some questions that would have to be answered...

Wilma: The immediate next question is what happened?  What went wrong? And if Willem is not his biological father, who is? 

The Stuarts tried to go on as normal: they marked the boys' first birthday while they worried what would happen if their secret got out. 

Living with that fear and paranoia was too much for the Stuarts. They decided to go public on their own terms. They gave one newspaper interview. And on Saturday, June 6, 1995, the paper hit the  stands.

Within hours, their story was all over the world. Some of the public response was even stranger than the Stuarts had imagined.

Wilma: When the story came out there were reactions like— “If you’re not happy with your brown child, you can give it to me.” As if we would give away our own child. So amazing.

The hospital called it a “deeply regrettable mistake.”  The report of the investigation still has not been made public, but speculation is that a piece of lab equipment called a pipette, like a large eyedropper, had been used twice, causing another man’s sperm to be mixed with Willem’s.                                                                          

Wilma: They think that that’s what’s happened.                           

In fact, there were two other couples in the waiting room that day, and one of them was black.  

The hospital located the man and confirmed he was Koen's biological father. And though he was under no obligation to meet the son he never knew he had, when Koen was 18 months old, he did. 

Wilma: Koen’s biological father just looked at him from a distance. He didn’t try to claim him or take him on his lap or— I don’t think Koen noticed him as being someone special. 

Koen had met his biological father but it was up to Stuarts to tackle the question every child asks, “Where did I come from?” For the Stuarts, answering that question proved a lot more complicated.

Wilma: I’ll tell him that the fact that you’re born means that your urge to be born was so big  that you couldn’t wait for a black mommy. 

Even by the age of two, the boys seemed to have absorbed their differences on some level.

Wilma: When they see babies on television and it’s a white baby, all white babies are named “Tuen.” And when we show them a picture with a darker baby it’s always named “Koen.” It’s adorable.

Whatever their differences, from the beginning the twins undeniably had that special bond of siblings who shared a womb for nine months.

Wilma: Yeah, they can be together in a very small space without getting in each other’s way. For instance, we don’t have a big bathtub and they sit in together. It’s never a problem. It’s duo penotti. That’s a white and brown chocolate cream for on your sandwich. That’s what Koen and Teun are called, duo penotti. Black and white in one body.

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