Did Bing Crosby's Twins Suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?

Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty

“I had been hearing about it and then the twins, they didn’t look quite right,” Robert Trachtenberg, the documentary’s director, tells PEOPLE. “Something had told me that it was fetal alcohol syndrome, so I took existing photos of the twins and showed it to a couple of specialists at USC. When they re born [with fetal alcohol syndrome], it affects their skull and their nose, and it manifests itself physically as well. The specialists looked at them and said ‘Yeah, this is a like a textbook case of fetal alcohol syndrome.’ "

“I couldn’t find anything where he blamed her,” Trachtenberg says. “That’s the other tragedy of this whole situation. She died at 41. Nobody really had any significant way to treat that. Kathryn, Bing’s second wife, says in the film it was a terrible way to die. So to add insult to injury, you have this situation [with the twins] on the one hand and then she dies on the other. We could have done a whole other film just about that.”

source: people.com