On May 29, two women were pulled from the wreckage of a Ford Explorer SUV in Maui, Hawaii, after their car plunged over a 200-foot cliff. The driver, 37-year-old Alexandria Duval, was still alive. The passenger, her twin sister, Anastasia, was pronounced dead.
Witness accounts given to KHON 2 indicate that they saw the sisters “screaming and arguing with each other” and that the “passenger was pulling at the driver’s hair and the steering wheel.” Witnesses told the Associated Press they saw the car “accelerate forward and then take a sharp left over the cliff.”
Alexandria was arrested on Friday at the Seaside Hotel in Maui after she attempted to leave the state; she was later charged with second-degree murder. Her attorney, Todd Eddins, told the AP that she “did not try to harm herself or the person she most loved and was closest to in the world.”
But the twins have an odd, and sometimes contentious, backstory. For starters, Alexandria and Anastasia Duval aren’t even their real or legal names — until their recent move to Hawaii, they were known as Alison and Ann Dadow. (They will henceforth be referred to by their legal names.) In 2011, the sisters, who are originally from Utica, New York, opened a yoga studio called Twin Power Yoga in West Palm Beach, Florida, and quickly became a fixture of a local South Florida gossip site. In 2014, the Dadows abruptly shut down their studio and disappeared without paying their staff or refunding memberships.
Later that year, they moved to Park City, Utah, and opened another yoga studio — only to declare bankruptcy in December 2014, according to the Washington Post.
Since then, they’d moved to Hawaii and changed their names — and, according to Eddins, were trying to give the yoga business another shot. “They were in the process of building a business plan and were aspiring to open up studios here,” he told the Associated Press. They also had another brush with the law: on December 24, the twins were arrested for disorderly conduct.
Alison is currently being held without bail, with her preliminary hearing scheduled to commence on Wednesday.
