The path of destruction blazed by two blond yoga twins led them both off the side of a Hawaiian cliff.
Before Alison Dadow allegedly murdered her 37-year-old sister Ann in a Maui car crash last week, the identical twins squandered whatever profits they had made in Florida and failed to reboot their lives in Utah, all while dodging cops and creditors alike.
On the day she’d become an accused twin sister-slayer, Alison had already adopted a new identity: Alexandria Duval of Haiku, Hawaii. Ann turned herself into Anastasia Duval to match.
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Alison was discovered behind the wheel of a 2016 white Ford Explorer as Ann rode in the rear passenger seat at around 5 p.m. on May 29.
The sisters were seen squabbling just before Alison allegedly floored the gas. According to the declaration in support of warrantless arrest, cops assert that she “intentionally drove off the cliff” and that they found “no signs of braking from the vehicle.”
The authorities, in the court document, found there was a “hard acceleration” and “no attempts of any braking” before the SUV plunged off the cliff.
The Explorer was spotted by an eagle-eyed Boy Scout troop chaperone, who told cops the driver was “in a rage” after her hair was yanked from behind just before the death dive.
“You could tell that she was very violently swearing at somebody else in the car,” Lawrence Lau told Hawaii News Now. “She was mad and when she took off, it was in a rage. So she floored it and was in a rage as she sped past us.”
The SUV hightailed it southward toward Puiki on Hana Highway before, according to official accounts, taking a sharp left turn into the rock wall and launching off the cliff, smashing into jagged boulders 200 feet below.
According to the court document, Ann Dadow “sustained severe head trauma with bleeding to her head and face” and died at the scene, while Alison was “pinned against the steering column” but only suffered “minor visible injuries.”
The surviving sister apparently became tightlipped once she was freed. She claimed her name was “Alex” and refused to answer questions about the fatal plunge.
“After being extricated Alexandria Duval did not want to give any information and even at first identified herself only as ‘Alex,’” the court documents claim.
Once she trotted out of the Maui Memorial Medical Center, police, prosecutors, and TSA officials confirmed, Alison twice attempted to book flights to the West Coast of the mainland, once on June 1 and again on June 3. Police first noticed that “someone was packing items from within [the Duval] residence” on Aloha Aina Place three days after the crash.
Police picked her up at the Maui Seaside Hotel just before saying aloha to Hawaii.
A Hawaii judge denied her bail on Tuesday, deeming her a flight risk, the Palm Beach Post reports.
But what happened in the car in the seconds before Alison stepped on the gas is as much a mystery as what the twins were doing in Hawaii. The one-time Florida yoga gurus ran a business into the ground in Utah before Ann showed up at a Hawaii homeless shelter earlier this year.
Alison and Ann had opened up their Palm Beach Gardens studio in the midst of the financial meltdown of 2008. “We had no business plan and no financial funding,” Alison Dadow told the Palm Beach Post in 2011. “It was one day at a time. But our whole life is focused on sharing this yoga.”
Their business prospered, and they opened a second location in West Palm Beach. The studios were bolstered by a yoga clothing boutique run by the sibs, an early client named Mary Ali told The Daily Beast.
“I was probably with them all the way until they closed,” said Ali, who credits the yoga twins with helping her grow comfortable in her body after her double mastectomy. A twin herself, Ali said she still couldn’t tell the Dadow sisters apart.
The Dadows really helped “put yoga on the map in Palm Beach,” Ali said, adding that many owners of current studios had passed through the Dadows’ studio. At the height of their success, they even released a yoga DVD.
But then the Dadows suddenly packed up shop and disappeared in 2014.
Ali had heard they would be re-opening at another location in Jupiter, but they went to Utah instead. Their sudden departure was “traumatizing,” she said, though she remembers her takeaways fondly.
“I think at some point they mismanaged the business, but that was just the business side,” Ali said. “The whole yoga aspect they had.
“Were they running away from something? That I don’t know,” she added.
Dalia Soles, a manager at one of their locations, told gossip blogger Jose Lambiet that the local yoga community felt betrayed by their disappearance.
“A lot of people really trusted them,” she said. “But for all the love they got here, they betrayed everybody—and they had a great following.
“They wanted to be famous and loved, and they never understood that here, they were both,” Soles added.
The twins allegedly vanished with two weeks’ pay for their yoga teachers still in their pockets, according to Lambiet. And the great escape came soon on the heels of a Groupon promising a discount on future classes.
It’s unclear why the twins bolted from Utah for Hawaii and changed their names, but it may have been related to their latest yoga business going bust.
Burned Florida customers allegedly warned their Utah brethren to steer clear of the sneaky sisters and in November, they filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in Utah. The filing in federal court shows they were in the red to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, in no small part to the $50,000 Porsche Boxters they each owned.
Or maybe it was their multiple run-ins with the Utah law.
They both have allegedly been busted for intoxication summonses.
On Jan. 10, 2014, the two were heading home from a wild night at Carlos and Harley’s Restaurant in Eden, Utah, where Alison and Ann Dadow allegedly had “threatened the owner,” saying “they were going to get the Mafia to kill her,” according to the police report.
When the dispatching cop arrived, he found that the sisters’ white Ford Edge had “slid off the road and was in a ditch,” but they both refused to admit they had been drinking.
The sisters allegedly reeked of alcohol and were “stumbling around” while a Good Samaritan attempted to get their car out of the ditch.
While they waited, the sisters were “crying” and “screaming out of control,” and in an eerie foreshadowing of their future cliff dive, the Utah cop “observed Ann [Dadow] pulling Alison’s head towards the back seat.”
As the sisters were being cuffed with double locks, Ann allegedly “pulled away” and began “kicking” a sergeant, yelling “fuck off” to the officers.
Both were charged with public intoxication and disorderly conduct charges. But cops tacked on an assault on a peace officer charge for Ann Dadow.
This past Christmas Eve, the sisters were both cited for disorderly conduct. When they failed to appear in court, a bench warrant was ordered for their arrest, according to KHON.
In January, South Florida gossip blog GossipExtra reported that Ann appeared at the Family Life Center in Kahului with her bags and hit volunteers up for cash.
“She had the craziest story about arriving in Hawaii a few days ago and getting robbed of her wallet and getting separated from her twin sister,” shelter worker Khaili Moniz told the blog. “She gave us a false name at first. She claimed she had no ID, no money, no nothing.”
Moniz said Ann threw a tantrum demanding money, and the employees tried to help her reconnect with her sister, albeit without success. And then she vanished, leaving all her bags behind.
“She just wanted us to help her out with some cash. She claimed it was to buy a ticket back to the mainland. But we’re just a shelter, we don’t give out money,” Moniz said. “Plus, I had a feeling she wasn’t really telling the truth.”
—with additional reporting by Megan Fu.
