Demise of yoga’s tragic twins
Alison and Ann taught yoga, drank too much and fought with each other. Then one day they drove off a cliff . . .
IT SOUNDS like a scene from the movie Thelma & Louise: two women in a car hurtling along a road towards a cliff, sailing straight over it to be dashed on the rocks hundreds of metres below. Except in this case it was no movie, the rocks weren’t in the Grand Canyon but along the jagged shoreline of Maui, Hawaii, and the women weren’t actors but twins.
Neither were they united in death as Thelma and Louise were. One twin survived only to find herself accused of her sister’s murder.
To those who knew Ann and Alison Dadow, the crash was the culmination of a long list of incidents of drama, deceit and scandal that had dogged the pair most of their lives. To those who’d never heard of them, the story that began to emerge was gobsmacking.
Ann and Alison (37) were dubbed the terrible twins of yoga, setting up and then abandoning their Twin Power Yoga practices in various US towns. They even held yoga classes for dogs – doga – and many of those dedicated to the discipline described them as wonderful teachers.
But despite the serene poses the pair posted of themselves online, they failed to practise yoga’s principles of clean living, contentment and truthfulness.
Now Ann is dead and Alison faces an uncertain future. She was charged with second-degree murder after driving the car off the cliff – Ann was killed instantly but Alison sustained only minor injuries, appearing in court with her arm in a sling. Her lawyer argued there was insufficient evidence to prove she had intended to kill her sister, and the judge agreed.
But Alison remains in custody because of charges stemming from a previous arrest for disorderly conduct. Her lawyer,
Todd Eddins, said he was working on having her released on bail and was hoping she could make it to upstate New York in time for her sister’s funeral.
She wanted to attend with her grandmother, Todd said, so she “could be comforted by the only maternal presence she has left”.
As news of the crash spread, it seemed no one could agree on the kind of people Alison and Ann were.
“Beautiful twins with so much life,” is how Leslie McMichael, who met the sisters at a Kabala centre in Florida, described them. “The best yoga teachers ever,” former student Brett Borders said.
But there were other descriptions too – particularly when it came to Alison – including wild, domineering, out of control and driven by greed.
Both women were also plagued by alcoholism – and when they drank, those
‘They were pretty much left to fend for themselves’
in the know say, they changed completely.
THE twins’ tragic story starts in New Hartford, New York, when they were five years old. Their mom died suddenly, leaving them and their older sister, Amy (now 40), in the charge of their prison-doctor father, John.
To compensate for the long hours he worked he’d give his daughters everything their hearts desired. As soon as they were able to drive he handed over the keys of his Cadillac and they’d spend long afternoons in a mall, shopping with their dad’s credit cards.
“Alison and Ann had an incredibly close bond, even for twins,” a former high school friend says. “I don’t think anyone really knew them. And they were pretty much left to fend for themselves.”
Fuelled by their father’s money they wore Chanel and Giorgio Armani clothes to school. “Even the flash girls thought they were flash,” the friend says. “They’d wear gold and carry $800 [R12 000] wallets.”
But it didn’t take long for the twins to find other forms of entertainment apart from shopping, such as partying, smoking dagga and drinking heavily.
“Other kids partied at weekends but they did it pretty much all the time,” the pal adds. “But it never seemed to affect their schoolwork. They were brilliant at everything. They just needed some guidance.”
They harboured ambitions to become neurosurgeons and “didn’t seem to have separate ambitions”. They tried out for the cheerleading team together, joined the junior navy and even had bulimia at the same time for a while.
The family eventually moved to Florida, where the girls went to college, then set about opening their yoga studios. Over the years three Twin Power Yoga studios opened in Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. Another was planned for Boca Raton.
“We want to see you [prospective clients] on the mat,” Alison told a local newspaper. “We hope to make up your affirmative mantra based on what your goals are.”
Business was booming. The women lived in a 16th-floor apartment with sweeping views of the ocean and drove matching Porsches. “But they were living beyond their means,” a source says, “and the final straw came when a reality show project that promised to make them enough money to maintain their high-living ways fell through.”
They were left in a lot of debt and simply skipped town – without paying their employees or refunding clients who had paid fees up front, many for up to a year in advance.
“A lot of people trusted them,” says Dalia Scoles, a former manager of one of the studios. “But for all the love they got here, they betrayed everyone.”
The twins reappeared in an upmarket ski resort in Utah, but they were plagued with problems – they were arrested five times, all due to incidents related to alcohol abuse. They started another yoga studio – which included a class for dogs. “We wanted the studio to reflect love and light,” Ann said. “It’s a physical practice with a touch of spirituality.”
But despite again attracting clients, things were falling apart once more. Alison filed for bankruptcy in 2014, with Ann following suit soon afterwards. Between them the sisters had credit card debt of more than $200 000 (R3 million).
More trouble followed when they crashed their car in a ditch and police found them in the throes of a fist fight, punching each other and pulling each other’s hair. Charges of drunk and disorderly conduct followed. The twins fell off the radar for a while – until they popped up in Hawaii with different names. Ann called herself Anastasia Duval and Alison went by the name Alexandria Duval. They moved into a house in Haiku, Maui – and it was a few kilometres from this town where Ann, or Anastasia, met her end.
LAWRENCE Lau, a Boy Scouts troop leader, was chaperoning a group of boys on the afternoon of 29 May when they came across a “motionless white SUV”, he says, in the middle of the scenic Maui Hana highway.
He saw two blonde women in the vehicle and watched as the passenger started pulling the driver’s hair. “You could tell she was violently swearing at the other person in the car,” he says. “The driver was mad and took off in a rage, speeding past us.”
A second eyewitness, Alan Arkina, also watched the car racing by. “They sped up, drove past our van and turned off a cliff,” he says.
The SUV hit a rock wall before plunging off the 60-m cliff onto the rocks. Federico Bailey, Ann’s boyfriend, later told The Maui News newspaper that the sisters had been on a camping trip and had been drinking that morning. “And when they drink, they change,” he added.
Alison spent several days in hospital before being released into police custody.
According to court documents, in-car monitors showed the SUV “experienced hard acceleration and no braking”, even after it had crashed into the rock wall – proof, prosecutors said, that the driver had intentionally driven the car off the cliff.
But lawyer Todd Eddins argued there were other possible explanations, including that Ann had grabbed the wheel and caused the crash.
The twins’ father, John, is still alive. Their older sister, Amy, stands accused of assaulting him by throwing a can of disinfectant at him. He has applied for a restraining order against Amy, who also has alcohol problems.
“Somewhere along the line things went badly wrong for this family,” the former school friend says.