Twin Power Yoga ????

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Yoga teacher accused in twin sister’s death in Hawaii ON JUNE 7, 2016

A yoga teacher whose twin sister died after their vehicle sped off a cliff in Hawaii has been charged in the woman’s death.

Cops swooped into the Seaside Hotel on Maui and arrested Alexandria Duval, 37, Friday night after learning that she had checked out of a nearby hospital and intended to fly to the West Coast that night.

She faces a second-degree murder charge in Anastasia Duval’s death after investigators said she made no attempt to hit the brakes during the May 29 crash. Her SUV busted through a rock wall and went over the edge along Hana Highway, killing her sister.

Duval refused to tell police what caused the crash, but a witness said the blond-haired siblings, originally from Utica, N.Y., were feuding and pulling at each other’s hair before the deadly plunge.

n August, Duval was arrested in upstate New York on a drunken driving charge after authorities say she nearly struck a vehicle driven by a state police investigator. She was released about three weeks later.

Duval was being held in Albany County Jail awaiting extradition to Hawaii.

The Duval sisters, born Alison and Ann Dadow in the Utica, New York, area, operated popular yoga studios in Palm Beach County, Florida, from 2008 to 2014 before they changed their names. They moved to Hawaii in December 2015 from Utah.

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Yoga twins’ ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ passage through Palm Beach County

Joe Capozzi Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
6:03 p.m Friday, June 10, 2016 Local News
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Years before blazing a twisted path through Palm Beach County’s yoga community, identical twin sisters Ann and Alison Dadow were passengers one day in a car speeding along the Sawgrass Expressway at 85 mph.

Suddenly, from the passenger’s seat, Ann started kicking the steering wheel and windshield with her feet as she and Alison, from the back seat, screamed at the driver.

“They were like little kids throwing a temper tantrum’’ because Ann’s boyfriend, Keith Weiss, was ignoring their pleas to stop for another glass of wine, Weiss said.

“I almost went off the road,’’ recalled Weiss, who blocked the kicks with his right arm as he drove the twins in his green Pontiac Sunfire that day in 2001.

“I said, ‘Are you kidding me? You guys are going to wind up killing all of us.’’’

Weiss said he eventually got the twins safely to their Broward County home. But the incident eerily foreshadowed a similar spat between the sisters that ended in tragedy 15 years later.

Ann was killed May 29 when a car driven by Alison plunged 200 feet off a cliff in Hawaii. Witnesses told police they heard the 37-year-old sisters screaming at one another and saw the passenger pulling the driver’s hair just before the Ford Explorer smashed through a rock wall and launched over the cliff.

“I was in bed when I saw it on TV. I told my wife I felt like that could have been me in that car,’’ said Weiss, who told The Palm Beach Post about other fights between the inseparable twins, including some in cars.

“They were great people when they were sober, but the minute they (started) drinking they were like Jekyll and Hyde.’’

Alison survived after the SUV hit a patch of jagged rocks sticking out the Pacific Ocean. Ann was pronounced dead at the scene. Alison was charged with second-degree murder, but she was released Wednesday when a judge in Maui found no probable cause to hold her on that charge.

A common reaction from people who knew the twins in South Florida, where they lived from the mid-1990s until early 2014: The tragedy was no surprise.

Most of those people knew the Dadows from Twin Power Yoga, the popular studios they set up in Palm Beach Gardens in 2008 and in West Palm Beach in 2011.

“They were alpha females on top of being twins on top of being very dominating,’’ said Victor Ayala, a physical trainer who met the twins when they were neighbors at CityPlace South, where they lived on the 16th floor of the apartment tower.

“They were fantastic teachers, beautiful women, but I also know they were very competitive and very strong-willed. They seemed to have a lot of dark demons.”

Not ‘all rainbows

and butterflies’

The striking twins with blonde hair and blue eyes always seemed to make a positive first impression on people, many of whom credit the sisters with improving their lives by introducing them to yoga.

But others described bickering sisters who struggled with alcohol, used “shady” business practices and disrespected their employees and clients as they strived for fortune and fame.

“They were wolves in sheep clothing. They used yoga as a mask. They wanted nothing more than to be rich and famous,’’ said a person who worked for them and asked not to be identified. “They were very authoritative and not empowering.”

Three Twin Power alumni agreed to talk about the Dadows, but only on condition of anonymity.

Even before they felt betrayed when the Dadow sisters abruptly took off without paying them, some Twin Power employees were disturbed that the twins’ materialistic pursuits often clashed with the concept of yoga as a movement of serenity and a path back to the basics.

“They were paranoid. They thought everyone was stealing from them,” one person said.

Before leaving Palm Beach County for Park City, Utah, they were trying to launch a reality television show about yoga. The show fell through, which contributed to the sisters’ fall into debt, Leslie McMichael, a West Palm Beach psychic who said she served as the twins’ spiritual adviser, told The Associated Press

But in preparing for the show, the twins started shooting promotional videos together in a Porsche on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach and writing scripts about their employees without the workers’ knowledge.

A former Twin Power yoga teacher recalled getting berated by the sisters for making changes to a class instruction plan without their permission. “I walked away and they followed me into the bathroom: ‘Are you going to cry?’’’ the teacher recalled.

“I started taking anxiety medicine to teach classes for them because they were giving me such anxiety. I shouldn’t need anxiety medicine to teach yoga class. That doesn’t make any sense.’’

The twins also charged $2,000 to $3,500 for a yoga certification class but cut corners by skipping key elements such as anatomy, said former workers.

“They weren’t all rainbows and butterflies,’’ said a person who trained with the Dadows. “In the end, they left a really bad taste in the yoga community.’’

Palm Beach County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay was among Twin Power yoga clients who never got refunds on prepaid memberships when the sisters abruptly closed their second-floor Clematis Street studio in early 2014 after a Groupon special.

McKinlay, a staff member in the county’s government affairs office at the time, said she enjoyed attending the classes above Duffy’s restaurant at Clematis and Olive Avenue on her lunch break.

“I went one day and they were closed. Not cool,’’ said McKinlay, who lost about $600.

Older sister cursed

wheelchair-bound dad

Other Twin Power alumni had positive things to say about the Dadows.

“They both were so sweet. Alison was always like the mother of both of them, Alison was the one who was good with (financial) books. Ann was more intellectual,’’ said Lydia Oquendo of Delray Beach.

The twins traveled to India three or four times for yoga from 2010 to 2012, Oquendo said, and on weekends they brought in a percussionist who performed during the yoga classes.

“They were very enigmatic. If people tried to learn more about them they would just change the subject,’’ she said. “I never saw them arguing or yelling. They were not perfect but they were not bad people.’’

Oquendo said the twins, who grew up near Utica, N.Y., also spent time caring for their father, who is confined to a wheelchair and lives on Singer Island. Their mother died when they were 5.

Their father, John Dadow, a former New York prison doctor now living in Palm Beach Shores, has not spoken publicly since his daughter’s death.

Public records show that alcohol has played a destructive role in the lives of not only the twins but also their older sister.

Amy Dadow, 40, is on probation for assaulting their father in 2015. John Dadow, 67, told authorities he used his lifeline button to call police on July 15 after an intoxicated Amy threw a water bottle at him.

Amy Dadow cursed her father and threatened him unless he gave her $100,000, according to court records.

After leaving West Palm Beach, Alison and Ann moved to Park City, where their grandfather used to take them skiing, according to a May 2014 story in the Park Record. Their new studio also offered “doga,’’ a weekly hour-long class for clients to connect with their dogs.

In January 2014, five months before that story ran, the sisters’ vehicle slid off a road in Eden, Utah. Alison was arrested under suspicion of drunk driving, fleeing the scene and disorderly conduct.

Last November, they filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, citing hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and fled to Hawaii with plans to open a yoga studio in Maui.

At some point the sisters changed their names, Alison to Alexandria Duval and Ann to Anastasia Duval, the names found on their drivers licenses in Hawaii.

The twins’ legal scrapes in Florida date back to at least 1998 when Alison was arrested for DUI in Treasure Island, north of St. Petersburg. She was charged with DUI in Delray Beach in 2000 and with defrauding an innkeeper in Davie in 2002.

Ann was arrested for disorderly intoxication and battery in 2002 in Plantation.

One sister about the other:

‘I’m going to kill her’

At some point, they attended college in St. Petersburg and Tampa.

Weiss, who lives in Sunrise, said he met the women when they stopped in one night for a drink at the bar where he was working. At the time, he said, the women told him they were taking classes to become courtroom stenographers.

He dated Ann for eight or nine months between 2001 and 2002, but he said Alison was always around. There were times he said, when “Ann would go use the bathroom and Alison would start kissing me.’’

Their drink of choice back then: Chardonnay. “Anytime we went out, they always had a few glasses,” said Weiss, who now works at New River Grill & Pizza in Fort Lauderdale.

One night, Weiss said he received a frantic call from Ann “yelling at me, ‘You’ve got to get over here. I’m going to kill her!’

“I heard this noise. I asked, ‘What is that noise?’ (Ann replied,) ‘That’s me hitting her with the phone.’’’

When Weiss got to the twins’ apartment, he said he saw glass on the floor from a broken wine bottle and “blood on the floor from (the twins) walking through it. And they were just sitting on the couch hanging out — ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ – like nothing happened.

“I was like, ‘Are you OK?’ And they said, “We’re fine. We just had a little fight.’’’

Months later, after the steering wheel-kicking incident on the Sawgrass Expressway, Weiss broke off his friendship with the girls. “I was like, ‘You both are beautiful, but there’s too much drama going on.’’’

‘Always seemed

to be this tension’

In 2004, they worked at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino as servers at the center bar of the casino. “It’s a good way to earn money to save for graduate school,’’ Ann Dadow said in a Sun Sentinel story about a three-day job fair hosted by the casino.

It’s unclear what led the Dadows to yoga. But they studied in India and were trained under yoga instructor Baron Baptiste.

Dave Hazzard of West Palm Beach said Alison talked to him about the early plans to open a studio in Palm Beach Gardens.

Hazzard said he met Alison when he owned a mobile company that cleaned and detailed high-end luxury cars. He said he met her while working on cars owned by a North Palm Beach businessman, later identified by The Post as Clifton Goodrich.

Hazzard said he usually serviced cars at Goodrich’s office but soon was asked to go service cars at Goodrich’s home.

“He said, ‘There’s a new Pontiac Solstice in my driveway. I bought it for my girlfriend,’’’ Hazzard recalled. The girlfriend, Hazzard said, was Alison Dadow. Eventually he would see Ann at the house, but he never spoke to her.

When reached by The Post, Goodrich declined to comment. “I haven’t had any connection with them in eight or nine years so it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to say anything,’’ he said before hanging up.

Soon, Hazzard said, Alison began talking to him about her plans to open Twin Power Yoga at Donald Ross Road and Military Trail. Hazzard suspects she confided in him because he also worked as a radio announcer.

“She clearly understood the importance of promoting,’’ he said. “I may have been an early audience for her to practice on.’’

At some point, the sisters moved to a rental townhouse at the Cielo community in Palm Beach Gardens, where he serviced Alison’s Porsche Cayenne.

“I didn’t observe any overt hostility during the period I knew them, but there always seemed to be this tension you couldn’t put a finger on,’’ he said.

Hazzard said he hasn’t spoken to the sisters since 2009 but he was saddened to learn about the tragedy, especially since he once drove the same stretch of road in Hawaii where the crash occurred.

“When I heard about this Thelma & Louise they did off a cliff on a road I’ve travelled before, the tragedy really struck,’’ he said.

“I’m sure someone, somewhere, is even now looking to base a film on the whole mess.”


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