Town note
Settled between 500 and 800 AD by Polynesian people.
about 0:05:22The story
In 1978 Maureen and John Dadow's identical twin daughters, Ann and Alison, were born in Utica, New York. When the twins were five their mother died after a brief illness, and the two became almost entirely dependent on each other. Their older sister, Amy, went to public school, but the twins were sent to a Catholic school. Schoolfriends remembered them as bright but volatile, fighting with each other like a married couple, drinking heavily from junior high, and keeping to themselves. Their father gave them the keys to his Cadillac and let them run up thousands of dollars on his credit card for designer clothes. Both were cheerleaders, joined the Navy Junior ROTC, and told everyone they wanted to become neurosurgeons.
The family later moved to Florida, where the twins studied in St Petersburg and Tampa before settling in the Palm Beach area. In 2008, aged 30, they opened Twin Power Yoga in Palm Beach Gardens, and on 11 November 2011 a second studio followed in downtown West Palm Beach, with a third planned for Boca Raton. They became well known locally, drove matching Porsches, recorded a yoga DVD, and were nicknamed the terrible twins of yoga by a South Florida gossip paper. A reality show approached them and, on the advice of their spiritual adviser Leslie McMichael, they took a larger, more photogenic studio in a fashionable part of West Palm Beach. When the show fell through they could not afford it.
In Utah they opened another studio, offered doga sessions for dogs, ran up debts of about 150,000 dollars each and filed for bankruptcy in December 2013. In January 2014 police were called after the sisters fought each other and then fought officers outside a restaurant; their car had slid into a ditch. In 2014 they moved to Hawaii, arriving in mid-December on what they called a religious quest. In January one of them turned up at the Family Life Center, a homeless shelter, with her bags, giving a false name and claiming she had been robbed and separated from her sister.
By April 2016 Ann, now Anastasia, was living in Hana with Federico Bally, a self-described minister who had been sleeping on the beach, whom she met at Baldwin Beach Park. The four shared a rented five-bedroom, three-bath house of about 3,800 square feet on two acres, valued at around 1.4 million dollars. The sisters argued and fought in the front seat early that morning, then calmed down over wine before another fight. At about one in the afternoon they drove off towards Hana.
From about 3.30 that afternoon witnesses saw the SUV driven erratically along the Hana Highway. One saw a woman screaming while the passenger pulled the driver's hair and grabbed the steering wheel; another, Chad Smith, was forced onto the shoulder as the SUV came down the middle of the road. At about 4.30 the vehicle accelerated hard, made a sharp left turn, struck a rock wall and plunged roughly 200 feet onto an outcropping of lava rock. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The autopsy found blunt force trauma to her head and chest, a fractured spine, ribs and feet, and long strands of her sister's blond hair in her hands.
Officers smelled alcohol on her breath; when told her sister was dead she became defensive and refused to talk. Days later police found the rented house empty and located her at a hotel.
Witnesses described arguing, hair-pulling and punching. A crash reconstruction expert said the SUV was travelling 48.3 miles an hour, that the accelerator was flat to the floor for the last two seconds with no braking, and that the wheel turned from zero to 280 degrees in a hard left. The defence expert said the front tyre caught a berm and rotated the vehicle to the right. In 2018 she appeared on Dr Phil, saying she remembered little of the crash.