BONUS: Twin Tragedy (Accident, Suicide, or Murder)

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Hi, Snap listeners.

We're bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen's Hit Series, Accident, Suicide, or Murder.

Returning to Oxygen with all new episodes this Saturday at a special time, 8 p.m.

after after cold justice you can also watch full episodes live or on demand on the free oxygen app by clicking the link in our description enjoy

a horrifying car crash one of the boys said it drove over the cliff the front was smashed there was a rock that had gone through the window

two victims identical twin sisters they were two separate beings but really one person they were not usual sisters One twin miraculously survives.

I knew that we needed to get her out.

Was this a tragic accident?

This didn't seem like a normal crash.

Or something more sinister.

Did the driver potentially drive off that cliff?

Something definitely not right is going on.

What really happened on the road to Hana?

A woman who didn't want to be dead is dead.

On the afternoon of May 29th, 2016, police dispatch on the Hawaiian island of Maui received a call about an accident along the twisting Hana Highway.

It's like Port Explorer, I think it's on a steep tip that it went up.

Hana Highway stretches over about 50 miles of roadway.

Areas where there are sheer drops.

Everybody knows that it's a dangerous road.

First responders discovered a grim scene on the treacherous rocks below.

There was a crowd of cars already and a lot of people looking over the cliff.

It was all ocean except for where the vehicle landed.

It was the only patch of rocks.

Surviving the more than 100-foot fall seemed impossible, but bystanders insisted they could see someone moving inside the SUV.

There was a strong smell of gasoline.

I actually remember hearing the engine, so I went to the driver's side to turn it off.

And there was an adult female.

She was conscious.

I was shocked.

I asked for her name, and she wouldn't answer that.

But I knew that we needed to get her out.

Rescuers focused on getting the victim away from the pounding surf.

So I went to the rear driver's side where the side curtain airbags had deployed, at which which time I saw the other passenger.

In the back seat we're seeing head injuries.

I attempted to check for a pulse.

There was no pulse.

We have two patients.

One is

hopeless and unresponsive.

The officers and firemen who extracted her from the vehicle reported that when they were taking her body out of the vehicle they could feel all the bones in her body moving around.

She was basically a bag of broken bones.

I didn't really get a good look at the passenger's face because it's covered with blood.

But I remember thinking she looked very familiar to the driver.

Were the two women related?

And how did they end up at the bottom of the cliff?

As crews removed the victim's shattered body, the survivor was airlifted to the nearest hospital 30 miles away.

She had injuries to her head.

She had a broken arm.

Investigators faced a delicate situation.

The crash victim appeared to be coherent, but she wasn't communicating.

I'm trying to get her to identify herself.

She does not answer questions in regards to her name.

She remained quiet the entire time.

She's not telling us who she is.

As medical personnel tended to the survivor, Officer Maliola got a call from headquarters.

I'm just getting information from our HANA Patrol District supervisor who's telling us that we have two identical twins.

We have two IDs and tentatively they're Alexandria and Anastasia Duval.

And at this point we're still not sure

who's who.

We don't know for sure which is which.

The Duval sisters were born far from the lush Hawaiian Islands in upstate New York.

I was the twins babysitter.

They were very vivacious.

They were very spicy.

From the beginning, the sisters were inseparable.

They were able to communicate communicate with each other without even talking.

They were very much in their own little world.

Two separate beings, but really one person.

They were very affectionate little girls, and they loved to cuddle and have you read to them.

They would sit and talk about each page and very engaged.

Their mom was one of the most

loving mothers I had ever seen.

Always hugging them, always smiling.

They were the light of her life.

When the twins were just five years old, they suffered a nearly unimaginable tragedy.

Anastasia and Alexandria both were home with their mom, and their mom had an aneurysm and basically fell dead on the kitchen floor in front of them.

And the two of them were alone with their mom for several hours before a neighbor stopped by to check on them.

It was a tragic, tragic loss for those girls.

A childhood trauma that nobody should have to go through.

As they grew older, the bond between the sisters became strained at times.

Anastasia told me how her and her sister didn't really get along in high school.

And everybody thought that they were cool, but they kind of really didn't like each other.

I think there was a short period of time where one went to college away from the other, and then they got back together.

A lot of siblings have arguments.

There were times when they were like, I don't want to be by you, but then there's times times when they're like, I can't be without you.

By the late 1990s, the twins seemed to be as close as ever.

Alexandria and Anastasia decided to move to Florida, where they met friend and spiritual advisor, Leslie McMichael.

They were always together.

They couldn't imagine being apart.

Their energies were very different.

They were yin and yang.

Leslie described Anastasia as quiet and sweet.

She was the idea girl.

She was very kind

and

very concerned about the people she loved.

According to Leslie, Alexandria was no nonsense.

She was a force to be reckoned with.

She was the one who always got the ideas into play.

They were very spiritual girls.

That spirituality may have fostered the twins' interest in yoga.

Alexandria and Anastasia became instructors.

In 2008, the sisters opened their own studio, Twin Power Yoga in Palm Beach.

They grew a business to where they were super successful.

Nobody could come close to being in their realm of success as far as yoga was concerned.

They were stars.

By 2015, Alexandria and Anastasia had resettled once again, this time in Hawaii.

I was like totally amazed at watching the two of them work because while Anastasia is in the office looking for a manila folder, Alexandria will walk in from the bedroom and go, do you need this folder?

And she'd be like, oh yeah, that's the one I was just looking for.

When they are like on the same page, like there's nothing they couldn't do.

They were a machine together.

They were a force together.

Hawaii should have been a place of peace and inspiration for the twins.

Instead, they found tragedy on the coast of Maui.

There was damages on the driver's side.

and the front was smashed in.

The windshield was smashed.

There was a rock that had gone through the window.

On the passenger side, the rear door was ripped off, and the back, of course, was completely crushed in.

At the hospital where the surviving twin was being treated, investigators were still trying to identify which sister died in the accident.

Was it Alexandria or Anastasia?

In an attempt to get the survivor to open up, authorities revealed the sad news that her twin didn't make it.

We did that hoping to solicit more responses from her.

Once she was told that her sister was dead is when she gave this weird look on her face.

And that's when she kind of just zoned out.

In a lot of our traffic crashes, fatalities, there's usually a lot of crying, usually a lot of tears.

We're used to statements of, I wish it was me.

We didn't get any of that in this case.

Instead, she became very defensive, stopped answering questions, kind of didn't want to give us anything.

Was the surviving twin too stunned to speak, or was there another reason for her silence?

Later that day, vehicle homicide detective Larry Beecraft was dispatched to the accident site.

Nothing suspicious, nothing out of the ordinary.

Then I started walking through it, walking through it, and then I started to focus in on the tire marks that were on the roadway.

And right when I saw that,

I couldn't believe what I was looking at.

I was like, this isn't normal.

Coming up, investigators try to reconstruct what caused the crash.

They were stopped on the roadway.

That's when the vehicle accelerates.

The witnesses saw those two fighting prior to going over the cliff.

Was this an unavoidable tragedy or a deliberate act?

One of the big questions in this investigation was, did the passenger cause this accident?

Why would you intentionally drive over a cliff with a 115-foot drop?

I didn't think they had a theory for murder.

The close bond between identical twins Alexandria and Anastasia Duval was shattered when their SUV hurtled over a cliff on the island of Maui.

One sister was killed on impact.

Miraculously, the other twins survived the crash, but she wouldn't identify herself to police or answer any of their questions.

I'm just hearing a bunch of different names.

I don't know who's who.

I'm still actively trying to figure out who these people are so I can do notifications.

To make matters more complicated, the SUV wasn't registered to either sister.

Investigators were able to track down the owner at a house about 15 miles from the police station.

We were met at the door by a gentleman who identified himself as the owner of the car that's involved in this crash.

And that's where he began to tell us that he was a boyfriend of Alexandria Duval, who had borrowed the car with her twin sister, Anastasia.

Police brought Alexandria's boyfriend back to the hospital.

The man immediately recognized that the survivor was, in fact, Alexandria.

That meant her twin, Anastasia, was the one who died in the crash.

Alexandria hears us questioning him and she becomes extremely defensive, telling him to shut his mouth, don't say anything to the cops.

You always say too much and that's when bells start to ring and this just didn't seem like a normal crash.

Something definitely not right is going on.

Veteran detective Larry Beecraft thought the same thing when he examined markings left by the SUV.

I couldn't get over the tire marks.

I looked at it and I knew what they were.

If a person was trying to break and prevent themselves from going over the cliff, they wouldn't turn toward the cliff.

Is it possible to have those marks in somebody breaking?

In my training experience, no.

This person was turning and accelerating.

This was intentional.

First thing that comes to mind is, well, why would somebody do that?

You know, why would you intentionally drive over a cliff with a 115-foot drop?

Me being a homicide detective, we really don't work crashes or anything of that nature.

But I see Officer Justin Moyola and he begins to start to tell me about a crash out in Hana, telling me the details of the scene, evidence that looked totally different from a regular crash.

Several eyewitnesses helped fill in the dramatic moments before the SUV went over the edge.

I talked to one witness who lived in the area and she said a white explorer stopped right in front of her residence and there were two Caucasian females yelling at each other.

The only thing she remembers hearing was we need a psychiatrist before they sped off.

Some of the witnesses confirmed they saw those two fighting prior to going over the cliff.

So that kind of supported what I was saying that this was acceleration and turning and then they went over.

Another witness said they were actually pulling each other's hair.

Was it possible the driver, Alexandria, simply lost control during the fight?

Yeah, they could be fighting.

They could be doing things.

However, if they don't want to drive off the cliff, they're going to break.

They're going to stop that vehicle.

Alexandria was devastated by the loss of her sister.

She didn't remember what happened.

That happens with a lot of traumatic accidents that people don't remember.

After Alexandria was released from the hospital, investigators were still trying to piece together what happened.

When we get the toxicology results back for both Alexandria and Anastasia, it showed that they both had consumed alcohol

prior to this incident.

Despite the toxicology results, no charges were filed at that point.

Authorities focused on the physical evidence.

I was assigned a few days later after this crash to go back and assist with removal of the car, which was my first time back to the crash scene.

We knew at this point it seemed like an intentional act that the driver intended to drive off of the cliff, but why she did it, we were still unsure of.

The why

is important, but the why is coming from the operator or from the passengers and from the witnesses.

The next step for me was to get into that car.

That control module, it's like a plane.

A plane that has the black box will tell you your speed, it'll tell you if you brake, it'll tell you even if you have your seatbelts on.

That control module is very important for us at this point to further the investigation.

While the control module was being tested, the autopsy of Anastasia revealed key evidence.

We were able to locate blonde hair that we recovered from the fingers right around Anastasia's hands.

It was consistent with some of the witness statements that there were some hair pulling prior to the car going off the cliff.

When siblings fight, it's not always something where you think that that they're going to try and kill each other.

With the evidence that I was looking at, with all the witness statements, I fear that this was a worst-case scenario between sisters.

Could the crash have been a desperate attempt at a double suicide?

The traffic investigators were able to download the information from the airbag module corroborating the evidence on the road.

It showed that in the one and a half seconds before the first impact, the accelerator was floored.

It was at 100%.

The steering wheel was turned 288 degrees to the left.

So that indicated that it was a violent and quick action to take the car over the cliff.

So we had enough evidence to show that she intentionally drove off the cliff.

If a driver is going to intentionally drive off this cliff, then it's a murder-suicide.

It just turns out the suicide part didn't work out.

The theory has to be a murder-suicide because nobody's going to drive off that cliff thinking that they're going to survive.

There's absolutely no evidence that Alexandria had ever expressed any desire to commit suicide.

Authorities were ready to charge Alexandria Duval with murder.

When police went to arrest her, they were startled by what they found.

On the morning of June 3rd, we get to the house with our special response team.

The house had been completely cleared out.

That was pretty shocking.

Coming up, the case suffers multiple setbacks.

The judge found that I hadn't satisfied the burger.

And the search for the truth leads to new revelations about the Duval twins.

Once they started drinking, they would start having their issues.

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A horrifying car crash on the island of Maui left one sister dead and her identical twin, the driver, wanted for murder.

When police went to arrest Alexandria Duval, they found an empty house.

There's nothing there, so now I'm going to have to track her down.

We had enough evidence to show probable cause for murder.

But what caused us to sort of rush it was that we were afraid that if she left the island, that we may not be able to find her again.

There's only two ways off this island.

It's either by boat or by plane.

There was no indication Alexandria left Maui.

I was able to find out that she was staying at a hotel in town.

I had the officers surround the room and I was right there knocking on the door.

She opened the door and I said, Alexandria, you're under arrest for the murder of your sister.

And I was able to put the handcuffs myself on her.

On June 3rd, 2016, Alexandria Duvall was booked on charges of second-degree murder in connection with the death of her sister, Anastasia.

Five days later, Alexandria appeared in court and pled not guilty.

She insisted the crash was an accident.

During the preliminary hearing, the traffic investigators testify on what they saw as well as they didn't see at that scene of the crash.

The witnesses come in that were here on the island, they spoke, and then I testified on the witnesses that were not here, that were off-island.

And with all that, I summarized the investigation to the judge.

The judge came to his decision quickly, but the ruling staggered the prosecution team.

The judge found that I hadn't satisfied the burger, dismissed the charge, and released Alexandria.

The prosecutor's evidence was not enough to convince the judge to hold Alexandria on a murder charge.

It's a blow to having the public's confidence when at preliminary hearing you cannot succeed in establishing probable cause.

It is extremely rare for a judge to find no probable cause.

Watching someone walk away scot-free after you put handcuffs on them is not a very good feeling for a police officer at all.

Shortly after the ruling, Alexandria left Hawaii to attend Anastasia's funeral.

Alexandria was devastated by the loss of her sister.

She went back to where she was originally from in upstate New York.

Despite the decision, the prosecution team was determined to keep going.

It never occurred to me not to pursue the case once I became convinced that this was murder.

A woman who didn't want to be dead is dead.

We reconvene, and now we're going to file for a grand jury indictment.

This is not over.

Based on the evidence that we presented to the judge that day, he felt that wasn't enough.

So we knew we needed to go back.

Kind of show the background story.

Do some recreations to show that there's more to this than just a traffic crash.

One of the big questions in this investigation was, did the passenger cause this accident?

By pulling her hair, by distracting the driver, or did the driver intentionally drive off that cliff?

If somebody somebody is physically pulling you to the right, you can't physically go to the left.

That's just impossible.

So we're going to do a recreation.

The recreation was designed to prove that Anastasia could not have caused the SUV to go over the cliff.

Prosecutors wanted to eliminate any doubt that Alexandria was responsible for the fatal crash.

We got a female officer, same size, same physique, and put her as the passenger.

And then we had Officer Maliolo be the driver.

We then told told him to get up to 48 miles per hour, and she tried as hard as she could, and she could not grab that wheel when it was being turned at that rate, at that speed.

We found out that no matter what the person did on the passenger side to the driver, for that vehicle to turn left as hard as well as how fast it was going, it was physically impossible for the passenger to cause that crash.

The next step was to figure out potential motives.

So like all good investigators, you want to know the background of your parties involved, your offender, as well as your victim.

They had some drama in their past.

Come to find out that they had run-ins with the law, and they were not usual sisters.

Alexandria and Anastasia would fight not only verbally, but physically and sometimes very violently.

I think they fought because of alcohol.

First thing in the morning, they were really, really sweet.

Once they started drinking, they would start having their issues.

Anastasia was always concerned about Alexandria, and I think that that was one of the biggest reasons why she wanted to go into business with her sister to do this yoga studio, to keep her busy.

When the twins first started out in Florida, their yoga studio was very popular with the residents of Palm Beach.

That success triggered a series of life-changing events for the sisters.

The two of them were approached by a producer to do a reality TV show about their yoga studio.

And the yoga studio that they were in was kind of on the cheaper side of town.

They wanted to change the location to West Palm Beach.

West Palm Beach is a very,

a very expensive place to live.

Friends reported that the reality TV project took longer than expected to start production.

The show went on hold.

They had done so much to gear up for the show and the reality show was not happening nearly as fast as they wanted it to.

Anastasia told me they were left with square footage that they couldn't afford, and that's what led to them going bankrupt.

According to court filings, the twins were more than $100,000 in debt.

Creditors were knocking at the door.

They left Florida under some controversy that they then moved to Utah.

When they moved to Utah, they felt like they were going to start anew.

But from hearing their stories, one day, I believe Alexandria was driving a car and for whatever reason, they lost control of the car.

The two of them were in it.

And when a police pulled up, they saw the two sisters fighting and Alexandria got arrested for DUI.

At that point, I believe they felt like they needed to start over again, and that's when they moved to Maui.

The twins' experience in Utah seemed to be an eerie forecast of their fate.

In mid-December 2015, the Duval sisters landed in Hawaii.

That Christmas Eve, the sisters were cited for disorderly conduct.

As a detective, when we look at the backgrounds of our offenders, our victims, we're looking at any type of behavior or criminal offenses that they're involved in.

The out-of-control behavior puzzled investigators until they dug a little deeper.

Could the crash that killed Anastasia have been a tragic case of sibling rivalry?

The twins had a very love-hate relationship.

Like one didn't want to be without the other, yet one didn't want the other one to have a boyfriend.

Anastasia told me when we first met that Alexandria steals all of her boyfriends and

I was not allowed to get with her sister ever as long as she was alive.

Jeffrey recalled a bizarre incident early in his relationship with Anastasia.

I wake up and Anastasia was on the other bed crying, so I just figured she was upset, but she was lying there with a skirt on and topless.

So at that point, I got up and I went over and I'm like hugging her.

And then the door opens, and Anastasia walks in.

And she says, What are you doing?

Jeffrey didn't realize the woman on the bed was actually Alexandria.

And she's like, She's not Anastasia.

I am.

You better figure this one out real quick.

Investigators looking into the crash that killed Anastasia Duval became immersed in the unique, often turbulent dynamic between Anastasia and her twin sister, Alexandria.

Throughout their life, they had been very close, but also very volatile.

I've never seen two adults that wanted to be together as much as they did, fight as much as they did.

What was it that forged the complicated relationship between the Duval sisters?

Thinking back to their childhood, it had to have been the childhood trauma.

The mother being tragically removed from their life.

They have to...

Grow up without their mom.

And could this have shaped the teenagers, the young women that they became?

Could that make a life

impact in a negative way on the rest of your life?

Absolutely, I think it can.

That grief doesn't lessen.

Alexandra and Anastasia had probably the weirdest relationship I've ever seen two people have.

They would be perfectly fine talking, sharing, doing a project together, and one of them would say the wrong word and the other one would object to it.

And before you know it, they're throwing glasses at each other and rolling on the ground, pulling hair, fighting, yelling, screaming, calling each other names.

And then they would separate.

And five minutes later, they would come back out and act like nothing happened.

The twins' tumultuous relationship didn't always remain behind closed doors.

I was able to contact their landlord here on Maui, and then the landlord was giving me good information on how they would have neighbors complaining about the twins always yelling and screaming and arguing and fighting.

They had been in fights before, but they always made up and were just close friends.

They were always living with each other, sharing each other's clothes, and just very inseparable.

Anastasia told me that this was the thing with them.

At one point, they were fighting, and I tried to break it up, and she turned and she looked at me, and she was like, hey, if we're fighting, just let us fight.

Jeffrey and Anastasia broke up a few months before her death.

Anastasia soon began dating someone else who provided investigators with more background information.

Anastasia and her boyfriend met during a Bible event.

They started going out with each other.

From there, their relationship got stronger and stronger.

and they decided to go camping.

On the weekend of the crash, Anastasia and her boyfriend had planned to go camping in Hannett alone so that they could spend time together.

Alexandria found out about these plans and inserted herself into the camping trip.

And she was not a welcome addition.

According to the new boyfriend, Anastasia had an ominous premonition shortly before the fatal crash.

He said the three of them were in the car and then that Anastasia had an outer body experience.

She was floating above the car toward the shoreline, then came back and told the other two, the boyfriend and Alexandria, that one of them was going to die soon and it was going to be in the water.

Anastasia's new boyfriend revealed to investigators that on the morning of the accident, the twins started drinking early.

Anastasia's new boyfriend is telling us all this.

He sees this happening, unfolding in front of him, that they're fighting, that they're drinking, that they ended up leaving him at the campsite, they ended up driving off.

Witnesses are hearing the yelling, the screaming, the fighting within this vehicle.

A van full of Boy Scouts spotted the twins parked alongside the twisting Hana Highway.

The driver had long yellowish brown hair.

They were parked right there.

And we could see arms pulling her,

pulling her hair.

And her head was yanking and jerking.

The driver was like fighting the girl off in a rage.

She then turned off her flashers she put it into gear and stomped on the gas she did about 40 miles an hour right past me and she was like almost out of control as she was going and then one of the boys in my van he said it drove over the cliff so i called 911 on my phone the police came about five minutes later investigators corroborated eyewitness accounts with evidence collected from the scene Just prior to the crash, based on witness statements, they were stopped on the roadway.

And that's when the vehicle accelerates.

That information is backed up by data we got out of the vehicle.

So the area that the vehicle went off was probably the only area on that stretch of the road that a vehicle could have gone off, which led into our same theory that this was an intentional event.

The roadside evidence was backed up by data from the vehicle recreation.

Would this be enough to bring criminal charges against Alexandria?

If this was accidental, there was no reason why she was turning to the left.

Hair pulling definitely wouldn't have caused you to turn left.

From every aspect of this thing, it was intentional.

If you look at the pictures of Anastasia's hands, you can see one or two strands of hair.

So we're not talking about clumps of hair.

Everything was pointing in the direction that we needed to go, and now we have enough information to go to the grand jury.

After five months of painstaking investigation, prosecutors on Maui were confident they had enough evidence to bring second-degree murder charges against Alexandria Duval.

Now they needed to convince the grand jury.

We had to show that it could not have been an accident.

What we were preparing to bring to the grand jury is not just the evidence that this was intentionally done, but the evidence that this could not have been an accident or interference.

During the recreation, the passenger was never able to physically change the speed or the direction of that vehicle.

Once we were able to get all the information, all the statements, all the photos, all the evidence, all the data from the control module, now we have enough information to go to the grand jury.

The grand jury is not up to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt.

It isn't up to that level criminally to get a grand jury indictment.

They're only there to decide whether there's probable cause or not.

The grand jury convened on October 31st, 2016.

We present our case.

They find exactly what we expected.

They indict Alexandria for the murder of her sister and they issue a warrant for her arrest.

I was able to make contact with New York state troopers and they were able to track down Alexandria for me in Albany, New York.

I had the TV on, tuned into the newscast, and it hit me who it was.

I think I just sat there with my mouth hanging open and could not believe what I was seeing and hearing.

I used to call them my babies and that this could actually have happened to my babies.

My initial reaction when I heard that there was murder charges being brought against Alexandria, I thought it was preposterous because there was like no signs of depression with them.

When they were fine, they were fine, and when they were fighting, they were fighting, but neither one of them was ever like, you know what, I wish she was dead.

I want to get rid of her.

One month after being arrested, Alexandria was returned to Maui to await trial.

If convicted of second-degree murder, Alexandria faced life in prison.

So she had been taken taken into custody and extradited back to Maui and then released on bail, but was ordered to live on Maui.

And she was just devastated by the loss of her sister, number one, and scared with the charges here having to stay on Maui where she really had no connection anymore.

Her sister was her only connection and her sister was gone.

Alexandria's defense team requested a bench trial.

We opted for a trial by judge rather than a jury because the judge knew that another judge in that same courthouse had found no probable cause in this case.

And that is something that rarely ever happens in a preliminary hearing case.

It made sense for me.

Now she only has to make one person, the judge, believe her story instead of a jury of her peers.

So I thought that that was a good move on her part.

bad move for our part.

We anticipated that at trial the defense would be accident.

So, in preparing for trial, we sought to eliminate as many scenarios of accident that we could think of.

The girls were driving on a windy road to Hana.

They were fighting.

Anastasia was pulling Alexandria's hair, and Alexandria lost control of the car.

The theory of murder had to be based on murder-suicide, and there was just no evidence that Alexandria wanted to kill her sister, and no evidence that she ever wanted to commit suicide.

She caused another person's death, intentionally.

That's under our law, murder.

On January 29th, 2018, nearly two years after the fatal crash, the trial began on Maui.

It was extremely emotional and difficult for Alexandria to stand trial, to be on trial for the murder of your sister, which you didn't do.

Your twin sister, no less, is extremely emotional.

Each side presented their own interpretation of the physical evidence.

According to the airbag module data, one and a half seconds before it went off the cliff, Alexandria floored the accelerator.

One second before they went off the cliff, she whipped the steering wheel around to 288 degrees.

There was no braking.

There was a hard left turn and there was acceleration through the end.

I felt that the state investigator had misread the airbag control module.

He concluded that the driver, Alexandria, had turned the steering wheel 288 degrees in the last second.

I didn't feel that that was possible and I didn't think they had a theory for murder.

There was no evidence presented of alcohol or intoxication at the trial.

The only evidence of recklessness that the state alluded to was her driving on this narrow road on the side of a cliff while her sister is assaulting her.

Certainly her actions were reckless that day.

It was dangerous.

Somebody was was going to get hurt.

The fact that both Alexandria and Anastasia were under the influence of alcohol at the time of this crash

is not really pertinent.

Prosecutors called a string of eyewitnesses to bolster their case for second-degree murder.

On the day of the crash, the Duval girls were in a white SUV and were driving basically around Hana.

They were familiar with those roads.

A resident who was driving on that road happened to be be behind their SUV and noticed them weaving on this rather narrow two-lane road.

And he reported that he saw them yelling at each other, arguing, grabbing at each other's hair, grabbing at each other's clothes.

We knew about the one eyewitness who was driving a van of Boy Scouts, and he described that the passenger was using both hands to pull the driver, Alexandria's hair, so hard that it was jerking her head completely over into the passenger seat.

Well, she's fighting in the front seat and pulling the hair of a driver.

I mean, that's going to cause an accident.

Then, in a shocking turn, another eyewitness provided the trial's most stunning moment.

I just couldn't believe that one of the witnesses that I spoke to personally changed his story a little bit.

In January 2018, the trial of Alexandria Duval for the second-degree murder of her twin sister was rocked by a bombshell.

A key witness changed his testimony at the last minute.

The witness I spoke with initially told me that he didn't see brake lights.

He saw fighting.

He saw hair pulling.

But during trial, he basically said he didn't see any of that stuff.

That shocked me to hear that.

The police report said they saw the car intentionally go over the cliff.

Well, we went up there and realized that there's no way they could have seen the accident scene from there.

It just is not possible.

There were houses and bushes and trees blocking it.

And then I went back and I contacted the witnesses that said this and they said, oh, no, no, no, we didn't say we saw the accident.

We said we heard the car go over the cliff.

As a defense attorney, you just have to hammer away or break one link in that chain.

Alexandria chose not to testify.

On February 1st, 2018, the judge indicated he was ready to deliver a verdict.

I've never seen a trial for murder speed up so quickly and get done quickly.

It was less than a week that this trial was done.

I waited in a little windowless room next to the courthouse with Alexandria, and 15 minutes turned into half an hour, turned into an hour, turned into an hour and a half.

So it got extremely tense as to what was going on.

The judge's decision surprised the courtroom.

Nearly two years after the crash that killed her sister Anastasia,

Alexandria Duvall was found not guilty of second-degree murder.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing that she's free now.

The judge said that she is not guilty of murder.

The judge ruled that Anastasia caused the accident by pulling Alexandria's hair and causing her to lose control or not be able to control the vehicle.

Once the judge has made his ruling and finds the defendant not guilty, then the case is over.

The defendant is released and there's nothing further to do.

I take a lot of pride in being accurate.

After I was done testifying, I heard that the judge said that my testimony was credible.

So that means I was telling the truth.

Then you hear she was found not guilty.

If I was found to be credible, how could she have been found not guilty?

In hindsight, I have come to the opinion that our failure to cooperate with the media hurt us with public perception because we basically left the field to the defense to tell everyone that this was just an accident, to tell everyone that Alexandria lost her sister and that she's heartbroken.

So we left the defense in charge of the narrative.

The prosecution team was disappointed with the outcome, but the people who knew Alexandria and Anastasia believed justice was served.

When Anastasia died, it

seriously affected me for a long time.

It was really hard.

I knew that it was not an intentional thing by Alexandria.

They were just doing what they normally did.

I felt the verdict was fair.

I felt like the judge did a good job of seeing through the evidence and realizing that there was nothing there to prove murder.

This case was a tragic accident, not a murder.

After the trial, Alexandria Duvall moved back to New York State.

When she finally got in touch with me, her message was how hard it's been, how much she's gone through, how much she misses her sister.

I could tell she's still kind of broken up about it.

My good memories of the girls are sitting in my backyard looking at the lake and talking about the mysteries of life and the secrets of the world and all the things that people need to find out about.

My heart hurts for them.

I can still hear them playing in the driveway.

I can still hear them running around.

I can hear their mother.

It's crazy.

Like I really can.

How do you go on the rest of your life knowing now that you don't have probably the only person in the world that truly knew you

for you and was your other half?

Good people do bad things out of desperation.

It's not who they are.

And I don't want anybody to think that those girls were bad people because they weren't.

They were lovely, shining, beautiful, amazing girls.

For more information, go to oxygen.com.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her.

Shout out to all my therapists out there.

There's been like eight of them.

A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

That motherfucker is not real.

And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid.

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