What’s worse than a criminal?
Two criminals, of course.
Especially if those two know each other better than anyone else in the world, and can work
together at a level most people can only dream about.
As you may have guessed, we’re talking about twins who commit crimes together.
This may seem like a pretty rare occurrence, but in reality, there are tons of criminal
twins.
Here are some of the strangest cases.
10.
Jared and Gerald Smith
Jared and Gerald Smith did not technically kill anyone, but it was not for lack of trying.
In 2015, the teenage twins from Fresno, California cut off a woman on the street and started
demanding money.
She refused to comply and asked them not to do this, anticipating that they would beat
her.
She was right: One of the Smith twins attacked her ruthlessly, and although the other one
tried to stop his brother at first, he soon joined in.
The woman was sure that they would kill her when suddenly, a good Samaritan intervened.
Nathan Halsted was riding his bicycle nearby when he spotted the attack.
He rolled by the scene and asked the teens what they were doing.
The twins immediately stopped their attack on the woman … and started attacking Halsted
instead.
They brutally beat him down until he could not get up from the street anymore.
Then, they started to fight a driver and a pedestrian who tried to intervene.
At this point, to everyone’s shock, a car ran over the unconscious Halsted and killed
him.
The driver of the car had no chance to see the unconscious man, let alone swerve to avoid
him, so the investigation found him innocent.
Jared and Gerald Smith, who had left their defenseless victim on the road, were promptly
arrested and charged for murder.
9.
The Whitehead Twins
Teenagers often have issues, and if you look at the case of Tasmiyah and Jasmiyah Whitehead,
it appears that teenage twins have double the issues.
Until they were 14, “Tas” and “Jas” were girl scouts, excellent students, and
all-around well-behaved kids.
However, in 2008, things took a drastic turn.
For a year and a half, they became increasingly more rebellious and confrontative.
When their mother, Jarmecca, tried to put up some limits to their dating, cell phone
use, and school skipping, they even became violent.
Jarmecca found them so hard to handle that at one point, she even had to send them to
stay with their great-grandmother for a while.
This did nothing to remove the tension between the twins and their mother.
Things came to a tragic end in 2010, just one week after Tas and Jas had returned home.
On January 14, Jarmecca was brutally beaten and stabbed.
She died from a nasty, spine-severing knife wound.
Despite the fact that she had called the police three times over the week to come rein in
her increasingly terrifying children, it took a while until the investigators connected
the murder to the two innocent-looking girls who claimed that they found their dead mother
when they returned home from school.
As the investigation proceeded and evidence started to mount, they finally started growing
suspicious, and four months after the murder, the girls were arrested.
After a grueling trial that lasted for years, the first of the twins finally pleaded guilty
in 2016.
8.
The Fox Twins
Ebenezer Albert Fox and Albert Ebenezer Fox were hilariously named identical twins from
Stevenage, UK.
Ever since their birth in 1863, they were constantly getting mixed up: One of the baby
Foxes was marked with a blue ribbon, and the other one with a red one.
However, their dad got the ribbons mixed after they had been baptized, and from that moment
on, no one was sure which of the kids was which.
As Ebenezer Albert and Albert Ebenezer grew up, they didn’t become any easier to tell
apart.
They both developed a taste for outdoor life, and very much enjoyed hunting.
Unfortunately for them, the landowners of the area didn’t like the idea of random
Foxes hunting on their grounds.
So Ebenezer Albert and Albert Ebenezer became unapologetic poachers.
By the time the men were 50-years-old, they had been arrested for poaching almost 150
times.
However, they had a fine way to contest whatever sentences they received: When Albert Ebenezer
was sent away for a one-month jail sentence in 1913, Ebenezer Alfred immediately came
forward and said that he was actually the Fox behind this particular poaching incident.
He also said that this was just one of the many, many times the authorities had passed
a sentence on the wrong brother.
Sadly for whichever brother was actually sitting in jail, 150 arrests for the same crime doesn’t
give you a lot of credibility in the eyes of the law.
The claim was unceremoniously dismissed.
7.
The Hall Twins
In 2007, Donte Hall was awaiting his trial for killing a man in Orlando, Florida, when
he got some unexpected family news.
His identical twin brother Dante was also in jail, awaiting a trial of his own.
Well, it probably wasn’t completely unexpected: In 2006, the two brothers burst into a house
party, shot two men dead, and robbed the place.
If the court found them guilty and sentenced them to death, they would have been the first
twins on death row.
The problem was that the brothers had worn masks during their attack.
Although witnesses and accomplices recognized Donte as a shooter and he was convicted in
2009, the prosecution had a difficult time trying to tie Dante to the double murder.
Mistrial followed mistrial, as the defense adamantly argued that Dante had not been present
on the scene at all.
Dante’s lawyers even played the evil twin card: “Donte is the evil twin, not Dante.”
Of course, in the end it turned out that they were both the evil twin.
Donte’s girlfriend, who was an accomplice to the crime, agreed to testify against the
brothers, and they were both found guilty.
However, they both avoided death row: Dante was sentenced to life in prison, and Donte’s
initial death sentence was thrown out in 2017.
6.
The Duval Twins
The fact that a crime involves twins doesn’t always necessarily mean that they were committing
it together.
Sometimes, one of them commits a crime and the other witnesses it, or is even the victim.
And then there’s the strange case of Duval twins.
Twins Alison and Ann Dadow were yoga instructors in Florida, before they moved to Maui in 2015
and changed their names to Alexandria and Anastasia Duval.
Although they lived in the same house and spent a lot of their time together, they had
a fairly stormy and violent relationship.
Anastasia’s boyfriend says that they often fought physically, and since it seemed that
both had martial arts training, it could get pretty intense.
In 2016, the twins and Anastasia’s boyfriend had been camping, when yet another of the
Duvals’ fights caused them to drive off in their SUV, leaving the boyfriend behind.
Eyewitnesses saw that the fight continued in the car: Alexandria was driving, and witnesses
saw that Anastasia was pulling her hair and jerking her head.
And then, suddenly, the SUV revved its engine, took a sharp left turn, and drove off a cliff.
Alexandria survived.
Anastasia did not.
The various shady elements of the case, together with the fact that initial reports said Alexandria
smelled of alcohol, led to her being arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder.
However, the defense successfully argued that the steep drop off the cliff wasn’t visible
from the road and a dirt berm by the roadside (along with her sister actively fighting her)
caused Alexandria to lose control of the car.
She was acquitted.
5.
Berndt Brothers
In 2011, the neighbors of Edward and Edwin Berndt started noticing strange changes with
the twin brothers.
The usually well-groomed, normally dressed men started gradually growing wilder.
Their beards grew long and unkempt, their hair was tangled and wild, and they started
dressing in matching flannel pajamas.
Eventually, police popped by to check on the brothers’ 88-year-old mother, who hadn’t
been seen for a while.
They immediately knew that something was wrong when they saw that the house was full of flies
and the air smelled like rotting flesh.
They found the corpse of the twins’ mother lying in the living room.
It had been decomposing there for three months.
Although the twins were immediately arrested, the case turned out to be more complicated
than it seemed.
Edward and Edwin were both mentally disabled and unable to feel and express emotions.
They had been watching football when their mother suddenly fell.
However, the brothers had no money for medical treatment, so they just left the poor woman
lying there.
She died three days later.
Unable to make decisions on their own, the Berndt twins just kept going.
They stayed inside the house, slowly growing more disheveled and living on a diet of candy,
popcorn, and potato chips.
When they were walking in the living room, they just stepped over their mother’s body.
The mother’s end was horrifying, and Edward and Edwin could have faced charges of injury
to an elderly person by omission.
However, in the end no one could really blame the twins for her death.
A grand jury decided that Edward and Edwin would face no charges.
Family members were appointed to act as their new guardians, and they would get better help
for their conditions than their elderly mother was able to provide.
4.
The Adiwal Twins
Mike and Peter Adiwal are notorious Canadian gangsters who run their own “Adiwal Group”
and associate with a number of high-ranking members of other gangs in the Metro Vancouver
area.
The list of their crimes is long and reads like something out of a video game.
In the early 2000s, the police tried to connect them to a series of brutal gang slayings.
However, the surveillance was cut short when the police found out that the twins had just
kidnapped a man and were threatening to kill him.
The officers had to abandon the mission and rush to save the kidnapping victim.
The Adiwals pleaded guilty to this particular crime, but their possible past homicides were
left unsolved.
The twins have collected impressive rap sheets, both together and separately.
They have been charged of extortion and firearm crimes, as well as conspiracy and assault.
Still, perhaps the most dramatic crime they’ve been involved in was actually committed against
them.
In 2009, Peter Adiwal was shot over 24 times in a targeted murder attempt that was never
solved.
He survived.
3.
The Ali Twins
The circumstances that killed the identical Ali twins, Wasel and Wael, are some of the
strangest in the history of twins and crimes.
In 2006, the brothers signed up for the U.S. Army to become military police officers.
They soon left military life after allegedly stealing an Army vehicle, and started working
in customer service.
However, their dreams of becoming police officers had not been left behind.
In 2007, they were arrested for dressing up as cops at Clarendon Ballroom in Virginia.
Wael seems to have blamed Wasel for the incident, and authorities say that the two traded punches.
Wasel soon got his revenge by implicating his brother in a shoplifting scheme.
This seems to have been the last straw for Wael.
A few days later, Wasel was found dead in a forest area where the twins sometimes hung
out.
The bottom cartilage of his neck had been broken.
He was only 19.
Because the twins weren’t exactly on good terms, the investigators immediately suspected
Wael.
The problem was that they lacked physical evidence.
Because the twins share DNA and there was no murder weapon, the prosecution had nothing
concrete.
The jury couldn’t reach a verdict, and prosecutors decided not to retry Wael.
Although the case remains officially open, we will probably never find out what really
happened to Wasel.
In 2015, the 25-year-old Wael was hanging out with his friends outside Atlanta, when
one of them accidentally shot him in the neck.
The bullet that killed him hit the exact same spot where Wasel’s fatal wound had been.
2.
The Tamales
It’s safe to say that the 19-year-old twins Deo and Charles Tamale were not up to date
on party etiquette.
In 2015, they gatecrashed a house party in Edmonton (the one in England, not Canada)
with several accomplices.
When four of the actual guests tried to leave the party, the Tamales’ mob surrounded them
and ordered them to hand over their cell phones and wallets.
When 23-year-old Khiry Ford tried to defuse the situation, Deo and Charles stabbed him
over a dozen times.
Ford died in the ambulance on the way to hospital, and the twins were arrested for murder.
However, this seems to have done little to make them learn their lesson.
Even in prison, they were planning evil deeds: The police recorded them when they ordered
their friends to go find the snitch that they thought had been talking to the cops — despite
the fact that the murder scene had a literal house party’s worth of eyewitnesses.
1.
The Bondurant Boys
Pete and Pat Bondurant were large, frightening twins from Elkton, Tennessee.
For years, they terrorized half the county with their mean attitude and drug connections.
The 350-pound brothers were unpleasant and violent, but also charismatic: They held a
Charles Manson-like influence over many young people in the area.
When they were younger, Pete and Pat had a very clear evil twin/good twin dynamic: Pete
was a drunkard who was convicted of manslaughter in 1975, while Pat was a mild-mannered family
man.
However, when Pete got away from prison, he moved back to Elkton and both twins soon broke
bad.
The large farmhouse where the twins and Pat’s wife lived became a local party spot where
you could score drugs and alcohol at all hours.
Still, party spot or not, everyone knew to be careful around the twins.
Pete and Pat Bondurant didn’t just look terrifying, they were cold-blooded killers.
Apart from Pete’s manslaughter in the 1970s, they brutally murdered a woman named Gwen
Dugger in 1986.
Pat also committed a killing on his own when he beat his coworker to death.
Pete helped him burn the body.
The Bondurant Boys continued their reign of terror until 1990 when Pat’s now former
wife, who had lived in constant fear of the twins, finally found the courage to talk to
the police.
When authorities investigated the Elkton farmhouse and sprayed the room Gwen Dugger was killed
in with a chemical that glows in contact with small, hard-to-see bloodstains, the room “lit
up like the night sky.”