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Left inset: April Holt (WZTV). Right inset: Donovan Holt (Metropolitan Nashville Police Department). Background: The home where April Holt was killed (WZTV).
A Tennessee man was sentenced to two years for strangling his wife to death in a plea deal after the victim’s mother turned over a FaceTime video in which he confessed to her.
Donovan Holt, 33, learned his fate on Tuesday in the death of his wife, April Holt, 29, online court records show. He pleaded guilty in November to reckless homicide, tampering with evidence and false reporting.
Police found April Holt unresponsive in the bathroom of their home in Cane Ridge, a Nashville suburb, on July 31, 2023, with a plastic bag taped tightly around her neck. She died at a hospital. That November, the Medical Examiner’s Office classified her death as a suicide due to complications of suffocation, but the details were later changed to homicide by strangulation after the victim’s mother, Jamie Dickerson — who never believed her daughter killed herself — apparently helped piece the case together and got the confession.
“I knew that April was unhappy. She requested a divorce two weeks prior, and she was dead two weeks later,” Dickerson told Chattanooga Fox affiliate WTVC. “She had bruises on her wrists, her neck, her ankles, her thighs and none of it was taken as evidence.”
Dickerson said that the couple’s son, who was 7 years old and at the home at the time, heard them arguing and reportedly found April Holt unconscious.
The victim’s mother said the turning point was in June 2024, when Donovan Holt confessed to her on FaceTime.
She said he told her he accidentally killed his wife during a sex act.
“He just goes into how he killed her, and he described how he killed her,” Dickerson said, according to local ABC affiliate WKRN. “How he strangled her and that he didn’t know what to do.”
Donovan Holt was arrested on Sep. 19, 2024, in San Antonio, Texas. He confessed to the murder to Metropolitan Nashville Police Department Cold Case Unit detectives, authorities said.
Dickerson, meanwhile, paid tribute to her daughter on a GoFundMe page. The page was set up to raise money for a grief center in Nashville in memory of her daughter and to support April Holt’s two young children.
“After losing my daughter and seeing the far and few resources available for children and adults during their grief journey, I want to meet a need within the community,” Dickerson wrote. “A place to just sit and be, enjoy a cup of coffee, a place of grief resource classes, youth grief groups, grieving through art classes, and future grief camps.”
“People often go through grief alone even when they have large families. Grief is a journey to go through, not get through,” she added. “Living life with a piece of you missing doesn’t have to be done alone. The ‘Grieve with Me’ grief center will bless the community and prayerfully spread to other communities as well.”