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Jamie Dickerson never believed that her daughter, April Holt, had died by suicide.
The 29-year-old TikTok star, who shared positivity videos with her 200,000 followers, was found unconscious on July 31, 2023, in the bathroom of her Nashville home with a plastic bag duct-taped tightly around her neck. She died at the hospital that same day.
The case was later closed by the Metro Nashville Police Department and city prosecutors after an autopsy officially ruled Holt’s death a suicide. But Dickerson firmly believed they’d gotten it all wrong — and her detective work eventually led to her daughter’s husband being handcuffed.
“I got up, marched out of that room and said ‘I’m not done, I’m going to keep investigating,’” she told WSMV.
Dickerson had a suspect in mind soon after her daughter’s death. She said that a few weeks after Holt was found, her grandson told her that he had witnessed the 29-year-old fighting with her husband, Donovan Holt, the same day she died. She also learned that Holt had pawned his wedding ring the week prior.
The husband had called Dickerson after her daughter had been found, and she immediately found his tone odd.
“He was upset — kind of like a panic upset…He was like, ‘We found April she wasn’t breathing and she’s in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,’” she explained.
He had acted strangely at the hospital too, allowing Dickerson to make all the medical decisions on her daughter’s behalf. “He was holding his head. He was rocking and pacing,” she said.
After her daughter’s case was closed, Dickerson continued with her investigation, combing through police reports and the notes from her daughter’s autopsy for hours each day.
“They said she didn’t have any signs of trauma even though she had bruises, which I had to bring to their attention even though the autopsy stated she had bruises on her neck, her thighs, her ankles. She even had a gash on her inner thigh,” she told WKRN.
“I met with the DA. I met with everybody I possibly could. Everybody was like, ‘We don’t see enough evidence. We don’t see enough evidence,’ and they just let him be free.”
Dickerson filed complaints and eventually pushed the MNPD to launch an internal investigation, which produced a 47-page report. In it, detectives said there were “two hits” for Donovan Holt’s fingerprints on the duct tape roll.
“I said you can tell me the truth or I am going to go meet with the cold case team next Thursday and have this reopened,” she said, recalling her conversation with Holt.
Holt surprised her by confessing in full. “He just goes into how he killed her and he described how he killed her,” Dickerson said.
“How he strangled her and that he didn’t know what to do so he dragged her to the shower and put the bag over her head and taped it so it looked like a suicide.”
On September 20, 2024, the MNPD announced that Holt had been arrested in San Antonio, Texas, after confessing to detectives. Holt, 33, was indicted by a grand jury for reckless homicide, evidence tampering and false reporting, the press release stated. He is due to be returned to Nashville soon.
Though she’s relived her daughter’s suspected killer is now behind bars, Dickerson is still battling to get the charges upped from homicide to first-degree murder.
“I said I’m not going to stop fighting — even when the case was closed I knew that she was the one saying, ‘He did it mom’,” she said.
