‘I’m not done, I’m going to keep investigating’: Mom vows to find justice in her daughter’s murder

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV/Gray News) - When 29-year-old April Holt’s death was ruled a suicide, her mom knew something was not right.

April embodied positivity, which she shared in videos she created and posted to TikTok viewed by 200,000 followers.

“I still watch them all the time, almost daily, because I feel like I could actually feel her,” said Holt’s mother, Jamie Dickerson.

Dickerson spoke with WSMV on Monday inside a classroom at Believers Faith Fellowship in Christiana. It was full of décor and items April put there throughout the years where she taught middle school students.

It’s also where Dickerson was supposed to meet her daughter over a year ago.

“We were going to go see the Barbie movie,” she explained. “She said ‘Donovan has to work, I can’t go to the movie, but I’ll meet you at church at the Blast classroom tomorrow.’”

Dickerson never got a chance to reply to April. She and her husband, Donovan Holt, were in a rocky relationship and about to get a divorce. Dickerson got a call the next day.

“The phone rang, and it was Donovan, and he was upset – kind of like a panic upset,” she said as she remembered what took place in 2023. “He was like, ‘We found April she wasn’t breathing and she’s in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.’”

Metro Nashville police said April was found with a plastic bag taped tightly around her neck. She died at the hospital. She left behind a 12-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son in 2023.

Her death was ruled a suicide, but Dickerson knew that was far from the truth.

“They closed April’s case,” she said. “DA and everyone agreed to close it. I got up, marched out of that room and said ‘I’m not done, I’m going to keep investigating.’”

Dickerson would spend hours each day trying to find out who killed April. She filed complaints and eventually had the Metro Nashville Police Department reinvestigate the case. The department came up with a 47-page report.

According to the report, the detectives said there were “two hits” of Donovan Holt’s fingerprints on the duct tape roll.

Dickerson showed that piece of information to Donovan.

“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 told him.

Metro Nashville police said weeks ago Donovan confessed to strangling April, which is what Dickerson suspected from the beginning.

“I’m not shocked,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for a year knowing what happened; I already knew.”

April is now buried minutes away from her church. While Dickerson never got a chance to respond to her daughter over a year ago, she said her TikTok videos are words from the grave.

“I still watch her videos and am like ‘Oh I needed that one day,’” said Dickerson.

In the last year, Dickerson has written a book about grief and plans to open a grief community center that serves Rutherford and Bedford counties.

Donovan was charged with reckless homicide, evidence tampering and false reporting. Dickerson says she wants to see those charges bumped up to first-degree murder and add child endangerment.

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