Ohio woman gets 40 years for poisoning husband

TOLEDO, Ohio (WKBN) – An Ohio woman who admitted to injecting her husband with poison was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Amanda Hovanec pleaded guilty in February for her involvement in the killing of her estranged husband, Timothy Hovanec, with a drug imported from Africa where the couple had resided for a time due to his job with the U.S. Department of State.

Federal prosecutors say that Hovanec developed a relationship with a South African citizen while living there and initiated divorce proceedings against her husband in 2020 when they returned to the United States.

In 2021, a custody battle ensued and Timothy Hovanec was awarded visitation, including two months in the summer. The children went with their father for an April 2022 weekend visitation, as ordered, after which their father returned them to Amanda Hovanec’s Wapakoneta residence. Later, a missing persons investigation was opened when the husband failed to check out of an area hotel where he had been staying.

During the investigation, law enforcement officials discovered the husband’s abandoned car in Dayton, Ohio. It had been equipped with a dash camera.  A review of the camera’s video showed that the husband had returned the children to Hovanec’s residence around 7 p.m. on April 24, 2022. The video showed Hovanec and her mother waiting outside the residence next to the garage and Hovanec telling her children to go inside the house.

Next, the victim was heard saying in the video, “What the heck are you doing?  Did you just assault me?” and then, “Get away from me  . . .  Get off of me.”  The victim and Hovanec came into the camera’s view and the video showed Hovanec and her husband getting into a tussle and Hovanec pulling the man to the ground, holding him around the neck until his body went limp and he became unresponsive, lying on the driveway. Hovanec stood up and turned off her husband’s car, which stopped the recording.

Investigators later learned that Hovanec’s boyfriend from South Africa, Anthony Theodorou, was in town at the time of the murder and that he obtained the substance used to kill Timothy Hovanec and also helped Amanda Hovanec dispose of her husband’s body.

Investigators say Amanda Hovanec’s mother was charged as an accessory after the facet because she knew about the murder plan and drove Amanda Hovanec and Theodorou and the victim’s body to the grave site, which was dug in advance of the murder.

The investigation determined that the victim was injected with M-99, also known as Etorphine, a Schedule I controlled substance approximately 1000 times more potent than morphine, according to investigators. It is used in veterinary medicine for zoo and wildlife anesthesia.

According to court records, Hovanec considered killing her husband for at least a year before the murder and had considered alternate means to do so, including hiring a hitman, before settling on injecting him with M-99.

Amanda Hovanec’s mother, Anita Green, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and two years of supervised release after pleading guilty to being an accessory to the crimes committed by Amanda Hovanec and Anthony Theodorou. Theodorou’s sentencing originally scheduled for Oct. 1 has been postponed to Thursday, Oct. 3.

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