WAPAKONETA, OH – The quiet streets of this rural Ohio town have been shaken by the chilling circumstances surrounding the murder of Timothy Hovanec, whose life came to a sudden end during a custody exchange in May 2022. The plot, months in the making, unraveled in a way that stunned even seasoned investigators, leading to the conviction of his estranged wife, Amanda Leigh Hovanec, who now awaits a likely lifetime behind bars.
Amanda Hovanec, 38, entered a guilty plea to aggravated murder in the Auglaize County Court of Common Pleas, admitting to killing her husband in a scheme that combined calculated deception and cold resolve. The court accepted her plea last month, cementing her fate in state prison with no possibility of parole under Ohio law.
The case exposes a deadly web spun far beyond the boundaries of a marital breakup. Timothy Hovanec, 36, was a respected researcher for the U.S. State Department, a job that took the young family to far-flung locales, including South Africa in 2018. It was there that Amanda formed a clandestine relationship with Anthony Theodorou, a South African national who would become an instrumental figure in the deadly plot.
As family tensions escalated back in the United States in 2020, Amanda Hovanec filed for divorce and soon attempted to block Timothy from seeing their three daughters, disregarding a court order that granted him visitation rights. The disintegration of their marriage played out in courtrooms, but what began as a battle for custody took a sinister turn.
Just two days before his murder, Timothy was awarded temporary custody of the children for the summer. It was during this brief visitation period that Amanda orchestrated her plot. Prosecutors revealed that she had obtained a vial of M-99—an animal tranquilizer thousands of times more powerful than morphine—mailed to her by Theodorou a month earlier.
On the day of the murder, Timothy was unloading car seats from his vehicle when his estranged wife crept up and injected him with the lethal substance. Video from a dashcam captured the chaos, including Timothy’s desperate pleas as he realized something was terribly wrong. Amanda struggled with him, knocked his phone from his hand, and held him down until he stopped moving.
What unfolded next was a grim operation. With the victim unresponsive, Amanda removed his smart watch, shut off his car, and enlisted the aid of her mother, Anita Green, and Theodorou. The group acted in concert to hide the crime, placing a plastic bag over Timothy’s body due to concerns about bodily fluids, and transported his remains to a remote cemetery-like site near farmland once owned by Amanda’s family.
Theodorou, who had previously dug the shallow grave, helped her lay Timothy to rest in a wooded area at the intersection of Blank Pike and Wrestle Creek Road. After completing their task, Amanda and her accomplice waited for Green to return and drive them away.
The sensation of the case deepened when investigators confronted Amanda with video evidence from the dashcam. Her initial claims that Timothy had left after the custody drop-off collapsed. Facing the reality of the footage, she admitted to the attack, saying she had injected him with a fatal dose of what she referred to as “poison” or “drug,” fully aware of its deadly potential.
While Amanda Hovanec is already serving a 40-year federal sentence for distribution of a controlled substance resulting in death and related charges—telling the court her actions were driven by selfishness—her sentencing in state court remains pending. Both Green and Theodorou have also been convicted federally in connection with the killing and face additional state charges for complicity to aggravated murder, with pretrial hearings scheduled for the middle of March.
What began as a bitter custody dispute became a story of betrayal, collusion, and premeditated murder—one that has left a lasting mark on the community and the lives of the surviving children, now at the center of a tragedy marked by unimaginable loss.