“It all happened very, very quickly,” Holder told police. “None of it really made much sense.”
She and Hardy were on the bed inside the apartment’s smaller bedroom, getting along fine, when Hardy started bringing up the past. He called her a slut, she said, and accused her of ruining their relationship.
“I tried to get up, he pushed me,” she said, “then I started fighting back, he threw me into the bathroom, I hit the back of the shower wall and fell into the bathtub where he pulled me out.”
He dragged her out by her hair and picked her up again, she said, throwing her onto the futon, which had several weapons—what she described as “guns from ... the Army or ... I mean like from video games”—on it. She landed on top of the rifles and then fell onto the floor. In her telling, he stood above her and strangled her with both his hands. She would later tell Detective Faye Strother that she thought she was going to die. “His pupils were tiny,” she said. “I mean he looked ... crazy.”