Emmerdale’s April reaches heartbreaking conclusion about Donna’s s.u.i.c.i.d.e as things get worse

For Emmerdale’s April Windsor (Amelia Flanagan), the worst thing that’s happened to her recently hasn’t been being kidnapped and dangled off a high car park by murderous thugs. She seems to have coped with that ordeal relatively well.

The thing she’s really struggling with is the discovery that the same car park was where her mother Donna Windsor (Verity Rushworth) met her own death.

Donna, a police officer, had been suffering from a form of lung cancer. She had fallen in love with Ross Barton (Mike Parr) and together they committed a number of crimes, which brought them into conflict with an evil character called Gary North (Fergus O’Donnell).

As North threatened to harm both Ross and April, Donna took drastic action to stop this happening, pulling him over the edge of the car park where she d.i.e.d along with him.

The official verdict on this event was that North had pulled her over the edge, but the truth was that it was the other way round, with Donna knowing she didn’t have long to live.

Growing up, April was apparently told the version that Donna’s d.e.a.t.h had been accidental, so when Ross let it slip that Donna had deliberately jumped from the car park it was a huge shock.

Even worse, as far as she was concerned, was the fact that her dad Marlon (Mark Charnock) had kept the truth from her all this time.

In Wednesday (December 11)’s episode, Ross and April went for a pizza together and it wasn’t long before she wanted answers to the numerous questions she had about her mum’s death. First of all, if Donna was ‘literally dying of cancer,’ why was she still at work?

Ross admitted that he hadn’t known about the cancer until after Donna died. She’d hidden her symptoms because she wanted to keep on working to make more money for April.

If he thought that would satisfy April he was wrong. She was angry that Donna chose to spend her last months working rather than with her five year old daughter.

Donna must have loved her job more than she loved her, April concluded, since catching a ‘random nutcase’ was so important to her.

This meant that Ross now had to explain more about Gary North. ‘He was threatening to hurt you in the most disgusting way,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t let him live. She was protecting you.’

April absorbed this revelation and came up with a sad conclusion – that Donna’s death had been her fault. ‘She didn’t kill herself because she was sick, but to save me.’

Ross realised that he’d unwittingly made things a lot worse for April as she told him, ‘You’ve changed everything once again,’ and stormed off in tears.