Jessie Blodgett, & Dateline revisits musician’s demise

Daniel Bartelt, a former classmate and admirer of Jessie Blodgett, brutally raped and killed her. The murder of Jessie Blodgett was looked at in the most recent episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.

Summary for the Dateline episode that aired on June 22:

Jessie Blodgett was starting as a singer and performer when her mother found her dead the day after one of her shows. In the episode, the detectives who worked on the Blodgett case talked about what they knew about it. Some of these details were about Daniel Bartelt, who was found guilty of the murder and given a life sentence for it.

Jessie Blodgett’s body was found, and it looked like she had choked to death

In July 2013, Jessie’s mother, Joy Blodgett, made a panicked call to the 911 centre of the local police department. She told the operators that she had found her daughter dead in bed. When the police got to the victim’s house on Wayside Drive, they found Jessie Blodgett, 19 years old, dead on the bedroom floor. Her mother had put her there so she could give CPR to her daughter. Investigators found that her body had been cleaned after she died.

Jessie was a big part of the youth theatre scene in Hartford, Wisconsin, where she lived. In July 2013, she had just finished the first performance of “Fiddler on the Roof,” so she went to a friend’s house to celebrate.

At noon the next day, Jessie’s mother found her dead body in her bed. She was no longer alive. Before she went to work that morning, Jessie’s mother told the police that she had seen her daughter sleeping in bed earlier that morning. Joy went home around lunchtime to check on her daughter during the day. She found her daughter dead in bed with marks on her neck. Jessie’s body was found at the scene, and a later investigation showed that she had been strangled before she died.

Murdered by morning

Bartelt, a former classmate of Jessie’s and a fan of hers, is said to have followed a woman with a knife into a park on July 12 and tried to attack her before the woman was able to take the knife away from him. July 12 was the date of the event. After that, it was said that he had told the police that he had been trying to scare the woman.

The woman who was attacked told police about her attacker and his car, which led them to believe that Bartelt was the one who did it. The book “Murdered by Morning” says that when Daniel was being questioned by the police, he said things about Blodgett’s death that made the police suspicious of him.

Along with bloody wipes and tape, the police also found a cereal box full of ropes that had been used to kill Jessie. After doing more research, the police found that the ropes had DNA from both Bartelt and Jessie. On top of that, they found evidence of wrongdoing in his search history, which led them to a porn film with a scene that was very similar to the murder.