At 19, Jessie Blodgett was just a college freshman with her whole life ahead of her.
The music education student at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee loved playing instruments, singing and acting, until her life was brutally cut short in 2013.
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A new “20/20” episode, “Her Last Note“ airing Friday, Jan. 23, at 9 p.m. ET on ABC and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu, examines the case.
You can also get more behind-the-scenes of each week’s episode by listening to “20/20: The After Show” weekly series right on your 20/20 podcast feed on Mondays, hosted by “20/20” co-anchor Deborah Roberts.
On July 15, 2013, Blodgett’s mother, Joy, found her dead in her bedroom in Hartford, Wisconsin. Her hands appeared to have been bound together and there was blood on her sheets and pillows, investigators said.
“My daughter is blue. I went to wake her up and I just got home from, for lunch and she won’t wake up,” Joy Blodgett said when she called 911 that day.
Just three days earlier, there had been a violent attack on another woman, Melissa Etzler, in nearby Richfield Historical Park.
The then-20-year-old was tackled by a man wielding a knife, she said. To save herself, Etzler said she grabbed the knife by the blade, causing deep injuries to her hands as she wrestled it away from her assailant. He then fled the scene in a van, she said.
“There was just blood everywhere,” Etzler told “20/20.” “I think that was like my fight or flight.”
Etzler provided a description of her attacker to the police. Police started trying to track down the van the attacker was driving, and the investigation led them to Daniel Bartelt — Blodgett’s ex-boyfriend.
Blodgett and Bartelt dated for about three months during their freshman year of high school, until he broke up with her, according to Blodgett’s father. They stayed friends and participated in musicals together throughout high school, he said, and they continued to write music together after graduating.
“Dan was just over the week before [her death], playing music in Jessie’s music room with her,” Buck Blodgett told “20/20.”
The day after Blodgett’s death, her parents hosted some of her friends in their home in a vigil for their daughter. Moriah Boehlen, a friend of Blodgett and Bartelt’s, remembered him comforting her at the vigil.
“I was holding his hand, and I had my head on his shoulder crying,” Boehlen told “20/20.” “He squeezed my hand in comfort.”
At that vigil, Bartelt got a call from police asking him to come in for an interview relating to the attack days earlier in the park. During questioning, police said he confessed to being the one that attacked Etzler.
“I wanted to scare someone else, because everyone else looks so comfortable,” Bartelt told authorities at the time.
He was charged with attempted murder and reckless endangerment before authorities began asking him about Blodgett’s murder once he told police he was at her house when investigators called him.
“I think someone raped and murdered her,” Bartelt told authorities, which raised alarm bells since the detail about the suspected rape was not public information yet.
Police then found a key piece of evidence in a garbage can in a park near the one where Etzler was attacked. Bartelt said he’d been there the morning Blodgett was murdered.
In a discarded Frosted Mini-Wheats box, investigators found rope, alcohol wipes and tape that had DNA, along with traces of Blodgett and Bartelt’s DNA. Police said they also found suspicious search histories about serial killers on Bartelt’s computer.
Bartelt was then charged with first-degree intentional homicide, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was not charged with rape.
Bartelt was found guilty in Blodgett’s death, and sentenced to life in prison without parole, despite his defense maintaining his innocence. Bartelt tried to appeal his conviction in 2018 but was denied.
In the attack of Etzler, Bartelt took a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment while the charge for her attempted murder was dismissed, according to authorities.
Shortly after Blodgett’s death, her father started the “LOVE>hate” project in her memory. Its goal is ending interpersonal violence and promoting forgiveness.
“We believe that violence tends to happen a lot less in the presence of love and a lot more in the absence of love,” Buck Blodgett told “20/20.”
