Dateline: Friends Until Death - Who was Jessie Blodgett and what happened to her? Disturbing details of the 2013 murder, revealed 

Dateline: Friends Until Death, which aired on June 22, 2022, featured the tragic case of Jessie Blodgett, a 19-year-old teen from Wisconsin, who was back home from college in the summer of 2019.

Jessie Blodgett would spend the majority of the summer writing music with her former ex-boyfriend, Daniel, and was also a drama enthusiast.

The official synopsis for Dateline: Friends Until Death reads as follows:

The death of 19-year-old music lover Jessie Blodgett had been a disturbing mystery in her small Wisconsin town until investigators uncovered her shocking killer during a parallel investigation into another violent crime in a nearby town.

On July 14, 2013, Jessie was found murdered in her parents' house, with strangulation marks all over her hands and body.

More on this in our story.

Dateline: Friends Until Death- What happened to Jessie Blodgett?

On July 14, 2013, Jessie Blodgett was just back from the community theater production of "Fiddler on the Roof," where she played the titular role of the Fiddler.

She was out with her castmates and friends, celebrating the success of her play at a pool party, and returned home at 12:30 am, where her mother, Joy Blodgett, admitted her into the house. Soon after, Jessie went to bed, but her parents never saw her alive again after that fateful night.

The next day, Jessie was still fast asleep in her bed when her mother dropped off laundry in her room. However, her mother was shocked to see her daughter's cold body when she stopped by her home for lunch.

As shown on Dateline, Joy Blodgett's frantic call to 911 was as follows:

“My daughter is blue. I went to wake her up and I just got home for lunch and she won’t wake up! Oh my God...Her pants are all wet, and she’s got, it looks like strangulation marks.''

Soon, Joy and her husband, Buck Blodgett, realised that their daughter had been murdered, as Hartford Police Detective Richard Thickens confirmed. Remembering the crime scene, he said on Dateline:

“We found Jessie on the floor, very obvious mark on her neck, and marks on her wrists, very faint marks that could possibly have been binding marks.''

Dateline: Jessie Blodgett was murdered by her former ex-boyfriend

While the police initially suspected two older castmates who flirted with Jessie the previous night, they were soon ruled out as they had solid alibis. Another violent attack on Melissa Richards, days before Jessie's murder, brought her ex-boyfriend-turned-friend Daniel Bartelt under the police's radar.

As revealed on Dateline, Richards' attacker's car license plate matched with the teen consoling Jessie's parents at her house. While Jessie's parents were confident that Daniel could not murder their daughter, the evidence was all against him.

In a nearby park, the detectives found a trash can stuffed with a bloody cereal box. Inside the box were ropes, bloody sanitizing wipes, and tape, which contained both Daniel's and Jessie's DNA.

Further investigation into Daniel also led the police to some disturbing search history on the Internet, including serial killers and a violent adult film the teen had watched before murdering Jessie. It was later also confirmed that Daniel had s*xually assaulted the Dateline victim, following which he was arrested.

While Daniel did not confess to the crime even at his court trials, he currently sits behind bars at the Waupun Correctional Facility in West Bend, Wisconsin, and is not eligible for parole.

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