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About this Episode
A teen musician is murdered in her home, another young woman is brutally attacked nearby and the link that helped police catch the killer.
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Transcript
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We'll come into the night, and I'll have to invite three attendants.
Yeah, we'll leave still a couple of days away.
Jomalon has the complete forecast till the end.
Also coming up, we're moving on.
July 12th, it was a beautiful day.
The sun was beating down.
I decided to go to the park with my dog, Remi.
When I pulled up to the park, there was a van sitting there.
I didn't really think anything of it
because it's a park.
It was very peaceful, very quiet, and it was just, I mean, my dog,
which is what I love to do.
We walked through the woods a little bit,
and we were there for about an hour.
Once it got really hot, I'm like, okay, let's get back to the car.
That's when I noticed the van was still there.
I probably got halfway to my car, I heard somebody running from behind me.
I did a very quick double take, and that's when I saw the knife in his hand.
He tackles me on the ground.
I thought he was trying to kill me.
I was terrified.
We fought on the ground.
There's just blood everywhere.
I think that was like my fight or flight.
The police, they wanted to figure out who was this, who did it, how can we find them?
And, you know, just try to understand what's going on here.
And as scary as this attack was, what was about to happen next to a different young woman
in the area would be even more terrifying.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Hartford 911, what's the emergency?
My daughter is blue.
I went to wake her up, and I just got home.
And my husband lunches, she won't wake up.
Hold her, your daughter.
19.
Oh my god.
Okay, so if you're breathing, I don't think so, no.
Oh, that's beating.
I don't think so.
I just blew.
I tried to wake her up, but she's not even waking up.
Okay.
Can I see you?
Jesse was really bright.
She had a ton of energy and passion.
I'm Buck Blodgett.
I'm Jesse's dad.
Jesse, she went to UWM, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
She's 19 years old.
Jesse was a very talented musician.
She could play the piano.
She could sing.
She could play the violin.
Jesse was a performer more than anything.
She would find her way to a stage and entertain.
There's nothing like the opening night of a show.
It's high energy.
Everybody's really excited.
That energy is infectious, and the audience feels that
from the moment they come through the outer doors.
The first week of Fiddler on the roof, it was everywhere.
It was the talk of the town.
Jesse got the role as the Fiddler.
Fiddler on the roof sounds crazy though.
She got to play the violin,
which is something that she was always extraordinary at.
I was so proud of her.
She won the title role in her first community theater out of school.
And she started her own business that summer,
and had 28 mostly kids come into our house every week for piano, voice, and violin lessons.
The morning of July 15th was Jesse's first morning
that summer to sleep in.
They just had opening weekend and late night cast party.
So this Monday morning she was pooped.
It was a typical morning for Jesse's mom.
She walked into her room to drop off some laundry before she headed off to work.
Joy came home for lunch, called up to Jesse.
No answer.
She didn't think much of it.
She called up to Jesse again, still no answer.
And then she looks out the picture window while she's eating a quick lunch.
And she sees one of Jesse's six-year-old students and her dad walking up her driveway.
And so now she calls upstairs Jesse.
Jesse, your lessons here.
And there's still no answer.
So she runs upstairs and goes into Jesse's room.
She goes over to her.
She reaches out the wake Jesse up and Jesse's cold.
Oh my god, oh my god.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna stage out the fleece.
So hang on, I will go with you just a second.
You can hear Joy's emotion.
It's heartbreaking.
Then when she's put on hold, you can still hear her in the background,
calling out for her daughter.
Man, I have the EMS coming and please will be there shortly.
They're underway.
Man, is anyone else with you?
What?
Is anyone else with you?
No.
I got the phone call that every parent fears.
And Joy said, honey, it's Jesse.
I came home and she's, she's not responding.
And she said the EMTs are here and I said,
hun, is she and that I didn't want to say the word.
So I said, gone, is she gone?
She just tailed off and into tears.
So I hang up the phone and grab my car keys and drive home.
We saw a bunch of police cars outside of Jesse's house.
We tried calling her, we tried texting her,
but we couldn't get hold of anyone.
Lieutenant Jim Zowicki was one of the detectives that arrived that day.
So we're outside what was the blodgeon home you came here to process the scene.
Yes, it was a day off for me.
My phone rang, it was my captain at the time,
saying that they had a suspicious death in the city of a young person.
Apart, I walked around, I checked doors and windows,
and checked for anything that looked like forced entry,
or if there were going to be any problems.
I didn't notice any of that.
I walk into the house and I just kind of get an immediate feel of what we have here.
Where was Jesse found?
Jesse was found up in her bedroom.
He's here.
Upstairs.
So this was Jesse's room?
This was.
This was.
We had taken video of her bedroom,
and I saw it was a normal young lady's bedroom.
When I arrived up here, Jesse was laying in this general direction right here
with her feet facing towards the door.
Her head rate about in that direction.
I learned subsequently that her mother got her removed from the bed,
because part of CPR is you wanted on a hard surface.
So her mother had moved her.
I had immediately noticed the way that her head was tilted,
you could see a faint ligature mark on the side of her neck.
Pressure was applied to her neck via some type of
ligature, and there was pressure applied from the back,
which is something she couldn't have done.
We could also identify some faint bruising on the wrists in the ankle area.
Her hands had been bound together.
Her ankles possibly bound together as well.
This was a more intimate marker.
Yes, I would agree with that.
Someone who strangles at someone who is more comfortable,
especially if they come into someone else's house to be able to do that.
So as Lieutenant Zawiki looks over the room,
he's searching everywhere,
just anywhere to see what could have been used as the murder weapon.
We found extension cords in the room that were used to plug things in.
She also had the pulling type of shades that you can pull and control that had that rope on them too.
None of the items that he was finding in that room matched the marks on her neck.
Any other evidence found in this room?
There was a little bit of blood evidence that was found on the sheets in the pillow cases.
There was no signs of a struggle, no ransacking,
and actually when I had first shown up,
I won into the breezeway area.
She had a piano and on top of that was some cash from a piano lesson.
In that money wasn't taken.
This wasn't a robbery.
Did the scene seem staged?
Yes, absolutely.
The way her mother had found her, she was in bed.
She was covered up her head.
It was on the pillow as if she was sleeping or as if someone placed her back in bed
to make it look like she was sleeping.
Investigators are talking to Jesse's mother.
They're trying to figure out what happened.
And in those conversations,
Jesse's mother tells detective something really unusual
that Jesse's hair and pants were wet in bed when she found her daughter.
It appeared to be that she was bathed.
That struck me as extremely odd.
Now a mystery surrounded the death of a 19-year-old woman in Washington County.
She died in Hartford.
When we found out that she had been murdered,
there was a panic in Hartford.
We were so scared.
There was a dangerous person on the loose.
To have an actress killed after the first week of your musical,
it was beyond any imagination.
Holy cow, something's happening in our area.
Nobody saw this coming.
Nobody knew who had killed her or what had even happened.
This was all just completely a mystery.
Ma'am, she and the line with me were going to get EMS out for you.
What was going on?
She's pulled to the touch and she's pulled.
And she's gone.
It looks like strangulation works.
There are strangulation marks.
That's what it looks like.
I don't know what's going on.
I don't know what's going on.
After talking with Joy and her telling me what she saw,
Jesse's knack, we realized somebody had intentionally taken her life.
So it's part of the investigation.
You're canvassing the neighborhood.
Did you get any helpful tips from neighbors?
We've gone to each one of the houses in the neighborhood,
even in the back neighborhoods.
Nobody saw anything and there was nothing
that rose anyone's suspicions.
We have a killer in our community and it could be anyone.
I had no idea who would ever want to hurt her.
We were so scared.
This case absolutely stood out to us.
We don't have homicides in the city of Hartford.
They're very, very rare.
Hartford, Wisconsin, is a small town.
We're just off the northwest corner
of a greater metropolitan Milwaukee area.
Beautiful community, roughly 16,000 people.
There's a lot of art.
There's a lot of performing arts.
The Hartford's kind of exemplifies the the heartland of America.
The Hartford's kind of exemplifies the heartland of America.
The Hartford's kind of exemplifies the heartland of America.
The Hartford's kind of exemplifies the heartland of America.
Hartford, it's the local coffee shop.
It's where a lot of high school students would go out and hang.
If you didn't know where Jesse was,
you would probably be able to find her at Perk Place.
Buck.
Hello.
Perk Place.
Hot spot in town.
And that's where I met Jesse's dad
in downtown Hartford, Wisconsin.
Jesse loved this little shop.
Often I was in the habit of coming after school with friends.
They'd come here and do homework or just hang out and have fun.
This is Jesse when she's one day old.
And that's a very tired but very present looking joy who had just had her.
It was the most miraculous day of my life.
Jesse was joy and bucks only child.
They only had one daughter.
So for joy, this is still too much.
She can't speak about this.
It's too heartbreaking for her.
It's too painful.
We had to leave Hartford so she didn't have to relive the nightmare constantly every day.
I miss everything about Jesse.
Our bond just got deeper as the years passed.
We talk about everything and my kid who was never an issue trying to pull anything out of Jesse.
I couldn't shut her up sometimes.
She just was free to talk about everything and things that mattered.
Sometimes I would get annoyed.
I'd be like, let's just talk about high school things.
But she was definitely wise beyond her years.
She was the kid at the high school parties that chastised the smokers and the drinkers.
She had great inner strength and belief.
Music was so important to Jesse.
It was her way to express herself.
So she started playing piano as a kid.
As a kid, first grade.
Yeah, I took piano with Jesse because I thought I would need to in order for her to
stay in it. She was so far ahead of me and loved it so much.
She didn't need me anymore, so I just dropped up.
I met Jesse in high school.
We heard someone playing piano and singing and we're like,
we don't recognize that voice. Who is that?
We convinced her to try out for the concert choir and she was incredible.
Jesse wrote her own music.
I think that was what made her unique.
That's what made her special and that's what drew a lot of us to her.
Jesse's coming out party as a local musician was the eighth grade talent show.
The first song she ever wrote, joy and I had not heard. We didn't even know about it.
She starts to play and she starts to sing and I hear what's coming out of my kid.
And then the whole place exploded and standing ovation and she won the talent show.
It was the first time for me. It was the first time I really saw her talent as a musician.
Super musical. So in college, she auditioned for the University of Wisconsin Music Program.
So you want to do your name and introduce your pieces?
Okay, well my name is Jesse Glaget. I'm a freshman at UWM right now.
I'm in the English Education Program. Hopefully translate the music out.
After her audition, you know, she called me and she just was beaming.
She made it into the School of Music.
Well done.
Her dream and her vision was being a music teacher.
She really thought that she was going to change the world through music.
Music was going to be her vehicle.
I took on the directing for the Fiddler and the Roof production.
I first met Jesse at auditions.
She stuck out even from that first night of auditions.
She had an effervescence and an energy that was infectious.
And she could play the fiddle.
That, I had no idea someone was going to walk through the door and present that way.
She came home one day and she said, I'm the Fiddler.
She loved the cast. She called them her second family.
Jesse's last weekend on Earth was opening weekend for the Fiddler and the Roof.
We talked to the director of did anyone have a problem with Jesse?
Were there any jealousy issues?
Were there anything that could potentially lead someone to feel that they needed to harm her?
Because my mind started to think that this could have potentially been a targeted attack.
They knew their way around the house.
They knew where Jesse's bedroom was and that's where they went.
The crime lab did.
The rape analysis where they end up checking for any body fluids.
It usually takes time to get results back from any type of sexual assault kit that would be
done or any type of evidence that was potentially found on Jesse's body.
As investigators are waiting for the results to see if Jesse was sexually assaulted,
they're trying to piece together a timeline of Jesse's last days.
We made the termination that she was killed that morning simply by when we got there,
the body temperature was still warm.
She did not have rigamortis that had set in.
They had performed Friday and Saturday and then Sunday afternoon,
Matt and they then they had the cast party, the traditional late night cast party.
Jesse came home kind of late and was a little troubled.
The diary that she had that she was keeping we phone next to her bed.
Detectives learned that Jesse wrote in her diary just hours before she was murdered and
something that she wrote immediately jumps out at them.
In a way I'm furious there was a subject in the cast that she was furious at
was a little older than her.
We might want to find out why she was upset with this person.
It's a big clue in this investigation and that diary entry includes a name.
She was an actress, a musician, and also a college student.
My name is Jesse Klanchit and I'm a freshman at UWM right now.
But now 19-year-old Jesse is at the center of a bizarre murder mystery.
Everyone wanted answers, nobody had any.
He was very much like hearing that.
Her daughter had been killed.
I cannot imagine what buck went through.
You know, I was sorry for her dad not being there when she needed him most.
And that I would never stop loving her and I would never forget her.
We did a full work up on Jesse Blodgett.
Her friends who she knew, who they knew, where she worked, what type of person Jesse was.
And when we did that, Jesse was an amazing person.
She was doing everything in life right, everything.
Jesse had no enemies that I could think of.
The detectives asked us if we had any thoughts about who might have done this.
And we did have some thoughts.
There was the guys who trimmed our trees who were in the trees literally over Jesse's bedroom.
Trimming big limbs just the week before.
And they came in the morning as you were sleeping.
That is potentially a lead here.
The trees that they were working on overlooked her bed from window.
Where were those trees?
Just right back here?
Yeah, those trees were right over in this area.
And that's a window to her room.
It is, it's her bedroom.
They're here for a day, two days, three days.
They're picking up what the routine of the house is.
Window mom and dad leave.
I just thought, you know, maybe they had thoughts.
Seeing her thinking about her bedroom.
We interviewed people from the tree cutting place.
And we were able to determine that none of the tree cutters were involved in this.
The buck tells detectives about a concern that Jesse had about another individual.
And there was an old man in a restaurant where she was a waitress right in her neighborhood.
And he had once done an inappropriate thing when she was on the job.
He positioned himself in a narrow hallway where the waitresses had to come into contact with him,
had to rub against him as they passed.
But detectives are able to determine that that former coworker wasn't even in town
when Jesse was murdered, so he's completely cleared.
There are still no official calls of death.
If I already say they are awaiting toxicology results.
According to a police affidavit, Jesse's mother says after coming home from a cast party about
1 a.m. Jesse went to bed alone.
The cast party was at a really neat property.
It was out on a farm.
There were llamas out there.
This big swimming pool and the kids were swimming and playing.
We were having chicken fights.
It was just fun.
Jesse was happy and smiling.
I'm actually in that video with Jesse next to me chatting.
Jesse comes up and sits down on the chair next to me.
And is just bubbly as all get out and tells me how much fun she had had this first weekend
being this character.
I was thrilled to hear this.
Jesse came home from the cast party that night.
Joy heard Jesse come in and got up and asked her how was the day and the party.
And Jesse was a little troubled.
She had to talk with her about being uncomfortable at the party with this older male subject
who she thought became a little too flirtatious with her.
Jesse was uncomfortable enough to write it in her diary and leave it for us as evidence.
This was her last entry into her diary.
This was written the night before she was murdered.
It was I think I'm being corrupted.
I think certain men are taking what should be platonic love and perverting it into competition.
In a way I'm furious.
And Jesse writes about just this relationship with an older cast mate.
It's that she needs to clearly define that relationship.
And that castmate's name is Randy Talley.
Randy Talley was the choreographer for the show.
He also played one of the young men with a leading role in it.
At the cast party I did see her sitting in his lap.
It was around a fire.
This was a 46 year old individual and she was 19.
I did feel very unsettled seeing her in his lap.
I just remember feeling like is this something that she's okay with?
Because if yes, then whatever, that's their business.
But if not, I just felt this like what if she's not comfortable?
Like does she need somebody to intervene?
It just stuck with me.
Detectives have seen this entry that talks about an older cast mate, Randy Talley.
They've got questions for him now.
They call them in for an interview.
What happened?
Well, I don't want to get to that.
He was probably one of the last people to see her.
Certainly the police would want to talk to him.
When I get in the vibe, it's like for me?
Yeah, this is what you feel like you got a little more to tell me.
That was another one of those red flags for us.
I just can't believe this.
I hugged her goodbye last night and now she's gone.
And there's something else.
Investigators here don't know yet.
That just three days earlier in a town, just about 15 minutes away,
there had been that other violent attack on a young woman.
I saw the knife in his hand.
I was terrified.
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We are going to begin with the mysterious death of a teenage actress.
Her mother discovered her dead in her bedroom
the day after a cast party.
We were all terrified.
Oh my gosh, is it somebody that we were working with
on this show?
And Jesse had mentioned that someone in the cast
had made her feel uncomfortable.
The subject was identified as Randy Talley.
He was a 46-year-old individual and she was 19.
One of Jesse's friends tells investigators
they saw Randy pull Jesse onto his lap at one of the cast parties.
We subsequently were able to have an interview with Randy
and determine whether he was our suspect in this homicide.
What happened?
Detective Thickins conducted the interview.
Okay, I can tell you, Jesse's phone
deceased today by your parents.
They found her really this afternoon.
Okay, so that-
Will you tell me anything about the circumstances of finding her?
Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out.
It's not real clear right now.
We tried to get his time frame for that period that she had died.
And that was a little difficult
because he was supposed to be at a certain job.
Did you work this morning?
No, I did not.
So that was another one of those red flakes for us.
Randy says he works attempt job
and he didn't get a call that day.
They tried to call me but they had their own numbers or something.
They didn't get a hold of me until, you know, almost ended up at the work day.
We talked with them about how things went at the cast party,
what his interpretation was, what his feelings for Jesse were.
What happened to the party?
There was swimming and talking and hanging out.
I literally sat right next to Jesse for most of the night.
Were you just like sitting next to her or was she like sitting tight up in it?
No, you were on a couch with four or five kids.
Okay, we were about hit to hit.
Okay, I think I probably put my hand on her back a few times.
She didn't touch my leg a few times any times.
So you would have some contact with her?
Sure.
Did you have any impression for her that anything was wrong?
No, on kosher?
No, no.
You know, in fact, we had the best night, Sunday night.
We had also learned through our investigation that at another cast party,
Jesse was actually sitting on his lap.
One of the things that I wanted to comments I got from one of the other people
that was at the party was that you seemed like you guys were flirting a little bit.
A little bit.
One of the things they said was that the party on Saturday night,
like you pulled her on your lap.
I did.
Okay. She's one of my favorite people in the cast.
Okay.
Did anything more than that happen?
Absolutely not.
Okay.
I mean, I don't understand.
I understand the question and I understand what you're saying.
Okay.
I felt very close to her.
I never, I never kissed her.
Okay.
Or anything beyond what those people saw.
Well, you said you got, you know,
I have a girlfriend.
And yeah, that, you know, if I would repress her a lot.
It would not.
I mean, but, you know, it was, it's not anything I was shamed of.
You know, I'm a demonstratively affectionate person.
We had learned that he had a long time girlfriend.
He was in what we would have considered a stable relationship.
Since Randy had physical contact with Jesse in the last few days,
they asked him for a DNA sample and he agrees to it.
Swap it up back and forth inside your cheek.
I would stay in a different room and watch the interview.
When we back with him, 30 seconds.
All right.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then, Detective Thiccans would come out.
We would confer a little bit.
Do you want a dinner?
I need to can't feed.
And then, he would go back in and he would re-initiate the questioning.
Okay.
I don't want to leave here.
I guess with the vibe that there's something more
that maybe you have some more insight.
That's, that's what I'm getting to know.
I don't.
Okay.
I wish.
I wish I had some more insight.
I can't imagine this.
Detective's want to know if you didn't go to work that day,
what were you actually doing?
So what did you do today when you were
you know, did you sleep in after what did you?
Yeah, I just kind of slept in.
I Facebooked some friends.
I sent out a couple of resumes.
I um, you know, I hung around the house.
I guess actors.
I don't have a hard time reading sometimes when emotions people have.
That's why, I don't know if that's why I'm getting to vibe.
It's like, I mean,
to vibe from who from me?
This is what you feel like you got a little more to tell me.
But if you don't know, that's fine.
I'm just, if there's anything,
there's something you can think of.
No, I'm just forward, sir.
I'm just, I just can't believe this.
Okay.
I hugged her goodbye last night and now she's gone.
He was asked, did he commit this homicide?
And he adamantly denied that he had any involvement, didn't he?
I didn't know Randy very well,
but I never saw anything that caused me to say,
oh, wait a minute, I've got a member of my production staff,
who I feel is unsafe with these young people.
That kind of thought never, ever occurred to me.
This is the joy of my job.
I'm pretty sure.
But detectives aren't so sure.
They want to take a closer look at what Randy was doing the day of the murder.
And meanwhile, investigators, just a few towns over,
are working their own disturbing case.
And got a phone call.
There was a alleged attack at the park.
I really thought he was going to die.
It was like, oh boy, here we started to wonder if this is something that could be potentially connected.
This is unreal, my fear is that this happened, this is somebody that knew her.
He said, you haven't been to her house, do you have her?
You don't know where she lives.
What led us to a guy named Randy Talley was Jesse's last entry in her diary,
where she speaks of this person that made her feel uncomfortable at the cast party.
I'm a hugger.
I hug Pete.
Okay.
You know her.
I mean, you're saying you don't know her a lot.
I'm saying that I've known her for six weeks,
and then I feel very close to her.
I'm completely freaking out.
So there weren't any tips or hot moments or anything like that.
No, not any.
Detectives want to verify Randy's story.
So they pull his phone records.
We were able to determine his movements,
so there was an impossibility that you would have been able to be at the house on that day.
Mr. Talley was ruled out as a suspect in this case.
As all of this is going on, just a few towns over, investigators with the Washington County
Sheriff's Office are investigating their own case of a young woman attacked just three days
before Jesse Blodgett's murder.
We're going to need a copy of an ambulance.
My son's girlfriend was just attacked in a park by a guy.
So July 12th, you are here.
Yes.
Walking your dog.
Yep.
Was there anybody else out here when you first arrived?
I remember there being one person here.
He was sitting in a van,
but I didn't really think anything of it because it's a public park.
So Melissa said that she ended her walk with the dog, walk back to her cart,
and she had turned around and there's a guy running towards her.
When did it hit you that you weren't real danger?
When I turned around and said, oh, you scared me and he didn't stop, he just kept coming.
And that's when I saw the knife in his hand.
He just straight up tackled me.
I grabbed the knife and I've got the blade on in my hand.
And I'm just yelling at him like, what are you doing?
Did you get the wherewithal to put your hand on the knife blade?
My body was like, you know what, this is our best bet at survival.
I knew I had a grip on the knife and I was not letting go.
My adrenaline just really kicked in and was like, you don't have time to feel pain right now.
You need to survive.
A lot of people also said like, why didn't your dog bite him?
She just turned a year old.
She just was standing there and probably just kind of confused.
Then he went back and ran back to his van and took off.
Then she went to her car through the knife into the car and drove home.
Who was your first call?
Joel, we weren't even dating for that long.
She was just frantic. She said I just got attacked.
I just told her to go to my parents house and I stayed on the phone with her the whole time.
I'm on the phone. My hand is ripped open.
There's just blood everywhere.
I'm so thankful that he was there and he kept me calm because that's
I truly believe that's what I hope to save my life.
And then your dad calls 911.
In our area, there's very little stranger on, stranger crime.
You're very cynical at first, right?
You're like, it's probably is some BS, something manufactured.
But that was my initial thought.
When I got to the hospital, I introduced myself and talked to Melissa.
Okay, it's Detective Plausing July 12th.
Yes.
But how many falls hospital?
She was obviously distraught.
She was obviously shook.
So then he tackled me on the ground.
I somehow managed to grab the knife from him.
I mean, I really honestly couldn't tell you how I got it, but I did.
I'm just glad that you remember my dog.
I really thought he was going to die.
But I grabbed it.
That was a good one.
Dude, that's me.
So did he ever say anything?
When I was happy to from him, he said, can I go?
He was asking me if he could go and I was like, no.
No, when you tried grabbing the knife away from me,
I'm like, if you're going to go, I'm taking this with me.
And he started running back to his car.
And I'm like, oh, there's fast as I could.
He didn't say word until, can I just go?
And what did that sound like?
Week.
Scared.
It sounded confused.
And who asks that anyways?
I mean, what a weird thing to ask.
So the detective calls you.
Yep.
What did the detective say?
Just like interrogating me, asking me where I was last night.
How do I know her?
Detectives have cleared Melissa's boyfriend.
And they determine the story that she's telling is true.
And there is one particular detail that seals the deal for them.
She had gravel dust on the toes of her shoes.
Her story was that he was on top of her and she was on her stomach.
That would create these circles of gravel dust.
Whose white, blonde hair, black frame glasses.
And she described him to her team.
And she was to this day one of the better witnesses.
I've ever talked to him one entire time.
She would've made a better witness than I did.
Would you be able to do a composite sketch on him?
Could try for sure.
The sketch was very detailed and it was actually pretty remarkable
her recollection of this attacker during a traumatic incident where she's being attacked
and possibly going to be killed.
Washington County deputies are searching for a man who assaulted a woman in rich field historical
park.
I remember watching an on TV.
And I'm like, why is nobody calling?
Nothing.
Zero.
Zip.
Not a single call.
You get that realization of like,
wow, this is not going to be easy to solve.
But soon, there's an unexpected breakthrough in the knife attack on Melissa.
And I was like, holy ****, that never happens.
They zero in on a suspect.
But when they track him down, no one can believe where they find him.
So that was wondering if I could talk to you.
And he's like, sure.
And I'm like, where are you?
He was portraying himself as something that he absolutely wasn't.
He was with us when we were grieving.
He saw our pain.
Both cases very different.
But investigators are now piecing to pause it together.
Yes.
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Now a mystery surrounding the death of a 19-year-old woman in Washington County.
15,000 people have been on edge ever since Jesse Blodgetts murdered.
That 19-year-old UWM student was found dead inside her family's home.
That crime sent shockwaves through Hartford.
Fiddler on the roof. Jesse's a part of the cast.
She was the Fiddler, and after she was murdered,
the Hartford players didn't know if they should do the second weekend.
Without Jesse, everybody was traumatized.
What do we do now?
Do we cancel?
What would Jesse want us to do?
It was very challenging to get back into it.
They debated it hard and decided together that Jesse would want the show to go on.
And they were right.
Final decision was made to take a candle.
When we placed it up there where she had originally set.
And that candle was lit through the entire musical.
Just a lit candle.
Because they said Jesse wasn't replaceable.
So why even try it?
The symbolism of the Fiddler sitting on the roof is that life is always tenuous.
And you never really know what's going to happen next.
She could never have known that that harm was coming toward her.
While police in Hartford, Wisconsin, are investigating Jesse's murder,
they don't know yet that just three days earlier,
there had been a violent attack on Melissa Ezzler in a nearby town.
Washington County deputies are searching for a man who assaulted a woman in rich field
historical park.
When I found out about the attack in the park,
I did think it was related because we live in a small town.
So there's not a lot of crime that happens here.
The detective that went down to process the Melissa's car,
located a knife on the passenger floorboard of the vehicle.
And then later Melissa was like, that's the knife that I took from him.
Blood on the handle still most likely heard blood from the defensive wound of her hand.
We had assigned a detective go to the park.
There was a litany of evidence
through the driveway out the parking lot.
There were sunglasses that were located there.
And then we found a real estate ventilation tape.
It's kind of like an aluminum backing on it a little bit so that when you put it on,
it sticks real tight and it's real hard to get out of.
Why would he have a real estate on it?
This is not a robbery.
And I've done legit robberies.
It's a threat of force.
Guy with the gun, guy with the knife.
We now have your attention.
But that's followed by a request.
Give me your wallet, your necklace, and then you go in deeper and you're thinking,
well why didn't he hide his identity?
Put on a mask, put on a cap, why didn't he?
Absolutely nothing.
Really the answer is because he didn't expect that there would be a witness.
Probably because he wanted to take her with him.
And that's when my brain was like, oh, were you trying to kidnap me?
Were you trying to rape me?
What is this?
He was probably going to credit find her up somehow or control her that way.
So she really showed a lot of strength
and a lot of determination to survive by fighting him off.
Tuesday, July 16, 139, we're in Richfield at the historical park.
This is going to walk us through what had occurred.
Was it the 12th?
Yes, July 12th.
So a couple of days after the incident, you come back with police.
I basically walked them through the park of what happened during the attack.
Right to the gravel part after this.
I still had my leg bandaged up from the hospital.
The whole side of my leg was just ripped up from being tackled on the ground.
I noticed he was looking at me out of his car and when he noticed that I saw him,
he went like this so I couldn't see him there.
But she did say something about a blue minivan.
Even that's a pretty common vehicle, at least in Washington County.
So something really interesting happens just two weeks before the attack on Melissa,
an officer on routine patrol in that same park makes a crucial observation.
Richfield historical park, there's not a lot of traffic at all.
You see three cars in the parking lot at one time, that's quite a busy day.
Part of our duties are property checks and park checks.
I drove through this park at least once a day.
I saw a single vehicle tend to recognize the vehicles you see on a regular basis.
This was one I hadn't seen before.
I ran the registration.
I did a brief background check.
There were no red flags, no criminal history.
Nothing that caused any concern.
I concluded that the registrowners were probably just out here walking or walking their dog.
So he hears from fellow officers that they're looking for a similar vehicle that may have been
involved in that attack. Andy came up to me and said, hey, I don't know if it'll help or not,
but there was this blue van parked and here's the plate.
Here you go. Thanks, Andy.
With that license plate, we were subsequently able to identify who the vehicle belonged to.
It came back to a couple out of Richfield, right, local.
So then detectives went out to their house and they said, do you have this minivan?
They said, yes, our son uses this minivan.
And found out that they had a 20-year-old son.
So I called him, said I'm investigating incident that happened last Friday.
I was wondering if I could talk to you.
And they said he'd be there in 15 minutes, right?
I hung up the phone and I looked at Aaron and I was like, holy s**t Aaron.
He never asked me what this is about. That never happens.
It's just hot in here, cause.
And when they said down to talk to him, he says something about Jesse Blodgett's murder
that raises some serious alarms.
That's information that hadn't been released.
Correct. So that would be insight information that he shouldn't have had.
You
Everybody has had some mix of broken bones or broken heart or broken dreams or broken relationships.
But I've never had a pain that was 1-100th literally of the intensity and the duration of this
pain. The day after Jesse had been murdered,
some of us friends were invited to go over to the Blodgett house.
We thought it would be a good idea to be there for her parents, especially with her being the only
child. It was all of Jesse's friends that house was packed to the gills with people.
Mariah, Jackie, and Ian were among Jesse's closest friends that were there that day.
Along with Jesse's former boyfriend, Dan Bartelt.
Those are some good friends. Those are some good friends, some good kids, some good young
human beings. We formed a big circle in our living room around the fireplace and told stories,
you know, just shared memories and shared tears and shared hugs.
We were also laughing. Jesse's life, I mean, she was a light in this world.
Dan was Jesse's first boyfriend back in freshman year of high school.
Jesse was kind of head over heels for Dan temporarily. I think about three months, Dan broke up
with Jesse, but so they stayed friends. You would see them laughing or hanging out or just doing
music together. They sat right next to each other in school for four years, first and second
chair of islands in the orchestra. Dan was also very musically talented as well. He was very
similar to Jesse in that way. They weren't a lot of the musicals in the plays together,
and Dan was just over the week before playing music in Jesse's music room with her.
When we were gathered as friends the day after Jesse had died. I sat with Dan on the fireplace
and I was holding his hand and I had my head on his shoulder crying and he squeezed my hand in comfort.
And then his cell phone rang. So he excused himself from the room and went over into the dining
room and was on the phone for a while. He came back into the room and he said, okay, well, I have to
go and said I was just on the phone with a police officer and they asked me to come down to the station
for an interview. And Joyce said, you know, don't worry, Dan, the police are going to want to talk
to all of Jesse's friends. So we drove him to the police station. We dropped him off and he just
simply said, pick me up in 30 minutes. The police do want to talk to Dan, but not about Jesse's murder.
Instead, they want to ask him about the park attack on Melissa. We need, you know, to talk to him because
I have his picture and I was a heck of a resemblance for the sketch that I had in my hand.
Okay, um, I am 12, I'm going to have to hear them all.
Just so you know, you're not in trouble. Okay, do you need to drop that here?
Yes, I get to help.
What do you have to have?
Uh, some friends of mine.
All these different questions gets a person talking. What's your name?
What do you do?
Do you have a job?
What are you working in?
We're all live while we're associated with engineering.
And what do you do there, uh, mostly cut around to material service?
This is about an incident that, uh, you'd have to watch our investigation and have them last Friday.
So, um, this happened at a park.
And if you have any knowledge about what this is, best in coming out, you understand that?
Yes, okay.
The game plan was to get him to admit to being in that park at the same time that Melissa was.
Were you at a parkman's parade?
No.
And any kind of guy could be so.
Okay, is it possible that you're at a park now?
If this is our guy, he was in a fight on Friday where a girl, the wounds would still be there.
You could see both of us looking, occasionally looking underneath tables, looking for abrasions,
signs of a struggle.
I don't have time to tell him.
Good stamp of a screw at work.
Oh.
Grab it up.
It's like a card that I moved my stuff around on there.
Aaron thought this guy ain't working.
Aaron just saw it opening and went.
You don't have a job thing.
It was an intuition.
And do you, if we check with you on board, would you still have your job?
No.
Okay.
That's what I thought.
How long did you lose your job?
A while ago.
Okay.
Do you have a correctional area last year ago?
No.
First prove of a life.
No.
And then now he's on the defense, right?
Then that's when I went in and said, how did you hurt yourself then?
How did you injure your thumb?
So then you want to catch your finger that work?
Yeah.
What would you catch your finger?
Oh, that's fine.
It's also about that.
Which we're taking.
I can't figure out where I'm going to stand for that one.
Okay.
Okay.
At the point that I moved my chair, we went from an interview to an interrogation.
Listen, nobody in the red mind would lie about cutting themselves if they have that home cooking.
Okay.
Very well.
What happened?
Yes.
It's the honest.
I got it before.
I was a bit mad.
So we're knocking down dominoes, right?
We have our guy.
He's now admitted being there.
And what you have to do is basically make them understand or make them feel like
telling you the truth is better than not telling you the truth.
They up the pressure, telling him there's evidence.
There's blood on the knife.
It's being processed by the crime lab.
Finally, Dan Cracks.
And you went after that girl, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Why?
I'm scared of the one.
Which
life's here.
It's kind of a little rough.
Cow's just half a load.
That's cow's loads.
You're not telling me that I'm worried about it.
I don't want it to scare someone else.
It's okay, the house.
So good.
That's f***ing right.
That was just his out fine.
In his version of events, it was to quote, unquote,
to scare Melissa.
But we didn't believe that.
Okay.
So you understand that?
Yes.
I understand that.
He was arrested by law enforcement.
And then we charged him with an attempted murder and a recklessly
endangering safety.
I was very thankful because I was scared that he was like going to come back
and finish the job.
As for Dan's friends, but ones who had dropped him off at the police station,
they had no idea this was all going on.
And so we came back in 30 minutes and we said we're looking for Dan
and a police officer came out and said,
we can't release Dan.
He's being detained right now.
We were so confused.
And we just assumed that meant we could come pick him up later.
So what arrest has been made?
And investigators are now wondering,
is it possible that the man who attacked Melissa
could have also killed his own friend?
He was living this secret life.
Washington County Sheriff's Deputies arrested a man for attacking a woman
in rich field historical park.
It was all over the news.
This young man was taken into custody.
The reason why the police found him was because I remembered the van
making model and what it looked like.
I'm one of the people that I like to watch crime shows.
I do always joke about that the reason why I was able to remember what he was
wearing and how tall he was and his weight is because I watch those shows.
Dan and I became friends through high school.
How could the guy that I was friends with do something like that?
Dan appears to be in denial as well.
Just moments after his arrest for attacking Melissa,
he asked detectives a really odd question.
But there were two other comments that Dan made during that interview that really
struck investigators.
Did you get dropped out here?
Yes, I guess so.
Where were we adding in, I guess?
Uh, uh, I was being, uh,
Hartford, just going to stuff.
Did he who?
Roger.
He said to the girl that his pants, yeah, you were just bigger things.
Okay, sorry to hear about that.
They just thought it was a little bit odd and unusual that he had been coming from
her residence from this vigil.
And they asked him, you know, do you know anything about that?
And I was making small talk, right?
I had no idea.
What happened to my head?
I said, I don't know, I don't know what happened to him.
Someone raped him, I didn't heard.
You think so or did he?
You think so or what?
I didn't expect so.
And he said that his friend Jesse had just been murdered and that she had been raped.
But that's information that hadn't been released.
That is true, that had not been released.
That has been raped.
Correct.
So that would be insight information that he shouldn't have had.
This is a detail of the crime scene that only the killer would know.
Daniel Bartelt came from a nice family.
He went to church and he was involved in theater.
He was a straight A student.
He was one of the few students at Hartford Union High School who had a higher GPA than Jesse did.
He's gifted violinist.
He's an athlete on the cross-country team.
Dan Bartelt was funny.
I mean, he was a fun person to be around.
He lightened up a room.
He could pull in a crowd and get people to gravitate toward him and we
we loved being part of that group.
He could sing.
He could act.
He could write music.
He was a good entertainer.
Dan often showed off his talent.
Here he is singing Master of the House from Lamey's Rob.
Master of the House.
Two of them out the chomp.
Ready with the head shake.
And a new pain fall.
I know that Jesse and Dan were also close at that time.
And I was kind of always jealous of their friendship because I was like,
Dan is so cool.
He's so fun and he's so smart and he's an overachiever.
And he went off to University of Wisconsin-Steven's point and he was there for his fall semester freshman year.
And then he dropped out of school.
His father told him, well, if you're going to be home, you need to work.
He told his parents he got a job, but he also landed the lead role in the theater
production of Bye Bye Bernie.
Here he is singing One Last Kiss.
Jesse and Dan were also close at that time.
They made music together.
They wrote songs together.
They sang together.
They recorded together.
They loved music together and it was just a shared love that they had.
He's Jesse's friend.
He's a good kid.
He's never in any trouble.
Daniel Bartelt was playing the part of an actor who was portraying himself as something that he absolutely wasn't.
Dan had been pretending he had a job that he didn't have for months and nobody knew.
He never worked there.
Apparently he never even had applied for the job.
He would get up every morning, five, five, thirty, or his mom would pack his lunch for him.
He would put his lunchpale, his work boots, his computer, and a backpack in a van and drive away
from the house and his parents had no clue that he didn't have a job.
And in fact, what he was doing is he was hanging out in parks.
He was becoming a predator and he was looking for easy prey.
He was one of the smartest people that I've ever interviewed.
He was a creep.
I'm trying to think of a better way to put it.
When I found out that he had a relationship, friendship with Jesse, I knew I was going to
call Hartford right away as soon as they had time to do it.
The Sheriff's Department gives us a call and says we have someone in our custody right now for
our attack in Richfield. He's a friend of Jesse's. He knows Jesse.
You guys are probably going to want to come talk with him.
So our detectives had gone over there to conduct an interview with him,
pertaining to Jesse Blodgett.
But this time Dan has an alibi. He says he was at the park.
Sure enough he was there like he said he was.
But there's something else at that park that also catches the detectives eye.
We got very, very, very lucky.
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I'm RJ Decker, the private investigator, uncovering the sunshine state's darkest secrets.
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When Daniel Bartelt was arrested, the sheriff's department gives us a call and says we have someone
in our custody right now for the attack on Melissa.
A, he came and met me from Jesse's vigil.
B, he mentioned that she was raped.
You need to look at this guy.
So our detectives had gone over there to conduct an interview with him.
So July 17th, Roosevelt is brought in once again for questioning.
They had already gotten the evidence and they had enough for the charging for the attack on Melissa.
Now we wanted to speak with him about Jesse.
And Detective Thiccans was leading the investigation at this point.
So he conducted the interview with him.
I'm trying to talk to everybody who might have some information that's going to help me
and figure out what happened.
Initially Dan was cooperative and wanted to say that, you know, how great she was.
What kind of person was Jesse? How would he describe her?
She wanted to help. If one of her friends is having a trouble at home, she doesn't.
She ignored her Peter on the bus, she almost helped them confront him.
Crazy tree hugger and she only ate organic food then.
And then he would become emotional as he was talking.
She advocated against.
He makes one.
The day he finds violence against women.
He was exhibiting signs that would show somebody was emotional, putting his head down, making sounds.
But every time he would look up, there was a single tear in either one of his eyes.
By this point in time, they knew that he had lied about having a job.
They asked him what he was doing that Monday when Jesse was killed.
He worried about Woodland.
He could be doing, trying to write.
He's not like writing on site.
He said that he was at Woodland Park in fairly close proximity to Jesse's house.
What do you think about when it just went?
I don't think he wanted to.
It's the same just things I open that are in heaven.
You've been in a situation like that.
You make me very uncomfortable.
Where is it?
Where I make you strong comfortable.
It is what you're trying to say to you.
The reason he would be asked that question, what do you think happened to Jesse?
It's because we want to see what he's going to tell us.
We try to keep them open and it.
If you want answers, I'm going to help you.
If we're going to talk more in my trouble later.
That's what you're going to do.
He wants to have an attorney present, so we end our interview with him.
What we got on the interview was a little bit more of the time frame during this time that homicide
potentially happened.
So officers did what good officers would do and they tried to figure out, okay, is there any way
we can tell if Daniel Bartelt was at Woodland Park?
How many cameras are set up here throughout the park?
We've got the one, just the one up at this park.
When we pulled that video, saw that he was actually here at the park.
He walks this way over towards this pavilion here.
There's children in here playing.
He walks by these garbage cans here and then he kind of goes out of frame as he's walking down
the pathway to get out of the park.
So that actually corroborated what Daniel had to say that he was at Woodland Park on
sometime on Monday morning.
I think Daniel Bartelt was being asked so many questions and he was certain to get so frustrated
that he thought the easiest way is maybe feed us a little bit of the truth with a lot of lies.
If he was there at 10 a.m. on Monday morning like he said he was but
there's still between eight and 10 that he was, you know, that he's on a count of four.
So they went and pulled all the garbage from that park.
They asked the person in charge of the park when was garbage taken and he said, well,
garbage was last taken on Monday morning around 7 or 7 30.
At this point several days have passed since the murder.
What were the odds that that evidence would still be there in a trash can like this?
Closest to zero that you could get I would say.
There's being good and there's being lucky and, you know, in this line of work you need a
little bit of both of them. This case we had a lot of luck.
They did locate something we called it the mother load.
Inside this garbage can they ended up finding a frosted mini-weets box.
The top was opened up on it.
Stuffed inside that frosted mini-weets box was a ligature, the rope,
alcohol wipes, a ball gag that was homemade made with the same type of tape that is used
for ventilation systems.
And this type of tape was located at the crime scene with Melissa.
I refer to it as a kill kit. It's just someone who has bad intentions to harm someone else
gathering up all the supplies that they would need to do it.
Keeping it all in one place for easy disposal.
But now the critical question is can they connect these items to Dan?
Since Jesse would have been killed sometime after her mother went to work at 830
and Dan was seen at the park at 1025 police believe he would have had plenty of time to dump them there.
They were able to locate Jesse's DNA on the ropes and on some of the antiseptic wipes on that tape.
They were able to identify a fingerprint belonging to Daniel Bartelt
and they were able to identify a hair follicle with the DNA match to Jesse Blodgeon.
The only DNA that was in that box was Daniel Bartelt's and Jesse's. We've got him.
We begin with an arrest in the killing of that young Wisconsin actress found dead after a
filler on the roof cast party. The suspect is one of her high school classmates.
It's the same man who was arrested for assaulting a woman in a Washington County park
days before Jesse's death. This is a close friend of Jesse's.
They had been hanging out all summer and now all of a sudden he's being charged with her murder.
He was welcoming her home. He was over the week before.
Joy and I couldn't quite believe it.
Dan Bartelt is charged with first degree intentional homicide and please not guilty.
Then as detectives continued digging into his relationship with Jesse,
they discover a chilling social media post from just a month and a half before her murder.
We were able to retrieve a Facebook post that Jesse had written about Dan coming into her house.
Jesse wrote, when Dan Bartelt breaks into your house while you're sleeping to awaken you
and as people start commenting she adds, he walked into my house and then my room while I was
still in bed. What a freak. He knew how to get in. He knew her parents. He knew her parents worked
and he also would have the perfect alibi. I'm just over here to see Jesse and we're just going to
play some music. I think honestly it was a practice. Could I get in to her house? Could I get up to her room?
But that post is just the beginning. I did search warrants on the home, the van, the computer,
looking at this search history. It looked like that Daniel was attempting to play the part of the killer.
Opening statements started today in Daniel Bartelt's murder trial in West Bend.
13 months after Jesse's murder, Dan Bartelt walks into Wisconsin courtroom to face a jury.
He would eventually plead guilty to the charge of reckless endangering for that attack on Melissa
and the charge for her attempted murder that was dismissed. But he insists he's not guilty of killing
his friend. We see Jesse's side on one side of the aisle and Dan's side on the other side of the
aisle. Like a bizarre horror movie wedding. People are crying. People are angry. You could look at
anybody's face and you'd see a different emotion.
Although Bartelt's DNA was found on Jesse, he was never charged with rape.
Our biggest fear was that Dan was going to claim that this was a consensual thing that Jesse
participated in that went wrong and we knew that wasn't true. That didn't mean he might not claim it
and court and smear her name. If there's tons of pieces of evidence, we want to think through
a logical order of how we're going to present the case. Jesse's mother Joy was our first witness.
She didn't ever keep the covers on her and her bed wasn't cluttered. Joy was an important
witness because she was the person that found Jesse and she was also on that 9-1-1 call.
When the defense cross examines Joy, they focus on Jesse and Dan's friendship,
suggesting he would have no reason to kill his friend. You would see Dan at the house on those
three occasions that Jesse and Dan appear to enjoy each other's company and be having a good time
making music. Yes. Yes. This was an unusual case because Daniel Bartelt's family actually knew
Jesse's family and there was an interesting dynamic because we had two mothers testify.
Daniel Bartelt's mother broke down in tears on the witness stand today. I love your sign. Yes.
It's a fair to say that you and your husband have done everything to provide a decent and loving
home. I didn't blame them for this. They didn't do this. I only know them to be a good family
who gave him a good environment to grow up in. But when questioned by the defense, Laura
Bartelt admitted it wasn't her son's nature to be a bit of a liar. It was Dan, a kid who would lie
to you often as he was growing up. Yes. Time to time. Time to time. When you found that out from
law enforcement that your son didn't have a job, were you surprised? Yes. Why were you surprised?
Because he was leaving every day and I don't know where else he would have been going.
Jesse Blodget's parents walked out of court at one point today. The testimony simply too much to
take. A detective took the stand. He testified about some key evidence that he found.
Based upon your experience, was it also an unusual mixture of materials to be located in a cereal box?
Very much so. Here we had a box with all the stuff used to kill Jesse.
Brope, Laces, antiseptic wipes, and the intertapes 68 was a huge piece of evidence.
It's not like duct tape or masking tape or scotch tape. It's not a common tape. The police
couldn't even find any in all the hardware stores in Washington County. It was located at the crime
scene where Melissa was attacked on July 12th in the mother load of the Frost and Mini Wheat
cereal box. And that same intertapes 688 was also located in Daniel's house.
In addition, an actual role was found under Jesse's bed and it had Daniel's fingerprints on it.
We had taken good video and good photographic evidence of her bedroom. You can see in one of the
photographs the role of tape that was underneath her bed. The defense definitely made some
hay out of this role of tape because that was not initially taken into evidence. It was located
about a week later. They never came out and said that somebody planted this tape but they were
trying to cast doubt on the investigation. Another important piece of evidence for the prosecution was
that rope that was found in the cereal box. Jesse's DNA was sort of in the middle of the rope and
Dan's DNA was located on the ends of the rope by the knots that he made. These same ropes were
located by search warrant in Daniel's house. It was our theory that Daniel cut this rope at his
house. He made a knot around it so it would be a good grip for him and then he used that to
strangle Jesse. The defense tried to claim that there was some sort of cross contamination within
the mother load and that you can't tell which was Jesse's on one or on the other. If there is two
items that touch each other there is that possibility of transfer of DNA to occur. But the defense
never really said what those alternative explanations were for how this DNA got there.
We learned today that the young man accused of killing Jesse Blodgett seemed to have a fascination
with murder. The computer search history. A lot of the search history on Dan's computer was very,
very disturbing. It was serial killers, spree killers, how many bodies do you need to be considered
in one or the other. And it was intertwined with very graphic, violent pornography.
There was videos on there for bondage and sexual assault and homicide, much the same way as we
suspect that Jesse was bound. Jesse was in her bed sleeping. She never had a chance to fight back.
The motive was I want to kill somebody and I want to kill somebody that's going to be an easy
marquee. Jesse screaming to us. She's screaming to us. She's telling us the story. His DNA is all
under her fingernails under her left hand, under right hand. I don't believe that you have her
any testimony that would give you reason to believe that Dan or help had any motive to cross
that up Jesse Blodgett. That jury came back. I was nervous as everyone of the prosecution team was.
Breaking news now. Daniel Bartelt found guilty of murdering 19-year-old Jesse Blodgett.
The jury reached a verdict in just three hours this afternoon.
It wasn't a victory. Jesse's still dead and Dan's still lost.
And the world still hasn't changed. The kid's still gone forever. But it was justice.
Dan Bartelt took from this family their only daughter. He played on their emotions by going to
the vigil. He had just killed their daughter the day earlier. How could he show up to her house
after he had just killed her? And it's almost as if he was there so he'd get a front seat to
find out that he was, you know, acting apart. You know, it was kind of horrifying.
Sometimes evil comes to our door with a familiar face. At sentencing we each had ten minutes
me and Dan. And what Dan Bartelt had to say there said shock waves through the courtroom.
Yeah, I'd never witnessed anything like that.
Daniel Bartelt will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The judge sentenced him to life without parole.
At sentencing we each had ten minutes me and Dan to give our statements.
And he looked at Joy and I and he said these shackles and this orange jumpsuit don't make me guilty.
But Joy, I can't give you the answers that you're looking for.
I pray for you for all of you. And I hope that someday I will be
before a court that will know that my conscience is gone.
I love you. I'm so sorry for your loss.
There was like some sobbing but I didn't see any actual tears. I never saw
genuine actual remorse for Jesse, for what he put her through.
When it was my turn, mostly I talked about Jesse. I wanted people to know who she was and
the last quarter of it was directly to Dan. I wish no vengeance or retribution.
I not only forgive you, I love you.
Of course I hate what you did. You are forgiven but you won't know it and you won't feel it
and experience it and tell you tell the truth. Where does this
place of forgiveness come from? For me it comes from a higher place. It was a gift to me that I
didn't hate him and want vengeance. Me and Joy will look what came out of our concern for him,
a movement to end violence like this.
Shortly after her death, Buck started, the love is greater than hate project in Jesse's memory.
So we believe that violence tends to happen a lot less in the presence of love
and a lot more in the absence of love. So it's really simple.
The more we presence love, the more we absence violence. That's what we're trying to do.
The project recently hosted an event for survivors of violence and featured performances of Jesse's music.
I think the music that Jesse brought into this world still lives on and that's the legacy she left.
And Melissa Etzler has also teamed up with Buck in his mission.
My name is Melissa Etzler. My story is forever tied to Jesse's.
What he's done is just incredible bringing his daughter's legacy to life.
You never met Jesse? No, but we have a soul connection. We do.
Somebody said to me, you know, if Jesse was a soul waiting to come into a life and they said,
this one's going to be short. It's going to end bad and it's going to be violent,
but you're going to cause more love than most people ever will in their 80 years.
Jesse would have been at the front of the line to jump into that life.
To help keep her memory alive, there's now the Jesse Bludget scholarship given every year
to young people following in her footsteps, David, hoping to study music.
And as for Dan Bartelt, his latest appeals have been denied and he continues to serve his life sentence.
That's our program for tonight. Thanks for watching. I'm David Muir.
And I'm Deborah Roberts from all of us here at ABC News and 2020. Good night.
You
From 30 for 30 podcasts.
You
Brian Pada, senior defensive lineman from Miami, gunned down.
The key to this case is Brian. Before he died, he was on a phone arguing what's about.
This might be a hit. You want the truth? They just want a conviction.
We had a killer amongst us. Murder at the U. Listen now.
