On the day 19-year-old Jessie Blodgett was brutally murdered, the first person to comfort her grieving parents was someone they trusted completely – her ex-boyfriend, Daniel Bartelt. No one suspected he was hiding a dark secret…until he slipped up and revealed the horrifying truth.
On July 14, 2013, Jessie Blodgett, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sophomore, was celebrating with friends at a cast party for a local community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof, the show where she starred in the lead role. No one could have guessed that night would be her last.
The next day, Jessie’s mom returned to the home about 12:30 p.m. and found her daughter, strangled to death in her own bedroom, her body chillingly staged to appear as if she were still peacefully asleep, People reports.
“My daughter is blue, I went to wake her up and I just got home from lunch, and she won’t wake up,” Jessie’s frantic mother said in a haunting 911 call, that’s heard in a story surrounding her death in Discovery’s A Killer Among Friends.
The news of Jessie’s murder sent shockwaves through the quiet town of Hartford, Wisconsin, devastating her close-knit circle of theater friends.
At the center of that group was someone no one suspected – fellow theater kid Daniel Bartelt, Jessie’s former boyfriend and high school classmate, who, alongside everyone else, mourned the death of the teenager he had raped and murdered just hours earlier.
Killer grieves with family
While grieving and sharing memories with Jessie’s family that day, Buck, her dad, explained that Bartelt received a call from police, asking him to come in for questioning.
A friend then shared that he asked for a lift to the station.
“And when we dropped him off, he said, ‘Okay, maybe you can come and pick me up in 30 minutes?’” one of his friends explained on the show. But when they arrived back at the station to fetch him, officers were waiting outside and told the group: “We can’t release Dan. He’s being detained.”
They had no idea why he was being held in connection with Jessie’s murder.
“We couldn’t picture Dan being the type of person who did this,” said Ian, one of Jessie’s friends, suspecting it was a huge misunderstanding.
Even Jessie’s father, Buck Blodgett, struggled to believe that the young man who sat beside him in grief was actually her killer: “It’s not Dan. He’s never been in any trouble at school or the law, that we know of,” Buck said in the documentary.
“He was welcome in our home, He was just over, the day after Jessie’s murder, sharing hugs and memories and tears with us until his phone rang and he was called in for questioning.”
Even after the father learned Jessie’s ex wouldn’t be released, he still could not believe it: “Our first reaction wasn’t ‘we hate this kid,’ it was oh my god, what happened to Dan?’”
Park attack
Bartelt was called in for questioning after police linked him to a violent assault just days before Jessie’s murder. Investigators discovered he had attacked another woman in a nearby park, tackling her to the ground and holding a knife to her throat – a chilling preview of the horror yet to come.
Bartelt eventually confessed to the park attack, coldly claiming that he only intended to scare the woman.
When questioned by police about his ex-girlfriend’s brutal death, Bartelt denied any involvement, insisting he still had feelings for Jessie.
But one chilling slip gave him away: Bartelt told investigators that someone had “raped and murdered” Jessie – a disturbing detail that hadn’t been released to the public.
That revelation instantly raised red flags for detectives and pushed him further into the spotlight as the prime suspect.
DNA evidence
The breakthrough came from a trash can in the park where Bartelt had attacked the woman. Inside, investigators found a cereal box stuffed with rope, bloody sanitizing wipes, and duct tape.
Lab tests later confirmed that DNA from both Daniel Bartelt and Jessie were present on the discarded items, providing a direct and damning link to her murder.
Yet, he maintained his innocence and continued to deny that he murdered his friend.
“This jumpsuit that I’m wearing, these shackles that I’m put in, don’t make me guilty,” Bartelt said in the episode, in a scene from the courtroom.
The judge explained that the suspect was right; the jumpsuit and shackles didn’t make him guilty, but the DNA evidence did.
For the park assault, Bartelt was convicted of first-degree reckless endangerment and sentenced to five years in prison – to be served consecutively with his life sentence for the brutal murder of Jessie.
Love over hate
Since Jessie’s death, Buck launched The Love < Hate Project, a group organized to promote forgiveness – a “radical and purposeful reaction to the murder of his daughter by a friend, according to the site.
And every year on the anniversary of Jessie’s death, the grieving dad honor his “sweetie” whose “beautiful life was snuffed out,” with a heartbreaking tribute on Facebook.
“You were a Light, and you’ve left a hole in me that cannot be filled. You also left a peace and a purpose I never knew possible,” Buck writes in a July 15, 2025 post of his daughter, who would have been 31. “Home to mom now, who took a harder hit by this than anyone but you yourself. Can’t wait to see you on the other side my amazing butterfly angel. But first we got more work to do here.”
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