Hey, I'm Steph, and this is not today.

Hello and welcome. Sadly, Alex is on a work trip this week, so it's just going to be me,

but if you miss Alex, you can hear him and I talking about a lot of things over on Patreon.

Bonus episode number 48 just came out over there last week, and we're chatting about scuba divers that

got left in the ocean when the boat they were with couldn't find them in the water. And then

they ended up on an island with Komodo Dragons. And if you know anything about Komodo Dragons,

you know that's really bad and very terrifying. So if you want to hear that episode and a ton of others, head over there.

But today I'm going to be telling you a story that is unbelievable in so many ways and truly

heartbreaking. I have so much to say, so why don't we just get right into it? Listener discretion

is advised. Jesse Blodgett was born in 1994 to parents Joy and Buck Blodgett in

Atlanta, Georgia, although they eventually moved to Hartford, Wisconsin, which is just outside of Milwaukee.

Hartford was a community of roughly 16,000 people and was a great place for Jesse to grow up,

because it was a safe area and had a vibrant

art scene. Jesse was extremely gifted from a very young age. She was always a top student in her

class. For instance, in the first grade, when Jesse and her classmates were learning to spell,

Jesse's teachers needed to make her her own list with more complex words because she was so ahead of all the other

kids. She was also gifted musically. She began playing piano in the first grade, and her father

Buck began taking lessons with her because he thought he'd have to do it alongside her to keep her

into it, but she very quickly surpassed him, so he dropped out. And from then on, music became her

ultimate passion. It was a way for her to express herself. She also played the violin, along with the

piano. She sang, and she began writing her own music. Most of all, she loved to entertain.

She even won the eighth grade talent show with a song that she

...