Woman’s friend seeks justice
Change.org petition seeks movement on 7-year-old murder case
The childhood friend and mother of a Maine woman who was found dead in Humboldt County about seven years ago are trying to revive interest in her case and bring the man who they believe killed her to justice.
Kristen Seavey’s Change.org petition demanding justice for Seavey’s childhood friend Danielle Bertolini, 23, whose skull was found March 9, 2015, on the banks of the Eel River, roughly a year after she went missing, had garnered 368 signatures as of Thursday afternoon. The petition is also seeking justice for Sheila Franks, 37, who went missing days before Bertolini and was last seen with James Eugene Jones, Frank’s exboyfriend and the person with whom Bertolini was also last seen.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people about how to move this case forward,” Seavey said on a recent episode of her podcast “Murder, She Told.” “With their help, I created a petition to ask the Humboldt County District Attorney to prioritize this case, to re-interview people connected to it and provide us with an update.”
Seavey said it was important to keep being a “squeaky wheel” when it came to Bertolini’s case because it’s already seven years old and, at this point, can “get dusty and forgotten, buried under hundreds of new cases rolling in every day.”
In a two-part episode on Bertolini, Seavey talked to Bertolini’s mother, Billie Jo Dick, about how her daughter moved from Maine to Fortuna after her son Xavier died during delivery.
“She pulled through,” Dick said. “She was never the same after that.”
Two months after that, Dick said Bertolini moved to Humboldt County because her father and a lot
of Dick’s family members live in the area.
“She just met up with the wrong people,” Dick said. ” … She went to go work for people on ‘Murder Mountain,’ which is a mountain out there where there’s marijuana grows, a lot of dealing, a lot of heroin, a lot of meth, a lot of everything.”
Bertolini began to use drugs, but Dick said she shouldn’t be defined by some of the bad choices she made.
“She may be a junkie to you, but she’s still my child,” Dick said. “She was my child and I will fight for that child no matter what the outcome is.”
The last time Dick got a call from Bertolini was Jan. 29, 2014, saying she was ready to leave and was planning on going to law enforcement, but she went missing shortly afterward on Feb. 9, 2014.
At the time of her disappearance, Bertolini had been crashing on the couch of a man who hasn’t been publicly identified and called him on the night of her disappearance to pick her up from the Swain’s Flat area, about a 30-minute drive away, Seavey said.
“And Danielle was never seen alive again,” Seavey said.
A year later on March 9, 2015, an ATV rider found a human skull on the Eel River just south of Fortuna that matched Bertolini’s DNA.
The last public update in the case was in September 2019, when law enforcement confirmed a femur found in June belonged to Franks, Seavey said.
In the second of the two episodes on Bertolini, Seavey discussed the case with true crime journalist Billy Jensen, whose book “Chase Darkness With Me” featured Bertolini’s story, and Fortuna Police Department detective Brian Taylor.
The Fortuna Police Department and Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office brought the results of their investigation to the District Attorney’s Office, but District Attorney Maggie Fleming said she requested additional investigation be done by law enforcement.
“I have spoken to Chief Day about this case and he confirmed they are doing additional work on it,” Fleming wrote in an email. “We will make a charging decision when we have the information we need.”
A breakthrough can happen potentially any day, but it’s hard to say how long “this can drag out,” Taylor
said.
Jensen said the struggle is whether there’s enough evidence anytime a murder charge is brought to convince 12 strangers to agree that the defendant killed someone.
“That’s a hard thing to do,” Jensen said.
At the same time, Jensen said he felt as if law enforcement and the District Attorney’s Office were waiting for someone to come in and confess rather than putting pressure on the people of interest, at whose homes drugs have been sold and people have died.
“We have a pretty clear pathway into finding out who did this,” Jensen said. “And the police feel like they’re at a roadblock and they can’t move up that road in order to try and figure it out, which is incredibly frustrating for the families.”
The Fortuna Police Department was unavailable for comment by publication time.
To listen to the podcast, visit murdershetold.com. To sign the petition, visit bit.ly/3qDOpa8.