Danielle Janene Blackburn was born in Fort Myers, Florida in 1988 and grew up in the community. She attended Fort Myers High School, and in 2003, became pregnant with her daughter, Marissa. Despite becoming a mother, Danielle graduated with her high school class in 2005.
Not long afterward, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The neurological disease can cause weakness, balance problems and impaired movement, and police later said Danielle’s condition had progressed to the point that she had difficulty defending herself physically.
Yet accounts from people who knew her portray someone who did not allow the illness to completely define her. Her obituary noted that she retained her determination and enthusiasm for life despite her condition. Friends remembered her as lively and outgoing, with a distinctive laugh and a strong personality.
By early 2009, Danielle, six-year-old Marissa, and Danielle’s mother were living together at the Maplecrest Apartments, at 3623 Crestwood Lake Circle in Fort Myers. It was there that Danielle would be killed.
The known timeline begins on February 10th, 2009, before seven a.m. Danielle’s mother left the apartment for work, leaving Danielle and Marissa at home. At some point after she departed, someone apparently entered, or was admitted into, the apartment.
Years later, investigators indicated that there was an important reason they did not believe Danielle had been attacked by a random stranger. The apartment had a sliding rear door. It was normally secured not simply by its lock but by a wooden stick placed in the track. On the morning Danielle died, Marissa noticed that the slider was unlocked and open.
Fort Myers Police investigator Richard Harasym told reporters in 2024 that whoever entered the home and attacked Danielle was someone with whom she was familiar. Police have specifically appealed for information about an adult male known to Danielle who may have been at or near the apartment that morning.
Exactly what occurred inside has never been publicly reconstructed in full. What police eventually determined was that Danielle had been attacked in the apartment, strangled and left in the bathtub. Investigators have also said that she was submerged in the water. Her impaired mobility meant that once the assault began, she had little ability to physically resist whoever was attacking her.
Meanwhile, Marissa remained inside the apartment. The horrifying implication is that Danielle was murdered while her six-year-old daughter was only a room away.
When Danielle’s mother returned home later that morning, she encountered Marissa crying because she could not locate her mother. The search through the apartment ended at the bathroom. Danielle was just twenty-one years old.
Interestingly, police did not immediately publicly classify Danielle’s death as a homicide. On March 24th, 2009, approximately six weeks after she died, the Fort Myers Police Department announced cash rewards in a series of unsolved killings and suspicious deaths as the city struggled with an increase in violent crime. Danielle’s case appeared separately from the homicides.
Police described her death at that point as a death investigation, explaining that the circumstances were suspicious but that the case had not yet officially been ruled a homicide. The department offered a $5,000 reward for information in unsolved cases during that period.
Subsequent investigative work apparently resolved any uncertainty surrounding the manner of death. Today, the Fort Myers Police Department explicitly identifies Danielle’s case as a homicide and states that evidence showed she had been strangled. The larger question of who strangled her has proved much harder to answer.
One man would eventually become central to the investigation. His name was Connell Carroll, and according to police reporting, he had been Danielle’s boyfriend.
The history between Danielle and Carroll predated her murder by several years, and it was deeply troubling. In 2011, Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers disclosed that Danielle had obtained an injunction for protection against Carroll in 2006, following what the organization described as repeated beatings. A second injunction was obtained in 2008. Carroll had also been arrested in connection with violating an injunction against Danielle.
Crime Stoppers described Carroll as having a substantial history of arrests in Lee County, including earlier arrests involving allegations of burglary, aggravated assault, kidnapping or false imprisonment, battery and violations of protective orders.
Those facts would inevitably become significant when Danielle was found murdered only months after the second injunction.
Years later, Fort Myers investigators publicly acknowledged what had long been suspected: Carroll was considered a prime suspect in Danielle’s murder. But suspicion was not enough. Authorities never charged him with killing Danielle. According to a 2024 report on the cold case, investigators believed they did not have sufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.
Then, two years after Danielle was killed, another young woman died. On May 29th, 2011, twenty-two-year-old Nicole Lynn Smith was shot during an altercation in Fort Myers. Nicole, like Danielle, was a young mother. Her obituary described her as someone who loved the beach, cooking, shopping and spending time with friends and relatives, but said that being a mother was most important to her. She left behind a young daughter.
Police identified Connell Carroll as the suspect in Nicole’s killing. According to Crime Stoppers, Carroll allegedly dropped a gun at the scene before fleeing on foot. Two days later, while authorities searched for him, he was placed on Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers’ Ten Most Wanted list.
The public notice seeking Carroll’s arrest explicitly brought up Danielle’s earlier death and her protective orders against him. Crime Stoppers noted that Danielle had been murdered in 2009 and that no arrest had been made in her case.
Carroll was apprehended shortly afterward. Later reporting on Danielle’s case stated that he was ultimately serving a life sentence in connection with Nicole Smith’s murder.
The second killing inevitably intensified scrutiny of Danielle’s case. It did not, however, provide prosecutors with the evidence necessary to charge anyone with Danielle’s murder.
In Danielle’s case, police have never publicly disclosed the complete evidence file. There has been no detailed public accounting of what forensic material was recovered from the apartment, whether usable DNA was found, what fingerprints were collected, what telephone records showed, or precisely which witnesses were interviewed. What investigators have publicly emphasized, however, is that they believe Danielle knew her attacker.
As anniversaries passed, Fort Myers police continued periodically asking the public for help. On the thirteenth anniversary in February 2022, investigators again publicized the case, emphasizing Danielle’s multiple sclerosis and asking for anyone who knew what happened, or who remembered seeing the adult male known to Danielle near the apartment, to contact detectives.
Two years later, the fifteenth anniversary prompted another appeal. By then, investigators were speaking unusually plainly about both the circumstances and the longstanding suspicion surrounding the case.
As of 2026, Danielle Blackburn remains on the Fort Myers Police Department’s official list of ongoing homicide investigations.
Crime Immemorial 