Gabby Petito, born in 1999, was 22 years old and loved traveling and exploring new places, but she passed away due to strangulation in 2021 on one of her adventures. In high school, she met Brian Laundrie, and he was born in 1999, too, and they became friends. After graduating in 2017, they started dating in 2019. Gabby moved to North Port, Florida, to live with the Laundrie family. One of Petito’s friends says living there was an uncomfortable experience for Gabby. Petito struggled to get along with Brian’s mother, Roberta. Gabby’s discomfort was from Brian’s increasingly controlling behavior, like one time he stole her wallet and ID so she couldn’t go out. In July of 2020, they got engaged. Gabby and Brian shared a lot of interests like long drives, national parks, and traveling around the US. They bought a van and redid it so they could live in it. They were gonna use it because they had wanted to travel across America for four months. They were going to stay in a number of America’s national parks while Gabby started a blog and YouTube channel to catalog their trip. A year after the engagement on July 2nd, 2021, they set off from New York on their adventure.
On August 12, 2021, the police got a phone call in Moab, Utah, saying a man was attacking a girl in a van. After the call, the police had driven past a van that had belonged to Gabby. When police interrogated the couple, Petito was very panicked, and Laundrie was calm. The conclusion was that the couple were the reported suspects from the phone call, and Laundrie was the victim of domestic assault by Gabby. He refused to press charges. They were separated for an evening. He was taken to a hotel, and she remained in the van. The very next day, they continued their trip. A week after that incident, her first YouTube video called ¨Van life building our van life journey¨ was full of images of them smiling and kissing and was posted. Even though on social media, Gabby and Brian were the perfect couple, things weren’t improving. August 25th, Gabby posted on Instagram for the last time. Around the time she stopped posting, she stopped responding to texts.
August 27th, Gabby’s mother got a strange text from Gabby’s phone saying something about her grandfather, ¨Can you help Stan, I just keep getting his voicemails and missed calls¨. That message referred to Petito’s grandfather, but Gabby never said his first name while referring to him. On September 11, her mother filed a missing persons report with the Suffolk County, NY, PD. Brian did return home to his parents’ house. He returned with Gabby’s van but not Gabby. His family hired an attorney and refused to help police with the investigation. The investigation to find Petito spanned over 2,000 miles as police tried to retrace her steps. Before Petito was declared missing, Brian made numerous phone calls on August 29th to his parents, saying Gabby was ¨gone¨ and he needed help. That is when they called the attorney. Police appealed to anyone with potential information to help, which led to the surprising discovery of another van life blogger who looked through her footage to find Gabby’s van located in Spread Creek in Grand Teton. Three weeks after the search began, her body was found on September 19th, 2021. Investigators believed that the scene was staged. An autopsy later revealed how she died. Gabby Petito died of strangulation.
Everyone was devastated by the news of Petito’s death. Her stepfather said ¨I collapsed to the ground¨. He went to Wyoming to help find her ¨and I had to pick up the phone and compose myself and call Niki, and get Joe on the phone and Tara in a conference call and tell them from 2,000 miles away that our daughter is dead.¨ A friend of Gabby’s from high school says, ¨When the news had broken out that they found her body… I just wanted to shut it off or wake up like it was a bad dream or something.¨ The discovery of Gabby’s body allowed police to put together the last moments of her life. August 27th, 2021, she was seen with Laundrie around 1 pm in Jackson, WY, at a restaurant called Mary Piglets. A witness told police it looked like they were fighting. American murder revealed that Petito placed a phone call to her ex-boyfriend, Jackson Hufham, but he was unable to answer because of work. Then, around 2:13 PM, the couple was seen on the security camera footage of a nearby Whole Foods. They drove to Spread Creek and arrived about 6 PM. Gabby was rearranging files on her computer at 8:32 PM. Police believe that was her last moment alive.
September 20th, a day after finding Gabby’s body, police executed a search warrant on Laundrie’s home, but Brian had gone missing. He told his parents a week earlier that he was going on a hike. His parents did not report him missing because they expected him home. He was somewhere in Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park, which spans over 20,000 acres. Thirty-seven days after he was reported missing, his remains were found by his parents on October 20th at Carlton Reserve. When his body was found, there was a letter from him admitting he killed Gabby, saying he put her out of her misery after she had a bad accident and was in unbearable pain, but this is inconsistent with the autopsy. In 2022, Gabby’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Brian’s parents, Roberta and Chris. It was settled for 3 million. Criminal charges have been filed against the Laudrie family.
