Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie got engaged in 2020 and seemed to be starting a grand adventure together, but things weren’t as they seemed with Gabby’s body found after a missing person’s hunt
It started out as the trip of a lifetime but ended up as a nightmare.
The story of Gabby Petito, 22, and her fiancé Brian Laundrie, 23, shook the US and beyond, mobilising an army of amateur online sleuths and is now the subject of a new Netflix documentary.
The couple had set off on a road trip across the US, following the social media trend of #vanlife, which sees people – at least outwardly – embrace the outdoors and the simplicity of living with little more than four wheels and a sense of adventure.
The new three-part documentary series, American Murder: Gabby Petito, explores how the couple had begun to present a smiling, happy world as they moved through the sprawling American west in 2021.
They had got engaged the year before and seemed to be starting a grand adventure together – but things weren’t as they seemed and in September that year Gabby’s body was found after a missing person’s hunt by authorities.
The couple are known to have had at least one domestic argument after a passer by phoned in a call reporting a man slapping a woman in a white van in Moab, Utah. Chilling police body cam footage shows an officer walking round to the van to find a tearful Gabby, who can be heard saying “We’ve just been fighting this morning, some personal issues.”
The footage is unsettling, Gabby clearly distressed, her faced screwed up with tears as she’s taken to the back of a police officer’s van to catch her breath.
The pair were separated that evening, but no charges were pressed and they carried on their journey the next morning and a week later a video titled Van Life | Building Our Van Life Journey – Gabby’s first – appeared on YouTube.
The couple looked happy, a dreamy presentation of a of the story she wanted to tell, of a couple who had worked odd jobs to make the trip happen, a couple who were sailing into the sunset together.
On August 25, Gabby stopped responding to texts from her mum and on September 11 a missing person report was filed with Suffolk County, New York Police Department.
Things took a chilling turn however, when police in Florida found that Laundrie had returned to his parents’ home in the southwest of the state with Gabby’s van, but not with her.
National interest spiked. People and cameras gathered outside the Laundrie home as the family hired an attorney and refused to help with the investigation.
Police would later go to where her phone was last used in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, ultimately leading to the discovery of her body on September 19. Investigators were sure the scene had been staged, while the new Netflix show reveals Laundrie’s efforts to creat an alibi for himself, making multiple phone calls to his parents saying Gabby was gone and even exchanging texts between their two phones to make it look like they had not been together prior to her death.
He even moved $700 into his own bank account from Gabby’s with a note saying “Goodbye Brian, I’ll never ask you for anything again.”
On September 20, the day after Gabby’s body was found, police carried out a search warrant at the Laundrie home but he wasn’t there, his parents saying he had gone hiking and expected him to return.
Some 37 days after he too was reported hissing his remains were found on October 20 in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park with a note admitting to killing Gabby but had done to so put her out of her misery as she had suffered a strange accident and was in terrible pain.
Nothing in her autopsy supports this, however, and her in 2022 her family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against against the his parents which was settled for $3 million although no criminal charges were filed against the family.