On social media, Gabby Petito and her then-fiancé Brian Laundrie appeared to be living their best #vanlife during a “dream” road trip across the country, which they documented along the way.
But new details have emerged about the abusive relationship.
Nearly four years after the shocking killing, a Netflix docuseries American Murder: Gabby Petito, set to premiere on February 17, reveals new details about the couple’s final days, tearful interviews with her parents, and new revelations from her friends.
Her ex-boyfriend Jackson also disclosed for the first time that she’d called him just days before she was killed, told him about a fight she had with Laundrie and the plan she had to leave him — then tried to call him again on the day she was killed.
Appearances can be deceiving
In the three part series, an array of footage the couple shot while traveling in their converted camper van shows a smiling, bubbly Gabby as she rambles on about their “van life.”
Unedited clips show as she nervously laughs while repositioning the camera or nudging Laundrie to join her in the shot. It’s a raw version of their life that also showed moments of discomfort as Laundrie is seen awkwardly laughing at Gabby’s play by play of their day and, at one point, rolling his eyes at her.
“Gabby and Brian seemed like a lovely couple,” Gabby’s friend Rose Davis said in the docuseries. “But behind the scenes, they would get into arguments.”
Davis says that Gabby had told her that Laundrie didn’t think the vlog was a good idea and his annoyance was evident in many of the takes shown in the doc.
“The happiest people on social media usually have the darkest skeletons in their closet,” she added.
During one of their arguments, Gabby reached out to an old boyfriend she dated for about a year before Laundrie.
Jackson, speaking out for the first time in the doc, recalled his surprise when his ex reached out to him on August 22, 2021.
He said that Gabby was the love of his life and they had planned to do a similar cross country van trip, but that he was happy for her because she was doing what she had always dreamed of. His happiness turned to concern when she told him she had been in a fight with Laundrie.
“I feel like the phone call was a cry for help,” he said. “I think she wanted to get away but just didn’t know how to do it. I think she wasn’t sure what he would do, or what he could do.”
He said Gabby told her she had a plan to leave him.
“And I was just kind of making sure that she knew, ‘hey be careful,” he said.
“The fact that she reached out to me kind of told me like hey, she feels safe talking to you or maybe she felt like she was the only one who would understand, or that I was the only person who would even listen at all,” he added.
On August 27 – the last day Gabby was seen alive – Jackson said he got a Snapchat from Gabby that she was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and that it reminded her of him.
She then tried to call Jackson, but he was working and missed it.
“I think back on the fact that maybe if I did answer that phone call, I could have helped or there could have been a different outcome,” he said.
That afternoon, Gabby and Laundrie are seen strolling through a Whole Foods store. It’s the last known footage of Gabby.
By the next day, there was nothing to indicate that she was still alive, investigators said.
Gabby’s last contact
Gabby kept in close contact with her mother, Nicole Schmidt, during the cross country road trip. So when days, and then weeks passed, with no word from Gabby and nothing posted on social media, her family grew increasingly worried.
The last time they spoke was on August 25, 2021. Schmidt said she received several worrying text messages over the following few days but was not convinced that they were actually written by her daughter.
Her suspicions were further raised when she received a final “odd text” in which Petito mentioned her grandfather by his first name “Stan” after Gabby was last seen.
“Can you help Stan, I just keep getting his voicemails and missed calls,” the message said, according to an arrest warrant.
Schmidt said the text was concerning because her daughter never called her grandfather by his first name. It was later revealed that Brian had sent the text from Gabby’s phone.
Meanwhile, Brian left Wyoming on August 30 to head back to Florida. Footage from multiple gas stations where he had stopped was shown in the doc.
Investigators revealed in the doc that he had used Gabby’s debit card to get gas and during this time, there was a Zelle transaction from Gabby to Brian for the amount of $700.
In the memo section was written: “Goodbye Brian, I’ll never ask you for anything again.”
“We do know Gabby was dead at this point and that Brian was making the transactions,” an FBI agent based in the Denver office told Netflix.
Laundrie returned home to North Port, Florida, with the van – but no Gabby. Authorities later revealed that he had made a flurry of frantic calls to his parents saying that Gabby was gone and he needed a lawyer.
After multiple tries to get information about Gabby’s whereabouts from Laundrie’s parents, Gabby’s mother reported her missing on September 11, 2021.
Laundrie was named a person of interest in the case and then disappeared from his parents’ Florida home. They told police he had gone hiking and was often gone for several days.
Gabby’s body was found on September 19, 2021, just outside Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Authorities determined that she had been strangled.
A month later, Laundrie’s remains were found in the Carlton wildlife Reserve about a mile from where he parked his car.
His belongings, his clothes and shoes were all still there. But he had completely decomposed down to the bone. It was later determined that he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Alongside his remains was a written confession in which he admitted to killing Gabby.
Gabby’s parents respond to Moab footage
Just days before the tragedy unfolded, an incident was captured on bodycam footage from the Moab, Utah police on August 12, 2021, that showed a distraught Gabby with Laundrie on the side of the road after someone had called to report a man “slapping” a woman.
But police determined that Gabby was the aggressor, and officers had them spend the night apart.
When the bodycam footage was released on the news, Gabby’s mother said in the Netflix docuseries that she watched it along with the rest of the world.
“I watched my daughter looking frightened to death – that’s when I realized that things were way worse than I could have imagined.”
She also said that she didn’t know there was a 911 call that some guy was slapping his girlfriend.
“To see the distress my daughter was in then to see them laughing and joking around,” she added about the officers at the scene.
“I couldn’t believe that she was being treated as the aggressor.”
Gabby’s stepmother Tara Petito added: “It breaks my heart to see her in such distress. We didn’t get all of the facts that day.”
The family has filed, and settled, two separate civil suits against Laundrie’s parents.
The first for wrongful death was settled in November 2022 for $3 million. The second one for emotional distress against Laundrie’s parents was settled in February.
The Petitos alleged in the suit that his parents knew Gabby was dead but lied to them and the public by issuing messages of hope that she’d be found.
Last November, a Utah judge dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit that Gabby’s parents filed against the city of Moab alleging police did not do enough during a traffic stop to protect their daughter from Laundrie.
An independent investigation found that Moab police made “several unintentional mistakes ” when they encountered the couple. In their report investigators said Gabby very likely “was a long-term victim of domestic violence, whether that be physically, mentally, and/or emotionally.”
Burton, their lawyer, said that Gabby called them during the interaction with police and they wanted her to come home, but she assured them police would take care of things.
The attorney said the parents relied on the police to handle the situation but a “grossly negligent” investigation increased the chances of their daughter being harmed.
Burton said officers placed Gabby in a police car and sympathized with Laundrie, laughing with him, which could have emboldened him. He said one of the responding officers explained the risk of domestic violence, showing he understood the situation but did not respond properly.
Mitchell Stephens, the attorney representing the Moab Police Department, argued for dismissal on the grounds of governmental immunity, while adding that allegations about Moab’s involvement in her death are completely speculative.
He said the couple left Moab together and continued traveling. He cited multiple instances where courts have not found police at fault when domestic violence escalated to murder.
Tragedy into purpose
Gabby’s case generated national attention but there was also scrutiny from authorities and the media, both of which have been criticized for focusing more attention on missing white women than women of color.
Her parents became very aware of this and started the Gabby Petito Foundation with a mission to “turn our tragedy into purpose.”
“We wish to turn our personal tragedy into a positive,” they say on their website. “It is our hope that Gabby’s foundation will bring these important issues into the forefront of the public eye to the benefit of all our communities.”
“It’s so hard for us to realize that Gabby’s gone, that she’s not with us,” her stepfather Jim Schmidt said in the docuseries.
“I can only hope that we’ve made her proud and that she’s looking down on us and saying ‘thank you for being my voice when I couldn’t speak anymore.’”
The three-part docuseries will be available to stream on Netflix on February 17.
