Back in August of 2021, all eyes were on Gabby Petito, the woman who went missing after going on a cross country trip with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. Laundrie returned to his parents’ North Port, Florida home from the trip by himself.
After a nationwide search, Petito’s body was found on September 19th in the Grand Teton National Forest in Wyoming. It was believed that she had been strangled to death by Laundrie.
Once her body was discovered, Laundrie fled to the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park, where he was later discovered dead. An autopsy showed the cause of death to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Next to his remains, they discovered a journal where Laundrie reportedly confessed to killing Petito. Fast forward to 2024, and we’re still receiving more information on what exactly went down during that fateful trip.
According to the Daily Mail, Laundrie reportedly called his parents at least 20 times two days after killing Petito. In the two months prior, he had only called his dad, Christopher, once, and his mother, Roberta, five times. Laundrie told his parents that Gabby was “gone,” and they needed to get a lawyer two days after her death.
Additional details show that Laundrie first called his parents around 4 PM on Sunday, August 29th, a few days after Petito had last spoken to her mother, Nichole. The call lasted 55 minutes, and was followed by another 22-minute call around 9:20 PM.
The first two calls were followed by several more from Sunday and into Monday, August 30th.
The Petito family attorney Pat Reilly told the outlet:
“Brian told Christopher, ‘Gabby’s gone, I need a lawyer.’ And he was frantic in Christopher’s words. They refused to acknowledge that that meant Gabby was dead, which flies in the face of logic.
If your son calls and he’s frantic and he says she’s gone, I need a lawyer. What other explanation of ‘gone’ could there be?”
Christopher denied Reilly’s interpretation, saying:
“Something to the effect of, well, there were times that Gabby would leave and go away for a couple days to meet with her friends or she’d just leave for a couple hours when she was living with us.
That was his explanation for why he couldn’t admit that ‘gone’ meant she was dead. It was a flurry of calls on those two days. The calls between Brian and his parents prior to that were very sporadic, around five.”
With all of this known now, it’s crazy that the Laundrie family continued to withhold information from the Petito family and authorities knowing that Gabby was already dead. I can understand that they’re the guy’s parents, but it seems an awful lot like they tried to cover up a crime… right?
