Over the past few days, I have been caught up in following the case of Gabby Petito, like everyone else. What started due to curiosity and good intentions (maybe we can actually help find a missing person or solve a crime and get some justice), ended with me having some conflicting thoughts and reservations. I thought I’d come here to discuss.
Last night it was reported that the body of Gabby Petito was found (it will not be officially confirmed until the coroner’s report), which I think was the outcome most of us had come to expect. The 22 year-old went missing while road tripping with her fiancé Brian Laundrie out West. They had been documenting their “hashtag vanlife” for their respective Instagram accounts and their shared YouTube channel, so when Gabby was first reported missing on September 11, there was plenty of opportunity for people online to pour over the footage and captions trying to figure out what happened to her.
I first saw the story reported on the E! News Instagram account and the details were so vague, I clicked over to read the article, which was nothing more than two paragraphs and even more bizarre.
The article said that Brian and Gabby’s plan was to road trip up through Halloween, but Brian returned to Florida early at the end of August without her, driving home in her van. Home was actually Brian’s parents’ house, where him and Gabby had both been living prior to the trip. Neither Brian nor his parents notified Gabby’s parents (who live in Long Island, New York) of his return alone. It wasn’t until Gabby’s parents tried to contact the parents ten days later and got no response that they realized she was missing. The article said that Brian was not cooperating with the police, not even to tell them where he last saw Gabby, but for some reason, he did not appear to be labeled as a person of interest at the time. Anyone who read the article would draw the logical conclusion that he had something to do with her disappearance so I rushed to the comments under the E! News Instagram pic to see if everyone else was seeing what I was seeing. Someone in the comments linked to both Gabby and Brian’s Instagram accounts, so I clicked over to do some sleuthing. It quickly became obvious that several thousand people had done the same. And, they had A LOT to say.
The commenters (not sure whether they were longtime followers or newly interested spectators like me) seemed to think that Gabby’s last two posts on social media were not from her. They noticed that all her other posts had location tags except for the last two, all her other posts used hashtags in the caption while these were separate in the comments (like Brian does on his account), and that all of her other posts had long captions while these two were very concise. Also, the second to last caption talked about someone leaving plastic garbage on the ground which is really more of a Brian Instagram topic. He talks frequently about plastic ruining the environment on his account. People speculated that Gabby’s last picture wishing everyone a “Happy Halloween” seemed to be taken at an earlier date because her hair was longer. Plus, it seemed like an odd choice for someone to post in late August.
Over on Brian’s account things got even more suspicious. Commenters noticed that he made several references to the book Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, which is about a cross country road trip and a serial killer, and that they shared a Spotify playlist containing several ominous sounding song titles. The few photos Brian posted with Gabby have retroactively disturbing captions like the one announcing their engagement saying “‘til death do us part” or the one from last fall saying “I’d die to watch all of our memories on repeat.”
I probably read through those comments and went back and forth between their accounts for a good two hours, thinking I had solved the case by the end. OBVIOUSLY, something very bad happened and Brian did it.
The next day, body cam footage from an August 12th altercation between the couple that involved the police was posted on the internet. Apparently, Gabby and Brian had been having a fight that turned physical and someone had called the cops. Video showed a visibly distraught Gabby seemingly taking responsibility for the incident. Was she the aggressor? Or, as various people online speculated, was she being gaslit by a narcissistic sociopath into believing everything was her fault?
As the case gained more and more attention in the news, Brian and his parents still refused to cooperate with the police. Gabby’s parents publicly pleaded with Brian’s parents to give them information about where they should center their search, but the Laundries weren’t talking. Then came the news that Brian was now missing. Or, as the Petitos pointedly corrected— Gabby was missing. Brian was HIDING.
Over the course of the next few days, I got more and more wrapped up in Instagram stories, podcasts, tiktoks, twitter hashtags… all with people piecing together timelines, documenting emerging details, trying to connect the dots with another murder of two women in the Moab area (coincidentally, or not coincidentally, one of the women worked at the Moonflower Coop which was the scene of Gabby and Brain’s August 12th altercation, although police have said the incidents are not related), and posing various theories. There was the questionable art with very dark themes on Brian’s Instagram account. The YouTube clip where Brian looks like he is reading a book called Annihilation which is also about people going missing on a trip out West. The tiktok from a woman who picked up Brian as a hitchhiker at the end of August and described him as being agitated and exiting their car suddenly. The facebook groups of hikers familiar with the National Parks mapping out their route and analyzing the couple’s hikes that they logged into an All Trails app.
Then yesterday, a family who was also documenting their trip for YouTube was uploading footage and realized they had video of Gabby’s van parked on the side of the road on August 27th at Lupine trailhead in Wyoming. People online compared the stickers on the back of the van to the van in the body cam footage on the 12th to confirm it was hers. They also identified what looks like the same hat shown in her last Instagram pic on the dashboard and blew up the footage to reveal what could possibly be Gabby’s lone flip flop in the dirt. The van footage was a big missing piece of the puzzle for the actual police and detectives who finally had an exact location to search. I read one theory that connects the location of her van to the location that Brian was picked up hitchhiking later that same day, saying that he could have entered the park for a hike with Gabby at Lupine, but ended the hike at Colter Bay alone (the distance between them is approximately a seven hour hike), which would also explain why Brian hitchhiked saying he was going to Jackson (as described by the woman on Tiktok who picked him up) and why he hopped out of the car abruptly, when he was actually closer to retrieving the van. This theorist determined that her body was most likely somewhere between Lupine trailhead and Colter Bay, which sadly, proved to be correct. Gabby’s body was found yesterday afternoon about 60 feet away from where the van was spotted by the family.
At the very least, I hope Gabby’s parents have some closure. However, Brian is still at large and his parents appear to be helping him evade the police. Anyone see Your Honor starring Brian Cranston? That was all about how far a parent will go to protect their son from taking responsibility.
One reason I think this missing persons case has gotten so much attention is because Gabby and Brian were both documenting their trip on numerous social media platforms (YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, All Trails) in real time, so there was endless footage to pour through for amateur online investigators. I would even go so far as to say that the interest this case drummed up across the internet helped the police find her missing body. I don’t believe the family would have noticed Gabby’s van in their video if the case hadn’t been getting so much attention online.
But, another reason for the all the awareness surrounding Gabby’s case that can’t be ignored is that she was a young pretty white woman. As numerous people have pointed out, BIPOC missing persons rarely, if ever, get this much interest, let alone national news coverage. In fact, there have been 710 indigenous people, mostly girls, reported missing in Wyoming over the past decade. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard about any of them. Now, usually you could say that it’s the media’s fault for elevating stories about pretty blonde girls, but in the age of social media, where all of us are active players, it’s harder to place that blame. We are complicit.
When someone first called me out for this over direct message on Instagram, I got defensive, saying that the interest was more based on the bizarre details of the case, the fact that the police somehow let the obvious suspect get away and the sheer amount of online investigating people could do from the comfort of their couch due to how much the victim had posted on social media. But, upon further reflection, I had to admit, when I first clicked on the photo of Gabby Petito on E! News to read the article, it was just a pretty photo of a white girl with barely any details. I did not know at the time that I was about to put on my True Crime investigator hat and go down a four day long rabbit hole with the entire internet. I went back and checked E! News Instagram and found out that in the last five days, they have posted eight in-feed photos of Gabby Petito. Eight! Every other photo on their account is of a celebrity. I guarantee they keep posting photos of her because they are pretty and because they are driving click throughs, like mine. In other words, E! may have chosen to introduce the story to their national audience, but now, they are just giving the people what they want. When the media is a reflection of the masses, we all have to take some responsibility for what does and does not go viral.
There’s another possibly equally concerning reason this story picked up steam. Gabby and Brian became a trending topic on every social platform, and the more things are trending, the more national media outlets and average content creators pile on to take advantage of the increased views and upticks in follower counts. I actually started posting about it on my Instagram story, linking to various accounts that were following the case, but then I started questioning my motivation. These are real people and this is a heartbreaking story. Obviously everyone is genuinely interested and wants justice, but at what point does solving a mystery crossover into something more voyeuristic and closer to fandom?
Sure there are people posting about it to raise awareness and get answers, but we can’t ignore that there are also content creators posting about it for clout and entertainment value. Being one of the first to break an important detail in the case is a pretty surefire way to go viral. Which might be why, according to Buzzfeed, several people with important tips posted on social media before reporting it to the police. Would any parent with a missing child feel lucky to have so many online sleuths on the case? Or is it heartbreaking to hear people discussing your daughter’s disappearance while doing their makeup routine set to trending music on tiktok? Are cases more likely to be solved because so many eyes are on it? Or are the details more likely to get confused because people who are not real detectives are posting things without checking their facts first?
There are many content creators and influencers who appear to be posting only verified information about this case, but the further I went down the rabbit hole, the more I started to see other accounts with conflicting details. I noticed some accounts running out of breaking news to feed their audiences, so they were leaning heavier into guessing, theories, and thinner connections. One thing that occurred to me yesterday is that all of this online postulating feels eerily similar to an article I read on Medium that explained why so many people get sucked into Qanon conspiracies. The author creates games for a living and talks about a gamer theory called Apophenia which is, “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).” He says that Apophenia can often derail a game as users come to seemingly logical conclusions which were never intended by the creators. Once you identify a pattern or connection (he uses the example of politicians and celebrities using the same hand signal), you see it everywhere. In Qanon, users are rewarded by people literally “liking” your discovery and building upon the clue you supposedly unearthed. The difference between a traditional online game and Qanon is that games usually have a destination where everything leads, whereas Qanon is all leads and no answers, so people can endlessly build on conspiracy theories. That’s why they start to sound so crazy to the rest of us, who haven’t been there for the minor connections along the way. I think in the case of Gabby Petito, the online speculation and sleuthing paid off, and hopefully it will help catch Brian too, but it’s easy to see how this kind of amateur sleuthing can go awry, particularly as content creators look for the next case to solve.
I was told yesterday that someone I have been following all week for Gabby and Brian updates is heavily into Qanon. I’m not sure if that’s true but it gave me serious pause, because part of cultivating a following around true crime stories is building trust with your audience. Last year, I had started following someone based on their commitment to solving a different case and after the case was over, her content started to veer into Covid hoax territory. It made me realize that if we decide to follow random people on the internet because they are feeding our hunger for details more than the actual news, we have to realize these are not trusted sources. There is a reason the news doesn’t supply this level of detail. It’s a lot of speculation. And as much as we would love to think we are in the middle of a real life Clickbait or Only Murders in the Building, Gabby and Brian are real people. Even if Brian is guilty (The Undoing taught us the most obvious answer is most likely true), we don’t know if Brian was reading Lullaby because he’s been leaving bread crumbs for us to discover his evil plan or if it’s because it’s a popular book written by a bestselling author.
I have gone down the rabbit hole so deep, I feel like I have come out the other side. The sheer amount of content being created around this particular case is blurring the line between being helpful and being exploitative. Even while writing this article, I’ve wondered if I’m guilty. I sincerely hope that the people sleuthing online are actually aiding investigations instead of distracting. If they are helping, I hope they work up this much interest and energy around missing Black, Brown and Indigenous people too. And if you start following someone because they are closely following a case and come to trust that person because they are satisfying a need for a steady flow of information and getting you closer to that feeling of solving the puzzle, be aware that they might try to take you down a different path you didn’t realize you signed up for once it’s over.
I am not judging anyone for following this case. It’s riveting. I feel invested too. I sincerely think the internet helped locate Gabby’s body. Just don’t follow anything blindly. And pay attention to what grabs your attention. We all know the harm that the internet has the potential to create and the implicit bias that is present even when we don’t realize it. This new era of online amateur crime solving is no exception, even if maybe, it helped find real answers this time.
Are you following this case? Are you as far down the rabbit hole as I am? Do you feel online sleuthing is more helpful or harmful?
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If you’re interested in learning more about some stories of missing BIPOC people, the podcast The Fall Line is a great place to start. They do deep dives into the stories of missing POC children and women in GA.
I am a self professed true crime follower. However, you are correct. A lot of true crime content is based on entertainment. I try my best to follow content creators that have a larger purpose. I follow the Crime Junkie podcast because the creators mainly cover cold cases in the hopes that a listener may have a new tip to re-invigorate a case. They also really emphasize unsolved cases of minorities. They have focused on people of color, Trans, and indigenous women who don't get the media coverage that young white females get. They sell merchandise and donate proceeds to organizations like The DOE project and DNA funding for cold cases. I think this case was a anomaly in which the determination of the public helped find her but I can see how this can easily go south.