Dog the Bounty Hunter has called the death of Brian Laundrie ‘suspect’ and detailed a slew of inconsistencies in his disappearance and suicide.
The reality TV star suggested in his new memoir that Brian’s parents knew the location of his body all along after he killed his fiancée Gabby Petito in 2021 while on a cross-country road trip.
Dog writes that it would have been a ‘miracle’ if Roberta and Chris Laundrie really had found their son’s remains by chance as they claimed in the 160-acre Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park in North Port, Florida.
‘I believe in miracles but that seems miraculous indeed!’ Dog writes snarkily in Nine Lives and Counting: A Bounty Hunter’s Journey to Faith, Hope, and Redemption, which is out next month.
Dog joined the search for Brian but he killed himself before he was able to apprehend him, making him the first ever fugitive to evade the famed bounty hunter.
Dog says he is not convinced Brian shot himself dead and it writes that it doesn’t make sense that his suicide note was still legible despite supposedly being underwater for a month.
Dog The Bounty Hunter joined the manhunt for Brian Laundrie after he was wanted for killing his fiancée Gabby Petito in 2021
Dog, real name Duane Chapman, writes in his upcoming memoir that Laundrie’s death is ‘suspect’ and points out several ‘inconsistencies’
Dog writes that it would have been a ‘miracle’ if Roberta and Chris Laundrie (pictured) really had found their son’s remains by chance as they claimed
The case still troubles him due to ‘too many irregularities and inconsistencies that have not been explained satisfactorily’, he writes.
Petito, 22, from Blue Point, New York, was on a cross country road trip in 2021 with Brian 23, when her parents reported her missing in September that year.
She had been chronicling her journey on Instagram with her posts talking about how much she enjoyed the travels and living out of their van.
His memoir, Nine Lives and Counting: A Bounty Hunter’s Journey to Faith, Hope, and Redemption, is out next month
But after her parents had not heard from her in a month they called the police, who later concluded she was murdered by Laundrie in late August.
Laundrie went missing soon after and became the prime suspect, even refusing to come forward when Petito’s body was found despite mounting outrage from Petito’s family and the public.
Dog became involved in the case while Brian was still a fugitive and writes in the book that he interrupted his honeymoon in Florida with his sixth wife Francie Frane to go and knock on the Laudrie family home in North Port.
Dog, whose real name is Duane Chapman, writes that his daughter Barbara Katie died in a car crash when she was 23, a similar age to Petito.
‘I had an immediate emotional connection with Gabby’s parents,’ Dog writes.
After explaining this to Frane, he told her he wanted to knock on the Laundrie family home ‘so bad’ and she agreed to go with him.
After knocking loudly on the property and nobody answering, Dog became convinced he was nearby.
He writes: ‘I felt in my gut the parents knew where their son was….I could feel that Laundrie was close.’
Dog told Francie: ‘That boy slunk back home with his tail between his legs and I’m going to find him – for Gabby!’
Cutting his honeymoon short, Dog began working the case and ‘tracked down a lot of clues’ and set up a tip line run by former law enforcement agents that he knew.
Dog’s suspicions grew even more when Roberta and Chris decided to ‘suddenly’ go looking for their son’s body in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park, where his van had already been spotted.
Soon after Brian’s remains were found along with a backpack and a notebook.
The TV reality star flew a banner with a message for Gabby Petito’s boyfriend: ‘Aloha Brian Laundrie’. The banner flew over the islands off the western coast of Florida
Dog is seen wading through water in the area around the campsite where the Laundries visited in the days before Petito was reported missing
Dog announced he was launching his own manhunt for Laundrie days after Petito’s body was discovered. He posted footage of himself wading through the Fort De Soto Park looking for him
Dog raised questions about how Laundrie’s suicide note confessing to Petito’s murder was in a wooden box in an area that had been underwater for a month, yet it was still legible
The first inconsistency in the case that Dog cites is that reports said the area – which had been searched by law enforcement – had been underwater earlier but the waters had receded.
Dog writes: ‘When I talked with a group of native Americans living nearby, they told me the water had only receded about an inch in two months, so a body or a backpack should have still been visible.’
A bigger issue was how Chris Laundrie could have led police to the exact point where his son’s body was, even though it was off a trail inside a 160 acre park, which was inside the 25,000 acre Carlton Reserve.
Dog writes: ‘You read that right….I believe in miracles but that seems miraculous indeed!’
Dog also raised questions about how Laundrie’s suicide note confessing to Petito’s murder was in a wooden box in an area that had been underwater for a month, yet it was still legible.
He writes: ‘It wasn’t a watertight box, just a regular wooden box. Imagine this: take a paper notebook and write in it. Put that notebook inside a wooden jewelry box then drop that box in a swimming pool and leave it underwater for a month.
‘Then pull the box out of the water and retrieve the notebook. What do you think the odds are that the paper has not disintegrated or that a note you wrote on that paper would still be legible?
Dog writes that it seems ‘far-fetched’, as does the idea that Brian had shot himself in the left side of his head with a .38 pistol.
‘This is curious since Brian was right handed,’ Dog writes. ‘It does not follow the usual pattern of suicide by gunshot’.
Dog writes: ‘The whole thing felt suspect to me…to this day I believe there are too many irregularities and inconsistencies that have not been explained satisfactorily. Officially the case is closed but I feel like we don’t have all the answers.’
Chris Laundrie led police to the exact point where his son’s body was, even though it was off a trail inside a 160 acre park, which was inside the 25,000 acre Carlton Reserve
Dog writes: ‘The whole thing felt suspect to me…to this day I believe there are too many irregularities and inconsistencies that have not been explained satisfactorily’
Laundrie’s parents were never charged with a criminal offense but late last year they settled a civil lawsuit brought by Petito’s parents Joseph Petito and Nichole Schmidt for undisclosed terms.
The lawsuit claimed that the Laundries had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the Petitos because they knew about Gabby Petito’s death in August 2021, and the location of her body.
But instead of telling the authorities, they merely issued a statement expressing ‘hope’ that she would be ‘reunited with her family’, giving the Petito family false hope she was alive.
During the case, the Petitos filed to the court a letter written by Roberta which was later found by detectives in Brian’s backpack next to his dead body.
In the note, she told her son: ‘If you’re in jail I will bake a cake and put a file in it. If you need to dispose of a body, I will show up with a shovel and garbage bags’.
On the envelope were the words ‘burn after reading’.
Roberta later claimed she wrote it before her son went on his road trip with Petito and that it was meant as ‘jokey’, but given subsequent events she admitted it ‘sounds awful’.
The complaint in the case stated that Brian told his parents in a phone call on August 29th 2021 he frantically told them Petito was ‘gone’ and asked for a lawyer.
While the Petito family searched for their daughter, Roberta and Chris were accused of going on a vacation with Brian in Florida.
