Even taken purely at face value, the letter Roberta Laundrie wrote to her son Brian was disturbing – an intense and somewhat overwrought proclamation of a mother’s unwavering love for her child. ‘You are my boy. Nothing can make me stop loving you,’ it read. ‘Nothing will or could ever divide us, no matter what we do. If you’re in jail, I will bake a cake with a file in it.’
Roberta added: ‘If you need to dispose of a body, I will show up with a shovel and garbage bags.’ The letter was titled: ‘Burn after reading.’
The significance of the note was to become apparent when Brian’s remains were found in Florida’s Carlton Reserve on October 20, 2021.
The 23-year-old had ended his own life with a gunshot to the head. Nearby were his belongings, including photos and letters to his family. Also among them was a note, written by Brian, admitting to the murder of his fiancée, Gabby Petito, two months previously.
The disappearance of Gabby made headlines around the world: the 22-year-old from Long Island, New York, had embarked on a summer road trip with Brian, never to return.
Now, a new three-part Netflix documentary, American Murder: Gabby Petito, pieces together the last weeks of her life and includes some startling new details, not least the contents of Roberta’s letter to her killer son.
Gabby Petito was on a summer road trip across America with Brian Laundrie when she was killed and her body disposed
Gabby’s parents, Nichole Schmidt and Joe Petito, feature at length in the documentary and, as a shaken Nichole recalls, the letter made her ‘sick to my stomach’. Though Roberta later claimed she had written the note before the young couple set out on their road trip, its contents still manage to appal – not least because when Gabby’s body was finally found in a forest in Wyoming, it was determined that she had been strangled and her body disposed of.
‘The first time we saw that letter, we were just so in shock,’ says Tara Petito, Gabby’s stepmother. ‘How could she write this letter? It’s just disgusting.’
In July 2021, Gabby set off on her four-month road trip across America with Brian, hoping to kickstart a career as a ‘Van Life’ vlogger – making and posting videos online as they crossed the country in their converted Ford Transit. But as the documentary shows, behind the carefree Instagram posts of a smiling couple posing at the canyons and hot springs of western America, a far darker picture was emerging.
On August 12, police in Moab, Utah, responded to a call from a person who reported seeing a man hitting a woman before they drove off together in a van. For the first time, the documentary shows the full bodycam footage taken by police as they pulled over Gabby and Brian in response to that call.
In the chilling video, a crying Gabby tells officers that the couple had got into a fight, while Brian – calm and affable – reasons with them. Both have visible marks on their body: Gabby on her face and arm, Brian on his face. When a clearly distressed Gabby tells police ‘I guess I hit him first’, the officers inform Brian that he’s the ‘victim of a domestic assault’. They go on to arrange a cheap hotel room for him overnight, while Gabby is instructed to stay in the van.
Given what eventually transpired, it’s an astonishing exchange and, if the situation had been handled differently, might well have changed the course of events. Nichole says of the footage: ‘To see the distress my daughter was in and [the police and Brian] laughing and joking around… I could not believe that she was being treated as an aggressor.’
When the pair first started dating in March 2019, Gabby’s family found Brian to be quiet and ‘a little socially awkward’, but otherwise liked him well enough.
Gabby moved to North Point, Florida, to live with him and his family, but struggled to get on with his mother, Roberta.
When the pair got engaged and Roberta posted the news on Facebook, Gabby’s family were shocked. Though her parents, Nichole and Joe, had separated when she was a baby, Gabby remained very close to both, as well as to Joe’s wife, Tara, Nichole’s husband, Jim Schmidt, and her six younger siblings. To be shut out of the news of her engagement seemed deeply out of character. ‘She didn’t want to tell anybody,’ says Nichole. ‘I thought that was really strange.’
In fact, as the documentary reveals, behind their picture-perfect online presence, Brian was a controlling and abusive partner.
When Gabby got a job at a fast-food restaurant to finance her dream of becoming a travel vlogger, for example, Brian labelled her ‘disgusting’, later explaining away his anger by saying he was anxious she might leave him.
On another occasion, he stole Gabby’s wallet to prevent her from going out without him.
Indeed, according to her best friend Rose Davis, Brian was entirely dismissive of Gabby’s vlog idea. ‘A big reason Brian didn’t want her to do the vlog,’ she says, ‘is because I think he was worried that the truth of everything would be on [camera].’ And Rose seems to have a point. In a selfie later retrieved from her phone, Gabby is pictured with a black eye. It was taken on the day of her and Brian’s fight in Moab, moments before police stopped the couple. In the bodycam footage, one officer even asks Gabby: ‘Did you get hit in the face? Kinda looks like something hit you in the face.’
A selfie Gabby took showing bruising to her face
Yet perhaps the documentary’s most startling revelation is that, ten days after the incident in the desert, on August 22, Gabby contacted an ex-boyfriend and told him she was planning on leaving Brian. Describing Gabby as his ‘first love’, her ex, identified solely as Jackson, admits that ‘from the sound of her voice… I think that she wasn’t sure of what he would do, or what he could do’.
Jackson felt that the call was a cry for help and, when they signed off, implored her to ‘be very careful’. Gabby made her final Instagram post on August 25, smiling broadly while holding a crocheted pumpkin. It was also on this day that Nichole spoke to her daughter for the last time.
Five days later Nichole received a text from Gabby’s phone, explaining that she had no phone service and asking: ‘Can you help Stan? I keep getting his voicemails and missed calls. My phone doesn’t even ring.’
Stan was Gabby’s grandfather, and Nichole thought the message was odd as Gabby normally referred to him as ‘Grandpa’. The FBI later said that Brian had sent texts from Gabby’s phone to trick the police into thinking she was still alive.
Over the next few days, Gabby’s family repeatedly tried to get hold of her. Worried that both Gabby and Brian had gone missing on their travels, Nichole texted Roberta on September 10. She did not respond.
‘Gabby was going to be their daughter-in-law,’ says Gabby’s dad Joe. ‘This is a person that I thought they loved.’ When he texted the Laundries to tell them he was calling the police, he was met with silence.
A missing persons report for Gabby was filed on September 11, which brought about an incredible twist. Police officers visiting the Laundrie family home in Florida were surprised to find that, not only was Gabby’s van parked in the driveway, but that Brian was home without her. Bodycam footage in the documentary shows Brian’s parents, Roberta and Christopher, refusing to speak with the officer and offering up their attorney’s number instead.
There then followed the most extraordinary hunt for Gabby.
After her father appealed for help at a press conference in Florida, not only did local and national news stations run the story, but amateur sleuths on social media – drawn to Gabby’s online posts – also started following the case.
Gabby’s phone had last been used in the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. As the search spanned over 20,000 square miles of rugged terrain, with officers combing the area on horseback and on foot, a further twist emerged: on September 17, Brian was also reported missing.
As the attention shifted from Gabby’s disappearance to Brian’s, a frustrated Nichole says: ‘I was still thinking: I haven’t found my daughter yet. I need to find my child.’
By now the FBI were receiving up to 300 tips a day from all over the country. Ironically, it was a couple of travel vloggers, Jenn and Kyle Bethune, who provided the final breakthrough in Gabby’s disappearance. Looking through footage she had taken on August 27 – the day Gabby was last seen alive – Jenn noticed Gabby’s van hidden away in the nearby Spread Creek area (before Brian drove it back to his parents’ house in Florida).
Finally able to narrow the search area, investigators found Gabby’s body on September 19. An autopsy declared her death a homicide by means of blunt force trauma and strangulation.
Her stepdad Jim is visibly distraught recounting the memory. She was lying on the ground, ‘on her left side in a foetal position,’ he sobs. ‘Just laying there on the ground for weeks… left there like she was a piece of trash, by someone who was supposed to love her.’ At lunchtime on August 27, Gabby and Brian had been seen arguing in a restaurant. When the couple left abruptly, a witness saw her crying. She later tried to phone Jackson again, but he was busy at work and missed the call.
Gabby and Brian were then spotted on security footage at a Whole Foods in Jackson, Wyoming, at 2.13pm. The recording shows Brian angrily slamming the van door before they enter the store. It is the last time that Gabby is seen alive.
They then drove to Spread Creek, arriving at around 6pm. Investigators believe Gabby was rearranging files on her computer at around 8.30pm – seemingly the last thing she ever did. No one knows exactly what transpired between the couple to result in Gabby’s life being cut so short.
Gabby with Brian’s mother Roberta Laundrie, who said she would provide her son with a shovel if he needed to dispose of a body
As the documentary reveals, over the next few days Brian worked furiously to try to establish an alibi. Not only did he send texts to Gabby’s phone to make it appear as though they were physically apart but communicating normally, he also made a $700 transaction from Gabby’s bank account to his, writing in the memo: ‘Goodbye Brian, I’ll never ask you for anything again.’
Phone records then show that he called his parents on August 29 to say that Gabby was ‘gone’. They contacted a lawyer immediately afterwards.
An arrest warrant for Brian was issued on September 23, but it is possible that he was already dead.
More than a week earlier, he told his parents he was going on a hike to clear his head and, despite an extensive police search, it was only when the Laundries themselves went looking for him at Carlton Reserve that Brian was found.
They discovered his belongings on October 20 and, shortly afterwards, his remains. In a notebook, he had penned multiple letters to his family.
‘I have killed myself by this creek in the hopes that the animals will tear me apart,’ he wrote in one. ‘That it may make some of her [Gabby’s] family happy.’ He also claimed that an accident had left Gabby in such pain that he had killed her as an act of mercy.
As for his mother Roberta’s own ‘burn after reading’ letter to her son, Gabby’s friend Rose expresses the sentiments of many when she brands it ‘disgusting’.
The extent of the Laundries’ involvement in Gabby’s death and the disposal of her body, according to the authorities, is still unknown, and while no criminal charges have been filed, in 2022 the Petito-Schmidt family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against them which was settled last year for $3million (£2.4million).
Roberta and Christopher Laundrie provided no input to the documentary.
Gabby’s family continue to try to mine some kind of good from the depths of the tragedy. In 2021 they set up the Gabby Petito Foundation to help locate missing persons and assist victims of domestic violence. ‘I can only hope,’ says Jim, ‘that we’ve made her proud and she’s looking down on us and saying, “Thank you for being my voice when I couldn’t speak anymore.”’
American Murder: Gabby Petito is available now on Netflix.
