20: Gabby Petito Reported missing & later found dead. Brian Laundrie suspected in death

One of the saddest events that occurred with the death of Gabby Petitio happened in the United States. The case brought international attention and a closer look at violence and domestic violence 

Gabrielle Venora Petito was an American woman who was killed while travelling on a van life journey across the United States with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie. The trip began on July 2, 2021, and was planned to last four months; however, Petito disappeared in late August.

On September 19, 2021, Petito’s remains were found at Bridger–Teton National Forest in Wyoming. According to the autopsy, she was killed by manual strangulation. 

After a month of speculation around Laundrie’s whereabouts and an extended search of the area around his Florida home, his skeletal remains were discovered in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on October 20. On November 23, it was announced that Laundrie died due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

On August 12, 2021, a witness called the 9-1-1 emergency response phone line claiming that a couple, later identified as Laundrie and Petito, was fighting in front of the Moonflower Community Cooperative in Moab, Utah. The caller told the dispatcher they saw a man slap a woman, and after the two ran up and down the sidewalk, the man hit the woman again and then drove off.

Another witness described the incident in a statement to police saying that Petito and Laundrie were talking “aggressively” and that Petito “was punching him in the arm.” The witness said it looked like Laundrie was trying to leave Petito and take her phone with him before Petito eventually climbed into the driver’s seat, moved over into the passenger’s seat, and asked “Why do you have to be so mean?” and then they drove off.

Police identified the van near the entrance to Arches National Park and conducted a traffic stop. They found Petito crying heavily in the passenger seat where she told officers, captured on police body camera footage:

“Yeah, I don’t know if some days, I have really bad OCD. I was just cleaning and straightening up, back in the … I was apologizing to him and saying, “I’m sorry, that I’m so mean,” because sometimes I have OCD and sometimes I can get really frustrated. Not like mean towards him. I just like, I just, my vibe is, I’m in a bad mood. And, I was just saying I’m sorry if I’m in a bad mood. I just … I had so much work I was doing on my computer this morning. … And, I just now quit my job to travel across the country and I’m trying to start a blog. I have a blog. So I’ve been building my website. I’ve been really stressed and he doesn’t really believe that I could do any of it, so, we just been fighting all morning and he wouldn’t let me in the car before.”

Laundrie was suspected of the murder of Petito but was on the run from authorities. The FBI issued a Federal warrant for fraud. Laundries were later found dead in Florida in late October. The death was ruled a suicide.