Vanlife Nightmare

The search for 22-year-old Gabrielle "Gabby" Petito, who had gone missing on a vanlife journey across the United States with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, filled newspaper pages and cable TV newscasts for weeks in the fall of 2021. The couple started their cross-country trip on July 2, 2021, and was to last four months; however, Gabby disappeared in late August. After Gabby went missing, Brian raised suspicion when he drove Gabby's van from Wyoming back to his parent's house in North Port, Florida, and refused to talk about her whereabouts. Gabby's mother reported her missing on September 11th and Brian immediately became a person of interest in the case, and an arrest warrant was issued on charges of making withdrawals using Gabby's debit card. However, before the police could arrest him, Brian left his parent's home on September 13 and his parents reported him missing on September 17. Sadly, on September 19, searchers discovered Gabby's remains at Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming.
An autopsy found that her cause of death was manual strangulation. After a month of speculation about Brian's whereabouts and an extended search of the area around his Florida home, searchers discovered his skeletal remains in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park in central Florida on October 20. On November 23, officials announced that Brian died due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and we later learned that in a notebook found by the police near his remains, he admitted to killing Gabby. Gabby's case gained national attention due to the couple's social media activity, police body camera video footage, 9-1-1 emergency dispatch call recordings, and eyewitness accounts. In these pages, we will follow the couple from their high school days in Blue Point, New York right up until their final days. Rest in Peace Gabrielle "Gabby" Petito March 19, 1999 - late August 2021.