Today, Explained - The disappearance of Gabby Petito

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Vox’s Aja Romano explains why the internet stopped what it was doing to find one particular missing person. Today’s show was produced by Victoria Chamberlin and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Hundreds of thousands of Americans go missing every year. So maybe like me, you were a little confused when the entire internet seemed to dedicate itself last week to finding just one of them. We reached out to Vox culture writer Asia Romano to figure out what made the disappearance of Gabby Petito different. Why people so quickly became obsessed? Sean, I think there are a number of

reasons, beginning with the viral social media aspect of the case. She was an aspiring influencer. She hashtagged her quote-unquote van life on Instagram. She had this supposedly idyllic life where she was road tripping with her boyfriend, the man of her dreams. And from outside, it all looked very picture perfect. I think our plan for today is to just hang out here in the tent. But then she abruptly went missing. And I think just that fact by itself was enough to really intrigue people. The search for 22-year-old Gabby Petito spans across the country. Bringing Gabby Petito home safely, that is her family's goal. Then as this case went viral, more people got involved and the Internet's role in

solving it, I think, has raised many, many, many questions and sparked lots of discussion about various aspects of true crime and various aspects of the role that, quote unquote, web sleuths play in hampering or helping investigations. Let's go back to the beginning of this road trip. Gabby Petito is an inspiring influencer on Instagram. Does she have a big following? She did not have a very big following, but she was hoping to substantially increase her following over the summer when she and her boyfriend, Brian, were going to go on this road trip across the U.S.

And she began posting content in July, documenting their trip. They were going through all these national parks, visiting all these sand dunes, just having a really, really nice time. At least, that's the impression that you might have gotten from her social media. Hello, hello, and good morning. It is really nice and sunny today. It's only 10 o'clock in the morning. Except then, abruptly, at the end of August, she went missing.

She was last spotted by eyewitnesses on August 24th, and around then was the last time Gabby's mother spoke on the phone to her. So, Gabby is driving this van that she owns. Her boyfriend is with her, and he unexpectedly comes back from this road trip without Gabby. He drives the van all the way back to Florida, where his family lived, and then just refused to say anything about what happened to her or where she was. So Gabby's family, growing increasingly concerned, finally reported her missing on September 11th. Whatever you can do to make sure my daughter comes home, I'm asking for that help. There's nothing else that matters to me now. This girl right here, this is what

matters. That is it. So from September 11th up until today, 11 days later, this case has basically grown out of nowhere, taken over the internet and exploded. Okay, we now know about the domestic incident that happened on August 12th. There is an interesting new TikTok theory about Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie. There are allegations that Brian appeared on Instagram Live accidentally for two to three seconds and viewers saw water as if he were on a boat. Arrest Brian! Arrest Brian! Arrest Brian! Bring Gabby home! Arrest Gabby! Arrest Gabby home. Where is Gabby Laundrie?

I think to date there's been like hundreds of millions of views of the Gabby Petito hashtag on TikTok. And there's also been massive searches conducted by the FBI and local law enforcement. Today, the FBI executing a search warrant at the home Brian Laundrie shared with his parents and his fiancee, Gabby Petito. Two people went on a trip, one person returned. And that person that returned isn't providing us any information. So he was pretty rapidly named a person of interest in the case. Where does all this extra interest in the case lead? To Utah, because that was where she was last sighted on

August 24th. And so keep that date in your mind, because on September 16th, the Moab City Police Department released this body cam footage of police responding to a 911 call that happened on August 12th. Okay, turn off your engine. Go ahead and set your keys on the dash for me, alright? What's your guys' names? Gabby. Gabby, Brian. Okay. What's going on? How come you're crying? I'm just crying. We've just been fighting this morning.

Some personal issues. And there's over an hour of footage. Yeah, I don't know. It's just some days I feel like I had OCD. hour of footage. And once this body cam footage is released, then there are suddenly millions of more eyes on this case and millions of people talking about it and about how she was acting and how he was acting in this footage and how the cops responded. Especially because now this footage isn't being looked at just as a domestic violence incident, which is how it was initially called in. I don't know. We'd have been fighting all morning,

and he wouldn't let me in the car before. Why wouldn't he let you in the car? Because of your OCD? He told me I needed to calm down. Yeah. But I'm perfectly calm. I'm calm all the time. She's clearly upset in the footage.

She spends most of the entire hour crying, just sobbing, while Brian tries to downplay the whole incident. So, tell me, what's going on? She just gets worked up sometimes, and I try and really distance myself from her. So, like, I lock the car, and I walk away from her. And we also see the cops coming in for a lot of criticism here, because the police and the body cam footage, although they responded kind of sympathetically to Gabby and they went out of their way to try and make them separate for the evening, but they also really acted as though Gabby was being histrionic. They sort of like bro-fisted Brian and like trying to bond with him over how, you know,

sometimes women just have these breakdowns. Believe me, if I were to say that me and my wife haven't had our share of spouts, I'd be lying to you. Where does the body cam footage lead? Well, it brought more tips, right? Because you have more people looking at the case and thinking about their own reflections. So I saw Brian Laundrie parking his van August 26th at Spread Creek. Hi, my name is Miranda Baker. And on August 29th, my boyfriend and I picked up Brian at Grand Teton National Park at 530 at night at Coulter Bay. I'm 100% certain

that I did see him parking his van. And he was very kind of awkward and confused. And it was just him. There was no Gabby. and among them was one tip that probably proved crucial to to really narrowing the search for for gabby when we pulled in we've got double gopros so we have one that faces front and one that faces my husband while he's driving and the gopros just keep rolling on september 19th this couple who had been vacationing in the Grand Tetons on August 27th, remembered that they had captured video footage of a van on the side of the road. And we passed by their van or a white van and the white van had Florida plates and we were excited. And this was kind of just an extraordinary chance. So many things had to align for this to happen because they went back

and they found video footage of this van that was quickly identified as being Petito's. And I ran to the computer, pulled out my footage, scrolled through it, and lo and behold, Gabby's van was recorded in there by a complete accident. When they actually went to search there, that search apparently was successful because on September 19th, the authorities announced that they had found a body that they believed matched the description of Gabby Petito. And I believe the autopsy was yesterday, Tuesday. What did they conclude? The FBI confirmed on Tuesday that the human remains found in Wyoming were Gabby and that this was a homicide. And as far as we know, the last person who saw her alive was Brian Laundrie and no one has any idea where he is. Correct. Police have brought in underwater divers to search for him in Florida swamps and other bodies of water around the region of his family's home.

I believe that pretty strongly implies that the cops in Florida think that there's a possibility he took his own life. And so if that happens, Gabby's family will never know what happened to her. You know, you think they only just found out after a month of searching that she died and that she died by homicide. So if he dies by suicide or if he vanishes and is never found, then her family will never have any justice for her and they'll never know what happened. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. I give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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If there's a missing white woman, we're going to cover that every day. I think Gwen Ifill came up with this phrase, may she rest in peace. It's almost kind of self-explanatory. But if you think about the people that you tend to see on TV, the people whose cases get all the attention, they're usually young, pretty white women who are upper middle class or wealthy. You can think of people like Natalie Holloway. Welcome back with me tonight live. Natalie's mom, Beth Holloway. We are taking your calls live.

Lauren Spearer. College student from Scarsdale who went missing 10 years ago today. Lauren Spearer was 20 years old when she was last seen early on the morning of June 3rd, 2011. You know, you know their names because you know their stories because you have heard their stories in the media over and over again. Is this like a chicken or the egg situation? Like, do these stories get covered more because these are the stories that people want covered? Would people want the other stories covered or would they look away? I don't know who's to blame here. Do you?

I think it's sort of a continuation of a phenomenon that we have seen throughout pop culture. The powers that be, the producers and the people who are in charge of how media narratives get created, assume that the majority audience white people only want to hear stories about other white people and this becomes the way that media is created and and consumed for decades until people really start pushing back against it the the good thing is that you have definitely had people pushing back against this idea within the last two decades you've had an increasing number of people within the true crime community,

from podcasters to investigators, who have gone out of their way to really focus on and bring attention to cases of marginalized victims. Without knowing her birth date, adoptive name, or any basic information about Cleo, our investigation for our podcast has to start here on the Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan, where Cleo's story begins. You've had increasing conversation around, for example, the victimization and denigration of sex workers and the role that that plays in how crimes against them are investigated. And you have all of this conversation becoming more public and becoming more a part of

the mainstream. It's interesting to hear you shout out like the greater true crime community as sort of a service to these, you know, coverage blind spots there have been for decades, because it also feels like maybe there's a dark side to this true crime community. I mean, there's like a podcast that's extremely popular called My Favorite Murder. Stay sexy and don't get murdered. Goodbye. Like, should we have favorite murders, Asia? I mean, this is a very very uh timely question that you're asking you know i think a lot of people have been asking this since the serial podcast first sort of jump-started the the new modern true crime phenomenon in 2014 but we can go back even further if you think about the way that true crime was really marketed in like the 80s it was like it's very pulpy um books

that were like semi-fictional and rule talking about ted bundy and like very salacious titles um very lurid marketing um and for a while i think that that's all people thought true crime was but there's been there's been a lot of deconstruction around that idea over the last decade. And a lot of work has been done to really drill down into why people are drawn to these stories. And I think a lot of that has to do with not wanting to become a murderer or a murderee, you know? Which are both very valid. It's good to be reminded that this isn't necessarily a new phenomenon, though we currently exist in the sort of confluence of social media and murder and a fascination with true

crime. The fascination with true crime predates this sort of confluence of social media and murder sleuthing that we saw in sort of this unprecedented way in the case of Gabrielle Petito. It seems like the sleuthing itself has come under the magnifying glass here and people are examining whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, internet sleuthing can sometimes verge on what's called doxing, right? Where innocent people are having their addresses and personal information posted online because some crackpot sitting at home thinks that they solved some case, right? Absolutely.

And in the very worst case scenarios, yes, this can backfire horribly. But we're talking about a community that has been around for a while. The actual forum, Websleuthws, was formed in 1999. We want to make sure that when people come to Webslews.com to read, that when they read a discussion thread, that they will get information. They will get thoughtful looks at the evidence. And they have very strict rules about what you can and can't reveal. You're not going

to get the drama and the rumors and the baloney that you will get in other places. The community has been really self-policing in a lot of ways. And it's really only when you have a lot of new people coming into the community that don't really have the rules in place for how to engage that you see things happening like what happened to a person who was wrongfully accused of being the Boston bomber, for example. We as a family received literally hundreds of phone calls. And it was it was very as well as watching our Facebook page that we've been helping coordinate our search just get plastered with these baseless allegations. But that's exactly what's happening right now, right? There's there to be these viral murders, and there's always going to be people who sort of jump in to the more experienced web sleuthing and think they know something when in fact, they're just people with

like Fios or something. Exactly. And you're talking about the internet, right? You're always going to have a part of the internet that is sort of untameable and uncontrollable. But does that make the entire internet bad, like a net bad? I mean, some people might argue yes, but I think in this case, like the outcome is very concrete. Like without the internet, we would not have gotten the footage of Gabby's van on the side of the road. And this is not the only case that has been solved with the help of internet detectives. You know, there have been several missing cases, missing persons cases, for example, that have been solved because trained forensic artists decided to join in the search and decided to go through the files of missing cases and make new sketches of these people

to try and draw new attention to them and get new eyes on them using new information, new science, etc. And in some cases, those have been successful and people have been identified because of that work. So I think you have a range. You have a range of good, bad, and ugly, just as you do with every other thing that happens on the internet? If this moment is indeed unprecedented, if there's an unprecedented amount of attention on this one particular aspiring Instagram influencer's case, is there a chance that some of that attention might spill over and help solve the thousands of other missing person cases across this country, regardless of, you know, social status or race? I mean, I think that's the goal. That's the ideal outcome of this, right? That people who fall down this rabbit hole will fall down others. And when they do that, the chances of those cases being solved will increase.

But I think we also have to keep in mind that there are all kinds of things that could go wrong, you know? So it's important to remember that these are real people. You know, they're not caricatures. These are real traumas that they've experienced, and they're not there for your entertainment or your exploitation. So please sleuth responsibly. Asia Romano writes about culture over at Vox.com. Our episode today was produced by Heidi Mawagdi and Victoria Chamberlain. It's Today Explained. you