Gabby Petito’s mother has condemned the “armchair detectives” who continue to profit from and spread conspiracy theories about the travel blogger’s killing, five years after her fiancé fatally strangled her.
Petito, a 22-year-old from Long Island, disappeared in Wyoming in late August 2021 while on a cross-country van trip with her abusive fiancé, Brian Laundrie. The devastating case quickly became one of the most closely followed missing-person investigations in the US.
Her remains were discovered the next month, and Laundrie later left behind a written confession acknowledging that he had killed Petito before taking his own life with a gunshot wound. Yet online investigators and content creators have continued to fuel baseless theories about the case.
“Once she was found, the story was kind of still ongoing,” Petito’s mother, Nichole Schmidt, told The Mirror US.
“The creators and the armchair detectives, as we like to call them — people who are trying to create these other stories, speculation, and trying to make things different than what the simple answer is — Brian killed her, and then he took his life.
“They were exploiting things like, you know, Brian’s still alive, or they were crisis actors. This really didn’t happen. You know, Gabby, this whole story is fake.
“And I’m just like, I wish it was fake. I wish that my daughter was still here. Like, just horrible, horrible things like that. And then it just kind of kept going. And it’s still today, I still see videos pop up.”
During the summer of 2021, Petito and Laundrie had been traveling through the western United States in a white Ford Transit van, sharing footage and photos from their trip across social media.
On Aug. 12, 2021, police in Moab, Utah, were called after a witness reported a domestic incident involving the couple.
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Police body-camera video captured Petito visibly distraught and sobbing. Officers ultimately treated the episode as a mental health crisis rather than a domestic violence assault, separating the pair overnight instead of making an arrest.
Petito was last seen alive in Jackson, Wyoming, and her family lost contact with her shortly after August 25.
Laundrie returned alone to his parents’ home in North Port, Florida, on Sept. 1 that year and 10 days later Petito’s family reported her missing after desperately trying to get information from Laundrie’s family.
Her body was discovered on Sept. 19 at Grand Teton National Park, with an autopsy later determining that she had been strangled.
Just days after the grim discovery, the US District Court of Wyoming issued a warrant for Laundrie’s arrest.
His skeletal remains were discovered in a Florida nature park on Oct. 20 alongside a backpack and notebook containing a confession that he had killed Petito.
“I ended her life. I thought it was merciful, that it is what she wanted, but I see now all the mistakes I made,” Laundrie wrote in the notebook recovered by the FBI.
Petito’s family currently runs the Gabby Petito Foundation, which supports missing persons and domestic violence prevention.