When Gabby, 22, vanished during a road trip of a lifetime with her fiance, online sleuths raced into action. They caused havoc, but ultimately they also cracked the case before the police

When Gabby Petito and fiance Brian Laundrie set off on a four-month trip across America in a white, converted Ford Transit van, recording their travels on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, they seemed to be on the adventure of a lifetime.

There were sunny posts of the young nomads hiking through U.S. national parks, kissing in canyons, enjoying what appeared to be a carefree existence.

But the picture-perfect life they depicted online in 2021 was not all it seemed.

After seven weeks, 23-year-old Brian returned alone to his parents’ house in Florida in their van — without his 22-year-old fiancee. After ten days of failing to get any information about Gabby’s whereabouts, police finally classed her as a missing person.

The mystery sent the internet into a frenzy.

In the following weeks, it became one of the first and biggest true crime cases to overtake TikTok. Just like the furore surrounding missing Lancashire mother Nicola Bulley last year, online super-sleuths went into overdrive.

Gabby Petito, 22, and fiance Brian Laundrie, 23, set off on a four-month trip together across the US in 2021

Gabby often uploaded her adventures with Brian to social media and gathered a sizeable following prior to her disappearance

There were more than 1.2 billion views of posts with the hashtag #GabbyPetito on TikTok alone. People camped outside Brian’s home.

And then, shockingly, he too went missing.

It wasn’t long before Gabby’s family and online followers got their answers, but not the ones they wanted.

Eight days after being reported missing, Gabby’s body was found in a forest in Wyoming. She had been strangled. Brian’s body was later found in a heavily wooded area near his parents’ home in Florida; he had shot himself.

A new three-part documentary, The Disappearance of Gabby Petito, not only gives a comprehensive view of their doomed trip, but examines how the power of social media can help and hinder true crime cases — with every detail analysed by armchair detectives.

Explaining why Gabby’s case caused social media mania, Professor Alex Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Miami, tells me: ‘Gabby’s age was a factor. She was 22 and in that age group young people are on their phones all the time. Their lives are largely in the digital world, so they’re constantly paying attention to feeds and postings and re-postings.’

News of her vanishing led to more than 1.2 billion views of posts with the hashtag #GabbyPetito on TikTok

Gabby was already a favourite online before her disappearance — which ignited a storm.

Brought up on Long Island, New York, blonde and vivacious Gabby was a typical twentysomething who had big dreams of big adventures, according to her parents Nichole Schmidt and Joe Petito.

An emotional Nichole says in the documentary, being streamed on ITVX: ‘She didn’t deserve what happened to her. She was everything to me and I just wanted to be the best I could be and do the best for her.

‘She taught me pure love, just pure joy, how to live life to the fullest . .. she was amazing.’

Gabby became friends with Brian at a New York high school and they began dating in 2019, after his family had moved to Florida. They got engaged a year later just before setting off on their trip, on July 2, 2021.

With stunning posts of dramatic natural backdrops in Utah and Colorado, aspiring travel vlogger Gabby documented every moment of a seemingly loved-up couple’s idyllic adventure on Instagram and her YouTube channel Nomadic Statik.

Gabby and Brian became friends while at high school in New York, started dating in 2019 and got engaged before setting off on their trip on July 2, 2021

Shortly before her last Instagram post on August 25, Gabby Facetimed her mother and said she and Brian were leaving Utah and driving to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

The final post, though, seemed strange to Gabby’s family — it was a picture of her with a crocheted pumpkin and the caption ‘Happy Halloween’, when Halloween was still two months away. Did Gabby post it — or someone else?

Then, five days later, her mother received an abrupt text message saying Gabby and Brian were in Yosemite, Calfornia — nearly 1,000 miles from their intended destination — with no cellphone service.

Alarm bells began to ring, especially when there was no new activity on Gabby’s social media.

They rang even louder on September 1 when Brian returned alone to Florida in the van registered to Gabby. No-one in the Laundrie family would speak to Gabby’s increasingly fraught parents or the authorities to pinpoint where she might be.

Gabby was officially reported as a missing person on September 11 with police confirming Brian was a ‘person of interest’.

‘Two people left on a trip and one person returned,’ police chief Todd Garrison said.

With the hunt for Gabby in high gear, her father Joe appeared at a news conference asking for help from the public in finding his daughter. ‘It seemed like the entire planet came to help,’ he tells the documentary.

Gabby had last been seen in a vast, remote stretch of Wyoming and canvassing people who had also been in the area yielded clues.

But then the case took on a life of its own. One TikTok user reported that she and her boyfriend had picked up Brian, who seemed to be acting ‘weird and jittery’. The post garnered an astonishing nine million views. Gabby quickly became the number one search online across America. But, as the hashtag #FindGabby trended, the search tipped over into obsession for many.

Brian Laundrie's yearbook photo taken about the time that he became friends with Gabby 

People posted multiple sightings of women who had been in the area where Gabby went missing (each sighting had to be debunked) and armchair sleuths traced the couple’s route, crowd-sourcing theories about what could have happened.

The flimsiest evidence, such as the different shades of Gabby’s hair and the clothes she was wearing in photos, were cited as possible clues.

Her online life before the trip was examined in minute detail.

The documentary interviews some of those who rushed to help solve the mystery of Gabby’s disappearance online — no doubt with good intentions, but often sending authorities down dead end routes.

One, Brent Shavnore, of Pensacola, Florida, explains: ‘The case resonated because you had all this content — the videos Gabby and Brian created were high definition... you could see the inside of their life. It gave everybody an open highway to dig into this content and see if they could find clues.’

Citizen detective Olivia Vitale, who even flew to Florida to protest outside Brian Laundrie’s family home, defends this, saying: ‘A lot of people don’t like us, but I think what people forget is that it’s a pressure campaign — that’s how things start happening, how things start moving.’

‘I slept for three hours last night. I have been so consumed by the case,’ one woman wrote on Facebook.

With more and more people piling in, Utah Police released bodycam footage from a 911 call about a ‘domestic problem’, recorded just over two weeks before Gabby’s last text to her mother. It showed the relationship between Gabby and Brian in a very different light from their sunny social media posts.

Gabby is in tears, saying she and Brian had an argument and he kept telling her to shut up, but she says the dispute was ‘her fault’. He has scratches on his face and arms but brushes it off as a lovers’ quarrel.

Video footage released by police shows Gabby in tears while seated in the back of a trooper's car following reports of a 'domestic problem'

Brian is also seen on camera after the argument between the couple. Gabby claims he told her to 'shut up' but that the dispute was 'her fault'

Fears for Gabby intensified.

Her mother Nichole recalls: ‘I wanted to jump through the screen and rescue Gabby. I think the video was important because we got to see the reality behind the social media personality… people saw her as a real person, struggling. It was hard to watch. I’ve only watched it once and I won’t watch it again.’

Police separated the pair and had Brian stay in a hotel for a night before they were allowed to drive on, which was later criticised.

The trail of videos, photos and personal accounts left by the couple, and Brian’s apparent refusal to come forward, meant that speculation reached fever pitch.

In livestreamed therories, online sleuths said Brian’s social media posts had a ‘dark’ side and that he had been spotted in photographs reading a violent novel. The couple’s Spotify playlist was examined in detail for clues. Suspicion even wrongly fell on a wholly innocent female friend of Gabby’s whom online investigators alleged was in cahoots with Brian.

There were claims that Brian had fled to Mexico, Spain, the Bahamas, Cuba, and had been sighted in cities across the U.S. One man called 911 and wrongly said he had talked to Brian. ‘I’m 99.99 per cent sure it was him,’ he insisted.

Further outlandish theories were that Brian was hiding in a shed at his parents’ home and that a hand had been captured on drone footage emerging from one of the family’s flowerbeds, prompting speculation he was hiding in a bunker.

Another influencer crowd-sourced money for a #Justice4Gabby banner to be flown over the Laundrie home to put pressure on the family. People flew from across America to stand in front of the house with megaphones, shouting ‘where’s Gabby?’ at all hours.

But for all the super sleuth dead ends, the breakthrough came from a travel vlog. A couple who documented their travels with their three children and four dogs in a converted school bus on YouTube spotted Gabby’s white van while editing their footage. It was parked at Grand Teton National Park.

The wife recalls in the documentary how she and her husband posted an image of the vehicle with a big red arrow pointing to it and the words: ‘We found Gabby Petito’s van.’ The sighting allowed police to narrow their search and Gabby’s remains were found among trees on September 19.

A post mortem revealed she had been strangled and her body wrapped in a blanket and left outside for three to four weeks.

Police had been searching the Carlton Reserve, a 25,000-acre swamp near the Laundrie home, after his parents told police their son had gone to the area a few days earlier and not returned.

It took until October 20 for officers to find Brian’s body in the swamp and identify him by dental records. He had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. A letter found nearby, written by Brian, admitted Gabby’s murder.

With both young people dead, the case was now over and the parents were left to pick up the pieces.

Chris and Roberta Laundrie declined to be interviewed for the documentary. They deny any wrongdoing.

But their lawyer was furious about the social media frenzy and said: ‘These platforms are running amok with these ludicrous and nonsensical theories about the parents… enough is enough.’ While Gabby’s parents were grateful the public helped search for their daughter, they expressed misgivings about the extent of social media speculation.

‘It’s very humbling so many people cared and wanted to help but I think you have to be careful about social media and sleuths,’ Nichole says. ‘Some of them are very self-serving and others are actually just good people that want to help.’

The ghoulish online sleuths were not finished, though. At Gabby’s memorial, the female friend targeted as a suspect was seen laughing — Gabby’s father said it was about a happy memory — but the friend has been bombarded with threats ever since.

Nichole Schmidt, Gabby's mother, wipes away the tears during a news conference following claims that the police failed to recognise her daughter was in a life-threatening situation

Alongside her husband, James Schmidt, Nichole holds a photo of Gabby. Their £2.4million settlement was used to establish The Gabby Petito Foundation for missing persons

In 2022, Gabby’s parents reached a £2.4 million ($3million) wrongful death settlement with Laundrie’s estate. The money they said would go to The Gabby Petito Foundation set up to help find missing persons and curb domestic violence.

They also settled another lawsuit with Laundrie’s parents for an undisclosed sum after claiming the couple concealed their son’s confession to killing Gabby. The Laundries denied the claim.

Professor Piquero says the lesson to be learnt by the public is that at the core of a murder investigation is a real person and their grieving family. Online sleuths can share misleading or false information.

‘If people have factual information that can help a case, there’s only one agency they should call,’ he says. ‘It’s not X, it’s not Facebook, it’s not Reddit and it’s not Instagram. It’s the police.’