The tragic story of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old aspiring “van-life” influencer who was killed by her fiance, Brian Laundrie, became a media sensation in 2021.
Now, a new Netflix documentary is revisiting the murder — and revealing new details.
Called “American Murder: Gabby Petito,” the three-part docuseries premieres Feb. 17 and was exec-produced and directed by filmmakers Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro, who also did the docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal” and “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.”
“The fact that we were able to have access to the family was super important,” Gasparro told The Post.
“We were filming the Murdaugh documentary at the time,” he said, when they were told: “The Petito family wants to tell Gabby’s story. There’s been a lot of stuff that’s done. They haven’t really participated in anything….And, that’s something Julia and I have been doing for a while.”
The documentary includes interviews with Petito’s parents, friends, siblings, cops and FBI agents who found her body and searched for Laundrie. Gabby’s ex-boyfriend, Jackson, who she dated before Laundrie, also appears and reveals she contacted him shortly before her murder as a “cry for help.”
“I have a plan. I think I want to leave him. I’m going to do it. I have to figure out when to do it,” Jackson recalled Petito telling him.
Petito and Laundrie took a cross country road trip that Petito documented on social media – which attracted internet sleuths and made her story a headline-grabbing sensation when she went missing in Aug. 2021.
On September 19 of that year, after she had been missing for nearly a month, Petito’s body was found in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest. A coroner revealed she was strangled to death by “human force.” Laundrie went missing shortly after, and died by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. His remains were found Oct. 20 of that year in Florida’s Myakkahtchee Creek Environmental Park. In a notebook found near his body, he confessed to killing Petito.
When asked if they were concerned it’s too soon for a doc, Willoughby Nason told The Post, “We’re only telling it with the family’s blessing. That’s the key. If we were going to make a quick turnaround doc while it was happening, that’d be one thing. And we don’t work that way.”
“We have to have people that were directly affected by what happened. So we wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for that,” she continued. “The family wanted to do it, it was important to shine a light on what Gabby went through.”
“I think it’s going to help a lot of people to see this young couple and the abuse that Gabby was going through.”
When asked what Petito’s story shares in common with other documentaries they’ve done, Willoughby Nason said, “abuse of power.”
“A lot of the themes are similar in terms of people being oppressed, people not having a voice, being in isolated, high control groups,” she explained.
The filmmaker added, “Whether it’s from a family of 19 kids that’s in fundamental Christianity on a reality show like the Duggar family, or it’s Alex Murdaugh, whose family were solicitors in South Carolina for three generations. There is a wall of power that feels impenetrable in these stories that we want to break open and show that there are holes and ways to escape from that power. I think with Gabby, even though she ultimately did not escape physically from the power, her story helps others identify subtle forms of intimate partner violence to help them escape and transition out of that.”
As the search for Petito played out before it came to light that she had been murdered, Laundrie’s parents’ behavior was notably odd. It remains a question how knowledgeable they were about their son’s crime.
“We wanted to tell Gabby’s story. We thought that was super important,” said Willoughby Nason. “Obviously, we wanted to reach out to the Laundrie family to get their participation …it’s important to speak to everybody. They declined, and we respected that. But, we did reach out.”
