The tragic story of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old aspiring “van-life” influencer who was killed by her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, grew to become a media sensation in 2021.
Now, a brand new Netflix documentary is revisiting the homicide — and revealing new particulars.
Referred to as “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 additionally 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 advised The Submit.
“We were filming the Murdaugh documentary at the time,” he mentioned, after they have been advised: “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 contains interviews with Petito’s mother and father, pals, siblings, cops and FBI brokers who discovered her physique and looked for Laundrie. Gabby’s ex-boyfriend, Jackson, who she dated earlier than Laundrie, additionally seems and divulges she contacted him shortly earlier than her homicide 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 street journey that Petito documented on social media – which attracted web sleuths and made her story a headline-grabbing sensation when she went lacking in August 2021.
On September 19 of that 12 months, after she had been lacking for almost a month, Petito’s physique was present in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton Nationwide Forest. A coroner revealed she was strangled to loss of life by “human force.” Laundrie went lacking shortly after, and died by a self-inflicted gunshot to the pinnacle. His stays have been discovered Oct. 20 of that 12 months in Florida’s Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park. In a pocket book discovered close to his physique, he confessed to killing Petito.
When requested in the event that they have been involved it’s too quickly for a doc, Willoughby Nason advised The Submit, “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 requested what Petito’s story shares in frequent with different documentaries they’ve finished, Willoughby Nason mentioned, “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 defined.
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.”
Because the seek for Petito performed out earlier than it got here to mild that she had been murdered, Laundrie’s mother and father’ conduct was notably odd. It stays a query how educated they have been about their son’s crime.
“We wanted to tell Gabby’s story. We thought that was super important,” mentioned 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.”
