Add The New York Post on Google The mother of Gabby Petito has hit out at “armchair detectives” who are still exploiting the travel vlogger’s death five years after she was fatally strangled by her fiancé.
Long Island native Petito, 22, went missing in Wyoming in late August 2021 while living in a van with her abusive fiancé, Brian Laundrie, in a horrifying story that gripped the nation.
Although her body was found the following month and Laundrie, 23, even left a note admitting he killed her before shooting himself in the head, Petito’s grieving mom, Nichole Schmidt, explained that wild speculation rages on to this day.
“Once she was found, the story was kind of still ongoing,” 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,” she concluded, adding that the bonkers conspiracy theories “need to stop.”
Petito and Laundrie spent the summer of 2021 traveling across the western US in a white Ford Transit van, documenting their adventures on social media.
On August 12 that year, Utah police responded to a 911 call reporting a domestic dispute in Moab.
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Bodycam footage showed a highly distressed Petito crying uncontrollably — but officers categorized the incident as a mental health break rather than domestic assault and instead of making an arrest, separated the couple for the night.
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.
