Newly released documents from a pain and emotional distress lawsuit brought by the parents of Gabby Petito, the Long Island woman killed by her fiance Brian Laundrie in a Wyoming forest in 2021, are shedding light on what happened in the hours after she was killed.
In depositions released on Monday, Laundrie’s parents detailed “the day everything hit the fan” when their son frantically called them to say his fiancee was “gone” and he needed their help to find him an attorney as he drove back home across the country without her.
The murdered woman’s parents, Joe Petito and Nichole Schmidt, are suing Laundrie’s parents, Chris and Roberta Laundrie, claiming they knew their son had killed Gabby and intentionally withheld that information.
A judge in Florida has already ruled against Laundrie’s family in a wrongful death suit against Brian Laundrie’s estate and awarded $3m. But a trial scheduled for May could determine how much Petito’s parents are owed for pain and emotional distress.
The young couple had set off on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 2021 that Petito, an aspiring social media influencer, planned to document. Police responded to a domestic violence incident involving the couple on 12 August in Moab, Utah, an incident that is now subject of a $50m wrongful death lawsuit. Days later, Laundrie strangled Petito in Wyoming’s Bridger–Teton national forest and returned to Florida.
Petito’s remains were found almost three weeks later on 19 September. Laundrie later disappeared into a Florida nature reserve. His remains were found a month later. Investigators determined he had died by suicide and found writings nearby in which he confessed to killing his fiancee.
In Roberta Laundrie’s deposition, she told the Petito family attorneys that her son had called her on the afternoon of 29 August 2021. Their conversation was initially an inauspicious catch-up but his tone “completely changed” as the conversation concluded.
“His voice was very upset and I didn’t know why,” Roberta Laundrie said in the deposition. “I didn’t want to push him, so we just said goodbye … When I got off the phone, I told Chris, you know, ‘Brian sounded upset. Maybe you should give him a call.’”
Asked what she thought her son meant when he said Petito was “gone”, Roberta Laundrie said she considered several possibilities, including that the couple had got into a fight and Petito could have been considering pressing charges.
“I didn’t know what to think,” she said, but later acknowledged that the possibility her son could have killed Petito “probably went through my mind”.
Later, when Laundrie’s father Christopher called him, he heard his son to be “frantic”.
“Gabby’s gone,” Brian Laundrie had said, but not that he had killed Petito, Christopher Laundrie said in his deposition. He said his son had asked him for help and that he might need a lawyer. “I asked him why. He wouldn’t tell me.”
Christopher Laundrie added that he never thought his son killed Petito when he said she was “gone”, but said he “had no idea what to think”.
But Laundrie’s parents said they had made no attempt to contact Petito or her parents after the call. “My attorney told me not to talk to anybody, so I just didn’t talk to anybody,” Roberta Laundrie said.
When Petito’s mother, Nichole Schmidt, contacted her she did not return her calls. “I was told not to ask, and so I just kept Brian close, kept him home and safe, and didn’t talk to him about anything and hoped for the best,” she said.
Later, investigators found a letter in an envelope that said “burn after reading” from Laundrie’s mother in his backpack, according to CNN. Petito’s parents say that letter, which “references bringing a shovel to help bury a body, and baking a cake with a shiv in it should Brian Laundrie go to prison”, should be included in their lawsuit.
But Roberta Laundrie maintains she wrote the note before her son left for the van trip and said in her deposition she “never imagined the future”. She said: “It was a poor choice of words. When I read this later, I was like, ‘This sounds awful.’”
