On July 2, 2021, 22-year-old Gabby Petito and her 23-year-old boyfriend Brian Laundrie set out from Long Island, New York on a two-month road trip through the country’s vast National Parks. Petito intended for the trip to launch her “van life” YouTube page, where she would share vlogs of their converted Ford Transit and their adventures in the driveable home. But things soon went wrong. On Sept. 1, Laundrie returned to his home in Florida. He was driving the van, but Petito — who was last seen in Moab, Utah — was nowhere to be found.
The subsequent investigation into Petito’s disappearance launched a media storm around the influencer, as her family asked the nation to help them find answers. Petito’s face was plastered on news segments, physical posters, and discussed in police press conferences at every stage of the investigation. Laundrie also went missing after he returned home and on Oct. 21, police confirmed that his body was found in a local park, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot. Alongside his remains was a letter, where Laundrie admitted to killing Petito.
The Netflix docuseries American Murder: Gabby Petito, out Feb. 17, charts the young influencer’s path from a beloved daughter and sibling to one of the most notable missing persons cases in recent history — and specifically notes the interest from online sleuths and van life influencers that helped police locate Petito’s body. But in TikTok‘s true crime community, the effects of Petito’s case dramatically changed the way the TrueCrimeTok operates — and it’s something the app is still wrestling with today.
Much of the interest in Petito’s case stemmed from the lengthy time of the investigation and available consumable content about her life. Prior to her disappearance, Petito had posted a single vlog on her YouTube channel Nomadic Statik, where she told followers she would be charting her nomadic journey with “awesome van life ideas, tips, hacks, camping spots, and so many beautiful places to travel!” The video is only eight minutes long, but the footage of Petito and Laundrie interacting together was the backdrop of almost every video discussing the case on TikTok. Using the hashtag #GabbyPetito, users speculated about her relationship with Laundrie through body language cues, linked her disappearance to double-homicide that happened in the area where Petito was last seen, and even spread conspiracy theories. There was also the full month of Petito’s family and friends asking for help, while Laundrie and his parents refused to speak to law enforcement and directed all questions to the family lawyer. But the driving force behind many of the videos was that if enough people worked together, TikTok’s crime community could solve Petito’s case. And they technically weren’t wrong.
“We need to do what we could and that’s get as many eyes on Gabby’s face as possible,” Joe Petito, Gabby’s father, says in American Murder. “After the press conference, it started to snowball. And a day or two later, it was everywhere.” The sheer volume of content surrounding Petito eventually found its way to people who were in Grand Teton National Park at the same time as Petito and Laundrie. One Grand Teton visitor, Miranda Baker, posted on TikTok that she and her boyfriend had picked up Laundrie after they saw him hitchhiking. This got to Wyoming resident Norma Jean Jalovec, who had also let Laundrie hitchhike, and said in American Murder that she immediately contacted the Sheriff’s Department. But it was two fellow van life vloggers, Kyle and Jenn Bethune, that helped police find Petito’s body. After seeing a video about Petito on TikTok, they were notified by a friend that the authorities had narrowed down the timeline when they believed Petito was killed. The National Parks service shared a notice from the FBI that urged anyone who was in the Spread Creek Camping ground between Aug. 27 and 30, 2021, and might have seen Petito, Laundrie, or the van to reach out. And when the Bethunes looked over their vlog footage from the trip, they had a perfect view of Petito’s van parked directly off the trail. “This allowed us to corroborate the information that we already had from the phone companies to give us a much better search area,” Kyle, an FBI Special Agent in the Denver Division, says in American Murder. From that spot, it took teams less than two days of searching to locate Petito’s remains.
Following the discovery of Petito’s body, and Laundrie’s subsequent death and confession, the Petitos sued the Laundrie family for emotional distress and wrongful death — both of which settled for an undisclosed number. But on true crime TikTok, the way online sleuthing actually helped emboldened many accounts to start getting directly involved in solving ongoing cases. Some interest has been harmless, like when creator Katie Santry was convinced by her followers that a rolled up rug found buried in her backyard could be hiding a body. (It was just a rug.) But that isn’t always the case. On Nov. 13, 2022, four students from the University of Idaho were found murdered in their off-campus apartment. It took six weeks for police to announce and arrest a suspect, Bryan Kohberger, but in that time, amateur sleuths on TikTok not only followed the case but actively harassed and accused at least five people of the murders without any evidence. (Kohberger has pleaded not guilty; the case is ongoing.) In many cases, the accusations were only taken down after threat of legal action, but not before people were virtually driven off of social media. “False, wrongful accusations, even wrongful convictions, are nothing new, but the speed and volume of those wrongful accusations seems to be exponentially increasing in this age of true crime on demand,” Adam Golub, an American studies professor at California State University, Fullerton, previously told Rolling Stone. As communities interested in true crime have continued to build presences on social media apps like TikTok, discussions around how to ethically engage with the genre are constantly ongoing. But in the four years since Petito’s death, it’s clear that there’s still no consistent approach to handling true crime developments online. For now, it’s a Wild West of content. And something that, unfortunately, might take the next Gabby Petito to change for the better.
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