'NOTHING NATURAL'
OFFICIALS say Gabby Petito's body was "positioned as if she fell asleep," however, cops say there was a telling sign that showed her remains had been staged.
Gabby grabbed national headlines when she disappeared in the summer of 2021 while on a road trip with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie.
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The 22-year-old vlogger went missing in August after she told her family that the couple was traveling from Utah to Wyoming to visit national parks.
Laundrie, 23, suddenly returned to his parent's North Port, Florida home without Gabby, causing her parents to report her missing days later.
Laundrie was later named a person of interest in her disappearance.
For weeks, the search for Gabby intensified as people across the country sent in tips on her possible whereabouts.
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The Murder of Gabby Petito: What Really Happened, is a TV special that uncovers the still unanswered questions surrounding Gabby's death with new footage and interviews from authorities involved.
"We were getting fed little bits and pieces of information from other agencies across the country," said Detective Sgt Phillip Smith with the Jackson Police Department.
Smith added that authorities received a potential lead using an app called The Dyrt, which provides user-generated information on campgrounds in the US.
The app also has GPS tracking, helping authorities to find Gabby's last-known location.
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Authorities were on crunch time to find Gabby before the winter and assigned horse-mounted crews to patrol the area where she was last seen.
Deputy Andrew Roundy of the Teton County Sheriff's Department said he and other searchers looked for Gabby along the south side of the riverbed at the Spread Creek Dispersed Camping area before crossing the creek to search the north side.
Around 11.30am or 12.30pm on September 19, Rounday said an unnatural texture in the ground caught his eye.
"When I first saw it, I had this feeling of 'Did we really just find Gabby? Is that really her?'" Roundy said, recalling that day. "Yeah. It was Gabby's body."
Roundy said Gabby had been laying on her side "almost in a peaceful way like she had just laid down, put her hands under her head, and fell asleep."
However, the way Gabby was positioned, her head was actually laying downhill, said Sgt. Clayton Platt of the TCSD.
"It's not a significant hill but I think it's human nature that you're gonna lay with your head uphill," said Platt. "You don't want to have blood rushing to your head."
Platt added that there was "nothing natural" about how Gabby's body looked with Roundy stating that to him "it looked like it was staged."
It was later determined after an autopsy that the manner of Gabby's death was homicide by "blunt-force injuries to the head and neck, with manual strangulation," according to the Teton County Coroner’s Office.
Two days before the discovery of Gabby's remains, on September 17, Laundrie's parents reported him missing after they claimed that they had not heard from him in days after he went out for a hike in nearby Carlton Reserve.
Internet sleuths posed theories on Laundrie's whereabouts while people claimed to have seen him in different parts of the country.
Laundrie's parents, Chris and Roberta Laundrie, who at this point had refused to speak to the media and authorities, suddenly decided to join in on the search for their son in late October.
"What was so strange is Brian Laundrie's parents went out one morning to look for Brian, and literally just within minutes, they find items belonging to Brian Laundrie," said News Nation senior national correspondent, Brian Entin.
Nearly a month to the day of the discovery of Gabby's body, Brian Laundrie's skeletal remains were found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on October 20, 2021.
It was revealed that Laundrie ended his life and cops were able to recover a letter near his remains that included a confession to Gabby's murder.
"I ended her life. I thought it was merciful, that is what she wanted," Laundrie wrote, claiming that Gabby had been suffering from some sort of injury and would "wake in pain".
"But I see now all the mistakes I made. I panicked. I was in shock.
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"From the moment I decided, took away her pain, I knew I couldn't go on without her."
Gabby's parents ultimately filed a lawsuit against the Laundries, claiming that Laundrie, his parents, and their lawyer knew that Gabby was already dead when Laundrie family attorney Steven Bertolino released a statement to the media on September 14, 2021.
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