By all appearances Gabby was a smart and loving companion. She wanted to impart her love for Brian Laundrie and the life she hoped they would have together using social media. They were engaged to be married but this would never occur. Now she is the victim of homicide. “The loneliest time in a life is being in the wilderness in the middle of night, with a person you once loved, now killing you. “If you scream for help in the wilderness and there is no one there to hear it except your killer, was there ever really a scream?”” Personal correspondence from B.F. Gagan. New website: http://www.arrestbrianlaundrie.com for details on the $25,000 reward for finding Brian Laundrie. Details on the site. There have been at least 11 questionable tips transmitted to the FBI tip line as of October 4, 2021. The media reports keep Laundrie’s picture in the news cycle.  Just today someone reported seeing him on the Appalachian Trail where hikers go from Northern Georgia and finish at Mount Katahdin – the highest peak in Maine. Mr. Laundrie has done parts of the trail and is familiar with its isolation from society. He may feel that he can make a safe getaway while remaining off the grid. But someone recognized him today in South Carolina. Or a look alike. 

Gabby Pitito is a case study for intimate partner abuse. From the outside, we saw a beautiful couple enjoying the wonders of the American West. Social media accounts updated with regularity bringing hundred or even thousands of likes. Gabby had a gift for creating an image.  Only now have we learned the imagery was deeply flawed. Friends of the pair described Brian Laundrie as a jealous and controlling partner as described by Rose Davis, a friend of Gabby Petito.  Common among abusive partners is separating intended victims from their emotional support systems leaving them isolated and without friends and needed help. It is a common red flag in most cases of domestic abuse and more commonly, domestic violence homicide. In most cases the abuser has an underlying pathological jealousy and in some cases, delusions of his partner “hooking up” with someone whenever she is out of his site. Once while on duty with the police agency for whom I served, a jealous husband came crashing into town hall hoping to catch his wife in a tawdry affair while she stood in line to cast her vote in a 2015 election. He had been sending her text messages from the parking lot like “Where are you? Who are you with?” Ultimately, the man needed an escort out of the building and was given a trespass warning. For her part, she felt pangs of guilt, resentment, and fear for keeping him waiting. Shortly after Election Day the family moved away from town. It happens all the time. 

“You can’t say that nothing can be done, because nothing will be done,” said Michael Sefton, a former Westbrook police officer who now works in Massachusetts and retired from the the New Braintree Police Department.

Women are kept from seeing friends and family members in an effort to disempower them of any sense of self. We now know this got worse during the pandemic where people were isolated anyway and those living in domestic fear became further inhibited and marginalized. By outward appearance Gabby Petito was terrified of her boyfriend at the time they were stopped in Moab, UT. This behavior speaks volumes about the state of the relationship just as Supervisory Agent Melissa Hulls said after they encountered Gabby and boy friend Brian Laundrie in late August 2021. I have reached out to Supervisory Ranger Hulls on two occasions without hearing back. I am interested in hearing from few friends of Gabby Petito with their appraisal of what they saw happening to the couple during pandemic? The pair had been together over 2 years and managed to get through waves of pandemic only to be set free on the cross country junket. Both seemed physically fit and healthy. Had the pandemic and subsequent quarantine changed them in any way? How did the couple decide to embark on this journey? Whose idea was it?  “Brian has a jealousy issue,” Rose Davis of Sarasota, FL said in the September 17, 2021 New York Post article. “I’m her only friend in Florida to my knowledge and that’s not because she can’t make friends, he just didn’t want her to have friends.”

“He was always worried she was going to leave him,” she said. “It was a constant thing to try to get us to stop hanging out.” She previously described him as a controlling and manipulative boyfriend with jealousy issues, and said Petito had sometimes stayed with her to put some space between them according to the New York Post interview with Davis. These are among the most common red flag warning for DV and DVH.

The Moab city Utah police were called to a possible case of domestic violence. The interview was caught on officer worn body camera and showed Gabby in an anxious, tearful state. Any physical signs should have been met with arrest of the likely perpetrator whether or not Gabby wanted to prosecute. The police report from Moab indicated that the officer believed something was not right! But he did not move on that feeling or was untrained as to what he might anticipate could happen next. She reported that her mental health was not good. Why? Was she in fear that the relationship was fragile and taking an unhealthy turn. Had the fuse been lit? At the very least Gabby should have been assessed for changes in her mental health and given her history, law enforcement missed the chance to understand the  underpinnings of her sudden loss of control and tearful anxiety? The care-free beginning of the exciting trip became suddenly serious enough to get on the local police department’s radar. A female national park ranger Melissa Hulls interviewed Gabby along side officers from Moab. She tried to advise Gabby that her relationship with Laundrie was had become toxic and put her in jeopardy. And just as quickly, Gabby and her fiancee fell off the police radar, leading Gabby into oblivion. Ranger Melissa Hulls saw the relationship for what it was and very likely feared for Gabby’s safety. Most murder-suicides involve intimate partners (72%) and the vast majority of these cases are women murdered by intimate partners using a firearm (Violence Policy Center, 2015). I have experience with domestic violence and the various red flag warnings of terminal anger and have tracked the downward spiral of a sick relationship. “We knew the system had failed Amy Lake” said Brian F. Gagan, a former Westbrook police officer who helped research the first psychological autopsy report, “We did not know how.” as published in the Portland Press Herald 11/30/2011. We learned plenty over the course of 200 hours of interview data and considered only confirmable facts and presented the findings to the Maine Attorney General’s Domestic Violence Homicide Review Board in the state’s Capitol. At very least, in the death of Gabby Petito, Brian Laundrie’s parents must be charged with harboring a fugitive, and aiding in the escape of a person of interest following a murder. The senior of the two responding officers in Moab is at risk of state decertification and may be charged criminally with statutory Utah failure to arrest. The officer will grope for the excuse that “neither party wished to charge” …which is not material to “Utah Mandatory Arrest”, according to Gagan. Gabby Petito’s body was found Sunday 9-20-2021 near an undeveloped camping area that’s surrounded by woodlands and brush, located about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Jackson, Wyoming. Her death was a murder according to the county medical examiner who has released very few details. Research has shown time and again that separating the couple for a “cool off” time out does little to stop domestic violence and often makes the violence increase. Meanwhile, I have seen the “neither party wants to prosecute” narrative too many times in my law enforcement career until there is serious injury to one of the partners – usually the female. I am fortunate to have never had a case go to the terminal stage of DVH, aside from Albert Flick – a Westbrook, ME case from 1979, police detectives Ron Allanach and Wayne Syphers handled while I was in the Juvenile Bureau. Flick went on to kill again, within weeks of his release from prison for killing a woman while her children looked on. The domestic victim never wants to prosecute because they have been conditioned against doing so over the years and are afraid they will be killed. Those most in fear of being killed by their partner are likely reacting to a primitive warning signal in the brain. The gift of fear  with a book by the same name highlights the subtle but powerful fear some women feel during courtship with violent men.  So, when these fears are realized, the terminal stage of violence begins the spiral downward when a domestic partner can no longer bind his angry, jealous impulses, and need for control. In spite of what the intimate partner may report to be deep felt “love” for his wife, girlfriend, and innocent family members, it comes down to murder for the sake of owning the life of a spouse and his children and feeling justified in his action. Gabby Patti’s cell phone has never been mentioned in published reports nor has her expansive social media reporting been studied. We have recommended that a safety plan be written omitting all social media whatsoever.  Everyone has a cell phone that can be tracked using triangulation data from cellular towers anywhere there is service. People who are lost can be easily found as long as cellular service is available and phones are properly charged. This is significant given her daily social media focus. It is certain the FBI has received all cell server data from both phones. This has likely contributed to the warrant issuance and national search. The cellular data was added to toll highway data from Colorado and Texas while Laundrie was on his way to Florida from the murder scene in Wyoming. It is also likely now that the Bureau is encircling his parents who may have helped him escape. At least one of them will be convinced to tell the truth because I am certain they are now being interviewed separately. They now cannot lie to protect the killer since there is now a federal warrant on him. If they do, they are then arrested and charged with being complicit in Gabby’s death. This case requires careful analysis once the murderer has been officially charged or found dead. By not doing so Gabby Petito’s death became another invisible young woman who wrongly believed she was safe and with the love of her life. After seeing the body worn police encounter, Dr. Ziv Ezra Cohen, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University and staff member of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, told Fox News Laundrie and Petito were ‘both minimizing their argument’ and said the footage suggested the couple may have been high and having ‘a bad trip.’ (Fox News story). The psychologist cast doubt on the couple’s efforts to explain away the fight as caused by Petito’s OCD, insisting that the condition is ‘not a risk factor for violence.’ Petito expressed anxiety through her tears perhaps with an impending sense of doom.  ‘People with OCD are not violent. OCD is not a risk factor for violence. If there was an altercation between them, certainly OCD would not be fodder for something that would lead her to hurt him,’ according to Ezra Cohen, MD. If anything having OCD is more apt to result in being victimized and not the aggressor. Park Ranger Melissa Hills told Petito that her and Laundrie’s relationship had the markings of a ‘toxic’ one as reported in the Daily Mail.  ‘I was imploring with her to reevaluate the relationship, asking her if she was happy in the relationship with him, and basically saying this was an opportunity for her to find another path, to make a change in her life,’ added Ranger Melissa Hulls in Moab according to writer Rachel Sharp published in the Daily Mail on 9-24-2021.  Domestic Violence Fatality Review Teams identify homicides, suicides, and other deaths caused by, related to, or somehow traceable to domestic violence and review them to develop preventive interventions (Dawson, 2017; Websdale, 2010; Websdale, 2012; Websdale et al., 2017). These frequently depend on careful communication among those who work within the field of intimate partner violence including members of judiciary, bail commissioners, district attorneys, law enforcement, and social services. Without definitive recommendations, review boards provide nothing to protect potential victims and do nothing to move the needle in the direction of improved safety plans and dangerousness assessments of potential murderers. Sadly, Gabby Petito will not grow old. She will not have children or grandchildren.  She will not have a career.  It is incumbent upon society to look at the similarities among cases of domestic violence homicide using case study data, aftermath review of facts, and structured interviews to intervene ahead of the secretive pattern of control, abuse, sexual violence, and murder that happens much too often and flies below law enforcement radar. By doing so, victims build new lives with safety plans and legal contingencies for those who violate those orders of protection.