Review: ‘American Murder: Gabby Petito,’ starring Nichole Schmidt, Joe Petito, Jim Schmidt, Tara Petito, Rose Davis, Loretta Bush and Matt Carr

February 17, 2025

by Carla Hay

“American Murder: Gabby Petito”

Directed by Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro

Culture Representation: The three-episode documentary series “American Murder: Gabby Petito” features an all-white group of people talking about the case of 22-year-old Gabby Petito, who was murdered in 2021, while she was on a U.S. road trip with her 23-year-old fiancé Brian Laundrie, who committed suicide and left a note admitting that he killed her.

Culture Clash: Before she was murdered, Petito had been a victim of domestic violence from Laundrie, which were problems that she hid when she documented her life on social media.

Culture Audience: “American Murder: Gabby Petito” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about well-known tragic cases of domestic violence that ends in death.

“American Murder: Gabby Petito” is a comprehensive and well-researched documentary about a notorious murder/suicide case that has already gotten enormous amounts of media exposure. The participation of Gabby Petito’s parents and lessons about domestic violence give the film more resonance. Although almost all of the archival footage in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” has already been widely shown elsewhere, the documentary’s exclusive interviews are worth watching.

Directed by Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro, “American Murder: Gabby Petito” also has previously unreleased footage and text messages from the two people at the center of this case: 22-year-old Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito and her 23-year-old fiancé Brian Laundrie. The documentary series also has interviews with a few people who knew Petito well and are speaking out for a documentary interview for the first time. Because the facts of this case have been widely reported, and it’s considered a solved case, the documentary does not present the story as a mystery but as a cautionary tale about warning signs in domestic violence that could lead to death.

Petito and Laundrie were on a road trip from their home city of North Point, Florida, to various states across the U.S., mostly to visit national parks. The trip (which began on July 2, 2021) was planned as a four-month journey that was documented on social media, mostly on Instagram. Petito was also filming parts of the trip as footage for a YouTube channel that she was launching called Nomadic Statik. She used drones for the scenic landscape footage that she wanted to include in her photos and videos.

Episode 1 of the documentary series is titled “We Bought a Van,” which chronicles the early years of Petito and Laundrie’s relationship and the beginning of their road trip. Episode 2 of the documentary series is titled “Where Is Gabby?,” which is about her disappearance and the massive media coverage that her missing-person case received and how it turned into a murder case. Episode 3 of the documentary series is titled “Burn After Reading,” which details the homicide investigation and the hunt for prime suspect Laundrie.

Petito was born on March 19, 1999, in Blue Point, New York. Her parents Joe and Nichole got divorced when she was less an a year old. Joe and Nichole would soon get married to other people. Joe Petito married his second wife Tara. Nichole married her second husband Jim Schmidt.

Joe and Nichole’s divorce was fairly amicable. Joe says in the documentary about himself and ex-wife Nichole: “We both agreed to put Gabby’s needs ahead of our own.” All four spouses raised Gabby as their own child in their blended family.

Gabby is described by several people in the documentary as an optimistic people-pleaser who liked to make people happy. She had artistic talent in drawing and photography. Starting from when she was a teenager, she liked to document her life on social media. Gabby eventually decided she wanted to be a social media influencer with a focus on having an adventurous lifestyle.

Brian Laundrie was born on November 18, 1997, in North Port, Florida. He was the youngest child of Christopher and Roberta Laundrie, who also have a daughter named Christie Laundrie. People who knew Brian describe him as a quiet loner who had a dark side. Just like Gabby, Brian liked to draw. His illustrations often had disturbing images evoking death. Brian also played guitar but didn’t have any aspirations to become a professional musician.

In fact, all the news reports and documentaries about this case do not describe Brian as having any particular career goals. That was in contrast to Gabby, whose dream job was to be a professional travel vlogger. (A vlogger is a video blogger.) She was working on making that dream a reality with this fateful 2021 road trip.

Gabby and Brian both grew up in middle-class families and graduated from Bayport-Blue Point High School in Bayport, New York, although Brian graduated a couple of years before Gabby did. He graduated in 2015, while she graduated in 2017. He didn’t want to go to college, and at one point was living in his car. Gabby was unsure if she wanted to go to college and was taking a few years off to decide while she had low-paying jobs at places such as a coffee shop and Taco Bell.

Brian and Gabby knew each other as casual friends and began dating in May 2019, when Gabby was 20 years old. By December 2019, Brian convinced Gabby to move with him to his Florida birth city of North Port, where his parents had moved back to after their time in New York state. Gabby lived with Brian and his parents at the Laundrie home in North Port. According to her mother Nichole, Gabby had no hesitation about moving to another state because Gabby was very much in love with Brian.

In July 2020, Gabby and Brian secretly got engaged (there was no engagement ring), which was an early indication of the secrets that they kept from their loved ones. Gabby’s parents found out about the engagement from other people. Gabby admitted it was true when she was confronted about it. She also told people that she and Brian didn’t set a wedding date because they were in no rush to get married.

Gabby’s parents say that Brian was always respectful to them and they saw no warning signs about him. However, two women who knew Gabby well are interviewed in the documentary and talk about Brian’s troubling side. They both say that he was manipulative and very skilled at hiding unpleasant aspects of his personality.

A woman with black hair, whose face and voice are shown but who is not identified by name, talks about how she knew Brian and Gabby pretty well when they were all in high school, but she got to know Brian first. After high school, she and a roommate invited Brian to live with them when they found out he was living out of his car, before he and Gabby started dating each other. She describes Brian as someone who had a crush on her and became fixated on her, but it didn’t escalate into anything dangerous because he began dating Gabby shortly he and this unidentified woman’s friendship fizzled out.

The unidentified woman describes an incident that took place shortly after she and Brian had built a desk together. In the desk, she found a note written by Brian where he said, “You’re either my best friend or the love of my life. I can’t tell the difference.” The woman says she only thought of Brian as being like a brother to her, so this note made her feel uncomfortable. Once he figured out that she didn’t want to be more than friends with him, she says that her relationship with Brian was never the same. They drifted apart, and he then began dating Gabby.

Rose Davis was a close friend of Gabby’s in Florida. Davis also worked with Gabby at a local Taco Bell. Davis describes Brian as being very clingy and possessive of Gabby, who often blamed herself if she and Brian had an argument. Davis recounts an incident when she and Gabby were supposed to meet up to go line dancing at a nightclub, but Gabby was about 90 minutes late. Gabby texted Davis to apologize and tell her that she was late because Gabby and Brian were arguing and he had deliberately hidden the driver’s license she needed to drive and gain admission to the nightclub.

Davis also says that Brian would constantly insult Gabby for working at Taco Bell and because Gabby liked to hang out with her Taco Bell co-workers. According to Davis, Brian thought it was “stupid” for Gabby to want to be a professional vlogger. No one really comes right out and says it in the documentary, but Brian wasn’t any great prize himself, even though he gave a lot criticism to Gabby about what she was doing with her life. The reality was that Brian was living with his parents and seemed to be frequently unemployed.

There was also tension in the Laundrie home in Florida when Gabby lived there. At first, Gabby’s mother Nichole says that Brian’s mother Roberta treated Gabby like her own daughter. But eventually, Roberta seemed to be jealous of Gabby because of all the attention that Gabby was getting from Brian, according to Nichole. Gabby’s mother says that Gabby once described how at a Laundrie family dinner, Roberta had a meltdown because no one was talking about Roberta and her homemade pie, because Roberta wanted to be the center of attention.

Previously unreleased text messages between Brian and Gabby show that Roberta would get angry about something and Gabby would worry about smoothing over any tensions with Roberta. Brian would then say that his mother would frequently be like that. In one of the text messages, he told Gabby that whatever Roberta was angry about, Roberta would get over it. It seems like Brian had been dealing with Roberta’s mercurial personality for a very long time, probably his whole life.

The 2012 white Ford Transit van that Gabby converted into a small camper home was a vehicle that she owned, not Brian. This is the vehicle that they used for the road trip. Brian did most of the driving. But as the documentary unfolds, and there are more indications of Brian being a control freak, you can’t help but speculate how resentful he probably felt that he was on this road trip for what he believed were Gabby’s “stupid” career goals and in a vehicle that he didn’t even own.

You’d never know that Gabby and Brian were having any serious problems if you only looked at the photos and videos that Gabby posted on social media during this trip. These social media posts presented an idyllic and fun road trip taken by a couple very much in love and living peacefully with each other. This facade is one of many examples of how people lie about, distort, exaggerate or give misleading information about their lives on social media, so that they can feel important and because they want other people to envy them.

Most people watching this documentary already know that the illusion of Gabby and Brian having a romantic excursion was shattered when a 911 call was made in Moab, Utah, on August 12, 2021. The caller described witnessing a man hit and slap a woman on a street before the couple drove off in a white Ford Transit van. Brian and Gabby were that couple.

When five Moab police officers (four men and one woman) caught up to Gabby and Brian shortly after this incident, they talked to Gabby and Brian for about an hour and 15 minutes. The documentary’s first scene is a clip from the police body cam footage. Gabby is seen crying and admitting that there was a physical fight, but she says she hit Brian first. She says the argument started because she was in a bad mood because Brian got the interior of the van dirty.

Brian is seen grinning and laughing a little nervously while he’s questioned separately. Brian calls Gabby “crazy” and someone who is obsessive compulsive about neatness. In their separate interviews, Brian and Gabby both say that she has anxiety. Brian keeps describing Gabby as the aggressor in the fight.

Gabby also has a visible bruise over her left eye. This bruise isn’t noticeable in the body cam fotage, but it’s very clear in a separate photo from Gabby’s phone. This photo is included in the documentary. She also clearly describes Brian grabbing her face during their fight. When a police officer asks her about the bruise, Gabby downplays it and repeats she was the one who hit Brian first.

Brian, who had mild scratches on his arm, says that if he did get physical with Gabby, it was in self-defense or to calm her down. In the end, the cops give more weight to Brian’s version of events and decide that he and Gabby should spend the night apart. The police arrange for him to stay at a hotel and escort him there, with the hotel paid for by public domestic violence funds, while Gabby is expected to spend the night wherever she parks the van and has to fend for herself.

When the body cam footage was released to the media, domestic violence victim advocates and many other people were outraged by the police officers overlooking all the indications that Gabby, not Brian, was the real victim. For starters, she had a much more serious injury than Brian. Second, domestic violence victims often blame themselves and try to protect their abuser. Third, if police are called to the crime scene, the abuse victim often lies about the incident if the abuser is nearby because the victim doesn’t want worse retaliation from the abuser after the police leave.

One of the most unsettling things about the body cam footage is that one of the cops expresses uncertainty about how to handle this incident because he says if the police don’t take these incidents seriously enough, domestic abuse victims often end up dead. Sadly, that’s exactly what happened to Gabby, who was murdered less than three weeks after this domestic violence incident. She was last seen in public on August 27, 2021, and it’s believed that Brian murdered her before the end of that month.

One of the most compelling interviews in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” is with the boyfriend that Gabby had before she began dating Brian. In the documentary, this ex-boyfriend is identified only by his first name: Jackson, who says that Gabby was his first love, but they broke up because their relationship happened at a time that “wasn’t the right time for us.”

Jackson remembers that when he and Gabby were a couple, they talked about taking the type of road trip that she was on with Brian. Jackson says that when he found out that Gabby and Brian were taking this road trip, he was very surprised at first but was ultimately very happy for her because he knew this road trip was a big dream of hers. Jackson and Gabby had drifted apart after their breakup and hadn’t been in touch with each other for a long time.

But that changed when, days before Gabby went missing, she contacted Jackson out of the blue. They talked on the phone and caught up with each other’s lives. Jackson says that Gabby admitted to him that she and Brian were having problems, but she didn’t give too many details. The last conversation that Gabby had with Jackson, she told Jackson she had a plan to leave Brian and she was going to break up with Brian in the near future.

On August 27, 2021, Jackson says he received a text from Gabby but he didn’t reply because he was busy. Jackson comments in the documentary that he believe this text was “a cry for help,” and he says he expresses remorse that he didn’t do more to help her. However, based on what many other people say in the documentary, Gabby hid a lot of her problems from her parents and other loved ones. It’s unknown how much Gabby would have told Jackson about her plan to leave Brian.

As many domestic violence experts can tell you, a victim of domestic abuse is most likely to be killed by the abuser when the abuser finds out that the victim is leaving the abuser for good. Although it will probably never be known for certain what caused Brian to kill Gabby, if what Jackson is saying is true, it’s very possible that Gabby could have been killed if she tried to end her relationship with Brian. She never disclosed explicit details of this plan to anyone, such as where she wanted live after she broke up with him.

The documentary chronicles other well-known facts of the case, such as:

• Brian returned to his parents’ home without Gabby on September 1, 2021. He was driving her van and told his parents that he and Gabby had an argument, and he left her at a hotel. (In his suicide note, Brian confessed that was a lie.) Brian and his parents refused to cooperate with law enforcement and hired an attorney after a missing-person report was filed for Gabby on September 11, 2021.
• Gabby’s missing-person case exploded on social media and was big news in mainstream media around the world. And then, Brian went missing. His parents reported him missing on September 17, 2021.
• Gabby’s remains were found at Spread Creek Dispersed Camping area in Teton County, Wyoming, on September 19, 2021, but law enforcement authorities believe she was murdered sometime between August 27 and August 30, 2021. Her death was ruled a homicide by blunt-force injuries to the head and neck, with manual strangulation.
• On September 21, 2021, an arrest warrant was issued for Brian, who had been staying at his parents’ house before he disappeared. Hs parents helped authorities in the search in early October 2021. Most of the search was in Sarasota County, Florida, at Mabry Carlton Reserve and at the nearby Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park.
• Brian was never apprehended. His skeletal remains were found at Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on October 20, 2021. The official cause of death was suicide by a gunshot to the head.
• Before Brian’s body was found, his parents discovered Brian’s journal and other belongings in a waterproof bag when they helped authorities search for him in Sarasota County in early October 2021. The contents of the journal were not made public until January 2022, when the FBI officially confirmed that he confessed in the journal that he had killed Gabby. In his confession, Brian claimed that Gabby had injured herself in an accident, and he wanted to put her out of her misery.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what Brian’s parents knew about Gabby’s death before her body was found and if Brian’s parents helped him cover up her murder. At the time this documentary was made, Brian’s parents have declined all requests for interviews. However, the documentary includes a mention of the widely reported hand-written note that Brian’s mother Roberta wrote after Gabby disappeared. The note, which was found in the FBI’s search of the Laundrie house, said in part: “If you need to dispose of a body, I will show up with a shovel and body bags.” She also said in the note: “Burn after reading.”

The documentary’s epilogue mentions that Gabby’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Brian’s parents in 2022, and the case was settled in 2024. The documentary does not mention that Gabby’s parents filed a separate wrongful death lawsuit against the Moab Police Department in 2022, but that case was dismissed in 2024. As of this writing, Gabby’s parents are appealing this lawsuit dismissal and do not discuss their lawsuits in their documentary interviews.

Other people interviewed in “American Murder: Gabby Petito” include FBI special agent (Tampa division) Loretta Bush; Teton County sheriff Matt Carr; North Port Police Department public information officer Josh Taylor, an FBI special agent (Denver division) identified only as Kyle; Norma Jean Jalovec, a Wyoming resident who gave Brian a ride to a campsite, not knowing that he was going to be known as a murder suspect; married couple Jenn Bethune and Kyle Bethune, the van life vloggers who had video footage of Gabby’s van during the time she was reported missing; and T.J. Schmidt, Gabby’s younger brother.

“American Murder: Gabby Petito” gives a brief mention of how Gabby’s murder case was disproportionately covered by the media, compared to the numerous missing people of color whose cases never get reported by the media. Gabby’s father Joe said that he used to be offended by the notion that Gabby’s case got special treatment because she was white until he saw the proven facts about the media giving preference to white females for missing person coverage, and he accepted that it was true. Joe says he and Gabby’s other parents have made it their mission with the Gabby Petito Foundation to get fair and accurate media coverage for missing people of any race.

Gabby’s parents and stepparents also did interviews for the 2021 Peacock documentary “The Murder of Gabby Petito: Truth, Lies and Social Media,” which did not have interviews with any law enforcement officials involved in the case and focused more on the media coverage by interviewing several journalists and social media influencers. By contrast, “American Murder: Gabby Petito” doesn’t have any interviews with journalists. “American Murder: Gabby Petito” also has the benefit of more information that has become available since this tragedy took place in 2021.

“American Murder: Gabby Petito” has excerpts from Gabby’s personal journals, letters, text messages and social media posts that are read by an artificial-intelligence-generated voice made to sound like Gabby. This A.I. content, which is disclosed in the documentary, was approved by Gabby’s parents, and it’s only a very small part of this documentary, which tells Gabby’s story in a respectful manner. If anything can be learned from this documentary, it’s how people can better help each other out of abusive situations, and living your best life authentically is much more important than what’s shown on social media.

Netflix premiered “American Murder: Gabby Petito” on February 17, 2025.