The Queasy Places True-Crime Obsession Has Taken Us

Last week I found myself googling the drive from Grand Teton National Park to North Port, Florida, and clocking firsthand the overt fishiness that much of the internet had already assigned to the behavior of Gabby Petito’s boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, who’d arrived home at the end of that trip on September 1 without his girlfriend, Petito.

By the time Petito’s family reported her missing on September 11, the facts of the case courted speculation: Petito and Laundrie, a #VanLife influencer couple, had been heavily documenting their cross-country road trip. A couple days after Petito’s mom received the last text message from her daughter’s phone about a lack of service in Yosemite, Laundrie returned to Florida with the van alone—and refused to elaborate. Petito’s absence, made all the more glaring compared to her active presence online heretofore, provoked the couple’s standing audience (and then quickly, the rest of the internet) into a frenzy—one that’s barely abated since authorities confirmed the discovery of Petito’s body, and the coroner’s initial report deemed her death a homicide.

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