Gabby is a pretty 22 year old young woman with a slim build and long blonde hair. In July 2021, she quits her job, sets up a van and goes on the road with her boyfriend Brian to explore the great parks of the American West. All smiles, the couple are constantly posted on social networks and post what looks like snapshots of happiness.
@thecasefiles Timeline of Gabby Petito // #gabbypetito #brianlaundrie #utah #breakingnews #truecrime #ThenNowForever #fyp #xyzbca ♬ Quiet and aesthetic piano solo (953247) – beefsoul
But at the end of August, suddenly, Brian returns alone to Florida with the van and Gabby no longer gives any sign of life.
His relatives are worried, the case begins to be publicized. Over the days more and more bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, Tiktokers start posting videos: they launch calls to find the young woman, share information or hypotheses about her disappearance. On September 19, Gabby’s body was found in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. Police confirm that the young woman was the victim of a homicide. And Brian disappears into the wild without giving an explanation.
This news item, which is as tragic as it is unfortunately banal, takes on an unprecedented scale. There are tens of thousands on the networks creating profiles devoted to Gabby, dissecting images, commenting on the manhunt that takes place in the swamps of Florida with drones and dogs, and scaffolding more or less theories. wacky about how the blogger was killed. On TikTok, the hashtag #GabbyPetito has more than 1.1 billion views.
In the midst of this avalanche of messages, there are real clues. On September 17, while FBI investigators were skating, a tiktokeuse recounts in a video that she hitchhiked Brian in Grand Teton at the end of August, that he was alone and appeared “weird”, offering him 200 dollars to make a journey of about fifteen kilometers. His testimony crossed with others, allows to circumscribe the area of research and to find the body of Gabby.
A couple of YouTubers realize, by updating their videos, that they too have passed the van, such and such a day at such a time, empty, parked by the side of a road. Other videos crop up and go viral, such as this sequence of police intervention called in after a violent argument between Gabby and her companion.
the networks gave the news so much importance that it almost became a national affair, which criminologists say might not have grown so much if Gabby had been African-American or African-American. Hispanic origin. But the fact is, the story of a young woman moved social networks to the point where they became an incredible sounding board that helped advance the investigation. And who will continue because it is now a question of finding the boyfriend, targeted by an arrest warrant. His phone emits a few seconds by mistake live on Instagram, we see the sea probably filmed from a boat; Internet users say so on their way to Cuba. The FBI must sort out the false leads but welcomes this collaboration with great interest.