It’s been over three years since Gabby Petito‘s death, and still, we’re getting more insight into her final days.
As Perezcious readers will recall, Gabby went missing on a road trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie back in 2021. Alarm bells went off when he returned home without her and refused to speak to police. It soon surfaced that the 22-year-old was in an abusive relationship. And sadly we soon learned it was as bad as everyone feared. Her body was found in the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Brian died by suicide months after her initial disappearance. In a notebook recovered near his body, he confessed to having strangled her.
Related: Gabby’s Mom Forgives Brian — But NOT His ‘Pure Evil’ Mother!
The story took center stage once again on Netflix‘s latest true crime doc American Murder: Gabby Petito, which premiered on Monday. Filmmakers sat down with the #vanlife influencer’s family and friends to unpack her life and loss. They also gained access to all her camera footage and other resources — helping them retrace her final moments. And we learned something we never knew…
In the doc, it was revealed Gabby called an ex-boyfriend in the days before her disappearance! In fact, the call was on the exact day detectives believe she was murdered. Whoa!
When asked if this surprised him, series co-director Michael Gasparro expressed in an interview with Variety on Monday:
“Yes. We didn’t know about that. We didn’t know she had reached out to him during a vulnerable time (during her trip with Brian). She was obviously suffering. She trusted her ex and reached out. It was like a cry for help. We think that’s probably something that Brian caught wind of.”
Jeez. How awful.
In the series, the ex-boyfriend is revealed to be a guy named Jackson (right inset), who Gabby called on August 22, days after she and Brian were filmed in that controversial police stop. Apparently she vented to him about a fight she’d had with Brian (possibly that same one, but they seemed to fight a lot, so who could say). Shockingly, he says she shared her plan to leave him!
Wow! That could change everything! Brian wrote that he viewed his murder of Gabby as a mercy killing. He said she was injured and freezing in the wilderness, and he was saving her suffering. But if she was planning to leave? And the abuser found out??? That’s a wildly different picture than the one he tried to paint.
What did Jackson think? He opened up in an interview:
“I feel like the phone call was a cry for help. […] I think she wanted to get away but just didn’t know how to do it. I think she wasn’t sure what he would do, or what he could do.”
He noted that he reminded her to “be careful,” adding:
“The fact that she reached out to me kind of told me like hey, maybe she feels safe talking to you or maybe she felt like I was the only one who would understand, or that I was the only person that might want to even listen at all.”
Gabby tried to call Jackson again on the last day she was seen alive on August 27. Sadly, he was working and missed the call, something that still haunts him. Oof.
It’s just so brutal to think she was trying to get away and that a simple call to an ex may have led to her death…
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