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| Above, Gabby Petito and "person of interest" Brian Laundrie. |
Several days ago, when news of finding a body near Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming hit, interest in the Gabby Petito case exploded.
At the same time, I saw several Twitter Tweets by liberals (the usual suspects) complaining that this was another case of "missing white woman syndrome" where the interest is race-related and ignoring non-white missing women cases.
An interesting and fair article has been posted on Vox that discusses the interest generated and true crime amateur sleuthing.
It begins with:
The entire internet was looking for her.
In the days before FBI officials on Sunday announced — and on Tuesday confirmed — that the body of 22-year-old Instagrammer Gabby Petito had been found near Grand Teton in Wyoming, her status as a missing person had gone massively viral. For the past week, the story of Petito and her boyfriend Brian Laundrie, 23 — who had returned home from a heavily chronicled #VanLife road trip without her — dominated social media, mesmerized true crime communities, and led the nightly news around the country. When news broke that Laundrie, amid intense public scrutiny, had fled authorities and gone on the run, the saga became one of the most viral news stories of 2021.
A coroner for Teton County in Wyoming confirmed after an autopsy conducted on Tuesday that Petito’s cause of death was homicide. Currently, Laundrie is the only known person of interest in the case.
On one level, Petito’s case is typical of true crime cases where a victim of alleged domestic violence goes missing. Too often the partner simply clams up, as Laundrie did, impeding investigation into the person’s disappearance. But the case of Petito and Laundrie garnered so much attention so rapidly that an extraordinary amount of public effort went into finding her — with the internet and social media platforms from TikTok to YouTube playing a major role in the search efforts.
To read more, go here.
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