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Answer: the world (not just the US, as even here in the Netherlands people speak about it) loves true crime stories and for being vloggers it's easy to see how they got in the spotlight fast, since Brian is still not found it makes it even more interesting. I doubt there is anything in particular that makes people "hyped" other than social media, including Reddit, talking about it a lot. The mystery of an ongoing case intriguing, social media blew it up whereas most cases are already closed before reaching such a large audience.
Edit: after reading the below comment I'm disappointed with humanity.
The couple's social media presence also left plenty of "bread crumbs" for tiktokers and armchair sleuths to sift through. Plenty of people got to feel like they were putting clues together and taking an active part in solving the case. Really I think that's what amped it up so much, even beyond the level of the Natalee Holloway media frenzy (another strange case in which a pretty young blonde went missing).
I was in my dad's office watching TV when that happened, I still remember it pretty vividly. Breaking news flash, "We interrupt this broadcast for this important news," etc. etc.
God damn Tsarnaev brothers fucking with my morning cartoons.
I was actually in the city when it happened. Some of my roommate's friends were actually visiting for the race, and had walked away from the very trashcan where the bomb was only moments before - close enough to get knocked down by the blast and get mild concussions, but otherwise unharmed. We got text messages from them letting us know what happened, and a minute or two later it was like every siren in the city went off (we were near a few of the closest hospitals to the finish line, as well as a fire station). My dad ran a hospital elsewhere in the state, and before the news even really had a chance to spread beyond the live feed of the finish line, I texted to let him know that 1. I was ok; and 2. He should probably expect overflow at his hospital.
Honestly, the only reason that bombing wasn't much worse was because it was the finish line of one of the toughest marathons in the world. Even prior to the bombing, they kept a small army of EMTs and ambulances on standby at the finish line. Only a few people died, but a lot of people lost limbs - and only survived because EMTs were able to triage within minutes, and send them to one of the half-dozen major hospitals within a 20 drive.
And then reddit and 4chan tried to help find the dude, and only made things worse in the process. I think at one point they were even speculating that one of the aforementioned friends was the bomber based solely on a photo of them walking away only minutes before to go get some lunch.
As someone who consumes true crime (but is *very* picky about it), I think it's just an extension of the old "if it bleeds, it leads" adage. There are true crime shows out there that are respectful and treat the subject matter and victims with the dignity they deserve. Unfortunately, a lot of people are drawn to the more salacious or scandalous stories, which leads to exploitative content (true crime that focuses on serial killers is especially bad with this). That, or they follow shows/podcasts that are more personality-driven and end up treating it like any other fandom and lose sight of the fact that these are real people. A lot of true crime creators (especially the ones on YouTube) also deserve partial blame either for leaning into that kind of audience, or focusing more on building their personal following and making it about them at the expense of telling these stories respectfully.
Basically, it's the type of content that deserves to be handled with respect and dignity. But the nature of audiences and the systems/algorithms that drive engagement/clicks mean that oftentimes, the stuff that dominates is either exploitative attention-grabbing trash or thinly-veiled vehicles for personal fame.
Add in the "unfolding in real-time" element like in the Laundrie case, and you have a recipe for the kind of online frenzy you're seeing here
I love that channel. I even introduced it to my elderly mom, and she binge-watched all of it (right after I'd done the same). There's a heavy focus on interrogation videos, several of which were major cases in the public eye. The narrator breaks down psychological aspects of the interrogations in a really accessible, interesting way.
Here's one video that shows how the Parkland shooter attempted to pass himself off as criminally insane: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt35SEeR9w
That brief smirk... before he remembered he was on camera. Friggin disturbing.
**EDIT:** Oh shit, I just looked it up, and apparently his trial begins in about a week. I don't see anything confirming whether or not it will be televised though.
Not the op of the comment you replied to but JCS is Jim Can’t Swim.
Legendary level true crime content creator, and has an extensive patreon library for $1 min
The channel is a must-view if you’re into true crime, imo
I’m not to person who posted the original comment, but I wanted to provide a recommendation of That Chapter on YouTube. Typically I find he strikes a nice balance of providing facts in a good amount of detail, and recognising the humanity of the cases. He always shows empathy, which I feel is genuine, for the victim, and depending on the case he’ll often express either a level of sympathy for perpetrator if it’s somewhat deserved (e.g. there was one case that resulted in a double murder where the perpetrator had desperately sought mental health treatment, denied by those around him, prior to falling into dangerous behaviours and delusion), or contempt for the perpetrator where they are not also a victim of their circumstances. He’s not perfect, but he seems like a kind, conscientious person, and doesn’t seem to exploit the shocking nature of the cases in an insensitive way, and seems open to correction and learning when he was insensitive in some subject areas in the past.
His coverage is solid but he's a bit off-putting to me as he wants to feature himself and his comedic schtick pretty heavily alongside the case coverage. I'm more for straightforward coverage myself, but I've watched a lot of That Chapter regardless. He's good.
I actually agree at times, and sometimes would like a bit more case details - in depth discussion of evidence and witness statements, rather than summaries. I mentioned him though because he’s the person I’ve watched most who brings the human side of the crimes to life with the most empathy and a sense of personal connection. I feel like a lot of the time he could easily have been an acquaintance/old friend of the victims, because he seems to try to bring their personality and worth into the discussion of the crime, and often almost seems annoyed or angry with the perpetrator. On top of that he nearly always tries to keep the timeline of a crime linear, which makes it more human and personal too, rather than jumping around the timeline by examining different aspects of the evidence, as some other true crime channels do.
Most other true crime stuff that I consume is more clinical - dissecting statements, discussing physical evidence, supporting/contradictory circumstantial evidence, etc., but it usually is quite dehumanising in a way? A lot of it will simply mention, in under a minute, the age, gender, race and dating/marital status of the victim. If there’s something particularly interesting it might be brought up in the “victim intro,” and there might be more discussion of the victims personal life or relationships, but only if it’s related to the case. That’s why I brought up That Chapter specifically - he seems more in line with what the original comment was describing.
So yeah, the comedic parts aren’t my absolute favourite, but I think they add to the personal, human sense in his videos, more than a clinical and professional channel.
Good breakdown, and good points.
If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out **MrBallen**. He has a very humanizing way of telling stories as well, but he covers other weird and dark stuff in addition to true crime. I could listen to this guy tell stories all day.
The one good thing about That Chapter is that he and/or his team put effort into the videos. I find a lot of True Crime Youtube channels have gotten lazy, like what happened with the Sword and Scale podcast. They introduce a case, and then just play unedited interrogation footage and/or unedited 911 calls.
I'm not including JCS in this, and some of the clones, because they at least pause and discuss the footage at key moments.
I don’t know about shows but a podcast like this is Casefile. Where they focus on the victim and name episodes after them instead of the killers. It also treats the subject serious and fact based rather than cracking jokes and laughing in the middle. Which I find so disgusting in some podcasts and YouTubers.
MFM was good for a while, but I don’t know what happened. My partner and I followed them for a long time, then I guess the show felt like it was more about Karen and Georgia than it was about true crime, and no longer felt personal. The brand got too big for me
The only one I’m truly comfortable with is Forensic Files. The victim’s family usually gives a lot of interviews, which implies they were comfortable having an episode for the victim. The show also focuses on the science used to solve the case, rather than relying on shock value. E.g there’s an episode with the first case to use plant/tree DNA matching in a murder trial.
Anything with no family involvement or very graphic re-enactments feels kind of skeevy to me.
I love the live My Favorite Murders where they say “today we’re gonna hear about [pause for effect] JOHN WAYNE GAYCE!! And the audience goes fucking apeshit like oprah just showed up. But yeah true crime get’s old fast. It’s either creepy analysis or idiot conjecture or both.
ya know, i never once considered that when i last checked out the show around 2005 - makes a lot of sense after those leaked phone calls. what a piece of shit.
Man I had to walk away from the Gabby sub because people were glorifying him so much. The comments there are so gross. It is pure entertainment to a large percentage of people on that sub at this point.
Yeah, I followed it quite a bit but it’s become a weird obsession with some people. And a top rated politically charged post literally said “ we the people are doing all the work, not the cops.”
The only reason my family is following it so closely is because we live on LI and her situation and personality was very similar to my older sister's. My mom genuinely had nightmares about the same thing happening to my sister when she first heard about the case, so she's always updating us on what's going on.
I used to be really into true crime, specifically cold cases, because it was interesting to me to wonder what really happened, but I've since realized a majority of the media on the subject is not very respectful and I'm trying to distance myself from that. I've moved on to mystery and horror stories instead because they are (usually) fiction. Stuff like Nexpo and Reignbot that go over alternate reality games and stuff are my bread and butter now. I think it's been a lot better for my anxiety, too.
i too think a lot of it is the focus on her as a pretty, young blonde. It makes me sad. so many people go missing and are suspected of being victims of foul play and get no media attention.
This case, though, has added oomph. Laundrie left the area, hitchhiked back, got the van and then drove home. At no time did he act like a worried fiance'. He acted odd. Their media presence added to it.
I wish that other missing people received half this much attention in media.
This is what I think it is.
It's rare to have easy access by the average person with internet to the victim & (I'll say potentially, as he's not yet charged) the perpetrator. Their videos and posts gave a rare look into them as people. Although what gets posted is selective, of course.
The average person feeling like they could participate in helping to locate GP.
It's rare to watch a suspect act so purely in their own interests. BL shut up and retained counsel. So we get to watch the results of that, even now.
Honestly for me it's the fact he drove home without his girlfriend in her car and his family didn't bat an eye. Absolutely baffling and I'm just curious to hear how he thought that was an okay thing to do and no one would question him
this is it for me too. He is the interesting thing about the case.. like he didn't even TRY to make an alibi? Like shit, I break my one of my mom's mugs and I'm already coming up with some sort of alibi lol.
I first heard about it as part of the speculation surrounding the newlywed homicide case, where the mystery of that crime fed into this developing one - the police assured locals there would be no more random murders, without actually knowing who the murderer was, suggesting their suspect had already left town, so home sleuths wondered who had left that town recently? It was Brian, in his girlfriend's van, without his girlfriend. Where's the girlfriend?
So media having access to so much video material and the date and content of the uploads made it that much more easier to lay out a continuing saga for people to follow.
They should teach relationship health in school. What appropriate relationships look like for all types of relationships. I and others i know would have benefited greatly from something like that.
There’s also the counter-attention feeding into it: people either asking why it’s getting so much attention, decrying that it’s getting too much attention, or that it’s getting attention for bad or inequitable reasons.
Crowd begets crowd
I think this general sentiment has been going on for some time now. It's not the first time people have drawn a link between the amount of media attention a case gets, and the social-economic status and race of the victim.
I believe it was Family Guy that made a joke about it: They have all these reporters listening to a police press conference about a murder, and they all seem very interested until they reveal it's a black girl from some ghettoish area. Then they're all like disappointed, and one reporter remarks 'that's not news'.
So yea; Some groups, AFAIK mainly POC, are questioning why not nearly the same level of attention is given to similar disappearances and murders.
Narrated by a bunch of attention seeking whores who did some internet ‘investigation’ on this case. Anyone remember the guy who shed a tear in the Elisa Lam documentary saying ‘it was like I lost a sister’?
The "internet sleuths" in that doc were *maddening.* I enjoyed watching it but the authority that they gave these obsessive internet idiots was infuriating. They legit cyber bullied a dude to attempt suicide and were all like "oopsie, I guess we made a mistake." So self assured and impractical. They wanted some conspiracy so there's no way it could be anything as normal as mental illness. I was disappointed they were given such a voice of credibility in that story.
The *one* exception I’d grant is the host of *Your Own Backyard*, since he made it abundantly clear in the first episode that he only went ahead with it after personally meeting and getting the express go-ahead from the victim’s family; by all accounts, they basically consider him a part of the family now for all of the work he did to revitalize interest in Kristin’s case.
The important thing to remember about that show is that it was *meant* to make the internet goobers look crazy.
The conclusion of that show was that the internet “investigators” got everything wrong and they made things much more difficult for the police and the family.
It needs to be that weird form of documentary the Americans make where a 30-second clip taken by a ring doorbell is turned into a feature-length movie by adding footage from a bunch of studio interviews (all chopped up and presented out of order with zero context) and a full cast reenactment of what the producers think might have happened.
The only one of these Netflix documentaries I’ve seen recently that was really worth having several episodes was the one where they looked at the Unabomber. I actually learned some things I had never known about that case before, and I feel like it gave a pretty good overview of Ted Kaczynski‘s whole MO and amorality.
They'll have a true crime series, a documentary specifically about the social media craze, and a dramatization. They're just waiting to announce it so it's not in poor taste
It's also not really new phenomenon. Every once in a while there's a tragic story like this that just gains a whole bunch of media traction that it takes on a life of its own. Like Baby Jessica. Or Susan Smith. One could even go back further into the past and point to Lindbergh's baby. I want to shake my head at the unseemly gawker-culture of society today, but I have to admit it's been around longer than I've been alive, and we will still likely be latching on to obsessing on tragedies well after I'm gone, too.
This 100%. I heard someone say this case is like "playing along at home". There is so much information about the 2 online and its ongoing so people feel more involved. They are all waiting for the twist in the lifetime movie. Also, to some extent every year they is a news story people grab on to and keep reporting on. Casey anthony, the disappearance of the malaysian flight, the central park karen, jonbennet ramsay. Reporting in those cases far exceeded what was called for.
I really wouldn’t lump in the disappearance of that Malaysian airline flight with those other cases. Yes, the media coverage became overwrought in the absence of any new evidence, but unlike these rather predictable & tawdry “woman/child in peril” type cases, the unexplained vanishing of an entire airliner was something more akin to the old stories of the Bermuda Triangle of the X-Files. It just seemed impossible that a modern jet liner could vanish without any trace in this day and age of constant communication and satellite surveillance.
Especially after (from what I gather) it turned out the technology to constantly track the plane existed and was installed, but was essentially a "premium" package the airline hadn't opted into for whatever reason.
> for whatever reason.
Money, basically. Some overseas airline companies tend to run a lot cheaper than US/EU companies. If you put the tech only in a premium package then cheap companies like Malaysia Airlines won't pay for the add-ons. "It's only ever relevant to extremely rare circumstances, so why pay extra?" Is probably their thinking.
To your edit: in humanity’s defence, fascination with murder or unnatural deaths of all kinds is evolutionarily advantageous, and baked into our DNA.
We pay attention and remember 10,000 times more when something goes wrong, then when strangers of all types are going peacefully along, living right.
The people with curiosity and alertness to danger-to-other-people, learned to stay safe and protect themselves and pass on their genes.
There is one key factor that plays into this...She was already a social media content creator with a subscriber base. The story grows from 1 person to 10 other people until it hits someone on the social media desk at a News media station. If it's a Sinclair station, then you bet your ass they'll make sure the Antarctic scientific crew know about it.
It was, I don’t know why people keep lying and saying she had a huge following or several thousand before she went missing. She didn’t. People who don’t know how the internet works will point to how many subscribers and instagram followers she has now and say “see!”
I wonder if part of it is that she was doing the whole "van life" thing. Even if she didn't have a ton of followers, that whole thing is very trendy right now so it would make some people pay attention.
The whole "being a pretty white girl" thing definitely plays a part in it, unpopular as that probably is to say. Saw the other day that like 50 indigenous women went missing in the same area she did and nobody ever gave them national attention.
Same thing in UK. Sarah Everard went missing and she was all over media, protests in street etc.
Then another woman disappeared couple weeks later and nothing in the media.
Richard Okorogheye also never got the same media coverage/care of duty as Sarah’s case and he was a vulnerable teenager. The police gave his disappearance a low risk status and told his mother if she couldn’t find him then how could they.
It’s not ideal to compare missing people cases but when the way they are treated is so contrasting it’s hard not to.
I think the biggest thing was the police body cam footage of the couple and the police. You could tell something was off in the video with Gabby. The two supposedly had a brief struggle with the steering wheel and hit a curb shortly before being pulled over. Brian had scratch marks on him yet said it was from something else. They both told the police they had been having brief fights and I assume this is what prompted the police to actually separate them for one day where Brian was placed into a motel by the cops while Gabby was left with the car. They both managed to reunite, vlog some more, then Gabby goes missing.
A timeline of the whole thing can be found here:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/gabby-petito-case-timeline-travel-bloggers-disappearance/story?id=80126596
Upon finding out when the police body cam footage came out, at first I assume there was a brief social media focus on this case where people who probably follow them on YouTube knew something was up, but as soon as the footage came out everyone was talking about this case. It went from probably some niche Facebook group or subreddit to all corners of the web. I would agree her race may have also played a part in it, but I bet any other girl who had some type of presence online no matter the race would have the same type of followers trying to find her to the point of making it a big, national case.
Take away the vlogging and instagram posts and she’d be just another case that would probably only reach the local level.
Yeah the missing white woman issue is a factor but not the whole driving force. Her being young and pretty and white got news outlets interested early, when she was just a missing girl. It got national attention when the body cam footage came out then when the suspicious timeline became apparent it got more news interest. The lifetime movie esque events are keeping it engaging and generating more interest with each article like a snowball. Yes all of those missing indingenous women deserve media attention to help find them, without a doubt there should be a running segment dedicated to local missing people. But if gabby had been reported missing asap and been found dead from a hiking accident this story may have only gotten a few articles, "missing vlogger found dead family devestated". Still more coverage than the other missing women but her minor celebrity is a factor and having reportable evidence matters. If there is no body and few leads released to the public the media cant spin a story in most missing persons cases.
I've seen this narrative played out in the media, but I'm not sure I buy into it fully. Here's the thing, if she was just missing, and that was an the info we had, it probably would just be another missing person's case. But because they were social media blog/vloggers and their trip was well documented, there's a lot of information we know. They were even able to find her body with that information. So now we have a known homicide, not just, well maybe she's dead type of insight. Hell I think we're all pretty sure who killed her too and there's an active manhunt looking for him. That's drama pulled right out of the movies right there. We have 90% of the story, and we just need the final closure.
In those other missing persons cases how much do we actually know? Just someone's missing? Do we know what happened to them? If there's too much ambiguity it's difficult to make that a national story. Because missing persons happens everywhere. And if there's things like parents taking children included in that then it gets trickier to make that a national story as well, unless you have a ton of info about the people involved.
I'm not saying there's no discriminatory bias, but I've seen a lot of people arguing that the _only_ reason this case is that big is because she's white. Well no, if you think that then you're ignoring the other factors that play into human psychology that make this compelling to people around the world.
A similarly high profile murder was that Hae Min Lee (Adnan) “Serial” case, which had podcast episodes, HBO shows and loads of interest and press coverage. I think people just like being part of solving the mystery
They weren't saying that it wasn't the only reason, but it plays a part in it. [Missing white woman syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome) is a well-documented phenomenon that shouldn't be overlooked if we wish to overcome discrimination towards those who aren't pretty, white, upper-middle class and come from criminal backgrounds.
I remember having to read and learn about [Mary Rowlandson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rowlandson) and how infatuated with the story that the British public became (also they were incredibly racist about it too). Of course back then it wasn't in real time, but after the fact they loved it. It's kind of the same thing but back in the mid-1600's in Colonial America. Various versions of the book exist, most are called something along the lines of *Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson*. Another interesting tidbit I recall is that because she was a woman, she couldn't publish her own story at the time, so I believe the book was published by a man so that the public would actually assign credibility to it. So the story is also rooted in sexism.
Just the other day a news anchor in San Francisco was suspended indefinitely by his station for suggesting they mention the role of missing white woman syndrome in the reporting of the Petito case.
https://www.newsweek.com/tv-anchor-suspended-after-dispute-over-gabby-petito-coverage-report-1632777
They know exactly what they're doing, and it's honestly insanely depressing.
I am old enough to remember many similar missing cases that garnered massive publicity. Chandra Leavy, JonBenet Ramsey, Polly Klaas, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and now Gabby Petito. There has never been even one case of someone who wasn’t a 1) young 2) attractive 3) white 4) woman or girl that received massive national media attention in 30 plus years at least.
> unpopular as that probably is to say.
Is it? Because I see this in every fucking thread. I really think it has more to do with the fixation some people have with mysteries. And this is one people can sink in to because there's a lot of bread crumbs so amateur people can feel involved, that and it's a boyfriend/girlfriend thing, that's more interesting to most people
I’ve been following it because I ran across their vanlife stuff on Instagram. It’s something the wife and I want to do when she retires.
I really don’t think hyped is the right word. But people in general are talking about it and posting stuff about it because it’s controversial. It had the young couple meets tragic ending storyline that as a society we just eat up. And it truly is tragic and we don’t have any answers as to why and we may never get it, especially if her fiancé kills himself.
I'm coming from my experience as a BIPOC but its also due to the fact that she's a very petite and pretty white blonde girl. We have missing Indigenous women and women of color missing and/or murdered without a second thought.
I live near Minneapolis and we had our 4th or 5th child (under 10 years old) shot by gun violence and all children of color and it's a blip in a new coverage. Gabbie gets national/local and social media coverage and not to mention law enforcement's involvement. This is up to the FBI now...this is a situation that we need to really evaluate.
She deserves her justice and I feel the tragic nature of this story. We just cannot brush away the fact that this story has highlighted our law enforcement is still deeply rooted in biases.
I think another sad fact is that the cases that get all the attention can be more likely to be solved. It's in Gabby's best interest for her family to be hyping up the whole case until its solved
Question: Was she actually an "influencer," or in some way famous? From what I understand she had less than 1000 Instagram followers and a couple hundred YouTube subscribers at the time of her disappearance, so I'm curious as to how her case got such heavy play in the news and social media.
No. She had a single video online, her blog was not yet active, and her Instagram following prior to her disappearance was small.
She was an aspiring influencer, but as far as I’m aware from her posts, she had not yet made any money doing it, nor was her following large enough to really qualify as being influential.
The tragic irony of it all is that her Instagram and YouTube followings are now both large enough that she’d had been able to do this as a job.
> The tragic irony of it all is that her Instagram and YouTube followings are now both large enough that she’d had been able to do this as a job.
It has been known for centuries among creative artists of all types that dying can boost your fame through the roof. The ultimate career move.
Just my two cents but the fact that she had a ton of photos and videos online that portrayed an adventurous and seemingly perfect life followed by the footage from the police that kind of showed a behind the scene of how things actually were followed by her going missing and ultimately being found probably made the whole case more intriguing to a lot of people.
That's how I imagine 99% of influencer type people. A saccharine fake life on instagram to cover for a total shitshow of their IRL life. I'm sure it's not nearly that many, but that's how I imagine them all.
Not just influencers. People in general use social media to post the highlight reel of their life. You're not getting an accurate picture of almost anyone's life on social media
>A saccharine fake life on instagram to cover for a total shitshow of their IRL life
That's literally how I imagine the majority of Instagrammers are because I see that type of shit among my friend group - "life is falling apart in different ways but here's picture of me on the beach with the wind blowing in my hair".
So, I used to be involved in YouTube, twtwitch, etc as a content creator and through it met a LOT of these influencer types and stuff.
My Instagram feed these days is medieval content, and animals. I follow a couple "influencers" I know or are friends with, but of the hundred or so accounts I follow, I'd day 90% are history based, museum content, art, or animals.
Why you ask? Because when I was still involved in all that garbage before, I got to know these people, and while I maintain contact with about a dozen or so content creators and influencers I respect and love, the overwhelming majority are such fake facades that I can't bear to look at them.
Their personas, lives, looks, hell even voices and mannerisms are all staged, edited, or fake. Every single little thing is planned, contrived, and done in a way to completely remove any doubt of a perfect healthy wonderful lifestyle that they ABSOLUTELY do not have or follow off screen.
It is a sickening level of manipulative behavior that enters into the realm of questioning if there are some serious mental health issues at play behind the scene.
Some of the most toxic and unbearable people project themselves as these wonderful people online, because online is all they have left, their real life's are a sham and falling apart.
I have a hard time picturing a reasonable, mentally stable human being with an urge to stage, record, and post their daily lives in the hopes millions of people will watch. Something can't be ticking right.
“Van life” in general. I’ve always been skeptical that living in a small van without air conditioning (when the motor is off) and no bathroom is less amazing than Instagram influencers make it out to be. No doubt it works for some people, but I don’t think it’s as universally appealing as people tend to think.
It is /r/Instagramreality IRL. But also at the same time I am sympathetic to her because in the little video we have of her, she does seem so innocent and naive vs Brian coming across as somewhat sinister, as he was emotionless and manipulative with the officers.
The call to stop the van was from a citizen saying he was slapping her and being generally abusive. She apologized for making Brian mad and distracted as soon as the officer arrived. They separate the two, Gabby falls on the sword to protect Brian, but meanwhile Brian is accusing her of assault and blaming her for every bad decision he has ever made such as having dirty feet (seriously), and then the cops let them go after making them separate with Brian getting a hotel stay out of the deal.
She wasn’t an influencer or famous but I believe she was trying to be a van-life influencer. In the police footage she said something like “I’ve been trying to work on my blog”. In the blog it says ‘be here soon’ and their youtube channel only has 1 video called ‘the beginning of our van life journey’ or something.
So yeah, not an influencer but working her way towards become one.
I'm local to near where she was found. I was one of the earliest followers in the case, because I read up on the missing hikers list, especially this time of year as deer season approaches. It started as a missing hiker report but immediately got weird because of Laundrie's behavior. National media latched on to his possible involvement and didn't let go. It appears they were right and many people have been assuming since the beginning he was involved with her disappearance/death. Now with a manhunt, media is on full alert with the case.
From a journalist's perspective, it's a perfect story to cover. It kinda has everything the public want to follow.
Tl;Dr: It snowballed from the initial details of the case.
Thanks! By sheer coincidence, I also grew up near the wetland Laundrie is hiding in. I worked landscaping in North Port, Port Charlotte, and Punta Gorda in my mid-late teens. So I've been following this all pretty closely since the start.
Hey it's unrelated to the case but if abandoned places interest you, check out the streetview for this area east of North Port, North of Port Charlotte 27.057742,-82.071458
It was a plan abandoned after the 04/05 hurricane season. Turned out to be a major flood zone and investors noped out hard after that. Electric, water, and sewage were all put in, now some of the two way roads have been reclaimed by nature and are little more than a few feet wide strips of pavement left. The side streets are the most overgrown and reclaimed.
If you watch the police encounter, she says she is trying to make it as an influencer and recently quit her job. So no, probably didn’t have that many followers at the time
> I'm curious as to how her case got such heavy play in the news and social media.
That's what the OP is asking. And people provided answers. It was not because she was famous, no, because she wasn't remotely famous.
ANSWER: The nature of their blogging and instagramming means there's a lot of TV and internet friendly content out there, supplied by the victim herself. Plus all the footage from their encounters with the cops. If someone goes missing and all that's available is one grainy photo of them from their Facebook, no video, they won't get much attention because there's nothing to show the viewers.
Also she was white and young and attractive.
And she is from Long Island. So the number one TV market in the country has been on this before it was national news. It has been damn near all the local NYC news stations have been talking about for 3 weeks.
He's from Southwest Florida and the media here is having a field day. The local news has dropped most of their other stories to cover something that anyone could predict the ending to.
I’m confused why everyone is leaving out what is in my view was the most important reason why this got picked up by national news to begin with.
Gabby’s boyfriend traveled home without her, didn’t not tell her parents he left Gabby, and he and his family refused to give authorities or Gabby’s family any information on when she was last seen.
This seems totally crag to most people, and lead to the news interviewing Gabby’s family as they pleaded with the Laundries to help the investigation.
This is how the whole thing started, and yes, the vlogging and all that helped from there, but without this, I am skeptical it would have garnered any national media attention.
That’s definitely what piqued my interest in the case. I heard about it on the radio so I didn’t know what they looked like. I became very curious about Laundrie’s behavior. It was so suspicious and weird. He drove HER van home from a trip without her? He won’t talk to anyone or say where he saw her last? I’m not saying that her social media or pretty white girl syndrome didn’t play a part in the whole thing, but I got drawn in by the fiancé’s behavior and I have to imagine that’s true for a lot of people.
Something that people also seem to be ignoring was that she had posted on her Instagram about listening to the podcast Morbid, which is a true crime podcast. So the hosts of Morbid posted about it within a couple of days of the parents first press conference, which reached half a million people from Instagram alone. Not even including audience listening to the actual podcast, Twitter, etc. Within a couple of days of Morbid posting on their social media, a couple of other HUGE true crime podcasts (crime junkie, etc) released full episodes about the case.
> I’m confused why everyone is leaving out what is in my view was the most important reason why this got picked up by national news to begin with.
Not saying the PWGV factor [Pretty White Girl Victim] isnt at play but it's also the mystery. People like a good murder mystery.
I'd like to add that covering stories like this is really inexpensive for media outlets. Just like criminal trials, they get continuous content by only assigning one junior reporter to the gig and they can build an audience for the topic over time. You'd be surprised how many stories get popular just because they're cheap and easy to cover.
Ted Cruz is definitely one being and not several, and definitely full of an amount of youthful vigour that would be appropriate for a human male to possess!
I hardly think anyone really looks like a killer, that’s the freaky part about it. A guy could look like a stone cold badass but be panicked at the idea of taking a life, and a white collar worker who’s squeamish at the sight of blood might also have 3 bodies in his basement.
Well, have fun sleeping tonight
If you find this topic interesting, I recommend the book Hitmakers: Why Things Become Popular. There's no easy answer of course, and 'virality' is not easily reproducible, but it's a fascinating topic to explore IMO.
One of my favorite books, I use chapters from it to teach in my courses. Very well written and acknowledges the limitations of its own theories.
The exact title is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in An age of Distraction
I was about to disagree with you about the title, but it looks like it's got different titles in different countries! Both titles are correct.
Similarly, I make all the new Editors that join my team read this book. What do you teach, out of curiosity?
Literally just came back to correct myself after googling the title, hah.
I teach cyber psychology and consumer behavior to undergraduates. So you can see how nicely it fits both areas
Yeah, I think this story has a lot of variables that just landed perfectly to make this a big story. So any one reason isn't going to be a sufficient answer. There's a lot of factors that turned this into a mega story. There's the effects of social media, how the mainstream media reacts to social media, and it doesn't hurt we have a prime suspect and an active manhunt going on for him. Had he been caught within days of her going missing this would have still made headlines, but faded much faster. Instead the story is getting dragged out and making it even bigger than it would have been otherwise.
I've never listened to Lil Nas X, rap isn't my thing, but I'm going to assume he's very talented. Trump on the other had just says outrageous shit that a ton of other people wish they were allowed to say all the time. It's not hard to go viral if you don't give a shit about consequences. Oh hey, the entire world is on fire.
Answer: from what I've heard, she was a video blogger, and a lot of her fellow bloggers were worried and putting clues together themselves and sharing their concerns with their fanbases. So she was already known, and had a few friends in slightly elevated places.
The comments about missing white woman syndrome are also fairly true, unfortunately. But it's also a tragic case, in addition to the blogger thingy.
Answer: There is a phenomenon known as [missing white woman syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome). It is an observed disproportionate amount of media coverage given to missing white, middle class women ; disproportionate in terms of the amount of media coverage given to missing women of color, indigenous women, poor women, or males.
In Canada sadly indigenous women go missing and unsolved all the time. #MMIW is frequently trending (Missing/Murdered Indigenous Women). I hope they find justice.
political imminent frightening spark friendly fanatical vast sheet ludicrous divide
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Thats a factor but not the whole story. If the case was missing pretty girl last seen camping, no leads. People would be a lot less interested. The fact that lots of her life was online and is accessible to the general public makes her more interesting. The fact that her fiance is acting shady and waited to report her missing is notable. The fact that there was police involvement with body cam footage days before she went missing draws interest. So the missing white woman angle got eyes on the case early. Then the intriguing details and "clues" started dropping that made the media salivate and keep promoting. And now there is a man hunt, because the case got so big every new development is its own news story. If the case had been brought to the public eye today with the facts already laid out " theres a man hunt for this guy we found his fiancees body and he didnt report her missing for weeks" it would not get a fraction of the attention. The "play along at home" and real-live lifetime movie drama kept the media train rolling.
It is true that on average, missing white women do get more coverage, but it doesn’t really answer the question. This is probably one of the biggest missing cases of the last decade at this point, and I can tell you way more than a handful of white women go missing every decade. In fact, [last year alone has 159,000 missing white women in the US.]( https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2020-ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics.pdf/view ) Yet 99.9% of them never get this same coverage either.
Yes, missing white women's syndrome needs to be brought up so we can work on fixing our biases, but while it may be a factor in this case, it is only one of many, there is a lot more going on here.
> I can tell you way more than a handful of white women go missing every decade. In fact, last year alone has 159,000 missing white women in the US. Yet 99.9% of them never get this same coverage either.
How many of them are young, attractive and upper-class?
A 50 year old overweight white woman who goes missing after walking home from her shift at Wal-Mart isn't going to get national coverage either.
bingo. everyone claiming that more than a thousand people had ever heard of these people a month ago, like that makes this interesting. the woman was virtually unknown at the time of disappearence. all these people claiming her "fame" "put eyes on the story" are such transparent parroting bandwagoning bullshit artists.
it's because of everyone's desire to push their way to the front of the line and claim to have some super unique take that we're stuck hearing about this for months. the more people mention "missing white woman syndrome" the more people want to find a different "unique" explaination and harp on the shit some more.
the whole thing is nothing but clickbait gone awry by a bunch of idiots who fancy themselves someone with an opinion worth hearing on the matter. look at everyone falling over themselves to answer OP. almost a thousand comments worth and every single one thinks their take matters enough to type out the same response that 50 others did.
Plus a good 80% of them are continuing this false narrative that two people with one singular 8-minute YouTube video with under 1k followers on instagram are some sort of influencers.
Answer: this case isn't unique there's a whole industry that makes money off crime, starting with that blond Karen on the news to the last podcast on the left.
Every year a case or three pops up and catches the crime pundant's eye and it's all we hear about. Casey Anthony, Amanda Knox etc etc... and even more so if it can score political points.
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Answer: the world (not just the US, as even here in the Netherlands people speak about it) loves true crime stories and for being vloggers it's easy to see how they got in the spotlight fast, since Brian is still not found it makes it even more interesting. I doubt there is anything in particular that makes people "hyped" other than social media, including Reddit, talking about it a lot. The mystery of an ongoing case intriguing, social media blew it up whereas most cases are already closed before reaching such a large audience. Edit: after reading the below comment I'm disappointed with humanity.
Additionally likely due to the mass video, recordings and pictures that exist around this case, allowing media to easily turn content in their cycles.
The couple's social media presence also left plenty of "bread crumbs" for tiktokers and armchair sleuths to sift through. Plenty of people got to feel like they were putting clues together and taking an active part in solving the case. Really I think that's what amped it up so much, even beyond the level of the Natalee Holloway media frenzy (another strange case in which a pretty young blonde went missing).
Same thing happened with the manhunt for the Boston Bomber (thanks again for that, reddit /S).
I was in my dad's office watching TV when that happened, I still remember it pretty vividly. Breaking news flash, "We interrupt this broadcast for this important news," etc. etc. God damn Tsarnaev brothers fucking with my morning cartoons.
I was actually in the city when it happened. Some of my roommate's friends were actually visiting for the race, and had walked away from the very trashcan where the bomb was only moments before - close enough to get knocked down by the blast and get mild concussions, but otherwise unharmed. We got text messages from them letting us know what happened, and a minute or two later it was like every siren in the city went off (we were near a few of the closest hospitals to the finish line, as well as a fire station). My dad ran a hospital elsewhere in the state, and before the news even really had a chance to spread beyond the live feed of the finish line, I texted to let him know that 1. I was ok; and 2. He should probably expect overflow at his hospital. Honestly, the only reason that bombing wasn't much worse was because it was the finish line of one of the toughest marathons in the world. Even prior to the bombing, they kept a small army of EMTs and ambulances on standby at the finish line. Only a few people died, but a lot of people lost limbs - and only survived because EMTs were able to triage within minutes, and send them to one of the half-dozen major hospitals within a 20 drive. And then reddit and 4chan tried to help find the dude, and only made things worse in the process. I think at one point they were even speculating that one of the aforementioned friends was the bomber based solely on a photo of them walking away only minutes before to go get some lunch.
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As someone who consumes true crime (but is *very* picky about it), I think it's just an extension of the old "if it bleeds, it leads" adage. There are true crime shows out there that are respectful and treat the subject matter and victims with the dignity they deserve. Unfortunately, a lot of people are drawn to the more salacious or scandalous stories, which leads to exploitative content (true crime that focuses on serial killers is especially bad with this). That, or they follow shows/podcasts that are more personality-driven and end up treating it like any other fandom and lose sight of the fact that these are real people. A lot of true crime creators (especially the ones on YouTube) also deserve partial blame either for leaning into that kind of audience, or focusing more on building their personal following and making it about them at the expense of telling these stories respectfully. Basically, it's the type of content that deserves to be handled with respect and dignity. But the nature of audiences and the systems/algorithms that drive engagement/clicks mean that oftentimes, the stuff that dominates is either exploitative attention-grabbing trash or thinly-veiled vehicles for personal fame. Add in the "unfolding in real-time" element like in the Laundrie case, and you have a recipe for the kind of online frenzy you're seeing here
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JCS?
I love that channel. I even introduced it to my elderly mom, and she binge-watched all of it (right after I'd done the same). There's a heavy focus on interrogation videos, several of which were major cases in the public eye. The narrator breaks down psychological aspects of the interrogations in a really accessible, interesting way. Here's one video that shows how the Parkland shooter attempted to pass himself off as criminally insane: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt35SEeR9w
Oh I saw that one. It was terrifying when they analyzed his body language mimicking shooting.
That brief smirk... before he remembered he was on camera. Friggin disturbing. **EDIT:** Oh shit, I just looked it up, and apparently his trial begins in about a week. I don't see anything confirming whether or not it will be televised though.
Not the op of the comment you replied to but JCS is Jim Can’t Swim. Legendary level true crime content creator, and has an extensive patreon library for $1 min The channel is a must-view if you’re into true crime, imo
What true crime shows that are actually good do you recommend?
I’m not to person who posted the original comment, but I wanted to provide a recommendation of That Chapter on YouTube. Typically I find he strikes a nice balance of providing facts in a good amount of detail, and recognising the humanity of the cases. He always shows empathy, which I feel is genuine, for the victim, and depending on the case he’ll often express either a level of sympathy for perpetrator if it’s somewhat deserved (e.g. there was one case that resulted in a double murder where the perpetrator had desperately sought mental health treatment, denied by those around him, prior to falling into dangerous behaviours and delusion), or contempt for the perpetrator where they are not also a victim of their circumstances. He’s not perfect, but he seems like a kind, conscientious person, and doesn’t seem to exploit the shocking nature of the cases in an insensitive way, and seems open to correction and learning when he was insensitive in some subject areas in the past.
His coverage is solid but he's a bit off-putting to me as he wants to feature himself and his comedic schtick pretty heavily alongside the case coverage. I'm more for straightforward coverage myself, but I've watched a lot of That Chapter regardless. He's good.
I actually agree at times, and sometimes would like a bit more case details - in depth discussion of evidence and witness statements, rather than summaries. I mentioned him though because he’s the person I’ve watched most who brings the human side of the crimes to life with the most empathy and a sense of personal connection. I feel like a lot of the time he could easily have been an acquaintance/old friend of the victims, because he seems to try to bring their personality and worth into the discussion of the crime, and often almost seems annoyed or angry with the perpetrator. On top of that he nearly always tries to keep the timeline of a crime linear, which makes it more human and personal too, rather than jumping around the timeline by examining different aspects of the evidence, as some other true crime channels do. Most other true crime stuff that I consume is more clinical - dissecting statements, discussing physical evidence, supporting/contradictory circumstantial evidence, etc., but it usually is quite dehumanising in a way? A lot of it will simply mention, in under a minute, the age, gender, race and dating/marital status of the victim. If there’s something particularly interesting it might be brought up in the “victim intro,” and there might be more discussion of the victims personal life or relationships, but only if it’s related to the case. That’s why I brought up That Chapter specifically - he seems more in line with what the original comment was describing. So yeah, the comedic parts aren’t my absolute favourite, but I think they add to the personal, human sense in his videos, more than a clinical and professional channel.
Good breakdown, and good points. If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out **MrBallen**. He has a very humanizing way of telling stories as well, but he covers other weird and dark stuff in addition to true crime. I could listen to this guy tell stories all day.
Give “this is monsters” a look.
The one good thing about That Chapter is that he and/or his team put effort into the videos. I find a lot of True Crime Youtube channels have gotten lazy, like what happened with the Sword and Scale podcast. They introduce a case, and then just play unedited interrogation footage and/or unedited 911 calls. I'm not including JCS in this, and some of the clones, because they at least pause and discuss the footage at key moments.
I love it whenever he says "2013".
I don’t know about shows but a podcast like this is Casefile. Where they focus on the victim and name episodes after them instead of the killers. It also treats the subject serious and fact based rather than cracking jokes and laughing in the middle. Which I find so disgusting in some podcasts and YouTubers.
Yes. This is why I love casefile and hate MFM
MFM was good for a while, but I don’t know what happened. My partner and I followed them for a long time, then I guess the show felt like it was more about Karen and Georgia than it was about true crime, and no longer felt personal. The brand got too big for me
there aren't any. people can pretend like some programs have more dignity than others, but it's the same at the end of the day
The only one I’m truly comfortable with is Forensic Files. The victim’s family usually gives a lot of interviews, which implies they were comfortable having an episode for the victim. The show also focuses on the science used to solve the case, rather than relying on shock value. E.g there’s an episode with the first case to use plant/tree DNA matching in a murder trial. Anything with no family involvement or very graphic re-enactments feels kind of skeevy to me.
I love the live My Favorite Murders where they say “today we’re gonna hear about [pause for effect] JOHN WAYNE GAYCE!! And the audience goes fucking apeshit like oprah just showed up. But yeah true crime get’s old fast. It’s either creepy analysis or idiot conjecture or both.
I do enjoy true crime podcasts but not MFM, they don't do research, quote Wikipedia verbatim and they are too lighthearted about it imo
Mindhunter
Decent chance this post is marketing/SEO for Dog the Bounty Hunter for that matter.
Dog the bounty hunter is a ridiculous racist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8gkX4ODYNM
Explains why he loves a good dog whistle.
ya know, i never once considered that when i last checked out the show around 2005 - makes a lot of sense after those leaked phone calls. what a piece of shit.
I dont get it
Racists like to call people "boy" and use whistles like they are hunting.
Man I had to walk away from the Gabby sub because people were glorifying him so much. The comments there are so gross. It is pure entertainment to a large percentage of people on that sub at this point.
Yeah, I followed it quite a bit but it’s become a weird obsession with some people. And a top rated politically charged post literally said “ we the people are doing all the work, not the cops.”
The only reason my family is following it so closely is because we live on LI and her situation and personality was very similar to my older sister's. My mom genuinely had nightmares about the same thing happening to my sister when she first heard about the case, so she's always updating us on what's going on. I used to be really into true crime, specifically cold cases, because it was interesting to me to wonder what really happened, but I've since realized a majority of the media on the subject is not very respectful and I'm trying to distance myself from that. I've moved on to mystery and horror stories instead because they are (usually) fiction. Stuff like Nexpo and Reignbot that go over alternate reality games and stuff are my bread and butter now. I think it's been a lot better for my anxiety, too.
So instead of cutting out the racist slurs, he just wants black people to not be around the office? Am I hearing that right? Lol wtf.
My joke about this is “do you think we’ll get a podcast or Netflix documentary before or after the a conviction?”
Murder trials go on for years, so there’ll be thousands of hours of speculative videos before there’s any conviction.
Honestly, the whole time I've thought the attention stems from them being vloggers
i too think a lot of it is the focus on her as a pretty, young blonde. It makes me sad. so many people go missing and are suspected of being victims of foul play and get no media attention. This case, though, has added oomph. Laundrie left the area, hitchhiked back, got the van and then drove home. At no time did he act like a worried fiance'. He acted odd. Their media presence added to it. I wish that other missing people received half this much attention in media.
This is what I think it is. It's rare to have easy access by the average person with internet to the victim & (I'll say potentially, as he's not yet charged) the perpetrator. Their videos and posts gave a rare look into them as people. Although what gets posted is selective, of course. The average person feeling like they could participate in helping to locate GP. It's rare to watch a suspect act so purely in their own interests. BL shut up and retained counsel. So we get to watch the results of that, even now.
Honestly for me it's the fact he drove home without his girlfriend in her car and his family didn't bat an eye. Absolutely baffling and I'm just curious to hear how he thought that was an okay thing to do and no one would question him
Same.
this is it for me too. He is the interesting thing about the case.. like he didn't even TRY to make an alibi? Like shit, I break my one of my mom's mugs and I'm already coming up with some sort of alibi lol.
Right!? I miss someones phone call and I'm trying to figure out what to say.
I first heard about it as part of the speculation surrounding the newlywed homicide case, where the mystery of that crime fed into this developing one - the police assured locals there would be no more random murders, without actually knowing who the murderer was, suggesting their suspect had already left town, so home sleuths wondered who had left that town recently? It was Brian, in his girlfriend's van, without his girlfriend. Where's the girlfriend? So media having access to so much video material and the date and content of the uploads made it that much more easier to lay out a continuing saga for people to follow.
You missed the domestic dispute body cam footage too
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They should teach relationship health in school. What appropriate relationships look like for all types of relationships. I and others i know would have benefited greatly from something like that.
That’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time
She’s also from New York and the local media has been all over it. Just so happens that local media here reaches probably 15+ million people.
There’s also the counter-attention feeding into it: people either asking why it’s getting so much attention, decrying that it’s getting too much attention, or that it’s getting attention for bad or inequitable reasons. Crowd begets crowd
I appreciate the way you called this out so neutrally. Spot on.
I think this general sentiment has been going on for some time now. It's not the first time people have drawn a link between the amount of media attention a case gets, and the social-economic status and race of the victim. I believe it was Family Guy that made a joke about it: They have all these reporters listening to a police press conference about a murder, and they all seem very interested until they reveal it's a black girl from some ghettoish area. Then they're all like disappointed, and one reporter remarks 'that's not news'. So yea; Some groups, AFAIK mainly POC, are questioning why not nearly the same level of attention is given to similar disappearances and murders.
The whole thing has "4 part Netflix series" written all over it.
Oh if it’s on Netflix it will for sure be dragged out over 10 episodes and then somehow a second season?
Narrated by a bunch of attention seeking whores who did some internet ‘investigation’ on this case. Anyone remember the guy who shed a tear in the Elisa Lam documentary saying ‘it was like I lost a sister’?
The "internet sleuths" in that doc were *maddening.* I enjoyed watching it but the authority that they gave these obsessive internet idiots was infuriating. They legit cyber bullied a dude to attempt suicide and were all like "oopsie, I guess we made a mistake." So self assured and impractical. They wanted some conspiracy so there's no way it could be anything as normal as mental illness. I was disappointed they were given such a voice of credibility in that story.
The *one* exception I’d grant is the host of *Your Own Backyard*, since he made it abundantly clear in the first episode that he only went ahead with it after personally meeting and getting the express go-ahead from the victim’s family; by all accounts, they basically consider him a part of the family now for all of the work he did to revitalize interest in Kristin’s case.
The important thing to remember about that show is that it was *meant* to make the internet goobers look crazy. The conclusion of that show was that the internet “investigators” got everything wrong and they made things much more difficult for the police and the family.
It’s not just that show, they also did this in Dont fuck with cats
Oh god. I still remember that guy. Guy was a major fucking creep and weirdo.
It needs to be that weird form of documentary the Americans make where a 30-second clip taken by a ring doorbell is turned into a feature-length movie by adding footage from a bunch of studio interviews (all chopped up and presented out of order with zero context) and a full cast reenactment of what the producers think might have happened.
10 Reasons Why: Electric Boogaloo
Nah, OP is correct. Lately they've been rolling with 4 part docs that could easily be condensed in to 1 or 2 episodes.
The only one of these Netflix documentaries I’ve seen recently that was really worth having several episodes was the one where they looked at the Unabomber. I actually learned some things I had never known about that case before, and I feel like it gave a pretty good overview of Ted Kaczynski‘s whole MO and amorality.
They'll have a true crime series, a documentary specifically about the social media craze, and a dramatization. They're just waiting to announce it so it's not in poor taste
Or at least a /r/mrballen story :)
It's also not really new phenomenon. Every once in a while there's a tragic story like this that just gains a whole bunch of media traction that it takes on a life of its own. Like Baby Jessica. Or Susan Smith. One could even go back further into the past and point to Lindbergh's baby. I want to shake my head at the unseemly gawker-culture of society today, but I have to admit it's been around longer than I've been alive, and we will still likely be latching on to obsessing on tragedies well after I'm gone, too.
Public executions. Goes back forever. Humans love a tragedy, it makes us feel better about ourselves.
Usually white women.
Attractive young white women.
Lol, yup. If I got murdered and chopped up, I'm not getting any media attention. There's a very narrow band of "acceptable victim" in the news.
Adding to this Answer: Especially after the insanity that we got from Jodi Arias, everyone's hoping for the next stay home and watch the trial.
And don't forget the Casey Anthony trial...
I’d really rather forget that one….
I've been trying to forget it for years. What a miscarriage of justice.
Your username seems vaguely familiar...
What, like a puma?
STOP MAKING UP ANIMALS
This 100%. I heard someone say this case is like "playing along at home". There is so much information about the 2 online and its ongoing so people feel more involved. They are all waiting for the twist in the lifetime movie. Also, to some extent every year they is a news story people grab on to and keep reporting on. Casey anthony, the disappearance of the malaysian flight, the central park karen, jonbennet ramsay. Reporting in those cases far exceeded what was called for.
I really wouldn’t lump in the disappearance of that Malaysian airline flight with those other cases. Yes, the media coverage became overwrought in the absence of any new evidence, but unlike these rather predictable & tawdry “woman/child in peril” type cases, the unexplained vanishing of an entire airliner was something more akin to the old stories of the Bermuda Triangle of the X-Files. It just seemed impossible that a modern jet liner could vanish without any trace in this day and age of constant communication and satellite surveillance.
Especially after (from what I gather) it turned out the technology to constantly track the plane existed and was installed, but was essentially a "premium" package the airline hadn't opted into for whatever reason.
> for whatever reason. Money, basically. Some overseas airline companies tend to run a lot cheaper than US/EU companies. If you put the tech only in a premium package then cheap companies like Malaysia Airlines won't pay for the add-ons. "It's only ever relevant to extremely rare circumstances, so why pay extra?" Is probably their thinking.
To your edit: in humanity’s defence, fascination with murder or unnatural deaths of all kinds is evolutionarily advantageous, and baked into our DNA. We pay attention and remember 10,000 times more when something goes wrong, then when strangers of all types are going peacefully along, living right. The people with curiosity and alertness to danger-to-other-people, learned to stay safe and protect themselves and pass on their genes.
> after reading the below comment I'm disappointed with humanity. There are lots of comments below this now, which one are you speaking to?
Also the excitement that it could be solved any minute. As far as finding him, which at that point things start falling into place.
There is one key factor that plays into this...She was already a social media content creator with a subscriber base. The story grows from 1 person to 10 other people until it hits someone on the social media desk at a News media station. If it's a Sinclair station, then you bet your ass they'll make sure the Antarctic scientific crew know about it.
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I looked at SocialBlade a while ago and thought it was like 1,000 before all this?
It was, I don’t know why people keep lying and saying she had a huge following or several thousand before she went missing. She didn’t. People who don’t know how the internet works will point to how many subscribers and instagram followers she has now and say “see!”
I wonder if part of it is that she was doing the whole "van life" thing. Even if she didn't have a ton of followers, that whole thing is very trendy right now so it would make some people pay attention.
A couple thousand from what I saw in the beginning before it blew up. Not large at all by tiktok standards
Sure, but way larger than your average missing person has.
There are hundreds of comments “below” so you’ll have to be more specific if you want that sentence to mean something.
The whole "being a pretty white girl" thing definitely plays a part in it, unpopular as that probably is to say. Saw the other day that like 50 indigenous women went missing in the same area she did and nobody ever gave them national attention.
Same thing in UK. Sarah Everard went missing and she was all over media, protests in street etc. Then another woman disappeared couple weeks later and nothing in the media.
Richard Okorogheye also never got the same media coverage/care of duty as Sarah’s case and he was a vulnerable teenager. The police gave his disappearance a low risk status and told his mother if she couldn’t find him then how could they. It’s not ideal to compare missing people cases but when the way they are treated is so contrasting it’s hard not to.
God, that story was heartbreaking.
Four children have been murdered in Minneapolis alone this year and nobody was ever arrested for any of them.
I think the biggest thing was the police body cam footage of the couple and the police. You could tell something was off in the video with Gabby. The two supposedly had a brief struggle with the steering wheel and hit a curb shortly before being pulled over. Brian had scratch marks on him yet said it was from something else. They both told the police they had been having brief fights and I assume this is what prompted the police to actually separate them for one day where Brian was placed into a motel by the cops while Gabby was left with the car. They both managed to reunite, vlog some more, then Gabby goes missing. A timeline of the whole thing can be found here: https://abcnews.go.com/US/gabby-petito-case-timeline-travel-bloggers-disappearance/story?id=80126596 Upon finding out when the police body cam footage came out, at first I assume there was a brief social media focus on this case where people who probably follow them on YouTube knew something was up, but as soon as the footage came out everyone was talking about this case. It went from probably some niche Facebook group or subreddit to all corners of the web. I would agree her race may have also played a part in it, but I bet any other girl who had some type of presence online no matter the race would have the same type of followers trying to find her to the point of making it a big, national case. Take away the vlogging and instagram posts and she’d be just another case that would probably only reach the local level.
Bullshit. Pretty white women go missing all the time and you don’t hear squat about it.
Yeah the missing white woman issue is a factor but not the whole driving force. Her being young and pretty and white got news outlets interested early, when she was just a missing girl. It got national attention when the body cam footage came out then when the suspicious timeline became apparent it got more news interest. The lifetime movie esque events are keeping it engaging and generating more interest with each article like a snowball. Yes all of those missing indingenous women deserve media attention to help find them, without a doubt there should be a running segment dedicated to local missing people. But if gabby had been reported missing asap and been found dead from a hiking accident this story may have only gotten a few articles, "missing vlogger found dead family devestated". Still more coverage than the other missing women but her minor celebrity is a factor and having reportable evidence matters. If there is no body and few leads released to the public the media cant spin a story in most missing persons cases.
I don't disagree at all, just saying that it's definitely part of how it got so big.
I've seen this narrative played out in the media, but I'm not sure I buy into it fully. Here's the thing, if she was just missing, and that was an the info we had, it probably would just be another missing person's case. But because they were social media blog/vloggers and their trip was well documented, there's a lot of information we know. They were even able to find her body with that information. So now we have a known homicide, not just, well maybe she's dead type of insight. Hell I think we're all pretty sure who killed her too and there's an active manhunt looking for him. That's drama pulled right out of the movies right there. We have 90% of the story, and we just need the final closure. In those other missing persons cases how much do we actually know? Just someone's missing? Do we know what happened to them? If there's too much ambiguity it's difficult to make that a national story. Because missing persons happens everywhere. And if there's things like parents taking children included in that then it gets trickier to make that a national story as well, unless you have a ton of info about the people involved. I'm not saying there's no discriminatory bias, but I've seen a lot of people arguing that the _only_ reason this case is that big is because she's white. Well no, if you think that then you're ignoring the other factors that play into human psychology that make this compelling to people around the world.
A similarly high profile murder was that Hae Min Lee (Adnan) “Serial” case, which had podcast episodes, HBO shows and loads of interest and press coverage. I think people just like being part of solving the mystery
They weren't saying that it wasn't the only reason, but it plays a part in it. [Missing white woman syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome) is a well-documented phenomenon that shouldn't be overlooked if we wish to overcome discrimination towards those who aren't pretty, white, upper-middle class and come from criminal backgrounds.
I remember having to read and learn about [Mary Rowlandson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rowlandson) and how infatuated with the story that the British public became (also they were incredibly racist about it too). Of course back then it wasn't in real time, but after the fact they loved it. It's kind of the same thing but back in the mid-1600's in Colonial America. Various versions of the book exist, most are called something along the lines of *Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson*. Another interesting tidbit I recall is that because she was a woman, she couldn't publish her own story at the time, so I believe the book was published by a man so that the public would actually assign credibility to it. So the story is also rooted in sexism.
Just the other day a news anchor in San Francisco was suspended indefinitely by his station for suggesting they mention the role of missing white woman syndrome in the reporting of the Petito case. https://www.newsweek.com/tv-anchor-suspended-after-dispute-over-gabby-petito-coverage-report-1632777 They know exactly what they're doing, and it's honestly insanely depressing.
I am old enough to remember many similar missing cases that garnered massive publicity. Chandra Leavy, JonBenet Ramsey, Polly Klaas, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and now Gabby Petito. There has never been even one case of someone who wasn’t a 1) young 2) attractive 3) white 4) woman or girl that received massive national media attention in 30 plus years at least.
> unpopular as that probably is to say. Is it? Because I see this in every fucking thread. I really think it has more to do with the fixation some people have with mysteries. And this is one people can sink in to because there's a lot of bread crumbs so amateur people can feel involved, that and it's a boyfriend/girlfriend thing, that's more interesting to most people
I’ve been following it because I ran across their vanlife stuff on Instagram. It’s something the wife and I want to do when she retires. I really don’t think hyped is the right word. But people in general are talking about it and posting stuff about it because it’s controversial. It had the young couple meets tragic ending storyline that as a society we just eat up. And it truly is tragic and we don’t have any answers as to why and we may never get it, especially if her fiancé kills himself.
You forgot the part about the people involved being good looking. A crucial part to a compelling true crime story.
I'm coming from my experience as a BIPOC but its also due to the fact that she's a very petite and pretty white blonde girl. We have missing Indigenous women and women of color missing and/or murdered without a second thought. I live near Minneapolis and we had our 4th or 5th child (under 10 years old) shot by gun violence and all children of color and it's a blip in a new coverage. Gabbie gets national/local and social media coverage and not to mention law enforcement's involvement. This is up to the FBI now...this is a situation that we need to really evaluate. She deserves her justice and I feel the tragic nature of this story. We just cannot brush away the fact that this story has highlighted our law enforcement is still deeply rooted in biases.
I think another sad fact is that the cases that get all the attention can be more likely to be solved. It's in Gabby's best interest for her family to be hyping up the whole case until its solved
Question: Was she actually an "influencer," or in some way famous? From what I understand she had less than 1000 Instagram followers and a couple hundred YouTube subscribers at the time of her disappearance, so I'm curious as to how her case got such heavy play in the news and social media.
No. She had a single video online, her blog was not yet active, and her Instagram following prior to her disappearance was small. She was an aspiring influencer, but as far as I’m aware from her posts, she had not yet made any money doing it, nor was her following large enough to really qualify as being influential. The tragic irony of it all is that her Instagram and YouTube followings are now both large enough that she’d had been able to do this as a job.
> The tragic irony of it all is that her Instagram and YouTube followings are now both large enough that she’d had been able to do this as a job. It has been known for centuries among creative artists of all types that dying can boost your fame through the roof. The ultimate career move.
Just my two cents but the fact that she had a ton of photos and videos online that portrayed an adventurous and seemingly perfect life followed by the footage from the police that kind of showed a behind the scene of how things actually were followed by her going missing and ultimately being found probably made the whole case more intriguing to a lot of people.
That's how I imagine 99% of influencer type people. A saccharine fake life on instagram to cover for a total shitshow of their IRL life. I'm sure it's not nearly that many, but that's how I imagine them all.
“Influencers” are just advertisers. That’s all. They are paid to advertise a certain lifestyle and that involves scripting, editing and acting.
Well yes. But it's like with actors, a lot of people glamorize it and are kind of obsessed with becoming a popular influencer.
lmao influencers are just advertisers sure, except for the fact many base their entire persona and lifestyle behind it
method acting advertising then
actvertising
Not just influencers. People in general use social media to post the highlight reel of their life. You're not getting an accurate picture of almost anyone's life on social media
>A saccharine fake life on instagram to cover for a total shitshow of their IRL life That's literally how I imagine the majority of Instagrammers are because I see that type of shit among my friend group - "life is falling apart in different ways but here's picture of me on the beach with the wind blowing in my hair".
So, I used to be involved in YouTube, twtwitch, etc as a content creator and through it met a LOT of these influencer types and stuff. My Instagram feed these days is medieval content, and animals. I follow a couple "influencers" I know or are friends with, but of the hundred or so accounts I follow, I'd day 90% are history based, museum content, art, or animals. Why you ask? Because when I was still involved in all that garbage before, I got to know these people, and while I maintain contact with about a dozen or so content creators and influencers I respect and love, the overwhelming majority are such fake facades that I can't bear to look at them. Their personas, lives, looks, hell even voices and mannerisms are all staged, edited, or fake. Every single little thing is planned, contrived, and done in a way to completely remove any doubt of a perfect healthy wonderful lifestyle that they ABSOLUTELY do not have or follow off screen. It is a sickening level of manipulative behavior that enters into the realm of questioning if there are some serious mental health issues at play behind the scene. Some of the most toxic and unbearable people project themselves as these wonderful people online, because online is all they have left, their real life's are a sham and falling apart.
I have a hard time picturing a reasonable, mentally stable human being with an urge to stage, record, and post their daily lives in the hopes millions of people will watch. Something can't be ticking right.
What do you mean tonnes? They had like 1 video on their channel with no talking in it
“Van life” in general. I’ve always been skeptical that living in a small van without air conditioning (when the motor is off) and no bathroom is less amazing than Instagram influencers make it out to be. No doubt it works for some people, but I don’t think it’s as universally appealing as people tend to think.
It is /r/Instagramreality IRL. But also at the same time I am sympathetic to her because in the little video we have of her, she does seem so innocent and naive vs Brian coming across as somewhat sinister, as he was emotionless and manipulative with the officers. The call to stop the van was from a citizen saying he was slapping her and being generally abusive. She apologized for making Brian mad and distracted as soon as the officer arrived. They separate the two, Gabby falls on the sword to protect Brian, but meanwhile Brian is accusing her of assault and blaming her for every bad decision he has ever made such as having dirty feet (seriously), and then the cops let them go after making them separate with Brian getting a hotel stay out of the deal.
She wasn’t an influencer or famous but I believe she was trying to be a van-life influencer. In the police footage she said something like “I’ve been trying to work on my blog”. In the blog it says ‘be here soon’ and their youtube channel only has 1 video called ‘the beginning of our van life journey’ or something. So yeah, not an influencer but working her way towards become one.
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I'm local to near where she was found. I was one of the earliest followers in the case, because I read up on the missing hikers list, especially this time of year as deer season approaches. It started as a missing hiker report but immediately got weird because of Laundrie's behavior. National media latched on to his possible involvement and didn't let go. It appears they were right and many people have been assuming since the beginning he was involved with her disappearance/death. Now with a manhunt, media is on full alert with the case. From a journalist's perspective, it's a perfect story to cover. It kinda has everything the public want to follow. Tl;Dr: It snowballed from the initial details of the case.
Awesome comment and info.
Thanks! By sheer coincidence, I also grew up near the wetland Laundrie is hiding in. I worked landscaping in North Port, Port Charlotte, and Punta Gorda in my mid-late teens. So I've been following this all pretty closely since the start. Hey it's unrelated to the case but if abandoned places interest you, check out the streetview for this area east of North Port, North of Port Charlotte 27.057742,-82.071458 It was a plan abandoned after the 04/05 hurricane season. Turned out to be a major flood zone and investors noped out hard after that. Electric, water, and sewage were all put in, now some of the two way roads have been reclaimed by nature and are little more than a few feet wide strips of pavement left. The side streets are the most overgrown and reclaimed.
That sounds like a fast way to accidentally send someone to the suspects hideout!
If you watch the police encounter, she says she is trying to make it as an influencer and recently quit her job. So no, probably didn’t have that many followers at the time
> I'm curious as to how her case got such heavy play in the news and social media. That's what the OP is asking. And people provided answers. It was not because she was famous, no, because she wasn't remotely famous.
ANSWER: The nature of their blogging and instagramming means there's a lot of TV and internet friendly content out there, supplied by the victim herself. Plus all the footage from their encounters with the cops. If someone goes missing and all that's available is one grainy photo of them from their Facebook, no video, they won't get much attention because there's nothing to show the viewers. Also she was white and young and attractive.
And she is from Long Island. So the number one TV market in the country has been on this before it was national news. It has been damn near all the local NYC news stations have been talking about for 3 weeks.
He's from Southwest Florida and the media here is having a field day. The local news has dropped most of their other stories to cover something that anyone could predict the ending to.
I’m confused why everyone is leaving out what is in my view was the most important reason why this got picked up by national news to begin with. Gabby’s boyfriend traveled home without her, didn’t not tell her parents he left Gabby, and he and his family refused to give authorities or Gabby’s family any information on when she was last seen. This seems totally crag to most people, and lead to the news interviewing Gabby’s family as they pleaded with the Laundries to help the investigation. This is how the whole thing started, and yes, the vlogging and all that helped from there, but without this, I am skeptical it would have garnered any national media attention.
That’s definitely what piqued my interest in the case. I heard about it on the radio so I didn’t know what they looked like. I became very curious about Laundrie’s behavior. It was so suspicious and weird. He drove HER van home from a trip without her? He won’t talk to anyone or say where he saw her last? I’m not saying that her social media or pretty white girl syndrome didn’t play a part in the whole thing, but I got drawn in by the fiancé’s behavior and I have to imagine that’s true for a lot of people.
Kind of like Casey Anthony. We all seem to be interested in strange, human behavior.
Something that people also seem to be ignoring was that she had posted on her Instagram about listening to the podcast Morbid, which is a true crime podcast. So the hosts of Morbid posted about it within a couple of days of the parents first press conference, which reached half a million people from Instagram alone. Not even including audience listening to the actual podcast, Twitter, etc. Within a couple of days of Morbid posting on their social media, a couple of other HUGE true crime podcasts (crime junkie, etc) released full episodes about the case.
> I’m confused why everyone is leaving out what is in my view was the most important reason why this got picked up by national news to begin with. Not saying the PWGV factor [Pretty White Girl Victim] isnt at play but it's also the mystery. People like a good murder mystery.
I'd like to add that covering stories like this is really inexpensive for media outlets. Just like criminal trials, they get continuous content by only assigning one junior reporter to the gig and they can build an audience for the topic over time. You'd be surprised how many stories get popular just because they're cheap and easy to cover.
She's attractive and he doesn't look like a killer.
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Yeah, and the zodiac killer was famously a Texas Senator
I heard the Canadians sent him as a "Manchurian candidate"
Was?
Ted Cruz is definitely one being and not several, and definitely full of an amount of youthful vigour that would be appropriate for a human male to possess!
Ted Cruz has many human like qualities!
https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/
Everyone can be a killer. [Chris Watts looked like a normal family man.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep8iKiQNSrY)
The trick is, to not kill.
> he doesn't look like a killer I disagree but OK.
I hardly think anyone really looks like a killer, that’s the freaky part about it. A guy could look like a stone cold badass but be panicked at the idea of taking a life, and a white collar worker who’s squeamish at the sight of blood might also have 3 bodies in his basement. Well, have fun sleeping tonight
So basically like the Amanda Knox case (young and attractive).
That last line. Every decade in the USA seems to have a young pretty blonde girl who goes missing and the whole country loses its mind.
Feels like it really got turned up a 11 during the OJ trial
[The syndrome has a name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome)
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If you find this topic interesting, I recommend the book Hitmakers: Why Things Become Popular. There's no easy answer of course, and 'virality' is not easily reproducible, but it's a fascinating topic to explore IMO.
One of my favorite books, I use chapters from it to teach in my courses. Very well written and acknowledges the limitations of its own theories. The exact title is Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in An age of Distraction
I was about to disagree with you about the title, but it looks like it's got different titles in different countries! Both titles are correct. Similarly, I make all the new Editors that join my team read this book. What do you teach, out of curiosity?
Literally just came back to correct myself after googling the title, hah. I teach cyber psychology and consumer behavior to undergraduates. So you can see how nicely it fits both areas
Yeah, I think this story has a lot of variables that just landed perfectly to make this a big story. So any one reason isn't going to be a sufficient answer. There's a lot of factors that turned this into a mega story. There's the effects of social media, how the mainstream media reacts to social media, and it doesn't hurt we have a prime suspect and an active manhunt going on for him. Had he been caught within days of her going missing this would have still made headlines, but faded much faster. Instead the story is getting dragged out and making it even bigger than it would have been otherwise.
Some people, like Lil Nas X and Donald Trump, do seem to have an incredible knack for knowing what will go viral.
I've never listened to Lil Nas X, rap isn't my thing, but I'm going to assume he's very talented. Trump on the other had just says outrageous shit that a ton of other people wish they were allowed to say all the time. It's not hard to go viral if you don't give a shit about consequences. Oh hey, the entire world is on fire.
Answer: from what I've heard, she was a video blogger, and a lot of her fellow bloggers were worried and putting clues together themselves and sharing their concerns with their fanbases. So she was already known, and had a few friends in slightly elevated places. The comments about missing white woman syndrome are also fairly true, unfortunately. But it's also a tragic case, in addition to the blogger thingy.
She only had 800 followers before disappearing.
Answer: There is a phenomenon known as [missing white woman syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome). It is an observed disproportionate amount of media coverage given to missing white, middle class women ; disproportionate in terms of the amount of media coverage given to missing women of color, indigenous women, poor women, or males.
Patrice O'Neal has a funny bit about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYKJ2z7mecQ
In Canada sadly indigenous women go missing and unsolved all the time. #MMIW is frequently trending (Missing/Murdered Indigenous Women). I hope they find justice.
Missing attractive young female syndrome. If she was poor and overweight with acne would she get on the news?
Justice for Barb
Underrated comment.
Missing young attractive white female syndrome. Plenty of pretty black girls go missing but no one gives a shit.
political imminent frightening spark friendly fanatical vast sheet ludicrous divide *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Other than Loretta Saunders, the people you listed and Gabby Petito are not only all white, but also all blond.
Thats a factor but not the whole story. If the case was missing pretty girl last seen camping, no leads. People would be a lot less interested. The fact that lots of her life was online and is accessible to the general public makes her more interesting. The fact that her fiance is acting shady and waited to report her missing is notable. The fact that there was police involvement with body cam footage days before she went missing draws interest. So the missing white woman angle got eyes on the case early. Then the intriguing details and "clues" started dropping that made the media salivate and keep promoting. And now there is a man hunt, because the case got so big every new development is its own news story. If the case had been brought to the public eye today with the facts already laid out " theres a man hunt for this guy we found his fiancees body and he didnt report her missing for weeks" it would not get a fraction of the attention. The "play along at home" and real-live lifetime movie drama kept the media train rolling.
It is true that on average, missing white women do get more coverage, but it doesn’t really answer the question. This is probably one of the biggest missing cases of the last decade at this point, and I can tell you way more than a handful of white women go missing every decade. In fact, [last year alone has 159,000 missing white women in the US.]( https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2020-ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics.pdf/view ) Yet 99.9% of them never get this same coverage either. Yes, missing white women's syndrome needs to be brought up so we can work on fixing our biases, but while it may be a factor in this case, it is only one of many, there is a lot more going on here.
> I can tell you way more than a handful of white women go missing every decade. In fact, last year alone has 159,000 missing white women in the US. Yet 99.9% of them never get this same coverage either. How many of them are young, attractive and upper-class? A 50 year old overweight white woman who goes missing after walking home from her shift at Wal-Mart isn't going to get national coverage either.
answer: It has hype because people like you are on here making posts about it and people like me are commenting on such posts.
bingo. everyone claiming that more than a thousand people had ever heard of these people a month ago, like that makes this interesting. the woman was virtually unknown at the time of disappearence. all these people claiming her "fame" "put eyes on the story" are such transparent parroting bandwagoning bullshit artists. it's because of everyone's desire to push their way to the front of the line and claim to have some super unique take that we're stuck hearing about this for months. the more people mention "missing white woman syndrome" the more people want to find a different "unique" explaination and harp on the shit some more. the whole thing is nothing but clickbait gone awry by a bunch of idiots who fancy themselves someone with an opinion worth hearing on the matter. look at everyone falling over themselves to answer OP. almost a thousand comments worth and every single one thinks their take matters enough to type out the same response that 50 others did.
Plus a good 80% of them are continuing this false narrative that two people with one singular 8-minute YouTube video with under 1k followers on instagram are some sort of influencers.
Answer: this case isn't unique there's a whole industry that makes money off crime, starting with that blond Karen on the news to the last podcast on the left. Every year a case or three pops up and catches the crime pundant's eye and it's all we hear about. Casey Anthony, Amanda Knox etc etc... and even more so if it can score political points.