Gabby Petito’s ex-boyfriend Jackson is speaking out about the conversations they had in the days before her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, killed her in August 2021. In American Murder: Gabby Petito, Jackson recalled getting a text message from Petito on August 22, which was 10 days after a witness called police to report that they saw Laundrie “slapping” her in Moab, Utah.
Following the incident, law enforcement separated Petito and Laundrie and urged them to stay apart for the night, but they reunited before the following morning and continued their road trip. Laundrie eventually traveled back East to clear out a storage unit that they didn’t want to pay for anymore, which was why Petito was alone when she contacted Jackson.
“Hey I’m sure I’m the last person on the planet you want to hear from,” she wrote in the text message. “I would really love to talk to you. I’m only alone until tomorrow.”
Jackson called Petito and they talked for hours. “A lot of what we talked about was just catching up,” he said. “How life was going for her, how life was going for me. It was real late in the evening when we got to the end of the phone call. I got the vibe that she still might have needed someone to talk to after we hung up, so I was like, ‘Hey, if you do need to talk again, let me know. It’s OK. I’m OK with that.’”
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At that point, Petito “hinted at the fact that [she and Laundrie] had kind of gotten in an argument a little bit,” according to Jackson. She even told him that she was working on a way to end things with her fiancé.
“She was like, ‘I have a plan. I think I want to leave him. I’m gonna do it. I have to figure out when to do it,’” Jackson recalled. “And that’s when I was kind of like, ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean you have a plan?’ From the sound of her voice and the way she was saying it, I think that she, like, wasn’t sure what he would do or what he could do. I think she was wanting to get away, but just didn’t know how to do it.”
He said he made sure Petito knew to “be very careful” before ending their conversation. He heard from her again on August 27 — the same day she disappeared.
“Gabby Snapchatted me, ‘Hey, I’m in Jackson Hole and it reminded me of you,’” Jackson continued. “Later in the day, I had gotten a phone call from her. I was at work and unable to answer it.”
The timeline of Petito’s final day showed that she and Laundrie ate at a Mexican restaurant around 1 p.m. The last known footage of the aspiring travel blogger was taken at a Whole Foods at 2:11 p.m.
However, her body wasn’t discovered until September 19, nearly a month later. “I was devastated,” Jackson said. “She was my first love.”
Since Petito was on a road trip with Laundrie and often didn’t have service, her parents didn’t report her missing until September 11. By the time police began investigating, Laundrie was already back at his family’s home. The Laundries hired a lawyer and did not cooperate with officials.
Petito’s official cause of death was “blunt-force injuries to the head and neck, with manual strangulation.” By the time her remains were found, Laundrie had also been reported missing. His remains were discovered in Florida on October 20, and it was later confirmed that he died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
American Murder: Gabby Petito, Streaming, Netflix
