A new docuseries on the investigation into the 2021 killing of Gabby Petito has brought a fresh wave of attention on the parents of her alleged killer and their controversial actions amid the search for Petito.

The docuseries, “American Murder: Gabby Petito,” showed Christopher and Roberta Laundrie stonewaling investigators and Petito’s family amid a high-profile search for the 22-year-old who went missing while on a cross-country roadtrip with Brian Laundrie.

Petito was reported missing after Laundrie returned, without Petito, to his Florida home, where he was living with his parents. As the search for Petito gained national attention, the Laundries mostly ignored relentless protesters assembled outside their house amid constant surveillance from law enforcement.

“Speak up!” demanded one protest sign seen at their North Port, Florida, home.

The documentary showed evidence that Laundries retained a lawyer before the search for Petito began and refused to cooperate with police as they started to investigate Petito’s disappearance.

Though speculation over the extent of their involvement was rampant, the Laundries were never charged with a crime. (Petito’s parents filed suit against the Laundries for emotional distress and settled last year out of court.) 

Legal experts in Florida consulted by USA TODAY were unsurprised by the lack of charges.

The Laundrie parents were not legally obligated to speak to authorities or to Petito’s family even if they did know something, said University of Miami law professor Craig Trocino, who also directs the school’s Innocence Clinic.

“There are a lot of facts that don’t look good,” he said. “It’s a bad case. It’s horrible any way you dice it… but the law is the law.”

The documentary also depicts the events leading to Brian Laundrie’s death.

While authorities searched the country for Petito, Brian Laundrie also went missing. Petito’s body was found near a Wyoming campground on Sept. 19, 2021, and investigators said she had been strangled.

The documentary shows a massive, weekslong search for Laundrie that only ended with the discovery of his body when his parents joined the search. Authorities believe Laundrie died by suicide. 

The Laundries’ attorney, Steven Bertolino, issued a statement to USA TODAY that was critical of the documentary, saying it “contained many inaccuracies, incorrect juxtapositions of timelines, and misstatements and omissions of fact – perhaps deliberate to capture their ‘truth,’ perhaps due to simple error. 

The statement continues: “We all know Brian took Gabby’s life and Brian then took his own as well.  Let the parents of both Gabby and Brian mourn and remember them in peace.”

The right to remain silent

Any person generally has the right to remain silent when speaking with police, which can lead to some moral quandaries, experts said.

“If I’m walking down the street and I see you shoot somebody, morally, I’m compelled to call the police and say, ‘I just saw this.’ Legally, I don’t believe you have any obligations to do that,” Trocino said. “Especially if it puts you in the crosshairs, if it implicates you.” 

In the Laundries’ case, it’s also unclear what the parents knew about Gabby Petito’s death, said Randolph Braccialarghe, a law professor at the Nova Southeastern University College of Law, in an email. 

“The difficulty with charging the parents was that the police did not know what Brian Laundrie had told his parents,” Braccialarghe wrote.

(The issue came up in a deposition for the civil suit, where the Laundries said they weren’t sure that Petito was dead when a panicked Brian contacted them on Aug. 29 and asked them to call a lawyer.)

But questions of “who knew what, when?” aren’t the most important legal consideration, according to Trocino, who said the parents would have been within their rights to withhold information from police and direct questions to their lawyer.

That’s exactly what footage in the documentary shows, when Florida officers starting their investigation asked to speak with Brian.

“He’s not going to talk to anybody,” Christopher Laundrie told Florida officers. “Goodbye for now. You can call our attorney.”

Law enforcement may have considered charges like being an accessory to the crimes their son allegedly committed, Trocino said. But those charges would have required evidence they had helped him evade capture while knowing he had killed Petito. 

What about the ‘burn after reading’ letter?

The docuseries also highlighted a letter Roberta Laundrie acknowledged she wrote to her son, contained in an envelope that said “burn after reading.”  

“If you’re in jail, I will bake a cake with a file in it. If you need to dispose of a body, I will show up with a shovel and garbage bags,” she wrote in the letter that was undated. 

See the letter:Brian Laundrie’s mom wrote him letter saying she would help ‘dispose of a body’

Roberta Laundrie said in statements through a lawyer she wrote the letter months before Petito’s death, but Petito’s family argued in court documents in their civil suit that it was evidence the Laundrie parents knew about their daughter’s death.  

“It is really bad. That’s kind of a messed up thing for a mother to write to a son, even jokingly. But is it criminal?” Not by itself, Trocino said. 

What happened to Gabby Petito?

Petito and Brian Laundrie, 22 and 23 at the time, were an engaged couple who set out on a cross-country road trip in a van in July of 2021. Petito’s friends and family said in the documentary that she wanted to build a large following on social media by making “van life” videos, and her footage and posts to social media depict a blissful couple in love and on the adventure of their lives. 

But the next month, a passerby called 911 to report a domestic dispute between them: “the gentleman was slapping the girl,” the caller said. Police in Moab, Utah, responded and separated the couple for the night, and believing that Petito was the aggressor, found Brian Laundrie a place to stay.

Brian Laundrie returned home to North Port, Florida, with the van but without Petito in early September. After she didn’t respond to her parents’ texts or calls for days, they reported her missing in their home state of New York.  

After he and his parents refused to speak to law enforcement, Brian Laundrie soon vanished as well, telling his family he was going hiking in a vast reserve near the home on Sept. 13, slipping out of the house undetected by law enforcement keeping watch. His parents reported him missing on Sept. 17. 

By the time Petito’s body was found in Wyoming on Sept. 19, 2021, the search for Laundrie as the prime suspect turned into a massive manhunt that lasted weeks before his body was also found on Oct. 20. 

Authorities found a journal with his belongings in which they said he confessed to killing Petito.  

Contributing: Grace Pateras Sarasota Herald-Tribune