Gabby Petito had begged boyfriend Brian Laundrie to stop calling her names as she professed her love for him in a heartbreaking love letter sent before their fateful 2021 trip.
“Brian, you know how much I love you, so (and I write this with love), please stop crying and stop name-calling because we are a team and I am here with you,” Petito wrote in the newspaper. undated letter included in a trove of documents released by the FBI on Monday.
The 22-year-old travel blogger subsequently apologized for being “angry over a stupid piece of paper,” although it is unclear what the argument was about.
“Yes, I can be a child sometimes, I know, but that’s because you give me this energy and I just love you too much, so much that it hurts,” Petito wrote.
“So you in pain is death to me,” she said. “I’m not trying to be negative, but I’m frustrated that I can’t do more.”
Gabby Petito, 22, wrote a heartbreaking letter to her then-boyfriend Brian Laundrie, expressing her love and begging him to stop calling her names
The two were taking a van ride across the country in 2021 when Laundrie killed Petito
Petito then promised that when she returned from New York, she would work with him on the van they would take across the country.
“We can work on the van together and it’s OUR dreams now,” she noted.
“So I hope you understand that if I’m upset, it’s because I love you too much,” Petito concluded.
‘Stop crying now!!! And come home and say you love me with a big hug.’
Laundrie would go on to kill Petito as they traveled across the country, leaving her body in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming while he returned alone to Sarasota, Florida.
He would later go missing himself and was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Petito apologized for being “upset over a stupid piece of paper,” though it’s unclear what the argument was about
She promised that when she returned from New York, she would work with him on the van they would take across the country
As a frantic search for the 22-year-old blogger continued, agents raided Laundrie’s parents’ South Florida home – the contents of which they recently released Monday in a nearly 400-page document.
In addition to the heartbreaking love letter, the newly released evidence included drawings from Laundrie’s notebook.
One appeared to show a skull surrounded by the words “kill” and in another he repeatedly wrote the words “don’t trust anyone.”
Laundrie also wrote about his mental health problems, at one point noting that he contemplated suicide and kept a revolver under his mattress.
In a diary entry, Laundrie repeatedly wrote “don’t trust anyone”
‘About a year ago I went into a kind of mania where I was punching holes in the wall with my head, kicking through paintings, tearing up what I was working on, pouring petrol on myself to burn myself alive, but the lighter got wet, parking in murder land , listening to Mac [unclear, but may be ‘DeMarco’] with a gun to my head, wrestling alligators,” Laundrie wrote in his diary on October 26, 2018.
‘I wanted to die and the strange thing is that nothing has changed, but the… [timer’s] run down.
‘Under the mattress I lie on is a loaded 357 magnum revolver. If you pull the trigger, all my problems will be over,” he wrote.
In another undated diary entry, Laundrie described a nightmare he had that seemed to be about Petito leaving him.
‘The ocean flows from her blue eyes and the fire is out. With one word the pain is gone. “Brian?” Laundrie wrote.
“Oh, how sweet she is to tell us to get together, but you know when you walk out the door, she’ll be gone forever. You (sic) back in the car, haunted by the eyes you’ll never look into again.’
“The pain burns fresh because you know it’s only tonight. You wake up and you are both free,” Laundrie wrote.
Laundrie left Petito’s body in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, returning alone to Sarasota, Florida, where he would later die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Other items the FBI collected include hundreds of bullets, several magazines and a bill of sale and manuals for Ruger .380 and Glock 49mm pistols and a compound bow equipped with a scope.
The reading material found included copies of “The Watchtower,” an illustrated religious magazine published by Jehovah’s Witnesses of New York, and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Choke,” about a con man who pretends to choke on food to earn sympathy checks from others.
Near Petito’s body, officers also noted in an affidavit in support of a search warrant application for Laundrie’s home that they found two arrows and a “revolver speedloader with ammunition.”
The FBI was then able to discover that Laundrie had written in a notebook that he was responsible for Petito’s death.
An attorney representing the Petito family told the New York Post the documents prove that Laundrie “was clearly a narcissist and manipulator capable of violence.”