My understanding is she was definitely alive on 8/25, she regularly called or facetimed her family and that was the last date she did either of those. I think they received text messages from her on like the 27th and 28th, and then nothing since–her family says they do not know if the texts on those later dates were actually from her or not.
For me the key issue is finding out the van was in her name. She’s a young woman in a contentious relationship, very possible maybe she just told him to fuck off and went off on her own for a while being a nomad and just disconnected from people to destress or whatever. But you don’t let a guy you just broke up with take your car and disappear with it, that’s the part that makes zero sense.
Oh, I agree. I didn’t mean that post to sound like a diss. I just remember that your chain of reasoning can be much more opaque. At least mine was, back in the days I partook.
I watched ~90% of the video. I think the cops did a good job.
My first girlfriend and I went on a 2000 mile road trip. About half of it camping. I did not know that she was bi-polar. Manic/depressive.
She forgot her meds. She never told me. Didn’t know she needed them. It was a very, very confusing trip. A real roller coaster. I’m sure it was harder for her. But I had know idea what was going on. Glee to anger in a few hours.
This was way before the internet or I had any idea what BP or MD was.
Not saying that abuse or assault or abandonment or murder is in any way the answer. I do have experience with road trips with someone that is off their meds though. Loving and adoring one hour and then sullen and quiet the next.
I didn’t have the first clue what was going on. I suspected it was me. “What’d I do”???
It was a “Long Strange Trip” indeed. The Grateful Dead don’t know the half of it.
People who murder their spouses are rarely as smart as they think they are. Most of them have their own hypotheses about how to throw off law enforcement investigations, and those hypotheses are usually wrong. Most think they know about forensics, and they’re usually wrong. Many think that they can just dispose of the body, refuse to cooperate, and hire a lawyer and the investigation will just stop because…no dead body - yet.
And when they begin to realize their hypotheses are wrong they behave funny, and don’t realize that they’re now under surveillance. They might then even be dumb enough to initiate an interview with law enforcement “just to clear their names” when in fact, they’re already kinda fucked and talking to investigators in a taped interview in which detectives, one by one, present them with contradictory statements and incriminating evidence, is only going to make them even more fucked.
I was stupid/bored enough to watch the whole dash-cam. She tells the officers (Oh, somewhere about an hour plus into that little slice of Hell) she doesn’t drive the van. She was kinda wigged out about driving it from the stop back to Moab, and down to the hotel to pick up The Dude. He rode off in the back of the cop car.
But here we have a guy who isn’t saying anything at a time when he’s expected to be saying a lot (about where he last saw her / where she might be / her plans, etc.). What then is the chance he’ll start talking at a time when he’d be expected to stay silent?
This thread is funny as some people keep looking at various things that could have happened.
Of course he killed her. There is a 99.9% chance that this is true. All of this talk about “they had a fight and he dropped her off” is absurd. If it was true, we would have heard from her by now. He killed her, end of story. I am not happy about it, but that’s what happened. I am not on the jury, so “innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t apply.
Having said that, from a pragmatic perspective, the boyfriend is absolutely doing the right thing (for himself) by not saying anything. There is no benefit for him by talking to the police.
Tragic as this may be, it does open up a possibility other than Laundrie killing Petito. Perhaps there is a serial killer targeting transient women in the area.
My “favorite” mysterious disappearence story was a woman who claimed her husband had gone fishing in the nearby ocean and 24 hours later still hadn’t come back. Then she basically did every single “suspicious spouse” thing you can think of including being spotted the next day trying to buy a headstone for her husband when the State Police and Coast Guard was still treating this as a search and rescue operation with multiple teams searching for him.
Despite all this suspicion she wasn’t arrested for 5 more years until somebody bought her house and started digging up the backyard for a pool and found a body.
It never ceases to amaze me that people will confidently apply numerical probabilities to real-world events where the fact patterns are unique or uncertain (making them poor subjects for statistical comparison).
When he’s even more afraid than he is now. When the pressure starts making him crack. The stress of knowing he’s under constant scrutiny - the kind he probably couldn’t have imagined - could cause him to make a few errors.
Hard disagree. We know that people voluntarily choose to go missing as we have confirmed cases of such happening in the past. We have no confirmed cases of alien abduction.
And to head off a potential counter, let me just emphasize the uniqueness of the facts. It’s not enough to say that people are more or less likely to go missing voluntarily vs. to be murdered, because there are added facts that may distinguish this case from others. So, to my original point, we would be wrong to think we can affix any sort of probability to a unique event.
I thought it was pretty clear, but maybe I am wrong, that when I say “There is a 99.9% chance that…”, I do not literally mean “99.9%”. It is a figure of speech meaning “The overwhelming probability here is that he killed her”.
Which is true. He killed her. It brings me no joy to say that, but it is almost certainly the case.
FWIW, inasmuch as I respect that you don’t literally mean to have assessed the probability that he killed her at 99.9%, I don’t even think there’s an overwhelming probability he killed her. Without being able to say what is more or less likely, I do feel confident in saying that it’s plausible she was killed by him, yes, but then I also feel it’s plausible that she went for a hike and fell off a cliff, as people often do. Or she wandered off in a wooded area and got lost. Or… I can think of at least one other option, that doesn’t need listing, because there’s no need to go flinging around accusations at anyone at this point, which is kind of my point. (And then there’s my fringe theory that… maybe this is all to generate social media buzz).
Regardless, from his perspective, whether he knows what happened to her because he killed her, he knows what happened to her but was not himself responsible, or he has no idea what happened save that she wasn’t there one morning, he does know there was a DV incident, and he does know how… people like us will tend to feel confident in assuming “He killed her.” And, before you go mentioning he certainly seems suspicious not talking to police if he’s innocent, I think the point has already been well-made that being innocent is no guarantee against being railroaded by police who, like many of us here, will be eager to jump to “He killed her… it is almost certainly the case.”
So I honestly have no idea what happened to her. And of the list of plausible explanations, I do not yet feel confident is saying which is more or less likely. To my mind, there is no credit for being “right” on insufficient evidence.