Gabby Petito: The original police interview, Cops failed her. Laundrie hit & slapped her.

[wnylib]

60. The friend was a couple years older than I was

and sympathetic because she had divorced a controlling, emotionally abusive man.

After my post, I watched the police video of when they stopped the van. The cops started out handling it ok, but, since Laundrie had scratch marks on him, they concluded that he was the victim, not her. They charged her with DV.

After seeing the video, I have my own suspicions about the relationship dynamics between Petito and Laundrie. I think that he is a psychologically manipulative narcissist, skilled at gaslighting. Petito was young and trusting, not aware of what she was dealing with. The interactions between each of them and the cops were unnatural.

Petito was very emotionally stressed and crying. Laundrie gaslighted both her and the cops. He denied that there was any problem between him and Petito. He was unnaturally calm and smooth the entire time. In separate interviews, she said they had been arguing all day and that she was stressed out from it. He said it was a "beautiful day" and things were going well until she got "upset." He never clarified what she was upset about, just that he tried to put distance between them by getting in the van and telling her to take a walk to cool off.

The cops then filled in the image that Laundrie was .creating for them, that he did the "right" thing and she was just an over emotional, hysterical type. But the van and phone were hers. They were thousands of miles from home. He had the keys (and the phone, I think). So of course she got upset when he was going to take off somewhere. She forced her way into the van to avoid being stranded, IMO. He made it look like she was just a "crazy lady," upset for no reason. That is a classic gaslighting maneuver of narcissists.

His behavior had Petito doubting herself. He presents himself as calm and rational to her, but does unreasonable things. She can't reconcile the image with the behavior and questions him. He gets super calm, creating the impression even in her own mind that she is overreacting. She ends up apologizing for her normal reaction to his controlling "reasonableness."

Even a calm, reasonable guy would feel and at least verbally express some frustration about trying to cope with an "over emotional" girlfriend. His calm is the scripted behavior of a self-serving narcissist.

IMO, the cops' mistake was in accepting Laundrie's story of him trying to get away from an emotional woman. They failed to see that it was normal for her to get upset over him taking off in HER van with HER phone thousands of miles from home after an argument. They wrote her off and considered him a heroic saint.