As Brian Laundrie’s parents seek to access their late son’s bank accounts, the FBI is declining to say whether it plans to turn over a notebook recovered along with other items near his body in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Reserve last year, where he is believed to have shot himself in the head.
Laundrie and former fiancée Gabby Petito made national headlines this fall after her disappearance during a cross-country road trip they’d been posting about on Instagram and YouTube. With the couple sharing so much of their journey on social media, members of the public and investigators have anticipated learning more about the notebook’s contents.
Steve Bertolino, the attorney for Chris and Roberta Laundrie, said the FBI has not told his clients whether investigators found anything pertinent to the case in the notebook or if what they recovered is even legible after spending weeks in the Florida swamp.
A police officer carries the dry bag that Chris and Roberta Laundrie found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park Wednesday. (Michael Ruiz/Fox News Digital)
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He said last month that the Laundrie parents had filed paperwork to access their son’s estate, since he did not have a will.
“The petition is simply to administer his estate, which is primarily the bank account,” Bertolino told Fox News Digital Wednesday. “The return of property by law enforcement is separate.”
And people hoping for a resolution to the high-profile disappearance and slaying may be disappointed once investigators do announce what they found inside, according to former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani. He said he didn’t expect investigators to find anything useful in the notebook.
“It is unlikely the notebook’s contents are legible if they were underwater for weeks,” he said. “Laundrie’s body was described as skeletal ‘remains’ and the FBI needed dental records to identify him. The human body can withstand water and wildlife better than paper.”
The FBI said it had no comments on the matter.
Chris and Roberta Laundrie in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park on the day police discovered their son’s remains. (Michael Ruiz/Fox News Digital)
Bertolino and Richard Stafford, the attorney for Petito’s parents, have also been working on the return of her personal belongings that were left behind at the Laundries’ home when the travel-blogging couple departed on their ill-fated road trip last year.
Stafford did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Petito vanished in late-August, months into a tour of U.S. National Parks alongside Laundrie that she hoped she could spin into a YouTube video-blogging career.
Days after her parents last heard from her, Laundrie showed up on the other side of the country – driving her van. Neither he nor his parents said anything about her disappearance publicly for 10 days.
When police knocked on their door on Sept. 11, they invoked their rights to remain silent.
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An FBI-led search team found Petito’s strangled remains in a campground north of Jackson, Wyoming, on Sept. 19. Other travel bloggers provided video evidence that she and Laundrie had camped in the area around the time of her death.
Gabby Petito in an undated photo shared by her father.
(Joseph Petito/Twitter)
In Florida, Laundrie slipped away from his parents’ home in North Port on Sept. 13 – under the nose of local police who declined to name him a suspect.
In November, North Port Police spokesman Josh Taylor told Fox News Digital that, “I don’t remember anyone of an official capacity saying he was on the run.”
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But the FBI ultimately named him the only person of interest in Petito’s homicide, and the bureau obtained a federal arrest warrant against him for bank card fraud.
“On September 22, 2021, the U.S. District Court of Wyoming issued a federal arrest warrant for Brian Christopher Laundrie pursuant to a Federal Grand Jury indictment related to Mr. Laundrie’s activities following the death of Gabrielle Petito,” Special Agent in Charge Michael Schneider, of the FBI’s Denver office said in a statement at the time.
A nationwide manhunt for Laundrie came to an end on Oct. 20, when investigators found his remains in a swampy park near his parents’ house in North Port, Florida. Fox News Digital captured dramatic images that morning when Laundrie’s own parents stumbled across some of his personal belongings. The find came in an area they had been telling police to search for weeks, but during that same span, flooding left most of it underwater.
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Authorities later said he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound – but both the FBI and local police have declined to acknowledge whether they recovered a firearm.
One was missing from the family home when his father voluntarily surrendered his guns to the FBI on Sept. 17, according to Bertolino.
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In the aftermath of Petito’s death, her family created the Gabby Petito Foundation to assist survivors of domestic abuse and help parents locate missing children.
Fox News’ Paul Best contributed to this report.
