So Brian and Gabby became friends-and perhaps to Brian’s chagrin, they would stay just friends for years. They reminded each other of Frog and Toad, a collection of children’s stories about two seemingly incompatible best friends: a sleek, dashing frog, who is demonstrative and cheerful, and a toad, a mottled and stouter individual who is more solemn and occasionally disappears to be by himself. Ultimately, Brian decided, “I gotta worry about my zen.” “How am I supposed to tell friends about my mental health without feeling like a burden?” “Why did I say that? Why did I say anything I have ever said?” he sometimes wondered. “I have never attended any schooling for art, but because of my love of comics I never needed a second in a classroom.”Īfter entering high school, Brian decided to change he adjusted his hairstyle and made a few friends who shared his interest in “guns and stuff.” “I will actually attribute all of my skill in painting to dissecting the works of ,” Brian later boasted. He screen printed T-shirts with faces of popular animated characters, like Bart Simpson and Hellboy (8). He carved linocuts of images traced from the covers of Chuck Palahniuk novels. He was a skilled copycat artist, rendering faithful facsimiles of his favorite cartoons and comic books. Over the course of his life, Brian made more drawings than friends. He took long hikes by himself, finding meaning in the part of The Seventh Seal when Max von Sydow’s character says: “Through my indifference for people, I’ve been placed outside of their society-now I live in a ghost world, enclosed in my dreams and imaginings.” Survivalism fascinated him (7). But over time, Brian grew to like being alone.
Kids who claimed to know him later described his life as lonely. He sat alone in the cafeteria, identifying with the phrase “Eat the spaghetti to forget your regretti.”īrian struggled with anxiety. Gabby’s classmate Brian Laundrie was 40 pounds overweight, with an underbite that made it look like he kept chewing tobacco in his lower lip. Despite Brian’s hard-earned calluses, his bare feet likely burned. But by 6 a.m., it was already 91 degrees, and the day was only getting hotter. As advised by the park’s website, they had set out early in the morning to try to beat the heat. One day, about five weeks into their road trip (1), Gabby and Brian were hiking up three miles of steep terrain to the Delicate Arch, a rock formation in Utah’s Arches National Park. When Brian returned to the campsite barefoot, he tracked dirt into the vehicle where they slept and made food. There was also the matter of dirty feet Brian and Gabby were on a cross-country road trip in a small van. The grounds of the national parks were blisteringly hot and rife with black widow spiders. But she would inevitably put them back on. Sometimes Gabby humored him and slipped off her shoes during their walks. He wanted her to “build up” her feet so that she, too, could ditch her shoes at the campsite.
He’d become intent on “living with less” and encouraged Gabby to join him in a more natural lifestyle. If it were up to him, Brian said, he wouldn’t even own shoes. Find us on social media: | For current & accurate updates: or /mandymatney Support Our Mission: /support-the-show Support the Reporting: fitsnews.When 23-year-old Brian Laundrie and his 22-year-old girlfriend Gabby Petito went hiking, Brian insisted on walking barefoot. Listen on any streaming service or visit to learn more. Follow along with Matney's reporting in real time from South Carolina as her exclusive sources guide listeners on a journey to expose the truth wherever it leads. Matney's podcast, ranked #1 globally in 2021, provides unmatched insight into the horrific deaths, botched investigations and newly-uncovered crimes that are all interconnected. The now-infamous Murdaugh family is surrounded by seven criminal investigations into fraud, obstruction of justice, the 2021 double homicides of Paul Murdaugh and his mother Maggie, the 2015 murder of young Stephen Smith, the suicide-for-hire plot of family patriarch Alex Murdaugh, and a vast insurance scheme that preyed on the region's most vulnerable citizens. Award-winning journalist Mandy Matney of has been investigating the Murdaugh family since that fateful night in 2019. For nearly 100 years, one family traded influence and held power in the South Carolina lowcountry until a fatal boat crash involving an allegedly intoxicated heir-apparent shed sunlight on a true crime saga like no-other.