Last year, the world was captivated by the disappearance and death of Gabby Petito. The 22-year-old travel vlogger went missing while on a cross-country road trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie, who it was discovered weeks later had murdered her and left her body along the border of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
Just five months later, Channel 5 has produced a documentary investigating the lead up to Petito’s disappearance, death, and her family’s subsequent quest for justice. And since The Murder That Gripped the World was released, Gabby Petito’s name once again begun trending on Google, with users searching for ‘Gabby Petito case’, ‘Gabby Petito boyfriend’, ‘Gabby Petito Instagram’ and ‘Gabby Petito parents’.
Every aspect of Petito’s life being Googled again is unsurprising. Her disappearance in September last year quickly became the focus of a controversial TikTok led investigation after users became captivated by scouring her social media videos for clues about what had happened to her. Petito’s ‘van life’ video on YouTube has now been viewed over 6million times.
And The Murder That Gripped The World documentary is not the first of its kind. Netflix has previously released a series about Jack The Ripper (The Ripper) and Steven Avery (Making A Murderer) while crime podcasts including Serial and The Teacher’s Pet have continued to climb in popularity.
These trends beg the question: why do we have such an appetite for male violence? It’s a huge problem in society and something many of us are deeply afraid of, so why would we want to watch and discuss it in our free time?
Psychiatrist Dr Sharon Packer believes that, as women, we find comfort in true crime because it feels ‘like a dress rehearsal’ in case we end up in these situations ourselves. Packer theorises that many women hope to learn something from watching the horrendous misfortunes that have occurred to other women at the hands of men.
This is backed up by a study led by psychology crime expert Amanda Vicary who found that women read true crime novels because they want to understand how a crime is perpetrated.
The flurry of ‘warning signs that a loved one is in an abusive relationship’ articles, which were published after Petito’s body was discovered, suggest that captive audiences are those who want to understand and identify signs or triggers of violent behaviour in order to keep their loved ones and themselves safe from the same fate.
And Petito’s death was especially horrifying because it was so unexpected. Her Instagram is still peppered with smiling selfies of her and Laundrie just months before he killed her - this is so conflicting from the events that subsequently took place that the knee-jerk response is to dig for answers.
Psychologists have also suggested that women are interested in programmes that investigate incidences of male violence because we have a strong sense of compassion for the victims. ‘When we read a victim’s story, we see them as a person and learn more about them. There’s always a little bit of us that thinks, that could have been me, that could have been somebody I know, somebody I love,’ co-host of the All Killa No Filla podcast Rachel Fairburn told Jane Garvey on Women’s Hour.
Fairburn also noted that women may have a morbid fascination with the killer’s motive as people love to play armchair detectives. Petito’s case exemplified this, as amateur investigators from all over the world used the internet to hunt for clues and send in a ‘remarkable’ number of tip offs to the FBI agent in charge Charles Jones.
But no matter our interest or intention with watching these investigations of male violence, that are produced and broadcast for entertainment, it’s important to remember that a woman’s death should never become the starting point for a spectacle or media circus.
That being said, the sinister intrigue in The Murder That Gripped the World and other programmes like it stems from the horror of watching our worst fears being realised on screen. For as long as there is male violence, women will have a terrified fascination with why it occurs and will attempt to learn everything we can through whatever medium available in order to possibly avoid it.
READ MORE: Stop Treating Gabby Petito’s Murder As If It’s A Live True Crime Documentary