They were found all over the country — in Alabama, California, North Carolina — in the span of roughly six weeks in the fall of 2021; some of the deceased individuals had been reported missing.
Among the many disturbing aspects of the death of Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old travel blogger who was killed by her fiancé , Brian Laundrie, three years ago in Utah, is that the massive attention the case received from the public and the media apparently led to the discovery of at least seven additional dead bodies .
Those deaths were not connected to Petito’s case but their recoveries coincided with a nationwide search for Petito and Laundrie, who had disappeared shortly after Petito was reported missing. “We had precincts and police departments from all over the country looking and searching,” Joseph Petito, Gabby’s dad, told People Magazine recently.
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It’s remarkable that Petito’s killing had such a powerful ripple effect. It highlights the disparities often found in law enforcement’s response and news media coverage when women go missing, a topic I’ve written about before. These disparities are a core feature of what’s often called “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” the tendency to devote vastly more resources and attention to missing white women — especially if they’re young and blonde, like Petito — than anyone else.
This inequity is why the Petito family is launching a television project called “Faces of the Missing,” which aims to amplify the stories of missing persons who don’t receive widespread attention.
“That didn’t sit well with me,” Petito’s dad says in a promotional reel for the series, reflecting on how cases involving people of color rarely receive the same level of media coverage as his daughter’s case.
While the search for Gabby Petito was ongoing, The Washington Post counted her media mentions over the course of a week: 398 times on Fox News, 346 times on CNN, and 100 times on MSNBC. This outsized focus overshadows countless other missing persons whose stories remain untold. The disproportionate coverage can also influence law enforcement’s priorities, with more resources and manpower allocated to highly publicized cases.
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But people of color make up 40 percent of the missing population which, at any given time, may be up to 100,000 people in the United States, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs.)
Marginalized disappearances are not invisible by accident. They are the result of systemic biases in law enforcement, media coverage, and public perception. The Petito family’s initiative holds the promise of shifting this imbalance, bringing long-overdue attention to the underrepresented stories of those who remain missing and the families left searching for them.
This is an excerpt from ¡Mira!, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Marcela García. Sign up to get ¡Mira! in your inbox each week.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.