Social media makes voyeurs of us all, drawn to watching strangers perform their unpolished, imperfect online lives. There is something especially familiar -- even intimate -- about people-watching at a time when, for our own safety, we are forced to maintain social distance. But when people live their lives in the public eye, their deaths, too, can become public.
captured the media's attention through snapshots and videos on her social media accounts -- proclaiming her love for her fiancé, Brian Christopher Laundrie, traveling with him, camping out of a van, dancing with joy. She was outgoing and engaging, and very much alive. When she disappeared, her family appealed on social media for help in finding her. A and footage from a showed up in public news reports. Her death was confirmed when her body was found and identified at the end of September. Laundrie has disappeared, and there is a federal warrant for his arrest. The forensic investigation of Petito's death continues, under the scrutiny of the social media public, who have shared their own videos -- and theories -- online and with the authorities.
As a forensic pathologist I am sometimes asked to comment on cases in the public eye on behalf of families, privately retained attorneys, or the press. Everything I have learned about Petito's death has come from news reports. With that caveat in mind, what do we know right now?
Petito was healthy. She had no reported history of substance abuse. She and her fiancé were traveling in a van with camping gear. They were last known to have visited Arches National Park in Utah and the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. There were reports of domestic violence: witnesses on the 911 call reported seeing a woman being hit by a man, and then both of them taking off in a van with Florida plates, matching their description. When the police later pulled them over pursuant to that call, the officer noted that Laundrie had scratches on him, and that Petito was very distraught. Both he and Petito confirmed they had been fighting. No arrest was made. Petito continued to be in touch with her parents over FaceTime and by text for the next 2 weeks. She was found dead near a campsite in Wyoming, 3 weeks or more after she was last seen alive. High temperatures in the area were in the 70s, with lows in the 40s. The Grand Tetons have an active wildlife population, including coyotes and vultures and other scavenger species.
The forensic death investigation is being overseen by an emergency room physician -- not a forensic pathologist -- who is the elected coroner of Teton County. Blue has positively identified the remains found by the campground as Petito's, and has made an initial determination of the as a homicide. He has held off on releasing the cause of death, pending additional studies.
That's a lot of information. But what we don't know is quite a lot, too.
We don't know what Petito's killer may have done to conceal her death. Methods to conceal death (such as burial or fire) would affect the condition of her remains and therefore the forensic information that can be gathered from them, which can have a huge impact on the investigating agency's ability to determine a cause of death through autopsy. While it would be very difficult to completely incinerate a body using a campfire (even with accelerant), fire will cause damage to the soft tissues and can create artefactual fractures in bone, both of which would make a diagnosis of death by strangulation or by blunt traumatic injury more difficult to establish. If the body was left out in the open air, decay and the work of scavengers could also obscure or even obliterate some perimortem injuries. If partially buried, even in a shallow grave, the remains might be better preserved, but the amount of humidity in the ground and the ability of insects or worms to access the remains will then factor into what physical evidence is left for the forensic pathologist to evaluate.
The cause of death is the disease or injury that starts the lethal sequence of events. We don't yet know Petito's -- but, since the manner of death has been ruled as homicide, we can conclude that Petito must have been killed by some sort of injury. The Teton County coroner has determined that this death cannot have been by Petito's own hand, nor by natural disease nor by accident.
The manner is also, notably, not "undetermined." Manner of death is a way to classify the cause based on the scene and circumstances. If the death is due to the actions of another person then it would be classified a homicide. If it doesn't classify easily or if the cause of death is unclear because of decomposition or skeletonization, then the manner could be classified as undetermined. That has not been the case in Petito's death.
So, the fact that the coroner has released the manner and not the cause signals one of two things: either the doctor found compelling anatomic findings during the autopsy to signify a traumatic death due to the actions of another, or the scene and circumstances support a determination of manner even in the absence of a clear-cut cause.
How can a coroner determine the manner without a clear cause of death? From the police investigation. If the decedent's body was found after having been intentionally concealed and the decedent had no prior health conditions that could have caused sudden death, and if the last person seen with the decedent alive was witnessed to have been violent against her, then the circumstances of death alone can support a determination of homicide rather than natural, suicide, or accident -- even if the body was nothing but bones and decomposing flesh with no apparent injury.
Why release the manner without the cause? The coroner's releasing the manner of death as homicide while keeping the cause of death pending allows the police to continue their investigation with written documentation of probable cause that a crime occurred, which could expedite their procurement of warrants. It gives the family and the public an idea of what is going on, so that they can feel assured that the investigation has yielded some answers, and to motivate them to cooperate in aid of its advancement.
What the declaration of manner of death doesn't do is to supply the details of what really happened, because right now the only person who knows that is the killer.
So please bear in mind that, at this stage, any opining on Petito's cause of death are just speculating -- and the good ones will tell you that right off the bat. It typically takes weeks after the autopsy for the final report to come out, and even then it might be kept under wraps until the suspect is found and interrogated.
Keeping the cause of death restricted is a technique that police use infrequently, but it's useful when they want to make sure that any information they get on a case is accurate and not influenced by public disclosure of key forensic details. For a case that has played out in the public eye this widely and for this long, that would make a lot of sense.
is an American forensic pathologist and CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. She is currently working as a contract pathologist in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the co-author with her husband, writer T.J. Mitchell, of the New York Times bestselling memoir , and two novels, and , in the Jessie Teska forensic detective series. You can follow her on and .