GABBY PETITO INVESTIGATION
Private investigator surprised search warrant hasn’t been served at house of Gabby Petito’s boyfriend
Sep 16, 2021, 8:49 PM | Updated: Sep 17, 2021, 7:03 am
SALT LAKE COUNTY, Utah — Another day has passed with no promising developments revealed by police in the search for Gabby Petito, and Chris Bertram, a former chief with the Unified Police Department indicated there’s likely a lot of detailed work behind the scenes.
“The FBI is probably in the background. They’re not saying a lot, but they’re doing a lot,” Bertram said.
Bertram was involved in many investigations with the Unified Police Department. He now works as a private investigator and teaches courses in criminal justice, psychology of criminal behavior and psychological profiling at Salt Lake Community College.
He does not have inside knowledge about this case, but he did share his perspective with KSL TV.
Many want to know why Petito’s boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, has not been brought in for questioning and has chosen not to cooperate with investigators.
“The boyfriend, as every citizen in the United States, has their Fifth Amendment protection,” Bertram said. “They don’t have to self-incriminate. They don’t have to cooperate.”
Because there is no evidence of a crime, Bertram said Laundrie is not technically impeding the investigation.
“You have to be obstructing, what crime?” Bertram said. “We would have to find that there’s a crime.”
Bertram did share that he anticipated a search warrant to be issued Wednesday.
“I imagined that at 6:01 that there was a pound on the door, and that the FBI and the police departments were executing a search warrant. I was surprised it didn’t happen,” he said.
Bertram suspects FBI agents from Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming are working the case on the ground, and back at their headquarters where they are working with cell phone data, trying to pin down exactly where Petito was when she disappeared.
That, he said, is the most important piece of evidence that will move this investigation along.
“If I’m on the law enforcement side, come on, tell me where you last saw her so we can start looking for her,” Bertram said. “If I’m on the defense side of things, don’t say a word.”
