It takes a pretty weird string of coincidences to turn a Google Street View car into a potential witness for the prosecution. But that’s what has happened here.
Street View is pervasive. Some may also call it intrusive. Millions of miles are logged by drivers and pedestrians, year after year. And while those efforts to map the planet may occasionally surface things ranging from the bizarre to the beautiful to the possibly dangerous, the cameras aren’t there to capture events. They’re there to capture places.
But sometimes these places also contain events. In what has be one of the luckiest breaks for criminal investigators anywhere, a Street View car managed to drive past an apparent crime scene at precisely the right time, as ABC (Australia’s version) reports:
Police in northern Spain say a Google Street View image has helped them make arrests in a murder investigation.
The image shows a man loading a bag, which police suspect contained human remains, into a car.
Presumption of innocence aside, the Google Street View image depicts something that looks absolutely like someone putting a body into the trunk of a car:
And that’s not the only Street View image being used in this investigation. There are a couple of others, including what appears to be the suspect hauling the (alleged) body down a street in a wheelbarrow.
This all seems pretty daring for broad daylight, but let’s look at the facts. First of all, no one expects a Google Maps car to be driving around this particular neighborhood. The images were captured in the incredibly small town of Tajueco in Spain. And by small, I mean it’s home to barely over 100 people.
Second, this was a return trip for Google, but the company’s last visit occurred nearly 15 years ago. So, the chances of having an inadvertent witness traversing the small town’s even smaller streets would normally be almost zero.
But everything worked against the suspect here. Not only was Google roaming the streets, but its cameras passed by at exactly the moment the “large object” (as some news sources refer to it) is being placed in the trunk of this car. And the camera passes close enough the average viewer can make several (adverse) assumptions about the “large object,” most notably that the larger part of the large object looks a lot like a human body, especially when paired with the smaller part, which looks exactly like a human head.
Suddenly, after a year where the murder case had gone from front-and-center to the backburner, presumably en route for the cold case files, investigators suddenly had a usable lead — one that has resulted in two arrests and discovery of the body (well, body parts) which had apparently been buried without permission in a nearby cemetery.
While most of us are content to use Google Street View to familiarize ourselves with unfamiliar areas or, perhaps, to see what our old neighborhoods now look like, others are using this service to solve crimes and locate suspects. There are more “witnesses” than ever of things happening in public areas (and “private” areas, for that matter) — something to keep in mind the next time you decide to transport a corpse in broad daylight on a public street. If you aren’t careful, your next vanity search is going to return some extremely surprising results.
