Google Maps has helped Spanish researchers solve a year-long murder mystery by capturing the moment someone put a suspected corpse into a car.
Police in the northern region of Castile and León began their investigation in November 2023 when someone reported the disappearance of a male relative.
Officers arrested a woman who was the missing man’s partner and another man who was her ex-partner in Soria province on November 12, police said in a statement on Wednesday.
Investigators then raided the suspects’ homes and inspected their vehicles, but also came across an unexpected clue in the search for further clues.
These were “images in a location application” where they “discovered a vehicle that may have been used during the crime,” the statement said.
Spanish media circulated photos of a screenshot from Google Maps’ Street View from October 2024, showing a person dumping an object covered in a white veil into a car trunk in the village of Tajueco. It was the first time in fifteen years that the car had been to the city of Tajueco, the BBC reported.
The images helped solve the case, although they were not “decisive,” police said.
Officials said another photo set shows the blurry silhouette of someone carrying a large white bundle in a wheelbarrow, the BBC reported.
The representative of the central government in Soria, Miguel Latorre, told public broadcaster RTVE that the person could “presumably” be considered the culprit.
Police said a severely decomposed human torso, believed to belong to the victim, was found this month in a cemetery in Soria province. The daily El Pais reported that he was a 33-year-old Cuban.
The judge has taken the suspects into custody and the investigation is still ongoing.
Google’s technology has helped investigators make breakthroughs in previous cases. In 2022, an Italian mafia boss who had been on the run for decades was arrested after being spotted on Google Maps.
In 2019, the remains of a man who had been missing for 22 years were finally found thanks to someone who zoomed in on his former Florida neighborhood with Google satellite images and saw a car submerged in a lake.
