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Google has spent decades dispatching specially-equipped cars to capture footage of streets around the globe. That includes one that was patrolling a town in Spain in 2023 that seemingly captured a man loading a body into the trunk of his car and subsequently helped police crack the case open.
In 2001, the world was introduced to Google Earth, the platform that harnessed an exhaustive amount of satellite imagery to give users a literal bird’s-eye view of the planet. Seven years later, the tech giant took things to the next level with the “Street View” option that provided, well, a view of streets at ground level with the help of panorama images initially captured by cars with cameras mounted on the roof.
The Street View option was quickly integrated into Google Maps as the company rapidly expanded its portfolio of surveyed areas, and nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find many places you can’t be virtually transported to with a single click.
Street View has attracted its fair share of criticism over privacy concerns; Google does automatically blur faces and license plates and will do the same for certain properties if requested, but the cameras used to capture the photos have still chronicled plenty of people engaged in fairly unsavory, risqué, and otherwise private activities during moments they probably wish hadn’t been documented.
That would appear to include what unfolded when a Street View vehicle was making its way through the small town of Tajueco in northern Spain last year and captured a man loading something into the back of a red car.
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According to The Guardian, police believe the “something” in question may have been the remains of a Cuban man who was reported missing in November of 2023 after his family received a string of texts informing them he was leaving Spain with a woman he’d been and would no longer be using his phone prior to losing contact.
The man’s torso was discovered in a cemetery a few weeks later, and last month, police arrested a man and a woman due to their suspected role in his death. Authorities didn’t specifically cite the photo or explicitly suggest it captured the body being loaded into the trunk, but they noted the investigation was aided by “images detected during an investigation of a mapping application” that allowed them to identify “a vehicle that may have been used in the course of the crime.”