Google Street View Appears to Capture Man Loading Human Body Into Trunk of Car

Spotted!

Red Handed

An image on Google Street View that appears to show a man stuffing a body into the trunk of a car provided Spanish authorities with a breakthrough in a year-long missing person investigation, The New York Times reports.

On Wednesday, the country’s National Police announced that it had arrested two people last month in connection with the disappearance and death of an unnamed man who went missing in the country’s northern province of Soria over a year ago.

One of the detained individuals, a woman, is said to be the former partner of the victim. The other, a man, is her current partner. Both are being held on suspicion of an “aggravated illegal detention,” and will be charged for the victim’s demise.

After authorities picked them up in two different locations in Soria, they were able to locate human remains believed to belong to the missing individual. It now appears that the case has been cracked — and in no small part thanks to the astonishing coincidence of the crime seemingly having been caught by a camera-laden Google Street View car.

“Among the clues that the investigators had to solve the crime, though they were not necessarily the decisive ones, were some images that they detected during the investigations” on Google Maps, the police said in the statement, as translated by the NYT.

Forensic Files

The Street View image, captured this October in the mostly empty streets of Tajueco, shows a man in jeans hunched over the open trunk of a red sedan, stuffing a white bundle that’s roughly the size of a human body inside it. Authorities didn’t say how they stumbled upon the image. As of Thursday, the photo remains accessible on Google Maps and has not been altered to obfuscate the suspected morbid act.

Spanish newspaper El País reports that the missing man, originally from Cuba, was in Spain to visit a romantic partner. According to police, the victim was reported missing in November 2023 by a relative who started receiving suspicious texts from the missing man’s phone number claiming that he had eloped with a woman he met.

It’s not clear yet what led authorities to arrest the two individuals, but the image is said to have played a part — though it wasn’t the “key” to solving the case, a National Police spokesperson said Wednesday, per the NYT.

Following the arrests, the police searched the pair’s homes and vehicles, and on December 11, human remains in an “advanced state of decomposition” were discovered buried in a Soria cemetery. They are believed to be the missing man’s, though they couldn’t be definitively identified.

Google Maps has been used to solve crimes in the past — but rarely is it because one of its roaming Street View cars caught one in the act.

More on crime investigations: Cops Say CEO Shooter’s Pistol and Silencer Were Both 3D-Printed