The chances of being struck by lightning are minimal, one in 500,000. Also the ones that you go out into the street and hit a meteorite or even that on Sunday Fatty’s turn to you of the Lottery. Each tenth has a meager and unflattering 0.001% in its favor. What surely no one has calculated until now is the probability that while you are trying to erase the traces of a murder in a remote town in Soria where they barely live 60 neighbors one of the Google Maps cameras ended up catching you red-handed. And let the police see it.

If we talk about chance and statistics, perhaps it is easier for you to be struck by lightning and hit the jackpot on the same day. And yet everything indicates that that’s what happened to him to a neighbor from Soria. Not the Lottery and lightning. No. He had the other thing: that a Google car that was taking photographs for Street View in the province of Soria photographed him in great detail just as he was putting a body in a trunk. All this, of course, presumably.

In a small town in Soria…

The case is so bizarre that it has ended up going viral and grabbing headlines both in the Spanish press as in some media foreigners. And at the moment very little is known reliably and from official sources. To understand it you have to go back a few months and travel to rural Soria, more specifically to Tajueco and Andalusiantwo nearby and sparsely populated towns. Between the two, they don’t even reach a hundred neighbors.

There, in Andalusia, the police located recently the torso of a man in a state of advanced decomposition. The mutilated corpse was hidden in the town cemetery, in the region of Duero Berlangaand allowed investigators to give a boost to a case they had actually been working on several monthssince a man reported the mysterious disappearance of a relative.

The case is under summary secrecy and the little that is known about him has been arriving very slowly, between agency tickers and some brush stroke shared by the police. In fact, it is not uncommon to find contradictory information about the real link that existed between the different people involved.

In a very summary way, the pieces that make up the puzzle are three. The first is the dismembered corpse discovered in Andalusia, where the police are still working, according to 20Minutes. The second, in the absence of confirmation from the Institute of Legal Medicine, that this body is that of the missing person that the police had been searching for for months, a 32-year-old Cuban who before disappearing He told his cousin that I had met a woman and planned to move to Soria.

The third piece of the puzzle is the two people detained by the police for their alleged relationship with the crime. His entry into the scene further complicates the case due to the alleged crossing of links that would exist between the three people involved, both the victim and the two people who —police suspect— are involved in the murder. In fact they have finished in the Soria and Zuera prisons.

One of the suspects is a neighbor from Tajueco. The other, a Cuban who, according to require several meanswould have a connection with both men. Specifically, she is the ex-wife of the Soriano detained by the police for her relationship with the crime, although both lived separately. He had a romantic relationship with the victim.

From there the story gets complicated. According to The Countryinvestigators work with a theory that connects all the pieces: the Cuban went to the town to meet the woman and, once there, discovered that she had been married to one of the neighbors. Things ended badly and his dismembered body ended up hidden in the local cemetery of Tajueco. The supposed triangle formed by the woman and the two men or the motive that motivated the crime is something that is still unknown.

Up to this point the case is interesting, it has its good load of morbidity and leaves material for judicial chronicles or even a true crime. If the crime has aroused so much interest and has taken it to the media throughout Spain and UK headers It is, however, because of what happened not to the victim but to the alleged murderer.

That and the unexpected (and surprising) role that one of the most powerful and influential multinationals on the planet, Google, has played in the case.

During their investigations, the investigators had several clues and the SER network assures even that they were able to hear conversations of the now detained couple. There was, however, another clue that reached the National Police through an unexpected source: Google Street View. The body itself has admitted it in Xalthough without directly citing the popular Mountain View street viewer.

How Google could get into such a Soriano mess is as surprising as it is surreal. While one of the vehicles that are responsible for photographing streets for Street View passed through Tajueco, more specifically along a street called El Norte, “hunted” red-handed supposedly the man now arrested carrying in the trunk of his car a large lump.

The image It could have been lost in the morass of Google Maps if it were not for the fact that the lump in question is wrapped in a sack and, from the perspective of the Google camera, it could well coincide with a corpse. The suspect is seen leaning over him, placing him in the trunk of an old burgundy Rover, wearing jeans, a Numancia CD jacket and his cell phone sticking out of the back pocket. In its description, Google reports that it is from October 2024.

The mere idea that Google cameras could capture you while you hide a body in a trunk is delirious, but even crazier is the possibility that this could happen in Tajueco, a town that fits perfectly into the profile of emptied Spain and in where just over fifty residents reside.

The man leaning over the old burgundy Rover is in fact one of the few locals portrayed by Google. As if that were not shocking in itself, the previous image archived in Google Maps at that exact point is from 2009, so in principle his famous car with cameras had not passed there for 15 years. It’s probably easier to get the Fatso. Or get struck by lightning.

The case is fascinating, but it will be added as one more page to the peculiar judicial chronicle of Google Maps, which over the last few years has left other equally curious events. In 2021 allowed the police to get their hands on an italian gangster who had managed to avoid justice for two decades.

The man had managed to escape the control of the agents, but not from the Google cameras that photographed him chatting at the entrance of a store in Galapagar, a town located north of Madrid. Realizing the resemblance of the figure captured by Google to the fugitive, the agents pulled the thread and discovered that he worked as a chef under a false identity.

At the end of the day, it is one thing to avoid justice and another to get rid of Google Maps.

Images | Google Maps

In techopiniones | I found my dead relatives in Street View: how Google Maps is opening a window to the past