By Spooky on December 20th, 2024 Category: News
Spanish police have credited a recent Google Maps update for providing them with evidence crucial to solving a murder case that they had been investigating for over a year.
The tragic case of a 33-year-old Cuban man identified only by his initials, JLPO, whose remains were found on the outskirts of Tajueco, a town in the Spanish province of Castille and Leon may soon reach its conclusion thanks to a Google Maps update. JLPO had traveled from Cuba to Spain to visit his wife who was working in the European country, but soon after arriving in Spain, his relatives began receiving weird texts from him. He told his family that he had met a woman in Spain and planned to throw away his phone, so after they stopped hearing from him completely, JLPO’s relatives declared him missing. Parts of JLPO’s nobody were discovered near a Tajueco cemetery late last year, and investigators have been trying to solve his murder ever since.
Although Spanish police had been suspecting JLPO’s wife of being involved in his brutal murder, they lacked the evidence to prove it. Investigators had information that the victim’s spouse had become involved with a local man known as “the world of Tajueco” and they suspect that they had planned to take JLPO out of the picture. By tracking the Cuban man’s phone, police knew that it had been in close proximity to his wife’s handheld, even after the man’s disappearance, and the male suspect’s reluctance to testify in this case also raised a lot of questions.
Spanish investigators had been struggling to gather evidence in this complicated case for months when they got an unexpected break from tech giant Google. An update to their Maps platform revealed a man believed to be the main suspect in this case loading a large “package” wrapped in white linen in the trunk of an old, red Rover. Although the person’s back is turned to the camera as the Google car passes by, police are certain that it is “the wolf of Tajueco”.
The chances of a Google Maps car capturing a vital clue in a murder mystery are extremely slim, but the chances of capturing two such details are almost non-existent. And yet, the same car apparently captured the suspect on the main street of Tajueco pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with what looks like the same large “package” as the one he later puts in the trunk of the Rover. The only thing that doesn’t fit in the investigators’ puzzle is that the wheelbarrow doesn’t show up anywhere near the red car.
“We always work with open sources, such as Google Maps,” Inspector Oscar Garcia, head of the operative group of the Specialized Crime and Violence Unit, told Diario de Castilla y Leon. “We know that the update was uploaded about two months ago, but we do not know when that image was taken.”
There is still plenty of mystery surrounding this case, such as the location of JLPO’s dismembered remains, the tool used for his murder, and the time when the horrific crime occurred, but investigators are confident that they can get a conviction based on current evidence, including the images from Google Maps.
