A picture says more than a thousand words. A red car and a man leaned over and placed a large white bag in the trunk. It is the image from the Street View application of Google Maps that helped National Police officers solve a murder in Soria, northern Spain, which they began investigating more than a year ago.

A vehicle from the search engine giant equipped with numerous cameras on the roof photographed every corner of Tajueco in Soria (Castile and León). By the time we arrived at Calle El Norte, it was a routine visit as part of the route to capture images for Google Street View.

There was an old red car parked there like any other day and a man next to it was packing a large bundle into the trunk. It could have been a normal everyday scene, but that was not the case, and it turned out to be the key piece that solved the mystery that the National Police had been trying to solve since November 2023.

Since then, officials and the Guardia Civil have been looking for a 40-year-old Cuban. The young man had come to Spain in search of his wife and had been missing since November last year. Little was known about the details and no one knew where he was.

After a long period of investigation, a strange coincidence raised alarm bells: the Google Street View image of a man putting a bulky white plastic bag in the trunk of a car on Calle El Norte de Tajueco.

Police found out who owned the car and listened in on the suspect’s phone. They discovered that he was living with the missing man’s Cuban wife. After months of listening to the couple’s conversations, both were arrested and charged in connection with the crime.

After a ten-month investigation, the case was solved. The young Cuban’s remains were found dismembered in the cemetery of the municipality of Andaluz, just 12 minutes from where the vital image used to solve the crime was taken.