Mysteries And Crimes That Were Solved Using Google Maps (14 pics)

1

After successfully escaping a prison sentence, Gioacchino Gammino lived a normal life for 20 years until he was caught chatting at a fruit and veg shop. The convicted murderer who is considered one of Italy’s most wanted criminals, was working as a chef under a different name in Spain. Google Maps exposed him outside the shop and police later confirmed it to be him.

2

Fourty-year-old William Moldt had been missing from Lantana, Florida since November 1997. It wasn’t until 2019 that a property surveyor spotted his vehicle in Moon Bay Circle on a Google Earth satellite photo from 2007. No one is sure of the cause.

3

After David Sloanes’ caravan was robbed for the second time, the police had no leads to follow. Luckily, a Google car was passing at the exact moment and caught a pretty clear image of the alleged thief, helping the cops close the case. 

4

In 2013, a farmer in Oregon was found to be growing more than 3 times his maximum limit, and in 2009, Swiss authorities found a weed farm 7,500 square meters big in the middle of a cornfield. Unsurprisingly, this kind of thing happens all the time.

5

After an argument, Leslie Todd Parvin allegedly killed 2 people and seemingly got away with it. All police had on him was that he left in a green Kia minivan. After checking the address he was associated with, the vehicle was present in the picture of the house. “Once things started rolling they just fell into place,” the cops said.

6

Six months after having his bike, phone, and cash stolen, - and receiving no help from police - a teenager in Holland looked at Google Maps footage and found photographic proof of the bike theft. This information was used to help apprehend the suspects.

7

Although many people thought this image was an accidental capture of death or an accident, the girl in the picture clarified that she had no idea that the Google car was there and that “I fell over while I was playing with my friend and thought it would be funny to play dead.” 

8

Just like finding a lot of weed farms, Google Maps has also found a lot of unlicensed pools. In Athens, those with pools are supposed to pay a special tax for them. There were 324 pools declared in the city’s suburbs but, thanks to Maps, authorities found there were actually 16,974 pools in the area.

9

In 2015, mortuary home employees who wanted to decorate their home for Christmas looked up an aerial image of it and discovered a car in a lake. Sadly, the vehicle contained David Lee Niles, who had been missing since 2006.

10

In 2011, an unnamed victim had her house ransacked by two people. After the police came back with no leads, the victim’s friend looked up her house online. Three years later, the friend found two people outside her friend’s Oklahoma City home. She hopes that this information will help police to identify the suspects.

11

The case of the body in the truck bed caused quite a stir before it was revealed that it was Oscar, a US Coast Guard search-and-rescue dummy.

12

Google Earth showed via satellite image that a 53-year-old man in Oxford had stolen over 500 bikes. 

13

When a man told authorities that he’d sold his home for €280,000, taxmen cross-referenced an image of the property’s distinctive pool to find the building and its location and size proved that the declared sales price was wrong. He’d overshot it by about 7 million euro and his tax-dodging was caught on camera.