Caught by Google Maps: Photo of man putting suspicious bundle in his trunk, key to solving a murder

In Tajueco, a hamlet of 56 souls in northern Spain’s Soria province, nothing ever happens. And if it did, surely nobody would find out, one of the residents must have thought two months ago, when he allegedly placed in his car trunk, in broad daylight, a bundle that police suspect could be the body of a man who went missing a year ago.

The moment was captured last October by a car working for Google Maps, the application that allows you to visually navigate almost every corner of the planet; it had been 15 years since the last time one of these cars had passed through Tajueco.

The image ended up in the hands of the National Police, which has used it as a clue, along with several cell phone messages and other evidence, leading to the arrest of two people on November 12 for allegedly killing and dismembering a Cuban citizen. The Google Maps car provided the police with a “determining” clue, although it was not the only one, the National Police said Wednesday at a press conference on the case.

The victim came to town a year ago to visit the arrested woman, who had been married in the past to the arrested man, Manuel Isla Gallardo, 48. The relationship between the victim and the woman is not clear, nor is the motive for the alleged crime.

It is the detained man who supposedly shows up in the Google Maps image: a hunched figure in jeans, wearing a blue jacket of the Club Deportivo Numancia soccer club, brown boots and hands busy with a long white bundle with a suspiciously human shape. Meanwhile, the street looks empty with the houses’ curtains drawn, except for a lady with a can of paint in her garage, a local out for a stroll who probably didn’t see anything... and the Google car that captures the moment. There is another clue from Google Maps: a second image showing, at the bottom of an uphill street in another part of town, the blurred silhouette of someone dressed in dark blue carrying a large white bundle in a wheelbarrow.

In Tajueco, a couple of locals out for a walk in the icy Soria morning now admit their surprise at the news that has spread like wildfire, because Isla “was not a troublemaker, he neither got along well nor badly with anyone.” They had seen the image on Google Maps with the individual tinkering in the trunk some time ago, but “we did not imagine that he was doing anything strange and we did not pay any attention.” They did notice in recent weeks the unusual presence of strangers in town, and now believe that they were plainclothes police officers. “He was a loner, we didn’t hear him talking about his life, he was helping out in the bar and lately he gave the feeling that he was blending in a little more,” they add. The pair are amazed when they are shown the image of what looks like a wheelbarrow with a white bundle: “It doesn’t look 100% like it’s him, it could be someone carrying firewood... but we also didn’t think that in the photo of the trunk there could be a corpse.”

The investigation began in November 2023, when a Cuban cousin of the victim, J. L.P.O., a 33-year-old resident of the city of Soria (the capital of the same-name province), reported him missing. The relative became suspicious when he started receiving WhatsApp messages from his cousin, who told him that he had met a woman and would leave Soria and leave his phone behind. The relative did not believe at any time that it was J. L. talking to him, but someone else, and he alerted the National Police.

The emergence of the Google photo last October was one of the keys to solving the case. On November 12, the couple involved, who had been married in the past, were arrested and the motive for the crime is still being investigated, as the woman and the victim had also been in a relationship. The suspects have been charged with illegal detention and homicide. It is not known what happened between November 2023, when the disappearance was reported, and October 2024, when the body was allegedly moved. Investigations led the police to the Andaluz cemetery, where on December 11 they found a buried and dismembered “torso in an advanced state of decay.” The other body parts are still being searched for.

This cemetery, with a solitary cypress in it, is attached to the Romanesque-style church of San Miguel Arcángel. A construction worker in the area points to a spot where the freshly moved earth contrasts with the weeds that cover the rest of the surface. “That’s where the police were looking,” he notes. “My God, the things that happen in the villages.”

The residents of Tajueco seem resigned about the charges made against one of their neighbors: “We did not know anything.” In the equally deserted nearby hamlet of Bayubas de Arriba, the few residents have little more to say. Gallardo used to work at the local bar, which is managed by the town council. A man points out that at first Gallardo was a “municipal laborer” and did all sorts of small jobs. Then he took over the bar, and in the last year he seemed more dispersed: “Now it’s all coming together, he seemed more absent-minded lately.” He was eventually removed from running the bar due to complaints about his laziness. A resident of Bayubas once saw the deceased Cuban, whom he describes as a “very corpulent” man. “Where would they put such a body?” he wonders.

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