The Edinburgh murder staged for Google Street View
Admit it, we’ve all spent more of our internet time than we should have strolling through the virtual streets of our dream holiday destinations on Google Street View, haven’t we?
I mean, it’s the closest many of us are going to get to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, or Roppongi in Tokyo, or Victoria Island in Lagos. What’s more, it’s also the best combination of real life and imagination you can find. After all, this way you can actually see the real-life streets and base your speculation on something a little more concrete than just your idea of the city in question-wait, hold up, is that man mooning the camera?!
Yes, it’s one thing to use Google Street View for its intended use, it’s quite another to use it for people watching. After all, this is a system built around cars going through some of the most populated cities in the world with massive cameras on top of them. They’re not exactly secretive, we’ve all seen them out and about, and there are some of us who are just not able to fight the intrusive thoughts that come whenever you look out and see a big ol’ camera on the street.
Now, obviously, most of the shots that Street View uses that feature people flashing the camera, swearing at the camera or even just waving at it aren’t used. I mean, obviously. It’s funded by Google, they can afford a reshoot or three if it’s really needed. Which means that most of the jokes and pranks you can find on Google Street View are corporate stunts. Sometimes they can still be pretty fun, like how the title of the (at the time of writing) upcoming Paul McCartney album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, was announced by a stunt only visible by visiting the actual Dungeon Lane in Liverpool on Google Street View.
However, most of the time, stunts like the one pulled by an Edinburgh garage owner in 2014 do not last long on the service.
What happened on this Google Street View stunt?
In 2013, if you scrolled through Giles Street on Google Street View (possibly planning your next trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival), you might have spotted something rather unsettling in your trip. You might have spotted an older man in a red boiler suit, face down on the side of the road, with a younger man next to him holding a pipe before he takes off running down the road, the older man not moving for the entire sorry affair.
Had the Google Street View cameras unwittingly captured a murder? No, obviously not. What they’d instead captured was Dan Thompson, the owner of Tomson Motors, a garage on Giles Street, who had heard that the Street View cameras had been covering Edinburgh and had the kernel of an idea. Once he saw one of the cars going down Giles Street, he knew it would be back for its second viewing of the street in a minute, so he raced inside, grabbed a pickaxe handle and one of his co-workers and told him he had a great idea.
The two perpetrators probably forgot all about it afterwards. Typically, the images captured by the Street View cameras aren’t actually uploaded for another year, so Thompson wasn’t reminded of his little stunt until a visit from the Police in 2014, after someone had finally spotted the supposed “murder” and made a complaint about it – Thompson explained himself with a public statement that also included an apology for wasting police time.
Man’s got absolutely nothing to apologise for.