Google Street View Image Solves Mystery of Woman Who Vanished
A Google Street View image led police to solve the mystery of a woman who wandered off from her home and couldn’t be found.
83-year-old Paulette Landrieux suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and was in the care of her husband Marcel Taret. The pair lived in Andenne, Belgium, and on November 2, 2020, Marcel went outside to hang laundry on a clothesline. When he came back inside, he found that Paulette was gone and began frantically searching and calling out for her.
Fearing for his wife’s safety given her vulnerable state, Marcel called the police which immediately began a full-scale search involving helicopters and dozens of officers. But sadly hours turned into days, days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and months turned into years.
Almost two years after Paulette’s disappearance in October 2022, a neighbor browsing Google Street View happened upon an image that made them freeze. Well aware of Paulette and Marcel’s story, the neighbor immediately realized the significance of seeing Paulette walking away from her home on Google Maps.
After the police were alerted to the image, they were able to track the route that Paulette was on. They soon discovered that Paulette’s path led her to a thick bramble bush which is ultimately where authorities discovered her body.
“So very likely Paulette, in her confused state, walked straight across the street as we see in the image and then fell down that hill and got trapped at the bottom inside of that bramble bush and couldn’t move,” explains podcaster and Youtuber MrBallen who revealed the story in a video.
“And so when that huge search for her was going on, very likely she was just trapped down there but didn’t understand what was going on. She couldn’t necessarily yell up to communicate with anybody. So she stayed down there and died.”
The fact that the Google Street View car — which roams around the world taking 360-degree photos of neighborhoods — just happened to be rolling by as Paulette was wandering off is truly an amazing coincidence. Without it, Marcel may still not know what happened to his wife.
Just a few weeks ago, PetaPixel reported on how a Google Street View image of a man unloading what appears to be a body from the trunk of a car is a clue in a Spanish murder investigation.
Image credits: Google
