Man Stages Murder In Front Of Google Street View Car

A Scottish man has apologized to the police for staging a murder on a street in Edinburgh after he saw one of Google's Street View vans.

It was by pure chance that Dan Thompson, owner of Tomson Motor Company, saw the Goggle Street View vehicle coming down the road in August 2012. Since the road was U-shaped, Thompson knew he had just moments to act before the van passed his business again.

"I had one minute to rush back inside the garage and set up the murder scene," Thompson, 56, recently told the BBC.

"I whiffled into the garage, grabbed Gary, one of my mechanics, and a pickaxe handle. Came out, laid down in the street, and he stood over me, pretending to give me a leaf massage with the pickaxe handle," Thompson said.

It wasn't until a year later when an Internet user noticed the image an apparently slain man and another man with an axe in his hand on Giles Street in the Leith district. The person alerted the authorities.

Thompson said he was "mortified" when police showed up at his business thinking he was dead. He told the BBC he had forgotten all about the murder hoax.

"They came in and said, 'you guys, do you happen to know anything about this?' We explained what had happened," Thompson told CNN.

"We apologized for wasting police time. They found it funny," he told the BBC.

Google's Street View, which began in 2007, offers 360-images of roads around the world. The images are taken by cars equipped with cameras on top and made available online. Thompson, who has been in business on Giles Street for 30 years, is not the first to stage a prank for the passing camera.

"There are pictures of men on Google flashing their bums but we thought we would be more classy," Thompson told the BBC.

Real Time Analytics