3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches

For Wired, Raksha Vasudevan recounts the 2020 Green Valley Ranch arson in Colorado—a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese family. The arsonists, three teenagers who had targeted the house by mistake, were eventually caught after law enforcement uncovered their Google searches. In this story, Vasudevan raises urgent questions about privacy, surveillance, and our digital footprints.

At a department meeting in September, Baker and Sandoval pleaded with colleagues for ideas. Was there anything they hadn’t tried—anything at all? That’s when another detective wondered if the perpetrators had Googled the address before heading there. Perhaps Google had a record of that search?

It was like a door they’d never noticed suddenly flung open. They called Sonnendecker and the senior deputy district attorney, Cathee Hansen. Neither had heard of Google turning over a list of people who had searched for a specific term. In fact, it had been done: in a 2017 fraud investigation in Minnesota, after a series of bombings in Austin in 2018, in a 2019 trafficking case in Wisconsin, and a theft case in North Carolina the following year. Federal investigators also used a reverse keyword search warrant to investigate an associate of R. Kelly who attempted to intimidate a witness in the musician’s racketeering and sexual exploitation trial. But those records had largely been sealed. So, largely unaware of these precedents, Hansen and Sandoval drafted their warrant from scratch, requesting names, birth dates, and physical addresses for all users who’d searched variations of 5312 Truckee Street in the 15 days before the fire.

Baker and Sandoval’s investigation had now been dragged into a legal process that could reshape Americans’ right to search and learn online without fear of retribution. “Even a single query can reveal deeply private facts about a person, things they might not share with friends, family, or clergy,” wrote Seymour’s legal team. “‘Psychiatrists in Denver;’ ‘abortion providers near me;’ ‘is my husband gay;’ ‘does God exist;’ ‘bankruptcy;’ ‘herpes treatment’ … Search history is a window into what people wonder about—and it is some of the most private data that exists.”