If You're Going to Commit a Horrible Crime, for the Love of God Don't Google About It
I’ll never forget the elation my father experienced when I introduced him to the joys of the internet, specifically the wonders of Google and Youtube.
My father was so impressed by Google that for a solid year or so he insisted it was his nickname. He was even more blown away by Youtube. His response to it was similar to my own. It didn’t just seem like an unusual and impressive new form of technology: it legitimately felt like magic.
What other word would you use to describe a website that seemingly made the entirety of pop culture available for free at the touch of a button? How else would you explain something that made not just the Star Wars Holiday Special available to anyone in the world even morbidly interested in it along with countless other buried treasures that seemingly would never be available legally in any form yet popped up on Youtube along with everything else all the same.
Oh, but it made my father’s heart sing to learn that there was a miraculous website that would make it possible for him to watch James Brown on The T.A.M.I Show or Elvis’ 68 Comeback Special or anything else revered by his generation.
My dad fell in love with the internet and its infinite possibilities. Then, because he is an old man with all that entails, he just as suddenly fell out of love with the internet. He lost complete interest in the internet just as suddenly as he’d become obsessed with it.
He went from regaling me with stories about all of the things that he could do through the internet to seeing it as something with nothing to offer a man his age. He was done with it for reasons that I couldn’t entirely understandably but clearly had a lot to do with his age and that grumpy feeling we get as we age that technology is for young people and young people only.
My father knows that I live my life online and sometimes asks me if I can physically send him my website or my new newsletter and I explain to him, yet again, that that’s not how the internet works.
My dad is and isn’t unique in being an older gentleman whose mind was blown by the internet before he lost interest in it in it completely.
As a professional pop culture writer, father and Gen-Xer I constantly use Google and ONLY Google. I don’t get down with that Bing shit that everyone is going on and on about these days.
I’m not alone. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts and I have noticed that for a certain breed of oblivious and misguided criminal Google and search engines like it are both an invaluable resource to help you literally get away with murder and a way of implicating yourself in horrible crimes.
That’s because Google searches aren’t anywhere near as private or as secret as we might like to imagine they are. If the police suspect you of murder with cause then they have the legal right to access your internet search records.
And if years and years of listening to true crime podcasts have taught me anything it’s that a lot of inexperienced criminals fuck themselves over with exceedingly damning Google searches.
The more specific a criminal Google search is, the worse it is for the murderous Googler. For example if you’re suspected of poisoning your 115 pound wife and then dumping her body in a swamp it would look VERY bad if you Googled “How much cyanide is needed to kill a 115 pound woman?”, “Disposing of a 115 pound body” or “Getting away with the murder of a 115 pound woman.”
I know criminals have a lot of questions and need advice on how to do crimes without getting caught but Google is NOT the place to look for solid information. By Googling all sorts of suspicious shit, inept criminals are giving law enforcement information THEY need on how and why various crimes are committed.
You might think you’re slick if you use a family member’s computer for incriminating searches. A gentleman named Brian Walshe found out otherwise recently when his son’s iPad turned up searches like “How long before a body starts to smell?” “10 ways to dispose of a body if you really need to,” “How long does DNA last,” and “How to clean blood from wooden floors.”
As the young people say, that is not a good look, particularly if you want to stay out of prison and/or off death row.
In conclusion, do not commit horrible crimes. You’ll screw up your own life as well as the lives of others. If you do commit a horrible crime, don’t Google about it because you’ll only be tightening the rope around your neck by doing so.
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