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By Greg Bartlett

In a recent case that has just concluded, a man was convicted of murder when the evidence provided by the GPS tracking device that his jealous wife had installed proved he lied about events surrounding the death of a 12 year old girl. This man had originally been charged with reckless endangerment, but his wife came forward with the GPS logs and the charge was upgraded to murder.

George Ford’s wife had begun to suspect he was having an affair. She had a GPS tracking device installed covertly into his vehicle. On the night his 12 year old babysitter died, he was supposed to be taking her home. According to the GPS log, he made an extended stop at an abandoned house with the girl before he took her further down the road and ran over her with his truck.

Authorities suspect he stopped to attempt to persuade the girl to have sex with him. It is even possible that he raped her, though that information is not in the court papers. What is of importance is the fact that he lied to police about events leading up to and following the time that the girl was struck by his truck.

When his wife produced the GPS logs, the charge was changed to murder because of his attempt at deception. For the first time in history, the information provided by the GPS tracking systems was the primary piece of evidence against the suspect. In previous cases, GPS data had been admitted as secondary evidence to prove a point. This time, the only real evidence that the story Ford told police was an untruth lay in the GPS logs.

Jurors apparently believed the GPS data to be quite reliable because they returned a guilty verdict. This landmark case will no doubt set a precedent for the inclusion and relative value of GPS data in future cases involving murder and suspicious stories.

In a recent, unrelated case, GPS data from a bracelet worn by a convicted sex offender was enough to get him to confess to the murder of a 13 year old girl in a vacant field near her home. The data log from his GPS tracking device corroborates his story of what happened and how he killed the girl. It may have been unlikely that a conviction would have been obtained in this case as well had the suspect not confessed.