[nocturnial]

From the article: "...Mr. Molina had sometimes signed in to other people’s phones to check his Google account. That could lead someone to appear in two places at once, though it was not clear whether that happened in this case."

If this is how it really happened then the investigators didn't even bother to crosscheck the data with the cell tower information (assuming the telco logs this info). Sending false location data to google shouldn't be that hard, but it should be a lot harder to fake the cell tower connections.