In order to get to the cargo hold, you need a special keycard that only Teniero has. When you go in the flight attendants' room, she says it is missing. How, then, did Edgeworth, Franziska, Gumshoe, and Teniero manage to get in? Did they break the door open or something? Furthermore, how did LaBlanc get in? I understand if they left the door to the cargo hold open, but then how did he get into the flight attendants' room to begin with?

Well, LaBlanc came in through both open doors, but to get the first point... i'd have to replay the case. Which I'm not doing. It's an extremely good point though.

OK, that is just stupid. Why would they leave BOTH doors open!? Did they WANT someone to walk in on the crime scene!? Plus, didn't they at least have an officer somewhere around there? The only explanation I can think of is that they were just too stupid to consider this. They had an officer at the top of the stairs, but he could easily be passed by by jumping (or falling) off the stairs, just as LaBlanc did. Did they really not think to at least close the door? For all they knew, the keycard could still be in the flight attendants' room, and (if Teniero really was hiding it) Teniero's accomplice could take the keycard from the room! Of course, this isn't really what happened, but at that point they had no way of knowing that...

Just about anyone can get into the cargo hold. It's the elevator that needs a card key in order to go to the cargo hold and back.

how could everyone hear Hicks' cell phone in the cargo hold when the phone was in a locker in the flight attendants' room? That must be one loud phone.

Then why did Meele need to steal Teniero's keycard... Oh, I get it. She needed the keycard to get the elevator onto the cargo hold. Although, come to think of it, it would make sense that you wouldn't need a keycard to open the elevator if YOU WERE ALREADY IN THE CARGO HOLD. Hmm, blame it on bad design... but wait! Doesn't Franziska name Teniero as a suspect because she was the only one that could get in the cargo hold? Hmm, I must have misunderstood something...

I was under the impression that they left the door to the flight attendants' room open, and that the locker's door was open as well, therefore making it easier to hear the phone.

Because the body was transported in a suitcase, the killer would have had to use the elevator to move from the cargo hold to the lounge. You need a keycard to get the elevator to even descend to the cargo hold. Ultimately any member of the crew could get into the cargo hold and so any of them could have killed Akbey, but it could only be someone with the key card that moved the body, and that's why Franziska suspected Rhoda.

It's stated earlier that the door to the cargo area in the Attendant's Lounge does not have any sort of card swipe or special security on it, since anybody trying to get in would have had to gotten by the card swipe for the Attendant's Lounge door in the first place. Edgeworth and crew were able to walk on in because of this. I assume that Rhoda or Cammy's cards were used to get into the Attendant's Lounge.

It's psychologically bizarre for someone to walk around carrying a bloody piece of evidence for a long time, if they have any other option. This goes double if they're wearing tight clothing and they fling their coat around a lot - where was he keeping that tape? Surely it would bloodstain his clothes if he held on too long.

Am I the only one who thought it very unlikely that something heavy enough to break glass, with a square footprint and a center of gravity that doesn't seem too high, would be thrown forward with such force? The turbulence is established as strong enough to knock over wine bottles... or at least some. But if we look at a lot of the bottles, and a lot of the items in the locked display cases, they're not disturbed at all!

I got penalized over this; I tried to prove that someone had opened the cabinet, and the door had been smashed by the luggage or something.

Yew drops the bloody plastic bag on the floor, and then scatters the other bags around it. At the time this happened, it is unlikely that the blood on the bag would be dry; she had a limited time window to work with. We're told that there's blood "on" the bag, not "in" the bag. Problem: why isn't the floor around the bag bloodstained?

More of a hole than a contradiction:

Why did Quercus Alba feel the need to murder Manny personally? He could have kept himself from danger by having Shih-na do it - she was already going to be on Manny's side of town, and it would've been easy to concoct a pretext to get Manny into his office at the right time. It could have gone even worse for him; what if Manny had struck a little lower?

The embassy building is symmetrical, so why are the revolving fireplaces on different floors? One is in Alba's office on the 5th floor, and the other is in Coachen's office on the 3rd floor. It's explained that the Babahlian statue and knives were moved into a lower office because of the renovations, but a fireplace can't be moved.

Maybe the embassy is just full of rotating passages? Why, who knows.

He had to keep the tape. He had no other choice. Quercus ordered him to do it.

It has wheels. The fact that it's heavy would make it more likely for it to move when you take into account the wheels.

Typo. The blood was in the bag. She stabbed Faraday with the bag under the knife (the knife was in the bag), so the blood fell into the bag. It's just another typo, and there seem to be a lot in case 4.

Actually, that's a good point. The only explanation I can think of is that he wanted revenge against Manny and wanted to kill him personally.

We know that Quercus Alba killed DeMasque II using the Primidux Statue that he received from Shih-na... but that was the fake statue from Babahl, which was hollow and much lighter than the original. How could Alba kill DeMasque II with that? I mean, that doesn't seem like a very good weapon. I might be missing something, though.

The real statue would have been much too heavy to lift overhead with such ease. In fact, I kept expecting to see a contradiction about how impossible it would be to lift anything made of gold of that size! The real statue should have been incredibly heavy.

Okay, so lifting the real statue would be nearly impossible, specially for a 72 year old man (he was a soldier, though, but I doubt that changes anything). I agree with that. Still, that doesn't change the fact that the fake statue doesn't seem like a very good weapon to me. Then again, maybe the fake statue is made of something heavy enough, but who knows...

The biggest contradiction is that 1-5 was accepted as a case in this game when it was a non-canonical game (Edgeworth's first case was not with Lana, He left directly after 1-4, etc.) but they also talk about his first case against Mia. 1-5, Ema and Mike Meekins should not have been in the game.

and for that matter, Ace Attorney Investigations.

In case 3, if Gumshoe brings Kay the blueprints to input into Little Thief, doesn't that already take into account the presence of a swinging mirror wall? Surely they wouldn't attempt to keep a gimmick like that so secret that they don't even include it on the original blueprints.

If Quercus said, 'Keep the tape on your person at all times, no matter what, even if you're investigating a murder scene,' then Quercus was a massive idiot. "Keep the tape" is more reasonably construed to mean, "Keep the tape in the safest place possible."

If the blood had been on the inside of the bag, it would have been incredibly obvious that someone else was at the scene - so obvious that even a thirteen-year-old could see the problem. A bag full of blood at a murder scene? Really? Furthermore, the image of Yew committing the murder seems to show the bag turned inside-out.

The only way for Yew to get away with it was this, which was my working hypothesis:

* Turn the bag inside-out.
* Put the knife in the inverted bag.
* Kill Faraday.
* Wipe the prints from the bag.
* Carefully turn the bag inside-out again and drop it near the bodies.

This leaves the blood on the outside of the bag, which could easily be passed off as blood splatter landing on the bag that held the knife or pistol.

:ema: I can show you the contradiction with high school geometry and high school chemistry!

Let's guess that the hollow statue contains about as much gold as a cylinder one foot tall (about 30 centimeters), 6 to 7 inches in diameter (about 16 cm), and one centimeter thick.

That seems like an underestimate to me.

Then we'll get a conservative answer. That's fine! Now, watch the power of SCIENCE!

The volume of that hollow cylinder is: PI * (49 - 36 square cm.) * (30 cm). That's (scribble, scribble) over 1,200 cubic centimeters!

... yes, the numbers work.

And the density of gold is about nineteen or twenty grams per cubic centimeter - almost twice as heavy as lead!

So... the hollow statue would weigh 2,700 times about 20 grams... that's over 24,000 grams, or 24 kg... that's over 50 pounds!

OVER FIFTY POUNDS FOR A HOLLOW STATUE?!

Yep! The statues can't possibly be made of gold, no matter what the Ambassadors say! The one that wasn't hollow would be impossible to move without a wheelbarrow!

What if they were made of brass coated with a thin layer of gold?

That's still heavy. The hollow one would weigh over 20 pounds if the shell were 1 cm thick, and a shell any thinner would give it away.

Then... aluminum?!

... hmm. If they were made of aluminum coated in gold, then even the solid one would only weigh about twenty pounds!

... I can see now why both countries would want to keep this a secret.

Maybe Quercus told Portsman to give him the tape. Or, maybe Quercus didn't tell him to do anything at all. It makes sense when you think about it.
-In the morning, Portsman tricks Maggey into opening the door to Edgeworth's office. He then searches Edgeworth's office for what he needs to steal.
-Then he is assigned to the Oliver Deacon murder case. He probably "interrogates" Ernest Amano about the forging of evidence, during which time Ernest tells Portsman where to find the tape, so that Portsman can keep it safe.
-Portsman gets the tape and goes back to Edgeworth's office, probably thinking that he can put the tape somewhere safe later.
-Buddy Faith walks in on him and Portsman murders him. Blood gets on the tape. If Portsman was the one who had that tape, he wouldn't leave it there because it would be extremely incriminating.
-Then, after tampering with the crime scene, Portsman goes to criminal affairs.
-He then goes back to "investigate" Buddy Faith's murder. He hasn't gotten rid of the tape yet.
The real question is, how did the blood get on the tape in the first place?

:objection: How would it be "incredibly obvious"? Here's a possibility:
Rell held the bag under the knife when he stabbed Faraday, so all the blood fell in the bag. Then, while he was falling to the floor, he closed the bag. Not very likely, but possible.

Namely, that there was a revolving mirror wall in the Horror House! And I'd hardly call that "minor"!

If there was a struggle (proven by the key/knife wound on Alba), how did the murder weapon find its way to the back of Manny's neck? Alba turning him around by force doesn't seem likely; he's old. Being so close that he could wind his hand around and stab (according to a mini-sim that took me half a minute) would lead one to expect that the victim be stabbed in the mid back. The only other scenario I can think of is Manny willingly revealing his back, and the evidence of a struggle makes that REALLY unlikely.

Quercus and Manny meet in the dressing room. Either he sneaks up on Manny, or takes him buy surprise, but he slashed Manny across the back of the neck. Manny quickly turns around, takes the key out of his pocket, turns it into a knife, gives Quercus a shallow stab in the shoulder, and drops dead.

Alba's old but he's also a super criminal, and (supposedly) a decorated soldier. It's not so hard to believe that Alba managed to turn Manny around that it's a contradiction.

Cammy stole the card key from Rhoda to access the cargo hold. This strikes me as odd, seeing as anyone can access the cargo hold without said key (and anyone and everyone seems to be doing so, as Croik mentioned before IIRC). So how would Cammy have known ahead of time that she would need to use the lift FROM the cargo hold, dragging the body in the suitcase? Would she have had time to steal AFTER the killing, and after painstakingly mopping up blood with a cloth of all things? At the end of the case, she doesn't strike me as knowing ahead of time that she was going to kill.

Not least because she went to the hold with Akbey, if I'm not mistaken.

Also, if you recall, she and Akbey were at the very top of the flight of stairs (whereas the lift was on the opposite side at the bottom of said stairs). This can only have happened if they had entered through the cargo bay doors.

If she just had to run into the flight attendant's lounge, which was right behind her, and take the card key from Rhoda's locker, then she definitely had time to get the key card after the murder.

When Ema investigates the footprints, the Badger prints are on top, making the person in the badger suit the last person to arrive. But why aren't the footprint of Edgeworth, Kay, Ema and Oldbag visible?

First reflex I imagine would have been to clean up the body and get it out of sight, though. I suppose she would have done that, stuffed it in a suitcase, mopped up and got the keycard. The problem here is leaving the scene on it's own- would she really do that, no matter how close the attendants room is?

Mind you, if it's in a suitcase at this point it makes sense.

I was under the impression the attendant's room was directly connected to the cargo hold. (They need to be really close, since they heard the cell phone from the cargo hold.) Even if she did clean up the body first, all that adds is an extra trip up and down the stairs. I'm sure it takes less than a minute to get the key card and come back, even from the bottom floor of the cargo hold.

'Twas raining when the murder happened. I think we can agree that It would be easier to make footprints when it's raining, and they would leave a deeper imprint. Therefore, any footprints made when it was raining would be easier to see.

Maybe whoever was in charge of the haunted house construction left the mirror wall and hidden room out of the original blueprints intentionally so the people who built the entire house wouldn't know the secret, then had just a couple guys come back and build that section later? It's what Lucas did when he made Return of the Jedi; he kept the filming crew to an absolute minimum when recording Vader's unmasking to keep his real face a secret until the movie released.

Then again, if the higher-ups were that adamant about keeping the disappearing Badger trick under wraps, you'd think they would have enough sense to switch the doll's belt over to the other side.