Neil Marshall Murder Timeline: 2014-2015

• Prelude: Six months prior, Joe Darke goes on an improbable murder spree in Los Angeles. He is somehow stupid enough to do all his killing in front of witnesses, but simultaneously savvy enough to leave no physical evidence whatsoever. This lack of evidence stumps the police for months, but on February 19, 2015, he is either brought in for questioning on some unexplained suspicion, or he, for reasons that beggar the imagination, turns himself in.
• That same day, Neil Marshall wins the King of Prosecutors award. He, Damon Gant, and Lana Skye take a moment to pose for an ominous photo before Gant and Marshall go downstairs to question Darke. Marshall even takes his trophy with him, possibly because its symbolism makes Gant enjoyably uncomfortable.
• During questioning, Darke somehow escapes questioning and, rather than leaving the building, flees upstairs in the elevator. Marshall grabs the only weapon available to him–the sword on the King of Prosecutors trophy–and he and Gant split up to pursue Darke. For whatever reason, they do not alert anyone else to the escaped fugitive in the building, nor do they ask for reinforcements.
• By sheer coincidence, Darke ends up on the top floor of the police department, in the hallway outside Gant and Skye’s office. Ema Skye, who had been waiting for her sister to return, opens the door at whatever commotion Darke is making. He spots her and chases her back into the office, where he may or may not intend to take her hostage. (If he wanted a hostage, I can think of better places to find one than “as far from the entrance to the building as possible.”)
• Whatever Darke’s intent, he and Ema are in the office together when Marshall enters. If Darke is in fact holding Ema hostage with his switchblade, Marshall plays things very badly and jumps at Darke. Miraculously Ema is simply knocked away and not fatally stabbed by her captor. (This is all more easily explained if they simply shoved Ema away so they could knock boots.)
• As Marshall and Darke either struggle with or grope each other, with Ema looking on, the power goes out. In the illumination from a flash of lightning, Ema sees two shadowy men locked together. In a fit of stupidity, Ema shoves the person holding the knife, Marshall. Marshall presumably hits his head on the floor, or a desk, or something, and is knocked unconscious. Darke is also unconscious, though it’s unclear when this happens. Ema herself passes out from the trauma. THE JAR–whenever it is that it was knocked skyward, because I give the fuck up on that–hits the floor but does not break.
• After EVERYBODY PASSES OUT (Anal Attorney’s favorite crime scene meme), Gant enters the room and sees these three goofs sprawled out on the floor, unconscious but alive. The sensible thing would be to arrest Darke–after all, he escaped police custody, which is heavy circumstantial evidence that he was guilty of the original murders, and he assaulted and possibly attempted to murder a prosecutor and a teenage girl. Not only does Gant not do this, but he decides the best way to proceed is to murder his colleague, frame the teenage girl for the murder, and blackmail her sister into helping him layer a second level of framing on Darke. Yes, doing things this way nets him a puppet in the prosecutors’ office, but I refuse to believe that is the first thing that springs to his mind when he enters this room. The only possible explanation for Gant’s actions is that he is enraged by, and possibly jealous of, the sight of Marshall and Darke naked and entangled on his office floor, and his gay terror boils over into a crime of passion.
• Regardless of his thought process, Gant carries out his plan. He first cuts Ema’s handprint off Marshall’s vest, preserving it for insurance in case he is ever fingered as the murderer, which seems like a long shot given the circumstances. He then picks up the unconscious Marshall and impales him on the suit of armor’s sword, physics and logistics be damned. Next, he uses Marshall’s blood to write “EMA” on THE JAR before shattering it on the floor, even though it’s apparently made of fucking adamantium if it survived its earlier adventures. Finally, he secures the leather scrap and one fragment of THE JAR in his safe. He does all of this before Lana happens to come upstairs, and without Darke or Ema waking up and spotting him. He then leaves to clean himself up, I suppose, allowing him to circle back after Lana discovers the scene.
• Lana arrives on the scene and immediately thinks Ema is the guilty party, though 1) the power is still out and she cannot see the message Gant planted on THE JAR; 2) one of the fragments is missing, rendering THE JAR’s message unreadable anyway; 3) the handprint has also already been removed; and 4) an alleged serial killer they’ve pursued for months is also in the room with her. I still don’t understand how she was convinced of Ema’s guilt. It’s as if Gant hid all the evidence he created to frame her, crossed his fingers that Lana would reach the desired conclusion anyway, and then she actually did. Anyway, Lana gathers the remaining pieces of THE JAR, thinking she has all of them, and wipes off the blood, still without really looking at it. It’s unclear what exactly Lana does with the fragments, since she makes it sound like she hides them, but they were catalogued SL-9 evidence.
• Gant doubles back into the room to “discover” Lana and Ema. It’s possible he feigns belief that Ema is responsible in order to convince Lana of it, but even if he did, Lana should be smart enough to want evidence of her guilt, even in that moment. Either way, she begs for his help to set the scene. Together, they remove Marshall from the sword, somehow remove all the blood on the armor and on the floor even past the detection of luminol, move the body to Lana’s side of the office (presumably to distance the body from the actual murder weapon, the suit of armor’s sword), break Darke’s switchblade, bury the tip and the knife itself in Marshall’s gaping wound, drag Darke’s unconscious form over there too, and stack one atop the other. All this, too, is done before Darke and Ema wake up. Gant also, at some point, disposes of the King of Prosecutors sword. Since it was never bloodied, there’s no reason he couldn’t have reattached it to the trophy without anyone being the wiser, but instead the sword vanishes into a plothole, creating an unnecessary mystery regarding why it was “abolished” from the award.

Well, that was horrible. And I still have another murder to discuss!

Bruce Niceguy Murder Timeline: February 21, 2017

• Sometime earlier that afternoon: After failing in his efforts to convince Bruce Niceguy to help him reopen the SL-9 investigation, Jake Marshall steals Niceguy’s ID card. The annual police and prosecution awards are held and Miles Edgeworth receives the King of Prosecutors trophy.
• 4:20 p.m.: Niceguy realizes his ID card has been stolen. He starts to fill out a lost item report, but chooses instead to tell Damon Gant about it directly, presumably because he needs access to the evidence room to finish his evidence transferal. Together, Gant and Niceguy enter the evidence room. While Niceguy is emptying his locker of SL-9 items, he has a change of heart and asks Gant to delay the transferal so they can reopen the investigation. In a moment of panic, Gant stabs him with Joe Darke’s switchblade. Gant hastily cleans up, but he misses a bloody handprint on Dick Gumshoe’s locker (I’m still unsure if it was left by Niceguy or Gant) and accidentally leaves Niceguy’s locker unlocked, due to the glove stuck in the door.
• Between 4:20 and 4:40 p.m.: Gant, on his own, drags Niceguy’s body to the parking lot, where he jimmies open the trunk of Edgeworth’s Penismobile and stuffs the body inside. He calls Lana to instruct her to get rid of the body once it arrives at the prosecutors’ office parking garage, and Lana in turn calls Marshall for no understandable reason. Gant then flags down Edgeworth and gives him a phony, absurd fetch quest. This not only gets Edgeworth to unwittingly courier the body to Lana, but it places him in the evidence room within the window of the murder, just in case the murder is traced back to the real crime scene. So Gant is obviously deliberately framing Edgeworth, but it’s unclear if he intended to all along or if he recognized the Penismobile and altered course accordingly. (Our theory is that Gant’s hastily formed plan is to frame Edgeworth and blackmail him, replacing Lana with a much more desirable bitch in the prosecutors’ office.) But, to repeat, Gant committed murder, moved the body to the parking lot, broke into Edgeworth’s car, and found Edgeworth within 20 minutes, and without anyone at the fucking police department noticing what he was doing, on a busy day that included the awards ceremony and the evidence transferal.
• 4:40 p.m.: Edgeworth enters the evidence room, grabs April May’s blue screwdriver from his locker (and I still do not understand why he has a locker), and leaves. There’s no reason to think Edgeworth would have been in a hurry, and yet he must have been because he doesn’t notice the bloody handprint in plain view. He leaves in his car and also does not notice that his trunk has been forced open.
• 4:50 p.m.: Mike Meekins drags the Blue Badger into the evidence room and places it directly in front of the bloody handprint, which he too fails to notice. He then wanders off to parts unknown until 5:14.
• 5:12 p.m.: Edgeworth arrives at the prosecutors’ office parking garage and goes up to his office. He does not spot or run into Lana, who must be hiding in an empty oil drum.
• 5:14 p.m.: Dressed as Niceguy, Marshall uses the stolen ID and enters the evidence room to steal the SL-9 evidence. He is aware that Niceguy is dead but dresses up as him anyway, because the trenchcoat is really slimming. He is unaware of the fingerprint locks, but by dumb luck, this doesn’t matter because the locker is open. By dumb bad luck, the item he was after, presumably the switchblade, is already gone. While he’s rummaging in the locker, Meekins returns to the security office, sees “Niceguy” on the camera, and for no reason, given the ID card system, rushes in to confront him, getting a stab wound and a punch to the face for his trouble. Marshall leaves him there, but removes and stows away his Niceguy costume at record, ridiculous speed.
• 5:15 to 5:20 p.m.: At the parking garage, Lana re-jimmies open the Penismobile’s trunk and begins to remove Niceguy’s body, pausing to replace the real murder weapon, still stuck in Niceguy’s chest, with a knife she finds in Edgeworth’s toolkit. What happens next is harder to reconcile, but here are the presented facts: Angel Starr sees the moment of the stabbing from the security office at 5:15 and also sees Lana attempt to use the emergency phone, but does not reach Lana until 5:20. Sometime between Angel leaving the security office and reaching Lana, Lana abandons her plan to move the body (though she has no idea she’s been spotted), hides the SL-9 switchblade (wrapped in her scarf) in Edgeworth’s tailpipe, and, at 5:18, leaves Ema a voicemail from her cell phone, telling her the location of the switchblade. The voicemail is only a few seconds long but Lana is still on her phone, two minutes later, when Angel apprehends her. So Lana must have “stabbed” Niceguy, failed to use the emergency phone, and then hidden the evidence before using her cell phone, which raises the question of what Lana planned to say when she tried to call Ema the first time if she had not yet hidden the evidence. Let’s just agree that this is a black hole from which no reasonable explanation can escape.
• That evening and the next day: Meekins is discovered in the evidence room sometime later. Even though there is no body and his supposed victim was found dead in another building 30 minutes away, Meekins is arrested for murder. He is also allowed to go free for some unknown amount of time, to courier NEWS OF HIS OWN SUPPOSED CRIME to Edgeworth’s office.

So that’s how it all happened! Why, it’s like a Swiss watch! So precise, with no unnecessary parts, no details overlooked! It’s going to be a heartbreaker when it loses the Oscar to Albedo raping MOMO.