[Renall]

Originally Posted by haguruma

The same could be said for Shannon, because there would be no evidence of her entertaining any moves outside Rokkenjima, except her holiday with George. I think even the bank account was installed by Genji for her.

All that really does is make Genji even more suspicious. Why was Kinzo's personal butler setting these things up? Was Kinzo up to something? Was Genji?

The problem here is that Maria's Beatrice and the Beatrice of the message bottles are inherently different in there characterization and it is common knowledge that Kinzo spread the story about meeting "the witch Beatrice" since the 1950's apparently. The question why somebody who'd portray this witch as a sweet and kind friend to a girl, yet portray her as a murdering monstrosity in a story remains unsolved without further evidence.
Yes, you could end on the agreement that "a nutjob who actually believed in a witch came close to Maria and finally blew them all up", but several things just don't end up with that solution. Which is why I think it is not entirely unthinkable that they'd leave the case undisclosed.

Counterpoint: Maria's writing becomes darker and more angry over time. One could argue that Beatrice merely appeared to Maria initially in a nice guise, then manipulated her into becoming bitter and hateful. Now it sort of matches up the two conceptions of Beatrice and portrays her as a potentially dangerous person.

Going by what I said above, about incriminating evidence, Kyrie is actually the one with the highest amount of "preparation" going into her departure towards Rokkenjima. She not only left her daughter at home, it might have even been possibly to produce evidence that the 3 siblings and their spouses were in a discussion before heading to Rokkenjima, the son of her husband suddenly returning after a 6 year absence. It is not that hard to understand why so many people in-universe seem to believe in at least a Kyrie culprit theory.

The problem with this is figuring out how some of these things actually benefit Kyrie, and also explaining how the explosion happened and why Eva didn't die. Leaving her daughter behind and bringing Rudolf's son with her is potentially suspicious, but what was it they actually intended to do? Remember, if Kyrie is premeditating things, she probably isn't planning to blow the island up because she isn't aware of any means to do so. If one were to argue that she somehow was aware... well, when and how did she find out?

I'd also question it somewhat in that Battler hasn't lived with Kyrie very much and I'd find it hard to believe she could convince him to help her commit premeditated mass murder just because he's her (as far as the entire world knows) stepson. Their only connection is through his father... and it's well-known that Battler is extremely upset with his father, and has been for six years. Surely people who knew Battler at school and wherever his grandparents lived would vouch for his behavior leading up to that point, or point out how infrequently he actually spent time with them, and how he thought of his father.

Yes, of course. But unless you find the person who actually built the trigger, wouldn't you be stuck with just witnesses testifying the existence of a probable cause of the explosion?

I'm almost 99% certain that if a trigger mechanism existed, Kinzo built it himself. He's described as an engineer in the flashback, and given the base where he's stationed all I can think of is that he's either a submarine engineer, a construction engineer (why would he still be there?), or a munitions engineer. Pretty much any one of those three could probably have done it.

So it's a non-starter, but on the other hand, it's a very odd rumor to hear about. "That guy whose house blew up? Yeah, he said on several occasions that he has a way to blow his house up, and sometimes he deliberately flips the 'blow my house up' switch and sits there staring at it while searching for inspiration."

Hell, that might be strong evidence for an accident: Kinzo went down to his secret room and flipped a switch and sat there thinking and dropped dead of heart failure. Eva followed him, found him dead, and took his ring, then went to explore the rest of the area before reporting back to the others about it and, unaware of the trigger mechanism, wasn't able to disarm it. It makes about as much sense as anything else.