Quote:
Originally Posted by TeeHee
At most, two days until my EP2 map is done. Anyways, I'm not dead.  |
Oh god, Natsuhi's room. I went back and looked at the anime and VN versions of that crime scene, and now it's bugging me even more than it was, especially since I generally support Shannon as the culprit. I've been trying to organize my thoughts about it, and I can't see any way she could have been responsible for any part of it.
Spoiler for Crime scene notes:
VN version:
- Gohda is flat on his back just inside the door with a stake in his chest.
- George is along the far wall with a stake in his stomach.
- Shannon is collapsed face down on the dresser, facing the mirror, with a massive head wound.
- A stake is lying near her in the pool of blood.
- The dresser's mirror is shattered and covered in blood.
- The room has been completely ransacked, with drawers thrown everywhere.
Anime version:
- The general body positions and wounds are roughly the same.
- However, Shannon is collapsed in an obviously unnatural position.
- Her stake is actually in her head, but not buried deeply, and it falls out when Battler moves her.
- The mirror in front of her is not broken or bloodstained.
- The room has NOT been ransacked. In fact, there's no sign of the jewelry box George pried open either.
- Inexplicably, someone has turned the lights off.
Regardless of which version you look at, it's blindingly obvious that Shannon's body was posed. Her position in the anime version makes it especially clear, but even in the VN, she could hardly have been shot in the forehead while facing the mirror, and if she'd been facing another direction, she wouldn't have ended up facing the mirror when she collapsed. But none of the other bodies are obviously posed, so why her? Could she have been killed separately from the other two?
The room key is in George's pocket inside the room, and all of the master keys are in Rosa's possession. Rosa couldn't have snuck out without alerting Battler because of the sofa barricade, so those keys are out of play. Therefore, whoever locked the door has to still be inside the room -- Beato even said that
the door was locked from the inside. There's no opportunity for anyone to be hiding in the closet unless you get really creative and suggest that Jessica faked her massive stab wound earlier, and depending on how you interpret Beato's wording, she ruled out hiding places anyway, so that leaves two sane possibilities:
1. The door was locked before the murders happened, meaning the killer was George or Gohda (since Shannon was posed). Shannon was shot with something, so the killer must have disposed of the weapon afterward, probably by throwing it out the window. Finally, the killer turned off the lights and committed suicide with a stake. (Why?)
2. The door was locked after the murders happened, meaning the murderer left and then one of the victims locked it. Shannon's wound rules her out, but either George or Gohda could have done it before expiring. Based on what the TIPS say about stomach stakings not being immediately lethal, George is probably more likely, so long as he moved back to the far wall before dying. As for the culprit, it could only have been Kumasawa, Nanjo, or Genji, since everyone else was in the parlor and couldn't have left without alerting Battler.
Option 2 seems reasonable if you suppose that whoever locked the door did it to keep the culprit from coming back. But there's still the big question: what were they doing in that room in the first place? Surely they weren't actually looking for a magical mirror, but the VN does seem to suggest that someone was looking for something. It could have been either the victims or the culprit ransacking the room, or possibly the culprit just made a mess to confuse things.
Another question is, when Rosa asked where George's group went, why did Genji immediately tell her they went to Natsuhi's room? He supposedly hasn't seen them since they left, so for all he knew, they could have still been out at the chapel. On the other hand, he was supposedly making his rounds and checking the windows, so shouldn't he have already come across the bloody handprints on Natsuhi's door?
Argh, my head hurts.