| “ | It's the addle-brained mock scientists that are the worst, you know. They don't recognize the fact that they don't have talent. They can't even get that right. And so they end up chasing impossible dreams, having unbridled faith on their abilities. They go on and on about their wonderful hypotheses, their stupid eyes shining like a little child's. They make me sick! I can't abide their foolishness! | „ |
| ~ Enoch Drebber expressing his hatred for naive scientists. |
| “ | There was an unexpected visitor to the cemetery with his own ideas about digging up graves. A man who witnessed what nobody was supposed to see. | „ |
| ~ Lord Stronghart regarding Enoch Drebber's connection to the Professor case. |
Enoch Drebber is a major antagonist in The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve, being one of the two main antagonists (alongside Courtney Sithe) of the third case of the game, "The Return of the Great Departed Soul." He is a famous conman known for being an expert on building convincing experiments to sell towards naive scientists so that he can swindle them out of their money.
Biography[]
Past[]
Being a student at London University, Enoch Drebber was previously known for being a brilliant scientist and engineer with a promising future. However, since he was poor, Drebber resorted to joining a small group of grave robbers to steal the recently buried corpses of executed prisoners, which he then sold to pay for his studies. He tracked the graves he already robbed by taking pictures of them with his camera.
Rising from The Grave[]
One night, in a night of grave robbing, Drebber decided to dig up the grave of the Professor, an infamous serial killer that had been convicted and executed under closed doors. However, when he started digging, he realized that the grave started moving, caused by the Professor, for he was still alive in his grave and was planning to escape it. To the Professor's unfortunate fate, someone outside of Enoch's vision witnessed the event and eventually executed him for good by shooting him from a distance. Shocked by the sequence of events, it's rumored that Enoch's hair started to turn white from stress after the horrifying experience.
The day after, news exploded in the streets of London of the Professor's sudden resurrection and immediate death shortly after, witnessed by an anonymous student. However, a certain Daily Circus newspaper, written by then journalist Odie Asman, managed to catch the name of the student, Enoch Drebber, and published the story with his name written in it alongside a drawn picture of him discovering the event.
Since Enoch was revealed to be a grave robber by the article, he was forced to quit his dreams and studies to prevent his bad reputation from getting any worse. Shortly after, he was approached by Esmeralda Tusspelles for interviewing, making him describe the appearance of the Professor to be sculpted in a wax museum and later locked on by a metal mask. Drebber also sold his camera in the process.
Embittered, Enoch Drebber decided to become a conman who used his experience in trickery and magic to make fake inventions that young students asked him to build. His inventions were convincing enough to persuade the scientists to invest in him, which then allowed him to rob them of their money.
Meeting Once Again[]
One year before the events of the main case, Enoch Drebber met Odie Asman in his factory, seeking a technician. Drebber noticed that the man who ruined his life did not recognize him and that he was carrying a newspaper that mentioned Courtney Sithe, one of the participants of the autopsy on the supposed final victim of the Professor, was being appointed as the head of the new Forensic Investigation Team. Knowing that Odie was blackmailing her somehow, Drebber started to devise a plan to get revenge on him.
The Return of the Great Departed Soul[]
With Albert Harebrayne's theory on "super-high-voltage instantaneous kinesis," Drebber's plan involved tricking everyone into believing the tele-transportation really happened. To do this, he built a machine that looked like it could teleport anyone inside the machine to where the laser was pointed and planned to demonstrate it at the Great Exhibition. In actuality, however, the machine had a compartment underneath the main cage that made it so that whoever planned to teleport themselves actually fell underneath the tower and died from the fall.
To keep the illusion of the tele-transportation, Drebber stole a balloon and the wax figure of the Professor (which he stole from Madame Tusspells and then left a ransom so that Courtney Sithe went along with his plan) alongside a second cage, so that when he popped it with a shot from his crossbow, it would look like the test subject actually teleported himself to the Crystal Tower, even if it looked like the experiment actually failed and teleported him too high. And so, when the body was underneath the machine, Courtney would discover the body and transport it to the crashing site of the wax figure, retrieving it and leaving the body there.
During the exhibition, Harebrayne accompanied Odie Asman to the machine alongside a group of people, whom he was hoping to impress and make it so that the government funded his studies. When he activated the machine, amidst the smoke, Drebber started to unfold his plan, which would seemingly go according to plan. However, unbeknownst to Drebber, when Courtney went to retrieve the body of Asman, he wasn't actually dead, as he was only gravely injured, which then prompted Courtney to stab him with a screwdriver, killing him for good.
Investigation, Day 2[]
Having taken up the case of Professor Albert Harebrayne, the duo of Ryunosuke Naruhodo and Susato Mikotoba figure out the manufacturer of the machine was actually Enoch Drebber, and eventually find his place of rest through Gina Lestrade's dog Toby sniffing an oil stain. Accompanied by Tobias Gregson and Herlock Sholmes, they find a seemingly upside-down room with a bomb in the center.
With the help of Susato and Herlock, they figure out that Enoch was actually trying to get the balloon from the upside of the room throwing his shoes in a hurry. When that failed, Drebber decided to explode the whole building with all the evidence and locked himself up in his own safe box. Because he couldn't find the code of the box to get himself out of it, Enoch decided to lock himself up anyways and leave the mess of the room as it was, seeing how it was going to explode either way.
When the group got Drebber out of his safe box, they decide to arrest him on the spot, to which he then revealed that there was a second explosive on the machine, seemingly exploding all the evidence of his crime.
Trial, Day 2[]
While in the middle of the case, Naruhodo uncovers a letter from Enoch Drebber and Odie Asman, that accorded that the manufacturer of the machine would get 30% of the funding of any of the payment that Harebrayne would receive on the condition that both of them would have to be alive. Naruhodo referred back to the autopsy and remembered that Odie Asman was encountered on the Crystal Tower, leading him to realize that the coroner who wrote the autopsy was an accomplice of the crime.
After Naruhodo and Mikotoba discovered Enoch's plan and found out that Courtney was an accomplice, it looked like the trial would soon be resolved. However, when they cross-examined the coroner once again, they realized that it was actually Courtney Sithe who delivered the final blow, and overall did the killing, with Enoch Drebber creating the theatrics around the murder. This convinced Enoch Drebber to confess to his crimes and complicated history with Odie Asman.
Trivia[]
- With a ton of moving parts, plans, and betrayals around the magic trick disguised as a machine, Enoch's plan to kill Odie Asman is considered one of the most complicated cases of the franchise, with the final reveal of Courtney Sithe considered one of the hardest reveals to exactly pin down.
- Originally, the name Enoch Drebber was taken from a victim in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, A Study in Scarlet, which was the book that first introduced Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.
