Kristoph Gavin

Kristoph Gavin was a renowned defense attorney with his own law firm, and Apollo Justice's boss and mentor. He was often called "the coolest defense in the West", referring to his ability to keep his cool during a trial. Kristoph was a special witness for the cases of the murders of Shadi Smith and Drew Misham. Kristoph has a younger brother, Klavier, who is a prosecutor.

Forgery

 * Main article: Turnabout Succession

In 2019, Kristoph Gavin met a magician named Zak Gramarye and offered to become his lawyer in the murder trial of Magnifi Gramarye. However, Gavin was only after the fame that would be gained by defending a famous magician, so he decided to ensure his victory by asking a forger, Vera Misham, to make a page that looked like it came from the victim's diary to implicate Valant Gramarye as the killer. He acted friendly to Vera to gain her trust; noticing that she had a habit of biting her nails whenever she was nervous, he planted atroquinine, an extremely deadly poison, in a bottle of nail polish and gave it to her as a gift, claiming that it was a "good luck charm" to soothe her fear. He told Vera that the magic of the charm would wear off if she told anyone about it. He also laced a commemorative stamp of Troupe Gramarye with the same poison and sent it to Vera along with a letter, confirming the payment for the forgery and telling Drew to mail a receipt for the payment using the stamp. These poisons were planted so that the Mishams would not survive to talk about Gavin's involvement with them. However, Vera kept the stamp for herself and replied to Gavin's letter with a different stamp. As well, Drew found out about the "magic" that Gavin had told Vera about to some extent.

Zak Gramarye challenged Gavin in a game of poker as a test of trust. Gavin lost the game and Gramarye rejected him as his attorney; he saw the man behind the cards, and didn't think he could trust him. He then called Phoenix Wright to his cell and played another round of poker; he lost for the second time in his life. Finding him to be trustworthy, Gramarye accepted Wright as his attorney. Furious with this outcome, Gavin decided to plant the diary page that Vera Misham had forged onto Gramarye's oblivious daughter to give to Wright, to ruin both him and his new defendant. He then told his younger brother Klavier Gavin about the forgery prior to the trial, and Klavier used this information to devise a trap to expose the forgery. The trap succeeded; Klavier summoned Drew Misham to the stand, who admitted to having forged the diary page, and Wright was subsequently disbarred after the trial.

However, Gramarye vanished from the courtroom before the verdict could be read, ending the trial with no verdict. This drove Gavin to watch everyone involved with the case - the Mishams, Wright, and Spark Brushel - in fear that Gramarye would reappear to one of them and expose Gavin's involvement in the forgery. To this end, he befriended Wright in an effort to prevent himself from being suspected, even voting against the decision to disbar Wright, but the relationship was never very pure because he knew Wright suspected his involvement in the case. Meanwhile, Wright conducted investigations of his own in preparation for events to follow.

Fall from grace

 * Main article: Turnabout Trump

Seven years later, Zak Gramarye reappeared to Phoenix under the name "Shadi Smith", and Gavin saw his chance to kill Gramarye before he could reveal Gavin's role as his original attorney. He hid in a secret tunnel behind a cabinet in the basement of the Borscht Bowl Club, where Wright and Gramarye were playing poker, and waited for an opening in which he could fatally attack Gramarye with a grape juice bottle. Wright was placed on trial for the murder, and he requested that Gavin call upon one of his new proteges, Apollo Justice, to defend him in court. Although Gavin tried to persuade Justice into implicating a witness and then Wright as the killer, Wright guided Justice into implicating Gavin as the real killer.

Final blow

 * Main article: Turnabout Succession

About six months later, Drew Misham sent a letter to Kristoph Gavin demanding that Gavin remove the "magic" that he had placed on Vera. Having only the stamp that had been poisoned, he used it to send his letter. He died of atroquinine poisoning 15 minutes later, while Spark Brushel was interviewing him. Drew's daughter Vera was accused of committing the murder.

Phoenix Wright convinced the judicial system to use this case to test the Jurist System. With Apollo Justice and Klavier Gavin as the defense and prosecution, respectively, the trial traced the poison to the stamp that Kristoph had poisoned seven years before. Meanwhile, Wright visited Kristoph in his cell to find out why Kristoph had killed Zak Gramarye. However, Gavin ignored the question. Even Wright's magatama would be of no use, showing Wright five black Psyche-Locks, which were unbreakable. Wright came back later and tried to steal Drew's letter, but Kristoph caught him in the act. However, Kristoph had not realized that Wright had recorded their conversations together as well as the contents of the letter and the poisoned stamp.

Wright built a program called the MASON System to guide the jury through the investigations he conducted for the past seven years, which revealed that Kristoph had poisoned the stamp and the nail polish. Justice was also informed of these events.

Kristoph Gavin was then summoned as a special witness. He convinced the judge to reject all of Phoenix Wright's investigative evidence and claims, citing Wright's lack of authority as well as the lack of any solid evidence implicating Gavin as the killer. Eventually, Kristoph told the court that Zak Gramarye had rejected him as an attorney prior to hiring Wright. However, he denounced Justice's accusations that Kristoph was the client for the forgery and Drew's killer, due to lack of decisive evidence to prove so. To pour salt on the wound, Kristoph pointed out that Justice and Klavier had been the ones to cause Vera to bite her nails, causing her poisoning and probable death.

Upon being informed about the Jurist System being implemented, which had the power to declare an innocent verdict regardless of solid evidence, and which had been designed by none other than Wright, he flew into a rage, calling the jurors "ignorant swine" and "emotional [...] riff-raff" unfit for passing judgment in a court of law, which he claimed was absolute. However, the judge and Klavier dismissed his statements, citing the continual evolution of law over the years; the law was always improving, but it was never perfect or absolute. Klavier added that the justice system did not need Kristoph anymore. When the trial concluded, the jury unanimously declared an innocent verdict for Vera Misham, and Gavin could do nothing about it but laugh "a laugh louder than any ever heard before... or since. A laugh that echoed in the halls of justice, lingering for what seemed like hours."

Personality
Kristoph Gavin made a point of striving for perfection in all areas of life, particularly in court, where he considered the law and evidence to be absolutes upon which all judgments should be made. This gave Gavin an extreme sense of self-importance and superiority, particularly over "common" citizens not involved in legal studies. This ironically drove him to compromise the law by finding loopholes, and he eventually resorted to forgery for the sake of fame and glory. In committing the forgery and the crimes that followed, Gavin showed great cunning and paranoia with almost every move he made. He was very determined in guarding his secrets at all costs, even foiling Phoenix Wright's attempts to find out what Gavin was hiding using his magatama; the magatama would merely show Wright five black Psyche-Locks, which were unbreakable.

Gavin's personality and emotions can be compared to those of Manfred von Karma to an extent, while his initially collected and seemingly positive demeanor can be compared to Dahlia Hawthorne's facade of beauty, which, like her's, ultimately collapsed when he knew he had been bested.

Gavin has a scar on his right hand. When he tenses the muscles in his hand a skull-like image is formed, with the scar acting as the "mouth". This was the "tell" that Justice's bracelet picked up on during Kristoph Gavin's last trial.

Name

 * Kristoph Gavin's Japanese given name, "Kirihito" (霧人), reads "hitokiri" (人霧) when read backwards. "Hitokiri" (人斬り) means "killer".