| Phoenix Wright |
| This darling little bottle is filled with memories of my darling little Dollie! |
Dahlia's present was a necklace that contained a small bottle in it, and was given by Dahlia Hawthorne to Phoenix Wright during their time at Ivy University.
Poisoning of Diego Armando
Hawthorne giving the necklace to Wright.
On August 27, 2013, Dahlia Hawthorne met with defense attorney Diego Armando in the courthouse cafeteria. Armando had been investigating the murder of Dahlia's stepsister, Valerie and suspected her involvement. Fearful that Armando would find out the truth, Dahlia filled the bottle in her necklace with poison stolen from her university's pharmacology lab. When Armando wasn't looking, Dahlia slipped the poison into his coffee, subsequently putting him into a coma.
After fleeing the scene, Dahlia ran into art student Phoenix Wright in the courthouse reading room. Seeing an opportunity to hide the evidence of her crime, she gave the necklace to Wright, under the pretence of it being a gift of her affection. Although Dahlia was the prime suspect in Armando's poisoning, the lack of any traces of the poison on her meant that she escaped arrest.
Murder of Doug Swallow
- Main article: Turnabout Memories
Dahlia pretending to mourn Swallow.
However, Dahlia's subsequent attempts to retrieve the necklace from Wright failed, as he refused to return it to her; he thought she was just joking whenever she brought it up. Even worse, Wright would tell everyone he met that it was a gift from "Dollie" (his pet name for Dahlia), which could cause trouble for her if he said it to the wrong person.
Dahlia soon began planning to kill Wright in order to retrieve the necklace. Not wanting her to commit any more crimes, her twin sister Iris offered to get it back for her. Iris posed as Dahlia and began a relationship with Wright to recover the necklace, but she soon fell in love with him and was unable to make him part with it. After eight months, Dahlia decided to take matters into her own hands and stole more poison from the pharmacology lab. However, her ex-boyfriend, pharmacology student Doug Swallow, found out about the stolen poison and warned Wright. Hearing their conversation, Dahlia waited for Wright to leave, killed Swallow by electrocuting him, and framed Wright for the murder.
Wright's trial
During Wright's subsequent trial, his defense attorney Mia Fey, who was also Diego Armando's junior partner, managed to figure out that Dahlia had hidden the poison in the necklace. However, before it could be checked for traces of poison, Wright snatched the necklace from Fey, ran from the courtroom and swallowed it, thereby destroying the evidence in an attempt to protect Dahlia, unaware that she was not the woman he had been involved with for the past eight months. Despite this, Fey would go on to prove Dahlia's guilt and she was executed for her crimes.
Note
- A previous boyfriend of Dahlia's, Terry Fawles, had a similar necklace, which the two of them had buried together on Eagle Mountain. On that occasion, the two of them had made a promise to drink the poison if one ever lost faith in the other. However, Dahlia had no real feelings for Fawles and the "promise" was simply her insurance, in that he would kill himself if he ever suspected her of wrongdoing. When Dahlia murdered her stepsister Valerie, she framed Fawles for the crime, and, during his trial, he found himself questioning his faith in Dahlia and killed himself on the witness stand by drinking the poison.