Glen Elg's $500,000 lottery ticket was a piece of evidence in Phoenix Wright's investigation into Elg's murder.
Role in Elg's murder[]
- Main article: Recipe for Turnabout
Elg bought hundreds of lottery tickets from Millionaire Radio before meeting up with loan shark Furio Tigre in Trés Bien. As collateral for Elg's debt to Tigre, Elg was going to hand over a dangerous computer virus called MC Bomber. However, Elg won the grand prize of $500,000 from the lottery, which was more than enough to pay off his debt without handing over the virus. Unfortunately for him, Tigre was counting on reselling MC Bomber on the black market to pay for Viola Cadaverini's surgery. In desperation, Tigre killed Elg and covered up the crime with the help of the restaurant's owner, Jean Armstrong, intending to frame Maggey Byrde, the restaurant's waitress. To do this, Tigre reenacted the entire crime to create a false witness, Victor Kudo who would then attest to Byrde's guilt in court, not knowing that the real crime had occurred a while beforehand.
During the course of the cover-up, Armstrong tried to steal the half-million ticket to pay off his own debts from Tigre, but accidentally took a ticket worth $1 instead. The grand prize ticket was planted into Byrde's pocket, which the police found during a body search. Prosecutor Winston Payne used this to establish Byrde's motive for killing Elg, securing her conviction.
A month later, Wright appealed Byrde's case and went to look for the ticket in Trés Bien, unaware that it had already been submitted into evidence. He discovered that Armstrong had been stealing customers' belongings to sell. He later found Detective Dick Gumshoe listening to Millionaire Radio, hoping for some lottery winnings. It was then that he learned of the timing of the lottery announcements, which he used in court to expose the fact that Kudo had witnessed a false version of the crime. Wright also confronted Elg's boss at Blue Screens, Inc., Lisa Basil, and learned about Elg's gambling problem, which had led to him making a computer virus to settle a debt with a loan shark.