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  Vader and Palpatine knew Obi-wan was with Padme on Mustafar. They knew Padme (dead or unconscious) was laying near the landing platform, before Vader and Obi-wan duelled. They knew that her body was gone from Mustafar when Palpatine appeared. And finally they knew that her body appeared on Naboo for her funeral.

  My question is, why didn't they track down who delivered the body to Naboo? Obviously, this person would have some relations with Obi-wan, because he was the most likely suspect to remove Padme's body from Mustafar before Palpatine arrived. I suppose Palpatine did have connections on his home planet to help him unravel this mystery.

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  • I assume they handed her to the nearest passing droid. Assuming they wore a disguise, that's where the trail would end.
    – Valorum
    Jul 29, 2017 at 9:26
  • @Valorum Droids have photo-receptors and memory core, it would be better just to dump body on the street like mafia does:D But I doubt they did that.
    – rs.29
    Jul 29, 2017 at 9:33
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    UPS didn't do tracked delivery back then
    – Edlothiad
    Jul 29, 2017 at 10:45
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    Even if Obi-wan dropped the body off its not like he would have told anyone where he was going. The best information they could get would be, "Yup, he dropped the body off and left".
    – Skooba
    Jul 29, 2017 at 15:38
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    @Skooba I doubt they knew exactly where he was, i.e. that he was secretly plotting Rebellion . Neither Palpatine nor Vader would play dumb for so long, if they had implications Organa knows where is Obi-Wan (possibly even Yoda)
    – rs.29
    Jul 30, 2017 at 19:34

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Padme and C-3PO travelled to Mustafar together, with C-3PO piloting, so the droid must have been at the top of the list of suspects. By ordering C-3PO's memory erased, Bail Organa prevented C-3PO from implicating others and provided the Imperial investigators with a plausible patsy whose level of involvement could no longer be proved or disproved.

The official novelisation implies (via timing of Bail Organa's dialogue) that a reason for C-3PO's memory erasure was to keep Leia's true identity secret(*). A single solution to multiple simultaneous problems would have appealed to the covert rebel leader.


(*) Why was C3PO's memory wiped, but not R2D2's?

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  • This now opens now question, why Empire didn't do something against Bail Organa .
    – rs.29
    Jul 30, 2017 at 19:31

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