If you want to hear all the details about Sing and Tapp that aren't even in the movies, then
stick around to the end of this video.
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The Saw franchise features a long line of law
enforcers who have tried to solve the Jigsaw case and put an end to the killings that take
place in their city.
From Detective Kerry, to Detective Matthews, to Officer Rigg, to Detective Lieutenant Hoffman,
Gibson, Fisk, Johnston, Halloran and Hunt… but none were onto Jigsaw before the duo of
David Tapp and Stephen Sing.
Welcome to Horror History,
“my name jeff”
and in today’s lesson we’ll be analysing
a pair of the Metropolitan Police Department’s finest, David Tapp and Stephen Sing.
Sing and Tapp play very important roles in the bathroom game that took place in October
2004, but before we can get there, we’ve got to study all the events that led up to
that point, so I’m gonna put the Horror History screen now.
David Tapp was born…
I don’t know probably in the 40s, I’m not sure how old he’s supposed to be, but
we do know that his partner, Stephen Sing, was born in 1976, because his age at the time
of death is stated to be 28 years old.
“A raid that also resulted in the death of Tapp’s partner, 28 year old Stephen Sing.”
Before the Jigsaw case, it seems they spend most of their time dealing with low-level
street gangsters.
One of the gangs they busted was called K2K.
After locking them up, their territory was still marked with graffiti, a lasting reminder
of the damage they caused to the community.
The first we see of Tapp and Sing investigating the Jigsaw case was at the crime scene of
Paul in the Spring of 2004.
They check things out with Detective Alison Kerry, and I think her line suggests that
Paul may not have been the first victim that these three encountered.
“This one’s not fresh anymore.
At least three weeks out.”
But they must be pretty new to the Jigsaw saga overall at this point.
The younger of the two, Sing, looks like he’s never smelled a corpse in decay before.
Tapp on the other hand doesn’t seem distracted by the stench and is able to fully focus on
the contents of the tape found at the crime scene, wherein Jigsaw calls Paul out on acts
of self harm and tells him if he wants to live, he’ll have to cut himself again, by
crawling through a cage filled with razor wire to reach the door.
I think one of the reasons Tapp and Sing work well together is that their skillsets compliment
each other.
For example, Tapp seems to have a greater attention to detail.
He’s the one to notice the Jigsaw piece cut out of Paul’s shoulder, the origin of
the nickname that newspapers would begin using to refer to the killer.
At some point, Sing is shown going inside the cage for a closer look.
So I think Tapp, being the senior, calls the shots, while Sing is the hands on guy.
They aren’t able to gain any suspects from the Razor Wire Trap, but in the meantime,
they are busy with other cases, and bring in a pedo dentist, something that sounds like
it could be the subject of its own horror movie.
Not long after, the three of them investigated the Flammable Jelly Trap, where a man named
Mark Wilson is tested by Jigsaw for faking his illness.
He’d been tasked with getting the combination to a safe written on the wall of a dark room.
His only source of light is a small candle, and he’s covered in flammable jelly.
Also the floor is covered in broken glass, as if Jigsaw hired Link to come in and do his thing.
Is there anything more satisfying than that?
No.
No there is not.
Tapp orders Kerry to have a pen light found at the crime scene tested for fingerprints,
leading them to an oncologist named Dr. Lawrence Gordon.
They turn up at the Angel of Mercy Hospital where Gordon works and asks him for his whereabouts
the previous night.
When he’s unable to provide that information, they ask him to come down to the police station.
After initial hesitation, Gordon gives an alibi: his mistress whom he was meeting in
secret at a seedy motel.
Around that same time, a survivor of one of Jigsaw’s games comes into the station to
file a police report, a woman by the name of Amanda Young.
The detectives are able to clear Gordon’s name, but they ask him to stay a little bit longer
and listen to Amanda’s testimony, because everyone is still confused by how Gordon’s
pen light ended up at the crime scene.
She tells them that she’s actually grateful to Jigsaw for his test helping her overcome
her drug addiction.
Still not convinced that Gordon is innocent, Detective Tapp becomes obsessed with the videotape
recovered from the room that Amanda had been trapped in.
For the next two weeks, he studies it over and over, probably going through boxes and
boxes of delicious donuts, to the point that Sing notices his partner delving into insanity.
“Hey Tapp, I don’t mean for this to be disrespectful… maybe you should find yourself
a girlfriend.”
Just then, Tapp notices something, that gives him an epiphany about the possible whereabouts
of Jigsaw.
He sees graffiti with the symbol of the gang, K2K, who they’d busted before they Jigsaw
saga.
Sing remembers that they had a small territory, only about four blocks, narrowing down their
search area considerably.
Tapp also hears a fire alarm in the background somehow.
Honestly I always thought this was ridiculous.
Play the clip.
“Now listen to this….”
Faint audio: “Welcome to the Kill Count, where we tally up the victims in all our favorite horror
movies.
I’m James A Janisse and today we’re looking at Saw...”
They’re able to get a list from the fire department of every emergency in that neighborhood
over a two week period, and this further narrows down the options to an old mannequin factory.
“You think we have enough for a warrant though?”
“Who said anything about a warrant?”
“Breakin the law!
Breaking the law!”
Inside they discover a model version of what would be Jigsaw’s next game, though Sing
and Tapp did not know it yet.
They do know they are in the right place however, because they discover Billy the Puppet, the same
avatar used in the Amanda Young tape.
Tapp uncovers a man being held captive.
They were about to experience one of Jigsaw’s traps first hand, but what they did not anticipate
was that they would be the ones who
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As Jigsaw could be heard coming in on the noisy elevator down the hall, the two
partners had different ideas of how to handle the situation.
Sing, the younger less experienced one is excited to catch the increasingly infamous
serial killer, but Tapp had the foresight to wait so that they could catch him in the
act and maybe learn a thing or two about him before putting him away.
If they could, they may be better prepared to pin all the killings on him in court.
These viewpoints also go back to their roles I mentioned earlier with Tapp being the head
and Sing being the hands.
They hide and watch as the hooded figure goes to investigate the disturbance in his latest
prisoner.
Their mistake here is being unprepared, as they vastly underestimate Jigsaw’s intelligence
and ability to think ahead and anticipate.
Jigsaw has been expecting them, and although he doesn’t show it, he knows they are in
the room as soon as he comes in, so when they come out to arrest him, Jigsaw puts his plan
into action, stepping on a button that starts the trap.
A pair of drills close in on the prisoner’s head, and Jigsaw tells Sing and Tapp that
they must choose what’s more important, making the arrest, or saving the life of another
man.
While Sing tries to figure out which key to use, Tapp makes sure that Jigsaw doesn’t
escape, so in the eyes of Jigsaw, Sing has passed this test by showing compassion for
human life, and Tapp has failed, due to his obsession with catching Jigsaw.
Sing is able to stop the progress of the drills by shooting them, but Jigsaw pulls a blade
and cuts Tapp’s throat before making his escape.
Sing tells his partner that he’ll come back for him, not realizing that he is still under
Jigsaw’s judgement, and by chasing after Jigsaw while his friend continues to suffer,
he’s making the same mistake that Tapp made just moments before.
He chases Jigsaw downstairs into a hallway, and orders him to freeze.
When Jigsaw continues to flee, he fires a shot, and Jigsaw hits the floor.
I’ve said throughout this video that Tapp and Sing’s skillsets compliment each other,
but with Tapp no longer there to offer his wisdom, Sing makes one rookie mistake,
and this time, it’s fatal.
He fails to realize that this whole scenario was a little too easy.
Would the greatest criminal mind the city has ever seen just walk out into open fire
like that with no protection?
Sing doesn’t consider the idea that Jigsaw was faking it, and this mistake leads him
right into the next trap, a fishing wire obscured by some Halloween store cobwebs, which sets
off a row of loaded weapons hidden above.
All Sing had to do to pass Jigsaw’s test would have been to stay back and help his
suffering partner, but his thirst to take down the man they’ve been looking for outweighs
the magnitude of a moral high ground.
Tapp struggles down the stairs just in time to see Jigsaw get up and walk away from the
remains of Sing’s now lifeless body.
If there’s a moment that defines David Tapp; that dictates his course of action from here
on out, it is the image of his trusted partner Sing who had died trying to bring their greatest
adversary to justice.
To this point, he had shown signs of obsession with the case, spending many hours studying
the Amanda Young tape, but it was this moment when the obsession turned from determination
to ire and a deep yearning for revenge.
This was the moment where Tapp went off the deep end.
In the aftermath of this event, David was discharged from the Metropolitan Police Force
on the grounds of entering without a warrant, so he ended up continuing to investigate on
his own.
That summer, as the scar on this throat slowly healed, he went deeper and deeper down the
rabbit hole, dedicating his life to finding and stopping the man who killed his partner
and attempted to take his life.
Due to Jigsaw’s oversized hood and robes, Tapp never got a good look at his face, and
thus, still suspected Lawrence Gordon as his primary suspect.
He went out and rented himself an apartment with an excellent view of Gordon’s home,
which he would use to spy on the doctor and his family over the course of the next five
months.
The apartment was also used as a headquarters which is absolutely littered with newspaper
clippings, tapes, photographs and other documents.
What little space he had left was designated to takeout boxes and also this crazed picture
of Rick Sanchez for some reason… perhaps just to depict Tapp’s manic state and complete
loss of touch with reality at the hands of his fixation.
In October of 2004, Tapp is starting to run out of leads, and hires a photographer named
Adam Stanheight to follow Gordon around while he’s out and about, hoping he can snap some
evidence proving that the doctor is the killer.
He uses a pseudonym, “Bob”, and pays Adam $200 each night.
On the third night, Adam and Lawrence are both captured and put into Jigsaw’s game
in a dilapidated bathroom while Tapp watches the window of Gordon’s home and notices
a mysterious man in there while the doctor is not home.
He realizes that something is very wrong when he hears gunshots.
Even in his deteriorated mental state, his goal is still to serve justice.
He loads his weapon and runs across the street to find Gordon’s wife, Alison in the midst
of a struggle with the man he had seen in the window.
I think this is where Tapp finally realizes that Lawrence Gordon is not the perpetrator
of these games and traps, he and his family are victims of it.
He battles with the captor, who channels his inner Link and smashes a vase over Tapp’s
head and attempts to make his getaway.
As soon as he is able to get back to his feet, he goes after the man, who leads him to the
location that Gordon and Adam are being held.
At this point, Tapp must be pretty convinced that he’s right on the tail of Jigsaw, and
doesn’t hold anything back in his fiery pursuit.
But as I’ve said over 69 times over the course of this video, Tapp is just one half
of a two person team.
He’s been working solo for five months, but in this final chase, he misses his late
partner Sing more than ever.
Because Sing was always the hands on guy, the guy who would take those shots while Tapp
planned what to do next.
But as Tapp was likely in his late 50s at this point, he didn’t have the strength
he once did, and at the end of a long chase, Zepp is able to overpower him and do away
with the ex cop once and for all.
That was the end of the buddy cop duo, the first in a long line of police officers who
would fall during Jigsaw’s active years.
Nearly two years later, in April of 2006, the officers are honored in a public police
ceremony and photographs of both Sing and Tapp can be seen on the memorial.
To be totally honest, I don’t really know why Tapp is on there because he was no longer a cop
when he died, and the location of the bathroom wasn’t discovered until years later, so
they wouldn’t have actually even found his body yet… but he did contribute a lot of
information to the case, so I’ll let that one slide.
Now if you want more on Tapp, if you’re just craving more Tapp,
then you’re probably an alcoholic--
*crowd booing*
No, but Tapp’s story does continue on in Saw: The Video Game--
“I want to play a game.”
Yes, I know Jigsaw, but the video game is not canon, it doesn’t count as a part of
the story, so I’m not going to cover it here on Horror History, because it would just
create problems with the timeline, but I’d be open to playing it if that’s what you
want to see.
The basic gist of it is that Tapp survives the gunshot, but finds himself in the reverse
bear trap, and once he gets out of it he has to save all these people from traps, and then
at the end he chases down Jigsaw and is faced once again with the decision he had to make
at the mannequin factory, either get the victims to safety or continue to go after Jigsaw.
Then there’s also a sequel to the video game which involves Tapp’s son, that he
apparently has, but I think that’s really getting off topic and the deathbell’s about
to ring so I think this is gonna be class dismissed.
For the homework, just make sure you like this video and let me know in the comments
which character you’d like to see me cover next on Horror History.
And as always check out the playlist on the left to see the histories of other Saw characters
and remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring that deathbell
for notifications and I’ll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.