Jigsaw is the unforgettable villain in the Saw series, but he's not just a creepy puppet.
He's a deeply disturbed man, whose morals are as warped as they are eerily understandable.
This is the story of John Kramer, Billy the Puppet, and where it all began.
There's no doubt that Jigsaw's life took a deeply dark turn. Yet before he became Jigsaw,
John Kramer led a genuinely upright life. A civil engineer, Kramer was utterly dedicated
to making cities better places to live. With his business partner, a lawyer named Art Blank,
he started a foundation with the goal of creating affordable housing for working families.
The foundation's first major project was a meatpacking plant. This was presumably
undertaken to provide jobs for blue-collar workers in New York City. But this plant had a far darker
destiny. It would become a base of operations for John after he became a serial murderer.
Unsurprisingly, Jigsaw took full advantage of the plant's capacity for grotesque horror.
We often imagine serial killers as extreme loners. However,
John Kramer is very much the opposite. He was a man of and for the people,
and he lived a relatively straight-forward life until it all went wrong. Prior to becoming Jigsaw,
he married Jill Tuck. His charitable nature rubbed off on his wife, who Kramer convinced
to open the Homeward Bound Clinic, aimed at helping drug addicts recover and build new lives.
Jill worked at the clinic all through her pregnancy with their first child,
who Kramer hoped to name Gideon. Alongside her team of nurses,
Jill helped people hoping to kick their opiate addictions, and she did so with kindness,
strength, and perseverance. Though he encouraged her to start the clinic, Kramer's increasing sense
of the danger of Jill's job began to weigh on him, particularly as her pregnancy progressed.
Much of Kramer's pre-Jigsaw life would extend into his career as a serial killer.
The knowledge he'd gained as an engineer and builder would
eventually come to fruition in his infamous and deadly contraptions.
In time, John Kramer met a man named William Easton at a party thrown at the clinic.
Easton was the head of Umbrella Insurance, and he revealed an algorithm his company
used to distribute care, essentially placing a concrete value on each individual human life.
"Everybody thinks we're the bad guys. Nobody
mentions the millions of people we help each year without incident."
Kramer was horrified both by the concept and the variables Easton used. He thought that the
equation was faulty because it didn't take into account a patient's will to live. This was a
brutal lesson in the mathematics of morality, one that would leave Kramer forever changed.
Kramer became more and more uneasy about Jill's workplace, and with good reason.
One night at the clinic, as he waited to pick up his wife, Kramer got between two patients about
to come to blows. One of the men, named Cecil Adams, pulled a knife on John. Kramer was able
to successfully talk Adams down, convincing him to drop the knife and even managing to deliver
a lecture on how one's mistakes can spiral out of control and affect society at large.
Despite Kramer's warning, Cecil Adams returned to the clinic, where he threatened Jill with a
knife and forced her to open the door. He backed the visibly pregnant Jill up against a wall and
commanded her to stay put while he stole supplies of methadone. Leaving with the stolen medication,
Cecil accidentally hit Jill in the stomach. Jill began to bleed and collapsed to the floor.
Realizing that he may have hurt Jill's unborn child, Cecil ran from the clinic.
Kramer was waiting out front to pick up his wife. When he saw Cecil leaving in a panic,
he ran in to see if anyone was hurt. John found his wife bleeding out on the floor
and took her to a nearby hospital. Jill and John's first child, Gideon,
had been lost. They were utterly devastated, and would never attempt to have another child.
Gideon's death took John to a dark place. He began refusing to see his wife or go to work.
He abandoned his mission to build housing for the needy. His withdrawal from the world
was so complete that neither Jill nor Kramer's business partner, Art Blank, knew where to find
him. They finally found John in his workshop, where he had been building Billy the Puppet.
Blank urged Kramer not to walk away from the needy families they had helped. Kramer was,
Blank argued, their savior, and they needed him now more than ever. Sadly,
Kramer was unmoved. Jill delivered a parting blow, telling John that she suffered as much,
if not more, from Gideon's death. She separated from John soon after.
After splitting from Jill, John began to deteriorate. Kramer was diagnosed with colon
cancer and an additional tumor in the frontal lobe of his brain, and started chemotherapy.
However, he was late in beginning his treatment as one of the hospital's
residents accidentally mixed up his imaging results with another patient.
"His name is John, Dr. Gordon. He's a very interesting person."
By the time the tumor in Kramer's brain was discovered,
the doctors believed it to be inoperable. As a result, Kramer desperately began to seek
out experimental cancer treatments. The clock was ticking, and the odds were against him.
Kramer needed approval from his medical insurance company to undergo a radical
cancer treatment in Norway. He attended a meeting with William Easton, the insurance
executive who had previously shaken Kramer with his brutal monetization of human life.
Easton claimed he couldn't cover Kramer's healthcare costs, based on the aforementioned
algorithms Umbrella Insurance used in all cases. As Easton explained in their earlier meeting,
the company determined whether or not a patient's health was a good
investment before making a decision. Kramer was not considered to be a good investment.
Fully convinced that he was going to die, John Kramer made the decision to end his own life.
He drove off of a cliff, but to his shock, he lived to tell the tale.
John emerged from the crash feeling invigorated, despite his injuries.
He realized that a true brush with death had made him realize how precious life really was.
Kramer began to think that other people could do with a near-death experience of their own.
He believed that, if he could make people come face-to-face with their own deaths,
they might learn to appreciate their lives. As a result, he began devising his special
games and contraptions, and started operating under his alter ego, Jigsaw,
alongside his tricycle-riding sidekick, Billy the Puppet. A horror icon was born.
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