John Kramer

John Kramer was a successful civil engineer and architect. Along with his friend and lawyer, Art Blank, he founded the Urban Renewal Group, a foundation dedicated to property development for low-income people under the motto "Four walls build a home." The company bought up abandoned real estate and renovated them into low-cost housing. The first building purchased and fixed up by the group was the Gideon Meatpacking Plant at 11235 Blake Drive.

At one point in his life, John married a woman named Jill Tuck and supported her work at the Homeward Bound Clinic, an ambulant recovery clinic for addicts under the motto "Cherish your Life." During a party at the clinic sponsored by an insurance company named Umbrella Health, he became acquainted with William Easton, Umbrella's manager. As they talked about their work, William presented him with a mathematical formula he had developed to decide which people would get insured by Umbrella. While William was visibly proud of it, John questioned this business policy because it put William in a position to decide about his clients' life and death. According to John, this business practice completely ignored the clients' will to live, which he deemed the most crucial element of human nature. However, despite their disagreements, John himself eventually became a client of Umbrella. Besides his professional career, John's private life took a happier turn in 1994 as he and Jill were expecting their first child. John, who had already meticulously planned that their son should be born during the Chinese Year of the Pig, also gave him his name, Gideon, inspired by his first building. Sometime later, John obtained a workshop, which he proudly presented to Jill. On this occasion, he also showed her an old clock, which was a part of a deal he had made. The clock greatly fascinated him because it still worked, even though it was almost 300 years old. As a surprise for Jill, he also presented her two homemade gifts for their son - a child's bed and a wooden ventriloquist puppet. Despite their happiness, John soon started to worry about Jill's safety, who continued to work at the clinic even during the late months of her pregnancy. During an incident at the clinic, John had to interrupt a brawl between two patients named Cecil Adams and Gus Colyard. The two of them got into an argument when Cecil vociferously complained about the long waiting time, subsequently causing Gus to slap him in the face. After having been separated from each other, Cecil pulled a knife from his pocket. Therefore, John tried to calm him down. When Cecil angrily asked him about the reason for his intervention, John merely answered that Cecil would soon become a problem for everyone around him due to his reckless behavior. Even though Cecil finally put the knife away, John's worries about Jill's safety would soon turn out to be justified. One night in the fall of 1994, John sat in his car and waited for Jill outside the clinic when he was approached by Addison Corday, a young prostitute, who offered him her company. However, John declined her offer and told her to go home as a beautiful girl like her should not do such work. Shortly afterward, he suddenly noticed how Cecil stormed out of the clinic and ran away after he had tried to rob Jill. John immediately entered the building and found Jill squatting on the floor after Cecil had accidentally slammed a doorknob into her stomach. Even though he took Jill to the Angel of Mercy Hospital, where one of the nurses, Deborah, immediately took care of them, the doctors could not save their unborn child's life. One of them, Dr. Steve, eventually delivered John the sad news. While John sat at Jill's bed and held her hand, she told him that she only wanted to help the people at her clinic. John, however, bitterly answered that they could only save themselves. After Gideon's death, John suffered from severe depression, which ultimately caused him to withdraw from his wife and the Urban Renewal Group. When Art Blank asked Jill about John's whereabouts, she helped him look for her husband, and they went to the latter's workshop together. While Art curiously looked at some blueprints and drawings on a table, Jill suddenly saw John sitting on a chair in a corner and asked him not to get angry with her for bringing Art to the workshop. When turning towards his partner, Art accidentally knocked the wooden ventriloquist doll that John had built for his unborn child off the table. He asked John about his condition and offered his condolences to him. However, he also tried to convince John to continue his work for the Urban Renewal Group because forty low-income families were already waiting to move into the houses they planned to restore. John, who was angry about his visit, told him to leave. After initially hesitating, Art gave in and asked John to call him once he felt better. Moments later, Jill left, too, and reminded John that she also suffered from the loss of Gideon. Once he was alone, he picked up the wooden puppet from the floor and stroked its hair, wistfully thinking about his lost child. His blunted affect eventually led to his divorce from Jill. Furthermore, he asked her not to come back to him again. Shortly afterward, John's physical condition worsened. When he went to the Angel of Mercy Hospital, the renowned oncologist Dr. Lawrence Gordon diagnosed him with colon cancer and a frontal lobe tumor. However, during an earlier visit to the hospital, one of the residents, Dr. Logan Nelson, made a careless mistake and inadvertently mixed up John's x-rays with those of another patient, Alex Rubinstein. Therefore, his cancer had further evolved and was no longer curable at the time of its diagnosis. Thoroughly depressed, John ultimately tried to end his life by driving his car off a cliff. Contrary to his expectations, he survived the crash. At this moment, John decided he wanted to live. Severely injured, he crawled out of the wreck and pulled a jagged piece of metal out of his body. Thereby, he realized that he had only learned to cherish his life when his death had been imminent. Because of this, John chose to spend the remaining time of his life testing other people's will to live, hoping that this would convince them to value their lives and the lives of those around them. However, his newly discovered will to live could not reunite him and Jill again, and therefore, he continued to ignore her attempts to contact him.

John Kramer was a diligent and hard-working man who was just as devoted to his wife and his unborn son as he was to his work, which was dedicated to helping those who were disadvantaged by society. He had strong moral convictions and a strong sense of justice. Even before his transformation to Jigsaw, John believed that only the knowledge of impending death could show if someone were willing to fight for their survival. Furthermore, he had a genius-level intellect and an excellent understanding of facts in diverse fields of science. Still, he was also somehow spiritual and was interested in esoteric subjects such as Chinese astrology. However, when his son died, and John was diagnosed with incurable cancer, the latter suffered from severe depression and turned away from his wife and his work until he eventually tried to commit suicide but unexpectedly survived. Because of this, John realized that he wanted to live and decided to spend the remaining time of his life testing other people's will to live in order to convince them to value their lives and the lives of those around them. Though John believed in his self imposed mission, he also showed that he was willing to give it up when he was convinced he had been cured of his cancer. Therefore, John became the Jigsaw Killer and started to test other people's will to survive by putting them in gruesome, potentially deadly situations. Despite these games' immense brutality, John took no pleasure in his victims' suffering and death but instead saw it as a necessary evil for them to learn to appreciate their lives. Nonetheless, he occasionally tended to confront his victims with their sins in a mocking way. He always tried to keep an emotional distance between himself and his test subjects during his games, so his personal feelings would not affect his work. John strongly disliked when being compared to a cold-blooded murderer, telling to detective Matthews that he has actually never killed anyone personally and that all those deaths are the result of his victims' choice and willingness to live. He also despised being framed and imitated. Nonetheless, he was not above using violence in order to protect himself. when detective Tapp and Sing went to the place he was building his traps and devices, he attacked cutting Tapp's throat, although in self-defense and avoiding any vital zone so he could live. When he felt it was necessary, he could act intimidating and frightening as an insurance his victims took their tests with the outmost seriousness.