History[]
Eric Matthews' Test[]
Moments later, they finally found the Jigsaw Killer, John Kramer, who was anticipating their arrival. Rigg immediately ordered his men to arrest him, but they refused to do so when John told Eric it'd the best if John stayed where he was until Eric took care of his problem. He instructed Eric to watch the surveillance monitors in the next room, to which Allison Kerry, Rigg, and Eric then entered the room. Upon looking at the monitors, they saw what appeared to be another one of Jigsaw's games and recognized one of the eight victims as Eric's son, Daniel. However, they didn't know that the footage was pre-recorded and assumed that the events were unfolding live. After seeing the recording of the game, Eric immediately attempted to attack John and angrily yelled at him before being held back by Rigg. John then explained to Eric the rules of his test. Eric's colleagues had to leave the room while Eric merely had to sit down and talk to John for a period of two hours until a timer went off. If he could successfully do that, he'd eventually see his son again. Otherwise, his son and the other prisoners would be killed by a deadly nerve agent.
Eric then unsuccessfully tried to call his son, as he was hoping that Jigsaw was only bluffing. Kerry tried to calm Eric down. However, this attempt remained unsuccessful as Eric got more and more nervous, especially when the first victim, Gus Colyard, was killed by a booby trap only a few minutes after the game began. On Rigg's advice, Kerry called for a tech team to trace back the video broadcast. After a talk with John Kramer, Eric told his colleagues about his ultimatum: In order to save his son he had to just sit down and talk to John until the end of the game. Kerry got into an argument with Rigg, who suggested to grill John about the victims' whereabouts by using violence. She told him this wouldn't work, stating that John fits a certain psychological profile. Eventually, Eric reluctantly agreed to John's challenge and conversed with him while Kerry kept an eye on the progress of the game. However, when talking to him, Eric placed a walkie-talkie beneath his chair so his colleagues were able to listen to their conversation.
When they began to talk to each other, John introduced himself to Eric by his name. However when Eric asked him if he shouldn't rather call him "Jigsaw", John claimed that this nickname came from the police and the press, not from him. Furthermore he revealed the true meaning of the jigsaw pieces which he cut from his deceased victims' skins and that gave him his nickname. They were a symbol of an important piece of the "human puzzle" that the victims, who failed their tests, were missing in John's opinion: the survival instinct. He also told Eric about his attempted suicide after he was diagnosed with cancer and how his survival of this event caused him to start his mission. During their conversation, he frequently provoked Eric by talking about his violent behavior towards a suspect approximately five years ago and the bad relationship he had with his son after he cheated on his wife with Kerry. By telling him the truth about his self-imposed mission and confronting him with his past mistakes, John wanted Eric to understand him and his work.
When the second victim in the house, Obi Tate, died in his trap, Rigg persisted on using violence to force John to tell them about the house, as they were just wasting time in his opinion, but Kerry insisted on keeping the situation calm as long as possible. However, Eric became more and more distressed as the game went on, and the tech team was running late, which caused Kerry to formulate a new plan. As she thought John was proud about his work and that it meant everything to him, she told Eric to threaten to destroy all of John's construction plans and notes in the hideout. Eric followed through, but was in turn only provoked by John, who was rarely impressed by Eric's outburst of rage, which only ended when he received his instructions from Kerry after the tech team finally arrived. As Eric refused to play the game and talk to John any longer, the latter told him and his colleagues to look in the desk located in the same room as the monitors. As Kerry did so, she found a bunch of files of old cases, which were the files of the seven other prisoners in the house. Eric ultimately recognized them as the people he had framed throughout his career and realized that they were about to find out the truth about Daniel.
tech team working
When the game in the house got out of control as one of the victims, Xavier, started to kill the other prisoners and pursued Daniel and Amanda, Eric brutally beat John up to make him reveal Daniel's whereabouts. Kerry tried to stop him, but she was held back by Rigg. Heavily injured, John ultimately offered to take him to the house when Eric threatened him with his gun, but demanded to go there with Eric alone. Eric agreed and left the building with John in a hidden elevator. Pursued by the SWAT officers, Eric and John took one of their armored vehicles to flee. While on their way, John told Eric how to get to the Nerve Gas House, where the game was taking place. Meanwhile, Kerry sent the SWAT team after them while she stayed with the tech team, who traced the video feed back to an address at 237 North Hyde Crescent shortly afterwards. However, when Rigg and his team arrived there, they realized that the game was already over and the video feed was merely a recording, so Kerry told the team to come back. As the timer went off, a safe in John's hideout suddenly opened and revealed Daniel Matthews, who had been locked up in the safe all along. (Saw II)
Reopening the Seth Baxter Case[]
Soon afterwards, Dr. Adam Heffner, the police department's pathologist, called the agents and Mark Hoffman to the morgue. Upon the obduction of Eddie, Heffner had discovered that a knife with a tined blade had been used to cut the jigsaw piece from Eddie's skin, while the pieces of most previous victims had been cut off with a plain scalpel. Upon comparing this case with other previous cases, the agents had found out that the tined blade had only been used once before, to cut the jigsaw piece from the body of Seth Baxter, the murderer of Hoffman's sister, Angelina Acomb. As a different knife had been used, Perez and Erickson had ordered to further analyze the video tape found at Seth's crime scene, thinking that it might have been recorded by someone else as well.
Later that day, Perez and Erickson received a laboratory report. According to this report, traces of Freon, more explicitly Dichlorodifluoromethane R-12, a chemical substance which wasn't produced anymore since 1994, had been found in Strahm's fingerprints. Furthermore, the uric acid levels and the eccrine gland residue of the fingerprints were inconsistent for an individual with an active epidural metabolism, leading to the conclusion that Strahm must've been dead already by the time his fingerprints were left at the crime scene. Therefore, Erickson called Hoffman to come to the FBI headquarters as soon as possible and thereby also informed him that the Seth Baxter tape had been found. Shortly after receiving the call, Hoffman arrived at the FBI headquarters, where he was greeted by Erickson and Perez, who informed him about the traces of Freon in Strahm's fingerprints. In order to find out if the crime scene of the latest game was polluted or if Strahm's fingerprints were already contaminated with the substance before, Perez and Erickson planned to find out what was formerly produced in the building where Simone and Eddie's game had taken place. Erickson was then interrupted by a phone call from the FBI's technical lab. Hoffman asked Perez if there were any news about the Seth Baxter tape, which she confirmed. Despite the fact that the tape was in a bad state, they were able to authenticate that the voice on the tape wasn't John Kramer's voice. Therefore, they had sent the tape to the technical lab to rectify it so they could hear the original voice. When she told Hoffman about it, she realized that his stopwatch was running and asked if he was timing something, to which he responded that he did before receiving the call from Erickson. Moments later, Erickson told them that the original voice on the Seth Baxter tape was soon going to be decrypted and told Hoffman and Perez to accompany them to the external lab.
The group reached the lab soon afterwards. When they came in, FBI technician Sachi was still working on the tape. As they had to wait some more time, Hoffman took a cup of coffee from the machine in the room. Noticing Hoffman's increasing nervousness, Perez tried to put him under pressure and began to discuss Strahm's motivation for helping Jigsaw and stated that she had never suspected him to be mentally unstable during the five years she had worked with him. Erickson, now also noticing Hoffman's nervous behavior, then talked about the possibility that Strahm had killed Seth Baxter to throw suspicion on Hoffman. However there was still some detail that didn't fit the picture and therefore he finally revealed to Hoffman, that Strahm, judging by the analysis of his fingerprints, must have already been dead by the time he left his prints at the crime scene of Simone and Eddie's game. Seconds later, Sachi restored the tape, finally revealing the voice to be that of Mark Hoffman. However, before the agents could react, Hoffman quickly pulled out a knife from his pocket, slashed Erickson's jugular vein and threw his coffee in Perez's face. Then, he cut off the power and grabbed Sachi, who was shot in the back three times by Agent Perez as Hoffman used her as a human shield. Upon doing so, Hoffman was able to approach Perez and stabbed her multiple times in the abdomen with his knife. He then asked her who else knew about him, to which she responded with her dying breath that everyone knew about him. Calling it a lie, Hoffman stabbed her one final time, killing her in the process. Following the massacre, Hoffman threw away his knife and ran out of the lab. Seconds later, he returned with the severed hand of Strahm, which he had kept in a cooling box in his car trunk, and a gas canister. He placed Strahm's fingerprints all around the room and also on Perez' gun as well as the screwdriver which he had used to cut off the power. Afterwards, he poured the gasoline all over the floor, the corpses and the technical instruments. When he approached Erickson, he briefly hesitated and smiled when he saw that the latter was still alive, before he poured the fuel over him as well. Then, Hoffman set the lab on fire before finally fleeing the scene. (Saw VI)