Wilson Steel Plant

## History

### Jigsaw's Hideout

Wilson Steel was a machining company founded in 1949. At some point after he started his series of murders, John Kramer, better known to the public as the Jigsaw Killer, used the multistoried factory building as one of his hideouts. There he set up a workshop where he designed and built several of the traps which he used to test his victims' will to survive.

### Preparations

During the Jigsaw killings, John Kramer eventually targeted Eric Matthews, a corrupt homicide detective who had framed numerous innocent people, including John's apprentice, Amanda Young. They abducted Eric's son, Daniel Matthews, and forced him to play one of John's deadly games, along with six other people who had been framed by his father. These people were Jonas Singer, his manager Gus Colyard, the prostitute Addison Corday, the drug dealer Xavier Chavez, as well as Laura Hunter and Obi Tate. Amanda pretended to be a victim as well, in order to observe the game's progress. Over the course of the game, all prisoners except for her and Daniel died. When it was over, Amanda sedated Daniel and brought him to the Wilson Steel building where John was already waiting for her. After their arrival, they tied Daniel up and locked him inside a safe with a sufficient supply of oxygen.

Shortly afterwards, the corpse of another one of John's victims was found in an abandoned building after being killed by a nail-spiked death mask. He was quickly identified by Eric as one of his informants, Michael Marks. Furthermore, John had left a message for Eric written on the ceiling of the rooms, telling Eric to "look closer". While initially Eric didn't want to have anything to do with the case, he soon deduced the true meaning behind the message. One of the metal parts used to build the death mask had an engraving of Wilson Steel on it, leading Eric to identify the factory as Jigsaw's hideout.

### Police Raid

The next day, Eric decided to accompany his former partner, Detective Allison Kerry, and a SWAT team led by Sergeant Daniel Rigg during their raid on the plant. Rigg, who had been at Wilson Steel at one point already, instructed his men. Minutes later, they went to the plant. Following Detective Kerry's orders, Officer Pete Baker was the first one who broke through a side door and entered the building along with Rigg and two of their teammates.

While making their way through a storage area of the building, the men soon reached a staircase surrounded by a chain-link cage. As the door was secured by a chain, Pete cut it with a bolt clipper. Upon opening the door, the lights in the staircase suddenly turned on. Pete entered the staircase, followed by his two teammates, while Rigg backed them up. They tried to climb the stairs but eventually stopped when they heard a squealing sound. Seconds later, a mechanical ventriloquist puppet appeared at the head of the stairs, sitting on a tricycle and maniacally laughing at them. After the staircase was locked by a mechanism, Officer Baker tried to approach the puppet, when suddenly, a rigged step sprang forward and broke his shins, causing his two fellow officers to back away, before receiving a lethal electric shock when they touched the cage. As they were killed in front of Sergeant Rigg's eyes, the puppet slowly rode back on the cycle. Moments later, the remaining SWAT team, as well as Eric and Kerry, entered the building. While the detectives went upstairs, Pete's colleagues dragged him out of the staircase.

### Eric Matthews' Test

Shortly thereafter, the remaining forces finally confronted Jigsaw, who had been sitting on his table in his workshop, already waiting for them to arrive. Sergeant Rigg ordered his men to arrest him, but they refused to do so when John told Eric it'd be 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 Kerry, Rigg, and Eric then entered the room. Upon looking at the monitors, they saw the recordings of the big game in the Nerve Gas House and recognized one of the victims as Daniel. However, they didn't know that the footage was pre-recorded and assumed that the events were unfolding live. After seeing the recordings, Eric immediately attempted to attack John and angrily yelled at him before being held back by Sergeant Rigg. John then explained to him 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'd rather be called "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 warranted the birth of 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.

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.