November 11, 2025 • 19 mins
By Robert Riggs
LAPD Homicide Detective John St. John aka "JigSaw John" Badge #1
Legendary LAPD Homicide Detective John St. John walked among the dead for nearly a half-century.
Known as “JigSaw John,” he pursued monsters that had an insatiable appetite for blood and suffering.
Jane Howatt, a suburban housewife and aspiring writer, wanted to trade her tennis racket for something more meaningful.
St. John didn’t need company, and he sure didn’t want a young unpublished author in his way.
But something about Howatt’s curiosity—earnest, unspoiled, insistent—broke down his guard.
St. John worked the evidence; Howatt worked the story.
The result is “JigSaw and Jane: Thirteen Years of Murder & Mayhem with Badge Number One.”
St.John empathized with crime victims because he was one of them.
As a young jailer, a prisoner ambushed him with an iron bar ripped from a bunk.
The prisoner savagely beat St. John to the brink of death, leaving him blind in one eye.
In another life, JigSaw and Jane would have barely noticed each other in a supermarket aisle.
Instead, they found themselves peering into crime scenes of LA’s most brutal and sensational crimes together.
This is their story.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
At quitting time in the 1980s,
the men in the Los Angeles business district
took off their ties, loosened their collars,
and headed home.
While they stepped back into ordinary lives, the
LAPD's most famous homicide detectives stepped deeper into
the darkness
most of them never had to see.
(00:30):
John Saint John, known as Jigsaw John,
carried the faces of dead home with him.
There was no quitting time in his business.
He lived in the company of murder.
He studied the handiwork of men who killed
for pleasure.
Their tools were ropes,
knives, their hands, and fear
(00:51):
used to torture and kill their victims.
During forty three years with LAPD
homicide,
he saw more than two thirds of 1,000
homicide cases.
He helped put a dozen prolific serial killers
in prison.
Well, unlike the police dramas that unfolded on
(01:11):
Hollywood's back lots in LA,
Saint John didn't fit the movie stereotype.
He was no Clint Eastwood from Dirty Harry.
He wore rumpled, off the rack suits.
Short and heavy, he shuffled in his step.
He moved slowly, but with deliberate
purpose.
He flashed a gold tooth when he smiled.
(01:33):
He could have been mistaken for someone's grandfather.
He took his own photographs at crime scenes,
hundreds of them.
He spotted clues others missed.
You've got to see the face of a
real victim, he told a reporter in 1974.
You've got to go to the murder scene
and you've got to see the face of
(01:54):
death,
the agony.
They could never fake that on TV.
A lifer paid him the best compliment.
If I ever killed anyone, I would hate
like hell to have old John on my
case
because sooner or later, he's going to get
you.
In 1982,
the LAPD awarded the then 64 year old
(02:16):
detective
the Distinguished Service Medal for solving the Freeway
Killer murder case.
Well, St. John carried the coveted badge number
one. He joined the department in 1942.
He was a legend in his own lifetime.
The morning newspaper headline about the award caught
(02:37):
the eye of Jane Howitt,
a 37 year old suburban housewife married to
a physician.
The story jumped off the page as Jane
sipped coffee while her two elementary school age
boys
spoon cereal out of their breakfast bowls.
She was taking a writing course, planned to
publish a book about tennis, the favorite pastime
(02:58):
of women among her circle of friends.
Suddenly,
she found herself drawn to a meatier subject.
She wanted to sink her teeth into the
backstory
of the legendary detective nickname Jigsaw John
after he solved a murder in Griffith Park.
(03:27):
When John got onto the case, the body
was was dismembered,
but the hands were were not found.
So it it came to be later on,
soon, that he was called Jigsaw John because
he was able to put the corpse
back together from the having it been hacked
as it was by the killer.
So it it was it really boiled down
(03:49):
to his being a puzzle solver, being able
to put put not only bodies back together,
but crimes back together. What are the missing
pieces?
So the jigsaw sort of went from the
dismemberment
case to now he became somebody well known
for his ability to,
put,
pieces of the puzzle of the murder puzzle
(04:10):
back together again. That turned out to be
the name Jigsaw
John.
Jane wanted to ride along with Jigsaw.
The detectives in the homicide bullpen responded to
the desire of a novice unpublished writer from
the privileged suburbs
to get up close to murder with,
yeah, like fat chance lady.
(04:33):
Jane's persistence
led to an unprecedented
journey alongside
LAPD's
greatest detective.
It produced her true crime memoir,
Jigsaw and Jane,
thirteen years of murder and mayhem
with badge number one.
You look at him
and you think, you know, he's this he's
(04:54):
this sleepy grandfather who goes to the buffet
on Sunday mornings.
He's he has that ordinary look,
you know, a little a little like Columbo.
You know, that kinda aw, shucks look. You
never
think, you know, that he was this, but
I can tell you, I think it helped.
The other thing that helped Robert was the
(05:15):
fact that he was an excellent listener.
He doesn't tell you anything.
You tell him everything.
And the way he would do that was,
you you know,
he would he would listen.
For example, when I was talking to the
one of the mothers of the the murder
victims,
he leaned into her as she spoke to
(05:37):
him, asked her questions about the family,
asked her questions about how things are going.
He had this ordinary sort of look
look to him, but that helped
because I think that disarmed people. They felt
that he could talk to him and they
could tell him stuff. And as he's as
I said to you, he's an information broker.
(05:57):
This is what he lives for. I want
you you would wind up telling him way
more about yourself
and he would know nothing about you. That's
the magic of how his interrogations
went.
Howitt says Jigsaw John's dogged determination
helped solve the sensational
(06:18):
freeway murder case,
the one for which he received the Distinguished
Service Medal.
William Bonin, a truck driver, kidnapped, robbed, raped
and murdered a total of 14 teenage boys
while prowling Southern California in his van between
1979
and 1980.
He dumped their bodies beside freeways in Los
(06:41):
Angeles and Orange Counties, thus the name
Freeway Killer.
Acting on information from his network of informants,
Saint John tracked down the truck driver and,
on 06/11/1980,
his team captured Bonin
in the act of sodomizing a victim.
The killer had his murder kit in his
(07:02):
vehicle.
Two months earlier, Bonin had picked up 16
year old Stephen Wood shortly after he left
his orthodontist appointment.
Wood forgot a notebook at home that he
needed for his driver's ed class. He walked
across the street to buy one at a
liquor store.
At that same moment,
Bonin, the freeway killer, walked in to buy
(07:23):
his morning paper.
Their whirls were never meant to touch.
Wood was Bonin's preferred type,
thin and blonde.
This is just
a guess, but it's St. John's guess, is
that he sees Stephen Wood in a hurry
to get to class. Hey kid, you wanna
ride?
(07:44):
Hey kid, you know, hey,
and and and he could have known him.
Sure, I'm a little late for class.
You know, I'll take a ride. So guess
what happens? The next thing you know is
that he's found, he's,
he's,
I think it's about the thirteenth victim. So
you talk about sort of
I I look at the coincidence of murder.
This happened, shouldn't have happened, that happened, maybe.
(08:06):
It's just like an airplane crash, a serious
happens that you don't expect and watch out.
Stephen Wood's nude body was found the next
morning in an alley behind an industrial complex
near the Pacific Coast Highway and Long Beach
Freeway.
He had been beaten, sodomized, and strangled with
(08:28):
ligature.
Bonin loved to hear his victim scream.
He confessed to committing 21 murders in the
span of a year.
Investigators believed he was responsible for many more.
His youngest victim was a 12 year old
waiting for a bus to Disneyland.
(08:48):
In 1996,
Bonin was the first California inmate to be
executed by lethal injection.
Speaking his last words to the ward of
San Quentin,
the serial killer said the death penalty sends
the wrong message to the youth of the
country.
He suggested that when a person considers breaking
the law, they should go to a quiet
(09:10):
place and seriously think about it.
Jane Howard felt what the serial killer could
never feel,
the pain of his victims' mothers,
the last physical memory of their sons,
death certificates.
This book
shook me
(09:30):
in so many ways to think that I'm
I I am so I have this good
life,
and their lives are are filled with all
this tragedy,
unbearable
tragedy.
Detective Saint John with Jane Howard in tow
topped off his career with the arrest of
serial killer William Bradford.
(09:53):
Bradford was an amateur photographer driven by a
sadistic lust for murder.
He murdered two girls in in the desert.
He was a photographer.
This is the lure that he used to
get, you know, to get to get women
to go out with him or to get
them to into his into his vehicles, which
(10:13):
is why he wound up killing them and
take and not killing them, but to where
he took them to the desert where he
murdered them.
So Bradshaw was guilty of of of Sherry
Miller and and Tracy Campbell, two murders that
happened in the in the, Mojave Desert.
In July
1984, a barmaid named Sherry Miller disappeared after
(10:34):
meeting Bradford at a Hollywood dive called The
Meat Market. He promised to help her build
a modeling portfolio.
Well, days later, Sherry Miller's nude body turned
up in an alley.
Initially unknown, she was named Jane Doe number
sixty
with patches of flesh missing from her leg
and stomach.
(10:55):
Around the same time, Bradford's 15 year old
neighbor, Tracy Campbell, vanished.
Detectives searched his apartment and found rolls of
undeveloped film.
One photograph stopped them cold.
A woman posed against a seal shaped rock
formation,
a tattoo visible on her calf
(11:16):
at the same spot mutilated on Sherry Miller,
aka
Jane Doe number sixty.
Jigsaw drove Jane to the crime scene in
the Mojave Desert to show how his eye
for detail
cracked the case.
I looked around,
and I thought
I thought, this is so desolate. This is
(11:36):
so frightening. Imagine
what it would be like
knowing that this is the place, the last
place you'd ever see before you died. And
that was what one of the both those
girls had to to feel. And Bradford now
isn't the next door neighbor. He's not the
photographer.
He's gonna kill him,
and he's gonna kill him in a way
(11:58):
that is so horrific
and so terrifying.
So all those thoughts were going in my
mind. What did those girls think as they
saw what was going to happen to them?
Bradford was convicted of the death penalty. He
died in 2008 at age 61 in a
prison medical facility.
(12:19):
Investigators suspected him of murdering more than 28
women.
And then in 1993,
the LAPD
decided to take Jigsaw John's Ford Crown Victoria
away,
deeming the 75 year old detective a liability
risk behind the wheel.
He retired.
(12:39):
He had to be on the beat.
If he was in his case, I'm not
gonna be I'm not gonna be an office
detective.
He he had to be out there. He
couldn't wait to get out. You know, you
show up at work at 08:30, and then
after a little while, you do your paperwork,
which there's tons of.
But then when he could get out, that
was when he really started to thrive. You
know, he never needed a map
(13:01):
to go any I said, where are your
maps? When I was in his car, he
knew every street. He could go any place.
You know,
there's no maps in his not one.
So he knew LA. Every street, every avenue,
every alley, he knew. It was in his
head.
So
to be taken away from his car was
(13:22):
like taking away, you know, his world of
homicide.
And then he,
then he quit.
And the party was the retirement party
was
was so it was a mixture of, you
know, fun and games. But at the end
of it, everybody knew that that it was
end of an era
with the end with the end of Saint
John because it would never be the same.
(13:46):
Detective John Saint John died of cancer two
years after retiring.
But Jigsaw John once said of serial killers,
These guys all kill the same way you
or me pick a banana off a tree.
Whenever they get the urge, they go out
and do it to get their sexual gratification
(14:06):
or whatever.
They'll keep doing it too
until you stop them.
At quitting time in the 1980s,
the men in the Los Angeles business district
took off their ties, loosened their collars,
and headed home.
While they stepped back into ordinary lives, the
LAPD's most famous homicide detectives stepped deeper into
the darkness
most of them never had to see.
(00:30):
John Saint John, known as Jigsaw John,
carried the faces of dead home with him.
There was no quitting time in his business.
He lived in the company of murder.
He studied the handiwork of men who killed
for pleasure.
Their tools were ropes,
knives, their hands, and fear
(00:51):
used to torture and kill their victims.
During forty three years with LAPD
homicide,
he saw more than two thirds of 1,000
homicide cases.
He helped put a dozen prolific serial killers
in prison.
Well, unlike the police dramas that unfolded on
(01:11):
Hollywood's back lots in LA,
Saint John didn't fit the movie stereotype.
He was no Clint Eastwood from Dirty Harry.
He wore rumpled, off the rack suits.
Short and heavy, he shuffled in his step.
He moved slowly, but with deliberate
purpose.
He flashed a gold tooth when he smiled.
(01:33):
He could have been mistaken for someone's grandfather.
He took his own photographs at crime scenes,
hundreds of them.
He spotted clues others missed.
You've got to see the face of a
real victim, he told a reporter in 1974.
You've got to go to the murder scene
and you've got to see the face of
(01:54):
death,
the agony.
They could never fake that on TV.
A lifer paid him the best compliment.
If I ever killed anyone, I would hate
like hell to have old John on my
case
because sooner or later, he's going to get
you.
In 1982,
the LAPD awarded the then 64 year old
(02:16):
detective
the Distinguished Service Medal for solving the Freeway
Killer murder case.
Well, St. John carried the coveted badge number
one. He joined the department in 1942.
He was a legend in his own lifetime.
The morning newspaper headline about the award caught
(02:37):
the eye of Jane Howitt,
a 37 year old suburban housewife married to
a physician.
The story jumped off the page as Jane
sipped coffee while her two elementary school age
boys
spoon cereal out of their breakfast bowls.
She was taking a writing course, planned to
publish a book about tennis, the favorite pastime
(02:58):
of women among her circle of friends.
Suddenly,
she found herself drawn to a meatier subject.
She wanted to sink her teeth into the
backstory
of the legendary detective nickname Jigsaw John
after he solved a murder in Griffith Park.
(03:27):
When John got onto the case, the body
was was dismembered,
but the hands were were not found.
So it it came to be later on,
soon, that he was called Jigsaw John because
he was able to put the corpse
back together from the having it been hacked
as it was by the killer.
So it it was it really boiled down
(03:49):
to his being a puzzle solver, being able
to put put not only bodies back together,
but crimes back together. What are the missing
pieces?
So the jigsaw sort of went from the
dismemberment
case to now he became somebody well known
for his ability to,
put,
pieces of the puzzle of the murder puzzle
(04:10):
back together again. That turned out to be
the name Jigsaw
John.
Jane wanted to ride along with Jigsaw.
The detectives in the homicide bullpen responded to
the desire of a novice unpublished writer from
the privileged suburbs
to get up close to murder with,
yeah, like fat chance lady.
(04:33):
Jane's persistence
led to an unprecedented
journey alongside
LAPD's
greatest detective.
It produced her true crime memoir,
Jigsaw and Jane,
thirteen years of murder and mayhem
with badge number one.
You look at him
and you think, you know, he's this he's
(04:54):
this sleepy grandfather who goes to the buffet
on Sunday mornings.
He's he has that ordinary look,
you know, a little a little like Columbo.
You know, that kinda aw, shucks look. You
never
think, you know, that he was this, but
I can tell you, I think it helped.
The other thing that helped Robert was the
(05:15):
fact that he was an excellent listener.
He doesn't tell you anything.
You tell him everything.
And the way he would do that was,
you you know,
he would he would listen.
For example, when I was talking to the
one of the mothers of the the murder
victims,
he leaned into her as she spoke to
(05:37):
him, asked her questions about the family,
asked her questions about how things are going.
He had this ordinary sort of look
look to him, but that helped
because I think that disarmed people. They felt
that he could talk to him and they
could tell him stuff. And as he's as
I said to you, he's an information broker.
(05:57):
This is what he lives for. I want
you you would wind up telling him way
more about yourself
and he would know nothing about you. That's
the magic of how his interrogations
went.
Howitt says Jigsaw John's dogged determination
helped solve the sensational
(06:18):
freeway murder case,
the one for which he received the Distinguished
Service Medal.
William Bonin, a truck driver, kidnapped, robbed, raped
and murdered a total of 14 teenage boys
while prowling Southern California in his van between
1979
and 1980.
He dumped their bodies beside freeways in Los
(06:41):
Angeles and Orange Counties, thus the name
Freeway Killer.
Acting on information from his network of informants,
Saint John tracked down the truck driver and,
on 06/11/1980,
his team captured Bonin
in the act of sodomizing a victim.
The killer had his murder kit in his
(07:02):
vehicle.
Two months earlier, Bonin had picked up 16
year old Stephen Wood shortly after he left
his orthodontist appointment.
Wood forgot a notebook at home that he
needed for his driver's ed class. He walked
across the street to buy one at a
liquor store.
At that same moment,
Bonin, the freeway killer, walked in to buy
(07:23):
his morning paper.
Their whirls were never meant to touch.
Wood was Bonin's preferred type,
thin and blonde.
This is just
a guess, but it's St. John's guess, is
that he sees Stephen Wood in a hurry
to get to class. Hey kid, you wanna
ride?
(07:44):
Hey kid, you know, hey,
and and and he could have known him.
Sure, I'm a little late for class.
You know, I'll take a ride. So guess
what happens? The next thing you know is
that he's found, he's,
he's,
I think it's about the thirteenth victim. So
you talk about sort of
I I look at the coincidence of murder.
This happened, shouldn't have happened, that happened, maybe.
(08:06):
It's just like an airplane crash, a serious
happens that you don't expect and watch out.
Stephen Wood's nude body was found the next
morning in an alley behind an industrial complex
near the Pacific Coast Highway and Long Beach
Freeway.
He had been beaten, sodomized, and strangled with
(08:28):
ligature.
Bonin loved to hear his victim scream.
He confessed to committing 21 murders in the
span of a year.
Investigators believed he was responsible for many more.
His youngest victim was a 12 year old
waiting for a bus to Disneyland.
(08:48):
In 1996,
Bonin was the first California inmate to be
executed by lethal injection.
Speaking his last words to the ward of
San Quentin,
the serial killer said the death penalty sends
the wrong message to the youth of the
country.
He suggested that when a person considers breaking
the law, they should go to a quiet
(09:10):
place and seriously think about it.
Jane Howard felt what the serial killer could
never feel,
the pain of his victims' mothers,
the last physical memory of their sons,
death certificates.
This book
shook me
(09:30):
in so many ways to think that I'm
I I am so I have this good
life,
and their lives are are filled with all
this tragedy,
unbearable
tragedy.
Detective Saint John with Jane Howard in tow
topped off his career with the arrest of
serial killer William Bradford.
(09:53):
Bradford was an amateur photographer driven by a
sadistic lust for murder.
He murdered two girls in in the desert.
He was a photographer.
This is the lure that he used to
get, you know, to get to get women
to go out with him or to get
them to into his into his vehicles, which
(10:13):
is why he wound up killing them and
take and not killing them, but to where
he took them to the desert where he
murdered them.
So Bradshaw was guilty of of of Sherry
Miller and and Tracy Campbell, two murders that
happened in the in the, Mojave Desert.
In July
1984, a barmaid named Sherry Miller disappeared after
(10:34):
meeting Bradford at a Hollywood dive called The
Meat Market. He promised to help her build
a modeling portfolio.
Well, days later, Sherry Miller's nude body turned
up in an alley.
Initially unknown, she was named Jane Doe number
sixty
with patches of flesh missing from her leg
and stomach.
(10:55):
Around the same time, Bradford's 15 year old
neighbor, Tracy Campbell, vanished.
Detectives searched his apartment and found rolls of
undeveloped film.
One photograph stopped them cold.
A woman posed against a seal shaped rock
formation,
a tattoo visible on her calf
(11:16):
at the same spot mutilated on Sherry Miller,
aka
Jane Doe number sixty.
Jigsaw drove Jane to the crime scene in
the Mojave Desert to show how his eye
for detail
cracked the case.
I looked around,
and I thought
I thought, this is so desolate. This is
(11:36):
so frightening. Imagine
what it would be like
knowing that this is the place, the last
place you'd ever see before you died. And
that was what one of the both those
girls had to to feel. And Bradford now
isn't the next door neighbor. He's not the
photographer.
He's gonna kill him,
and he's gonna kill him in a way
(11:58):
that is so horrific
and so terrifying.
So all those thoughts were going in my
mind. What did those girls think as they
saw what was going to happen to them?
Bradford was convicted of the death penalty. He
died in 2008 at age 61 in a
prison medical facility.
(12:19):
Investigators suspected him of murdering more than 28
women.
And then in 1993,
the LAPD
decided to take Jigsaw John's Ford Crown Victoria
away,
deeming the 75 year old detective a liability
risk behind the wheel.
He retired.
(12:39):
He had to be on the beat.
If he was in his case, I'm not
gonna be I'm not gonna be an office
detective.
He he had to be out there. He
couldn't wait to get out. You know, you
show up at work at 08:30, and then
after a little while, you do your paperwork,
which there's tons of.
But then when he could get out, that
was when he really started to thrive. You
know, he never needed a map
(13:01):
to go any I said, where are your
maps? When I was in his car, he
knew every street. He could go any place.
You know,
there's no maps in his not one.
So he knew LA. Every street, every avenue,
every alley, he knew. It was in his
head.
So
to be taken away from his car was
(13:22):
like taking away, you know, his world of
homicide.
And then he,
then he quit.
And the party was the retirement party
was
was so it was a mixture of, you
know, fun and games. But at the end
of it, everybody knew that that it was
end of an era
with the end with the end of Saint
John because it would never be the same.
(13:46):
Detective John Saint John died of cancer two
years after retiring.
But Jigsaw John once said of serial killers,
These guys all kill the same way you
or me pick a banana off a tree.
Whenever they get the urge, they go out
and do it to get their sexual gratification
(14:06):
or whatever.
They'll keep doing it too
until you stop them.
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