By Robert Riggs
Jane Howatt stopped mid-sip of her morning coffee. A newspaper headline jumped off the front page. The LAPD awarded its Distinguished Service Medal to 64 year 64-year-old homicide detective John St. John for solving the notorious freeway murder case.
The 37-year-old suburban housewife could not put down the paper as her two elementary school-aged boys slurped cereal at the kitchen table.
Howatt was an aspiring writer. A few weeks earlier, she had enrolled in a class on writing a book proposal. Her girlfriends at the tennis club thought it was a brilliant idea to write a tennis book. She had scheduled meetings with local tennis pros and dreamed of interviewing Chris Evert.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Howatt decided she wanted to write a book about the Freeway Killer case and the detective who solved it.
Against all odds, Howatt phoned the homicide squad to ask for a meeting. Detectives politely brushed her off, probably thinking, “like hell, lady. Fat chance that will ever happen”.
Howatt, unpublished and unknown, persevered. Detective St. John relented and agreed to meet her and her husband at Taylor’s Steakhouse so she could pitch the idea of writing a book about his eight-year investigation.
Little did she know they were sitting at the bar beside the detective, who purposely did not let on who he was. St. John overheard Jane’s running critical commentary about how he and other patrons could not possibly be the famous detective. She expected Hollywood’s version of a supercop to walk in.
More Like Colombo Than Dirty Harry
The unassuming detective wore rumpled off-the-rack suits, a felt fedora hat, carried a beat-up briefcase, shuffled with deliberate purpose, and flashed a gold tooth when he smiled.
St. John was the sort of man you might mistake for a grandfather at a Sunday buffet. But he carried the LAPD’s coveted “Badge #1” and, over a 43-year career, solved more than two-thirds of a thousand homicide cases and put a dozen serial killers in prison.
St. John, nicknamed “JigSaw John” for meticulously piecing together evidence during his investigation of a dismembered body in Griffith Park, painstakingly solved crimes like a complex puzzle.
The more St. John told Jane unvarnished stories of crimes, such as the accomplice to a serial killer who slept in a coffin instead of a bed, the more she wanted to write the book.
The Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship
Howatt’s writing instructor reacted to her proposal as a joke and demeaned her bravado in front of the class. Her tennis partners also didn’t cheer her spunk.
But Howatt’s determination led to a rare thirteen-year journey beside one of LAPD’s greatest detectives, chronicled in her memoir “JigSaw & Jane: Thirteen Years of Murder and Mayhem with Badge Number One.
In another life, JigSaw and Jane would have barely noticed each other shopping in a supermarket aisle.
Instead, they found themselves peering into crime scenes of LA’s most brutal and sensational crimes together. I imagine he realized that Jane shared his tenacity.
“I want to get this message out to women. If something grabs you so big and so strong that you can’t let go, follow it. Follow it because this could be an adventure,” advised Jane.
Miss Panic
Jane told me on my True Crime Reporter® podcast that the beginning of the adventure scared her. St. John called her Miss Panic. “I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of dead bodies. I was afraid of a drunk on the street. I was just afraid of everything.” But Howatt was determined to write the book.
She went to grizzly, bloody crime scenes. She saw victims dissected on cold slabs in the morgue. She met JigSaw’s informants in shadows. She heard other detectives’ deadly gallows humor at homicide conventions. She felt the grief of the victims’ families.
Detective St. John walked among the dead, and Jane walked with him. She realized that his ordinary, “everyman look” and his ability to listen disarmed people. He was a little like the character in the 1970s TV show ‘Columbo’.
He Stood In The Victim’s Shoes
St. John’s record reads like a city’s ledger of suffering. He, too, had suffered.
As a young jailer, a prisoner ambushed him with an iron bar ripped from a bunk. The criminal savagely beat St. John to the brink of death, leaving him blind in one eye.
The Freeway Killer case
If there is one case that defined JigSaw John for generations, it was the Freeway Killer case. William Bonin, a truck driver, prowled Southern California during the 1970s and early 1980s. He cruised in a van outfitted for abducting, torturing, raping, and murdering teenage boys and dumping their bodies beside freeways.
Acting on information from informants, St. John’s investigators captured Bonin in the act of sodomizing a victim on June 11, 1980, with a murder kit in his vehicle.
Bonin later confessed to dozens of killings and was executed in 1996. His youngest victim was a 12-year-old boy on his way to Disneyland.
Jane told me how unthinkable those losses felt to someone coming from her suburban life: “This book shook me in so many ways, their lives are filled with all this tragedy, unbearable tragedy.”
Stolen Dreams. Stolen Lives.
St. John topped off his career with the arrest of William Bradford, a serial killer driven by a sadistic lust for murder.
He was an amateur photographer who lured young women into his web with the promise of building their modeling portfolios to help them achieve their Hollywood dreams.
A barmaid disappeared after meeting Bradford at a Hollywood dive called The Meet Market. The next day, her nude corpse was discovered in an alley with patches of flesh missing from one of her legs and her stomach.
The body of 15-year-old Tracey Campbell, Bradford’s neighbor, was discovered in the Mojave Desert with the same mutilations.
St. John drove Howatt to the crime scene in the Mojave Desert.. She recalled the place as “so desolate, so frightening,” and said she tried to imagine what the girls must have felt in their last moments.
St. John took hundreds of photos of the crime scenes and discovered overlooked details. These were the forensic clues that St. John read better than most to send Bradford to the California death chamber.
Death Certificates
“You’ve got to see the face of a real victim,” he told a reporter in 1974. “You’ve got to go to a murder scene, and you’ve got to see the face of death. The agony.”
Jane didn’t just witness murder investigations. She bore witness to grief.
“The last physical memory for many mothers was a death certificate. That was all they had left,” she said. “And then, they had to go on living.”
The End of the Road for Badge #1
In 1993, the LAPD took away St. John’s blue Ford Crown Victoria, calling the 75-year-old a driving liability. He vowed not to end his career driving a desk, so he retired.
Howatt says he was a street cop at heart, “he knew LA, every street, every avenue, every alley. It was in his head. So to be taken away from his car was like taking away, you know, his world of homicide.”
Two years later, cancer took his life. In retirement, he was still trying to solve the infamous Black Dahlia murder, which was one of his first assignments in the late 1940s.
Epilogue
When I asked Jane why she stayed with the work for thirteen years, she answered: she wanted to understand what it took to follow those faces of death home.
Her book does more than chronicle crimes; it traces the methods of a detective who refused to be dazzled by headlines and instead built cases like a bricklayer builds houses — one brick at a time.
John “Jigsaw” St. John never shot a culprit. He weaponized curiosity, persistence, tenacity, and empathetic conversation.
He 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 or whatever. They’ll keep doing it, too, until you stop them.”