In 1978, Jack Merrill unwillingly entered serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s home. Unlike dozens of Gacy’s other victims, he left the house alive.
Merrill, who was 19 when the abduction and rape happened, has since become an actor, appearing in small roles on several television series, including “Law & Order” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Now he’s starring in his own story, having written a one-man show that he’ll perform called “The Save,” which details that horrific night with Gacy.
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“When I was 19 years old, I was abducted and raped by a mass murderer. One who’s etched into the American consciousness. John Wayne Gacy,” he told People magazine. “Yeah, that guy from Chicago who dressed as a clown and murdered 33 boys and young men under his house and garage and who authorities believe killed even more.”
The son of a respected sports writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, Merrill says he grew up in a tumultuous household, the youngest of five children.
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“By 19, I was working in clubs,” he explained. “I wanted to be an actor but didn’t know how to go about that. I would go swimming at the YMCA, and one night, after a swim, I was walking home. A guy pulled over and said, ‘Do you want to go for a ride?’”
“I thought I’d go around the block a few times, but he started driving quickly and turned into a really bad neighborhood. He said, ‘Lock your door. It’s dangerous.’ I said they kept that out of the papers because it was bad for business on nearby Rush Street, and he said, ‘How do you know that, huh? You’re smart. You’re not like those other kids.’”
“I had never gotten into anyone’s car before, but I had a sense that if he thought I was different from other people he’d picked up, then I should stick with it. He pulled over near the ramp of the Kennedy Expressway and asked if I’d ever done “poppers”—amyl nitrite. He pulled out this brown bottle, splashed some liquid on a rag and jammed it into my face. I passed out, and when I woke up, I was in handcuffs.”
Shortly after, he arrived at Gacy’s now infamous home. “He told me to be quiet,” Merrill recounted. “A light from the back of the house hit him in the eyes and suddenly I realized how dangerous he was.”
“I knew he was crazy, and I knew I couldn’t fight him. And I knew that I couldn’t anger him. And I just had to diffuse the situation, diffuse the situation. Act like everything was okay all the time. Because I grew up doing that. I did it my whole life.”
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Merrill remembers thinking that if he were to fight Macy, he wouldn’t survive. “I didn’t not, not fight him . . . I was 19 years old and I was a scrawny little kid . . . I had learned skills that I was able to put into use so that I didn’t lose.”
Now 65, he remembers the house being “dark” and that he “sensed it was a trap.”
“He asked if I trusted him, and I said I did, so he took off the handcuffs. There was a bar in the middle of the house. We had beer, and he had this strong pot, and then he put the handcuffs back on and dragged me down the hall. He put this homemade contraption around my neck. It had ropes and pulleys, and it went around my back and through my handcuffed hands in a way that if I struggled, I would choke,” he explained.
“I did at one point and started to lose air. He stuck a gun in my mouth. Then he raped me in the bedroom. I knew if I fought him, I didn’t have much of a chance. I never freaked out or yelled. I also felt sorry for him in a way, like he didn’t necessarily want to be doing what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop. We’d been there for hours. Finally, I could tell he was tiring. All of a sudden he said, ‘I’ll take you home.’”
“If this had happened to me and it wasn’t [Gacy], nobody would care. Which is interesting for me to think about. Because there’s a lot of other people that bad things happen to,” he stated. “They’re not interested in me. They’re interested in [Gacy]. And I know that, and that’s fine, but that’s a weird thing about our society.”
Merrill says Gacy dropped him off close to where they’d first met around 5 A.M. “He gave me his phone number and said, ‘Maybe we’ll get together again sometime.’ When I got home, I flushed the number down the toilet, then took a shower. I didn’t call the police—I didn’t know he was a killer at the time.”
Merrill says he initially tried to tell this story years ago, but was discouraged by a movie executive. Merrill remembers that person asking him, “That’s how you want to be remembered?”
That stalled the process of telling his story, but it didn’t kill it.
“One of my big messages with this [one-man]show is that I’m not a victim. Something happened to me. It was one night, and I made a pact with myself at that time that he controlled me for one night, but he would not control my life,” Merrill said. “He was not going to be the identifying factor in my life. . . . This trauma was not going to guide my life.”
