After nearly 50 years, actor Jack Merrill is speaking out about his experience with one of America’s most notorious serial killers. In a new essay in People, the actor—known for stints on Law & Order, Sex and the City, Revenge, Hannah Montana and more—wrote about the night he was kidnapped and raped by serial killer John Wayne Gacy in 1978. The harrowing ordeal is the subject of his new one-man show called The Save, which he’s performing in Los Angeles.
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According to the essay, Merrill was 19 and living in Chicago while working in clubs. Gacy approached him after a night of swimming at the YMCA and asked if he wanted to go for a ride. Hopping into somebody’s car was a new adventure for Merrill, so he agreed, only to soon get knocked out with amyl nitrate. He woke up in handcuffs, and soon was dragged into Gacy’s house and hooked up to a “contraption” that kept him from trying to escape the handcuffs. Gacy then raped him for hours before suddenly deciding to take Merrill home.
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Merrill recalls purposely not yelling or fighting back, and believes that instinct saved his life. He had no idea how truly dangerous Gacy was until he saw his house on the news a few months later as 26 bodies were recovered from Gacy’s crawl space.
Gacy was arrested in December 1978, and is known to have committed at least 33 murders of young men and boys between 1972 and 1978. He was known as the” Killer Clown” due to his years performing as the clowns Pogo and Patches, and was given the death penalty, which was carried out in 1994.
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Merrill sees himself as “lucky,” and while he’s been happily married to his husband now for 23 years and is now ready to talk about his traumatic experience every night on stage, he still doesn’t love to see people tied up in a movie, or to go on a Haunted Hayride where clowns chase people with axes and knives under a banner that says “Gacy’s Day Parade.”
“It’s that fright factor,” he writes. “People love it, but I don’t find violence fun. I won’t go to those movies. The idea of watching someone being tied up…I can’t.”
The Save is now running at the Electric Lodge in Venice, California.
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