The chilling spectre of serial killer John Wayne Gacy still casts a dark shadow 30 years after the killer clown caught the night train to Nowheresville.
Now, veteran actor Jack Merrill — who has appeared on Law & Order and Grey’s Anatomy — has broken his decades-long silence to detail his horrific ordeal at the hands of Gacy.
Merrill — describing himself as a “puny 19-year-old” — met Gacy in 1978 as his homicidal rampage was concluding. Gacy pulled alongside Merrill and asked if he wanted a ride.
“Do you want to go for a ride?” Merrill recalled Gacy saying in an essay in People, adding, “You’re smart. You’re not like those other kids.”
Merill lived in a studio apartment a block away, but Gacy drove to another neighbourhood. There, he told Merrill to lock the door before pulling off near Chicago’s Kennedy Expressway and asking if he’d ever done “poppers.”
The killer clown — who murdered at least 33 young boys and men — then shoved a dope-soaked rag into Merrill’s face. The aspiring actor passed out.
When Merrill awoke, he was handcuffed outside Gacy’s suburban Des Plaines bungalow.
“He told me to be quiet. A light from the back of the house hit him in the eyes and suddenly I realized how dangerous he was,” Merrill wrote. “I knew I couldn’t anger him. I just had to defuse the situation and act like everything was okay.”
Inside, Gacy undid the handcuffs and asked Merrill if he trusted him. The two drank beer and smoked pot.
Suddenly, Gacy re-handcuffed his victim dragging him down the hall and putting a device around his neck. The device was “fitted with ropes and pulleys” and went around his back and through the handcuffs.
If Merrill struggled, he would be choked to death. Before raping the teen, the killer clown shoved a gun in Merrill’s mouth.
“I knew if I fought him, I didn’t have much of a chance. I never freaked out or yelled,” Merrill said, writing he felt sorry for his abductor, “in a way,” because it was “like he didn’t necessarily want to be doing what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop.”
Then, an exhausted Gacy told Merrill he would take him home. And he did.
Gacy gave the teen his name and number and told him: “Maybe we’ll get together again sometime.”
Merrill ditched the piece of paper and never called the cops.
“I didn’t call the police — I didn’t know he was a killer at the time,” he said. “I made a pact with myself that I was going to get past this. I wasn’t going to leave my happiness in that house.”
When Gacy was finally arrested in December 1978 and his house of horrors laid bare, Merrill called the Chicago Sun-Times but then hung up because his father was famed sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, who worked at the paper.
The killer clown was eventually convicted of raping, torturing and murdering at least 33 males between the ages of 14 and 21. Cops found 26 bodies buried in the crawl space under Gacy’s house.
Five of the victims remain unidentified.
On May 10, 1994, Gacy got the big adios via lethal injection at the Stateville Correctional Facility.
“There’s a lot of people who have had bad things happen to them. Many people who have been raped don’t talk about it. I understand that,” Merrill wrote.
“Until now, I’ve only told close friends. But doing my new show, I walk through it every night. I’m proud of the journey.”