Hollywood actor Jack Merrill has revealed he was kidnapped and raped by serial killer John Wayne Gacy in 1978.
Merrill, now 65 – whose screen credits include The O.C. Hannah Montana and Games People Play – escaped with his life aged 19 after Gacy restrained him with ropes, stuck a gun in his mouth and raped him – just months before the fiend would be arrested.
Gacy – known as the Killer Clown due to performing as Pogo the Clown at charitable functions – brutally murdered 33 young men and boys between 1972-1978. Five victims remain unidentified to this day.
He raped, tortured and strangled his male victims before disposing of them in the crawl space beneath his house. Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994 aged 52.
Aspiring actor Merrill moved out of his Evanston, Illinois home at 17 after getting into a ‘fistfight’ with his father on Christmas Eve, living in a studio apartment overlooking Chicago’s Rush Street, which led to his encounter with Gacy.
Merrill – who was working in clubs at the time – writes how he was walking home from a swim at the YMCA in downtown Chicago when Gacy – then 36 – pulled over and asked if he wanted a ride, per People.
Hollywood actor Jack Merrill has revealed he was kidnapped and raped by serial killer John Wayne Gacy (pictured) in 1978
Merrill, now 65, escaped with his life aged 19 after Gacy restrained him with ropes, stuck a gun in his mouth and raped him – just months before the fiend would be arrested – Merrill pictured aged 21 two years after the assault
He said: ‘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.”
Merrill said he was flattered by Gacy’s comment and joined him in the car – but Gacy soon pulled over and asked if he’d ever ‘done poppers’ – amyl nitrate.
Amyl nitrate gives users a short head-rush and creates a euphoric feeling, while relaxing involuntary muscles such as the throat or anus.
Merrill said Gacy pulled out a bottle, ‘splashed some liquid on a rag and jammed it into my face’ which led him to pass out. When he woke up, he was in handcuffs.
Gacy drove Merrill to his house where the terrified teenager then realized just ‘how dangerous’ Gacy was.
Merrill said due to his upbringing by a ‘narcissistic’ mother and his parents’ rages, he learned to ‘lie low’ during turmoil.
He said: ‘I was a puny 19-year-old. I knew I couldn’t anger him. I just had to diffuse the situation and act like everything was okay.’
Gacy asked Merrill if he ‘trusted him’ and when Merrill agreed, took off the handcuffs.
Merrill – seen in Games People Play – is revealing his assault by Gacy for the first time. He was driven to Gacy’s home, tortured and raped before the killer let him go
Gacy seemed to be a cornerstone of his suburban Chicago community. He regularly performed as his alter-ego named ‘Pogo the clown’ at charitable functions’
Once Gacy got his victim back at his house, his modus operandi was to ply him with drink and drugs to gain his trust. He would then produce a pair of handcuffs to ‘show a magic trick – 2022 Netflix series Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes chronicled his killing spree
He took him inside the house and they drank beer and smoked strong pot’ – before Gacy once again handcuffed Merrill and dragged him down the hall.
Merrill writes: ‘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. 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.”
Gacy dropped him close to where he had picked him up around 5am. He gave Merrill his number and said ‘Maybe we’ll get together again sometime.’
Merrill flushed the number down the toilet and showered. He did not call the police and ‘made a pact with myself that I was going to get past this. I wasn’t going to leave my happiness in that house.’
Merrill was first alerted to Gacy’s arrest when he saw a headline in the Chicago Sun-Times: Bodies Found at Suburban Site – which had a map showing the Cumberland exit on the Kennedy Expressway – the same place Gacy had taken him.
He called the paper and told shocked staff ‘that guy raped me’ but when he was asked for his name, hung up due to fear his father – who was a sports writer at the publication – would find out.
Seeing ‘repulsive’ Gacy’s photo in the paper left Merrill traumatized and he moved to New York on his 21st birthday and enrolled at NYU.
Acting as part of his off-Broadway troupe Naked Angels became ‘therapeutic’ for him, with Merrill – then going by Merrill Holtzman – saying: ‘You’re forced to express yourself’. He only told his closest friends what had happened to him.
He recalled speaking to a Hollywood movie executive about telling the story of his abduction but was asked: ‘That’s how you want to be remembered?’ with Merrill saying: ‘I thought, ‘No, I guess not. That would be tying myself to him.’
He recalled speaking to a Hollywood movie executive about telling the story of his abduction but was asked: ‘That’s how you want to be remembered?’ with Merrill saying: ‘I thought, ‘No, I guess not. That would be tying myself to him.’
However after reading about Oprah doing a show on victims of rape forgiving their attackers – he realized he needed to ‘forgive’ Gacy to move on with his life.
He also forgave his parents and said the lessons ‘I learned at home saved my life that night.’
Merrill is sharing his extraordinary tale in his one-man show – The Save – performed at the Electric Lodge theater in Los Angeles from October 25 – which he says is ‘cathartic’ for him after decades spent dealing with the assault.
Merrill has been with his husband for 23 years and said he now has found true happiness in his relationship and caring for his pet dog and cat.
Gacy is one of the most infamous serial killers in history. Authorities found 26 sets of remains under Gacy’s home in 1978. Eight unidentified bodies were exhumed for identification in 2011, and five remain unnamed.
Depraved Gacy was previously known as a cornerstone of his community and performed at children’s hospitals and charitable events as Pogo the Clown or Patches the Clown.
Shown are headshots of boys and young men whose bodies have been definitely identified as the victims of Gacy. To this day, five victims remain unidentified
The serial killer was born in Chicago and was married to Marlynn Myers, with whom he had two children, from 1964 to 1969.
The couple moved to Iowa, where Gacy agreed to manage Myers’ father’s KFC franchises.
Myers filed for divorce after Gacy was sentenced to 10 years in prison for oral sodomy against a 15-year-old boy, though he only served 18 months of his sentence.
He established a contracting company called PDM Contractors in 1970. The business would later lead Gacy to his final victim, a 15-year-old employee at a pharmacy that PDM had remodeled.
Gacy had led the teenager to his house by promising him a job.
His mother reported him missing that night, and Des Plaines police Lt. Joe Kozenczak discovered that Gacy was the last one to see him alive, according to the Chicago Tribune.
He was questioned by police and released.
Gacy was arrested 10 days after Piest’s murder, when police saw him handing marijuana to a gas station clerk, with the scale of his more serious crimes subsequently unfolding.
He was married to Carole Hoff, whom he had dated in high school, from 1972 to 1976.
He was politically active and was named the precinct captain for Norwood Park Township.
He supervised Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day Parade starting in 1975. He met, and took a picture with, then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter through the job in 1978, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Gacy tortured and raped 26-year-old Jeffrey Rignall in 1978, but Rignall managed to get away.
Rignall vomited and was led away from the stand ‘in near hysterics’ while testifying at Gacy’s trial a couple years later, according to an Associated Press report published in the Gadsden Times in February 1980, which referred to Rignall as a ‘self avowed bisexual.’
Gacy is pictured on his wedding day with his second wife Carole Hoff in 1972. To those around them, ‘John and Carole seemed to be a perfectly normal couple.’ Hoff later claimed that Gacy had a ‘disfunction’ with women and said ‘we hardly had any sex.’ Their marriage deteriorated further as Gacy spent all hours of the night cruising for men
Investigators excavated 29 bodies that were badly decomposed underneath Gacy’s ranch style home after spelling the stench of death
Active in local politics, he met then-First Lady Rosalynn Carter in 1978 as head of Chicago’s annual Polish Constitution Day Parade
‘I was hit in the face by a dish cloth or a rag … it had a cold feeling and I had a buzzing bee in my head and I went unconscious,’ Rignall said, adding that he’d needed daily psychiatric treatment since the incident.
He was orally and anally raped and left by a statue in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, Rignall recounted in his book 29 Below.
The depravity of Gacy’s crimes shocked the nation, and he was executed at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois in 1994 after spending more than a decade on death row.
2022 Netflix series Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes chronicled his killing spree.
