Serial killer John Wayne Gacy kidnapped Jack Merrill for a night but did not control his life

“It was just another night,” Jack Merrill says of that warm fall afternoon in 1978 when he left the YMCA on Chicago’s near north side. “I was on my way home from swimming. “I was 19 years old and I lived alone and I was passing by this park, where all these cars stopped.”

One of the cars belonged to serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who offered Merrill a ride. As Gacy drove quickly to his home outside Chicago, he shoved a chloroform-soaked rag over Merrill’s face. Some time later, “I woke up in handcuffs,” Merrill recalls.

It’s a story Merrill tells for the first time in his new one-man show about his extraordinary life. The savingsin Electric Lodge Theater in Los Angeles. “I made a pact with myself at the time: he would control me for one night, but he wouldn’t control my life,” says the 65-year-old actor. “It happened 45 years ago and I think it’s time to tell it.”

As Merrill recounts on his show (and in an exclusive interview in this week’s PEOPLE magazine, on newsstands now), once he was at Gacy’s house, he was offered marijuana and beer. “He asked me if I trusted him and I said yes,” Merrill says. “He took off his handcuffs.”

But Gacy’s calm mood did not last. “Then he put the handcuffs back on me and dragged me down the hallway,” Merrill says. “He put this homemade contraption around my neck, which if I struggled would suffocate me. “He put a gun in my mouth and raped me in the bedroom.”

Looking back, he says, “I thought the only way to get through it was to stay calm and accept whatever psychotic behavior I was displaying.”

He also remembers that at one point Gacy told him: “You’re not like those other kids.” Merrill says, “I felt like it was good that he thought I was different. But I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t know then that he was a serial killer.”

When Gacy miraculously dropped Merrill off near her apartment the next morning as the sun rose, she still didn’t know it. It would only happen months later, after he read a newspaper headline in December 1978 about Gacy, a local contractor who also performed as Pogo the Clown at community events, being arrested in the Chicago suburbs.

“It was about three months later, and that meant I was one of the last ones,” he says.

Gacy was eventually charged with the murder of 33 young men, 26 of whose remains were found buried on his property. He was executed by lethal injection on May 19, 1994.

In the years following the kidnapping, Merrill told close friends what had happened to her during that night of terror. “It was in the early ’80s,” recalls one of those friends, Ravelle Tomczak. “He said it quite naturally. He told me that he had been chloroformed and that he woke up in the back seat of his car and said that when Gacy dropped him off, he told him, ‘You’re a really smart kid.’ “I remember my knees buckled, I grabbed the fence and started crying.”

“It still surprises me,” Tomczak says. “When you go through something like that, you realize how precious life is.”

Merrill ended up moving to New York when she turned 21. He enrolled at New York University to study theater and, in 1986, with a group of friends, became one of the co-founders of Naked Angels, a theater group for inner-city actors and playwrights. From there, he would play various roles in theater, television and film.

His new one-man show “is also about trauma and family trauma,” says Merrill, son of famed baseball journalist Jerome Holtzman, who invented the “save” statistic in baseball, and his wife, Marilyn. “It was a privileged fund that looked very good from the outside. My mother had a narcissistic personality. There was nothing outside of how it affected her.”

Writing the show led him to see his early life from a new perspective. “I realized that the lessons I learned at home saved me,” he says. “I had learned to go unnoticed during my parents’ anger. Those lessons saved my life. I follow my instinct because that’s how I survived as a child. And that’s how I survived that night with Gacy.”

Mike Reilly, director of saving, He says the show is “unique,” ​​in part, “because of the subject matter and Jack’s personal resilience in the face of the horror he experienced. “Persevere in the face of unimaginable tragedy.”

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“It depends on the imagination of the audience to follow the narrator and, in a sense, there is a communion with the audience, which makes it much more intimate,” Reilly says. “It speaks to the power of the human spirit, not just to ‘survive’ but to thrive. “We go where he goes and support him in these terrible times.”

As Merrill says: “Even if I tell my story, it will never go away. But there are people who have been through worse things and I decided that I am going to have a good life. When doing the show, you’re on stage in front of people and you’re forced to deal with how you’re made. It will be a fascinating journey. And I’m ready for it.”

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to connect with a certified crisis counselor.