Law & Order‘s Jack Merrill has detailed a terrifying ordeal with John Wayne Gacy. Gacy, who became known as The Killer Clown, was a serial killer who raped and murdered at least 33 young men throughout the 1970s. In 1978, Merrill accepted a ride from Gacy, who drugged and raped the then 19-year-old. Gacy would typically lure his victims by promising them work or money, before torturing them, raping and murdering them. He would dispose of bodies in a nearby river or his home’s crawl space (where police discovered 26 bodies). Merrill’s encounter with the notorious killer took place in 1978, the same year he was apprehended by police. In a PEOPLE article, Merill recounts the incident in his own words.
Merrill’s piece begins with an anecdote about his upbringing. According to Merrill, he lived in “a beautiful home but a very unhappy place.” His mother had “a narcissistic personality” and he and his four sisters “were walking on eggshells, always getting yelled at.” Merrill left his Evanstown, Ill. home when he was 17 after a fistfight with his father and relocated to Chicago.
When he was 19, after a night swim at the local YMCA, Merrill was approached by a guy who asked him if he wanted a ride. Merrill took the ride, not aware that the driver was the dangerous Gacy:
“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. I saw the exit for Cumberland on the expressway, near the airport, and the next thing I knew, we were outside his house,” Merrill writes.
Merrill, who describes himself as a “puny 19-year-old,” decided to act like everything was OK so he wouldn’t anger him. He notes that the instinct came from his childhood experiences:
“That’s the way I had survived as a kid—we learned to lie low during my parents’ rages.”
Jack Merrill Details Horror Inside John Wayne Gacy’s Home
Once inside the home, Gacy removed Merrill’s handcuffs, and the two drank beer and smoked pot. Gacy eventually put the handcuffs back on Merrill and proceeded to rape him. Describing the incident, 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.”
Merrill recalls feeling sorry for Gacy during the incident, as he felt that Gacy “didn’t necessarily want to be doing what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop.” After the harrowing incident, which transpired over several hours, Gacy told Merrill he would take him home. And he did. Gacy dropped Merrill off, and gave him his phone number in hopes the two would get together again.
“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. I went to the Snowflake Diner and had scrambled eggs and a chocolate milkshake. 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. “
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The Killer Clown was apprehended that December and sentenced to death on March 13, 1980. On May 10, 1994, he was executed by lethal injection. He has been the subject of several documentaries, films, and specials, including this year’s critically panned Gacy: Serial Killer Next Door and the upcoming Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy. Merrill, who has had minor roles in series like Games People Play, Revenge, and Hannah Montana, has written the one-man The Save, which he performs at Los Angeles’ Electric Lodge.