Veteran Actor Jack Merrill Recounts Being Abducted & Sexually Assaulted As A Teen By Serial Killer John Wayne Gacy

deadline.com:

Hollywood is seemingly obsessed with serial killer stories, and one veteran actor is now relating his own, all-too real encounter with John Wayne Gacy.

Jack Merrill, whose decades-long career includes parts in Eight Men Out, Law & Order, Sex and the City, Grey’s Anatomy, Numb3rs and Hannah Montana, wrote this week about surviving abduction and rape at the hands of Gacy, a serial killer who sometimes dressed as a clown and who authorities say sexually assaulted and murdered at least 33 young men and boys.

Merrill says his assault happened in 1978, when he was 19. “One night,” he writes for People, “I was walking home. A guy pulled over and said, ‘Do you want to go for a ride?'” Merrill recalls that he accepted, only to be drugged and dragged to Gacy’s home. “He put this homemade contraption around my neck,” writes the actor. “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.” Merrill says that Gacy “stuck a gun in my mouth” before raping him. “Finally, I could tell he was tiring.

All of a sudden he said, ‘I’ll take you home,'” writes Merrill, who at one point recalls his abductor telling him, “You’re not like those other kids.” Whatever the case, “He dropped me off not far from where he’d picked me up.