John Wayne Gacy Survivor Jack Merrill: ‘He Controlled Me For One Night But He Did Not Control My Life’ (Exclusive)

“It was just another night,” says Jack Merrill of that warm fall evening in 1978 when he left the YMCA on Chicago’s near North Side. “I was on my way home from a swim. I was 19 years old and living on my own and I was walking past this park, where all these cars pulled around.”

One of the cars belonged to serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who offered Merrill a ride. As Gacy speedily drove to his home on the outskirts of Chicago, he shoved a rag doused with chloroform over Merrill’s face. Sometime 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 Save, at the Electric Lodge theater in Los Angeles. ”I made a pact with myself at the time that he controlled me for one night but he would not control my life,” says the actor, 65.  “It happened 45 years ago, and I think it’s time to tell it.”

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

But Gacy’s calm mood didn’t last. “Then he put the handcuffs back on and dragged me down the hall,” Merrill says. “He put this homemade contraption around my neck, that if I struggled I would choke. He stuck a gun in my mouth and raped me in the bedroom.”

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

He also remembers that at one point, Gacy told him, “You’re not like those other kids.” Says Merrill, “I sensed that it was a good thing 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 his apartment the next morning as the sun came up, he still didn’t know that. It would only happen months later, after he read a newspaper headline in December of 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 that followed the abduction, Merrill told a few close friends about what had happened to him during that night of terror. “It was in the early 80’s,” recalls one of those friends, Ravelle Tomczak. “He said it sort of matter of factly. He told me that he had been chloroformed and woke up in the back seat of his car and he said when Gacy dropped him off, he told him, ‘You’re really a smart kid.’ I remember my knees going out and I grabbed onto the fence and started crying.”

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

Merrill ended up moving to New York on his 21st birthday. He enrolled at New York University to study theater, and in 1986, with a group of friends, he became one of the co-founders of Naked Angels, a downtown theater troupe for actors and playwrights. From there, he would go on to have a variety of roles in theater, TV and film.

Jack Merrill, left, and Willie Garson in an episode of “Sex and the City” that aired in 1998.

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

Writing the show led him to see his early life from a new perspective. “I realized I was saved by the lessons that I learned at home,” he says. “I had learned to lay low during my parents’ rages. Those lessons saved my life. I go with my gut because that’s how I survived as a kid. And that’s how I survived that night with Gacy.”

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

“It relies upon the audience’s imagination to go with the storyteller and in a sense there is a communing that happens with the audience, making it that much more intimate,” says Reilly. “It speaks to the power of the human spirit, not just to ‘survive’ but to thrive. We go where he goes and we root for him in these terrible moments.”

As Merrill says, “Even telling my story, it’s never going to go away. But there are people who have been through worse — and I decided I’m going to have a good life. Doing the show, you’re up on stage in front of people and you are forced to deal with how you’re made. It’s going to 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 be connected to a certified crisis counselor.