'I Had to Save Myself'

AT 19 YEARS OLD, ACTOR JACK MERRILL WAS ABDUCTED BY JOHN WAYNE GACY. NOW, 46 YEARS LATER, HE RECALLS HIS SHOCKING ORDEAL AND HOW HE REFUSED TO LET IT BREAK HIS SPIRIT: 'I WASN'T GOING TO LEAVE MY HAPPINESS IN THAT HOUSE'

- LIZ MCNEIL

Years ago actor Jack Merrill spoke to a Hollywood movie executive about telling the story of the harrowing night in 1978 when he was abducted by serial killer John Wayne Gacy. “That’s how you want to be remembered?” asked the exec. Merrill recalls,“I thought, ‘No, I guess not. That would be tying myself to him.’

For decades Merrill tried to put the attack behind him, only telling his closest friends about how Gacy had put a loaded gun in his mouth during a night of rape and torture at his ranch house on the outskirts of Chicago.

Miraculously Merrill survived. Several months later, on Dec. 21, 1978, Gacy—a contractor who also performed as Pogo the Clown—was arrested and eventually charged with the murder of 33 young men. He was executed by lethal injection in 1994. Now ready to share his account of survival, Merrill, 65, has written a one-man show about his extraordinary life, The Save, at the Electric Lodge theater in Los Angeles. Performing the show is “cathartic,” he says. “I’m proud of my journey.” Here, his story in his own words.

I grew up in a big house in Evanston, Ill., with four older sisters. It was a beautiful home but a very unhappy place. Everything looked good from the outside. My dad, Jerome Holtzman, was a baseball writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, the quintessential cigar-chomping sportswriter. He invented “the Save” statistic, used when a relief pitcher maintains his team’s lead to win the game. He’s in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

My mother had a narcissistic personality. Nothing existed outside of how life affected her. Me and my sisters were walking on eggshells, always getting yelled at. No matter what I did, I was wrong.