Law & Order actor Jack Merrill reveals how he was abducted, sexually abused by serial killer John Wayne Gacy: Do you want to go for a ride?

A veteran actor who has appeared in “Law & Order” and “Grey’s Anatomy” revealed Wednesday that he was abducted, raped, and held at gunpoint by notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy more than 45 years ago.Jack Merrill described himself as a “puny 19-year-old” in 1978 when “the Killer Clown” pulled his car up to the teen as he walked home from a swim at a YMCA in Chicago.“Do you want to go for a ride?” Merrill recalled being asked in an essay published by People.Merrill, who had been living alone in a studio apartment since he was 17, jumped into the stranger’s car before being told “You’re smart.

You’re not like those other kids.”Merrill believed the ride would be around the block, but Gacy drove quickly to a different neighborhood where he told him to lock the door, before pulling over near the ramp of the Kennedy Expressway, northwest of downtown Chicago.The then 36-year-old Gacy asked Merrill if he’d ever done “poppers,” alkyl nitrite, as he took out a brown bottle, splashing liquid onto a rag and shoving it into the teen’s face.Merrill, who had a boyfriend at the time, said he passed out only to wak up and find himself handcuffed outside Gacy’s Northwood Park Township home, 4 miles east of Chicago O’Hare International Airport.“He told me to be quiet.A light from the back of the house hit him in the eyes and suddenly I realized how dangerous he was,” Merrill wrote.

“I knew I couldn’t anger him.I just had to diffuse the situation and act like everything was okay.”Merrill said this method of de-escalation was the same one he and his sisters used to ward off the wrath of their parents.“That’s the way I had survived as a kid—we learned to lie low during my parents’ rages,” Merrill recalled.Merrill said his mom had a narcissistic personality, with “nothing existing outside of how life affected her.”His father was Jerome Holtzman, the legendary MLB historian and National Baseball Hall of Famer,...