When the worst happens, those at the center of the story hope for justice — or, at the very least, to be believed. Unfortunately, the vast, knotty criminal justice system doesn’t always prove so reliable. On March 23, 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, were woken in the dead of night by a home invader. Huskins was kidnapped, and what transpired next in the terrifying tale is the subject of American Nightmare, the new docuseries from The Tinder Swindler filmmakers Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins.
“A lot of crime stories are very linear and obvious from the start. What was really intriguing about this story was the fact that every time you think you know what’s happened, there’s another twist, Higgins told Netflix. “Everyone thinks they know the ending from the start. In this story, few people would’ve ever predicted that the truth was indeed the truth.”
The story of Huskins’ disappearance invited national media scrutiny, with many comparing it to Gone Girl, the hit 2014 film adapted from Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel. Law enforcement claimed the young couple’s recounting of the events was too far-fetched for anyone to believe. Incorporating a mix of interrogation footage and new interviews, the three-part docuseries unravels the consequences of our cultural rush to judgement — and what happens when law enforcement decides to focus on their version of the truth, even if it couldn’t be further from reality.
Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins were both physical therapists at the same local hospital.
Huskins and Quinn met in 2014, in the Bay Area city of Vallejo, CA, while working as physical therapists at a local hospital. On March 23, 2015, the couple were startled around 3 a.m. by a flashing white light, red laser dots, and what seemed to be a group of intruders wearing wet suits.
“Wake up, this is a robbery,” a man said. He then zip-tied the couple, put duct tape-covered goggles over their eyes, and applied headphones playing pre-recorded messages that told them they’d be given sedatives, which would be forcibly injected if they refused the drugs. The intruder told Huskins, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take you for 48 hours.” He put her in the trunk of Quinn’s car and drove away. Huskins reappeared just over 48 hours later, 400 miles away in Huntington Beach, CA, near her father’s house. She appeared unharmed, though she later revealed that she had been raped twice by her kidnapper.
Unfortunately, Huskins’ experience was only the first of multiple traumas the two would endure. The details of the incident, which sound like something out of a thriller, are so nightmarish that many people initially struggled to believe that it had really happened.
Aaron Quinn recalls his experience.
Flynn’s bestselling novel tracks the disappearance of a disenchanted small-town wife who, in a twist, reveals that she staged her own kidnapping in an act of domestic vengeance. The hit Gone Girl movie adaptation was released just a year prior to the break-in, and headlines quickly seized on the general similarity between its scarcely believable kidnapping plot and the harrowing details of Huskins’ ordeal. While Huskins was missing, Quinn was subjected to hours of intense interrogation from Vallejo detectives and FBI agents attempting to extract a confession of his involvement. When Huskins returned, police accused both of them of coordinating an elaborate kidnapping hoax.
Dubling police eventually arrested Matthew Muller.
Subsequent developments confirmed all the most unfathomable details of their story, but not before the two were put through the wringer by the Vallejo police, who refused to believe their account.
“It didn’t make any sense to have law enforcement — the people who have the power to investigate and to help — just turn against you. It made it that much more frightening,” Huskins told Tudum (nine years later, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn are still together and have many thoughts about what they went through). “It was just layers upon layers, and then finding out what evidence they had at the time that they did not use, they could have saved me. There was just so many layers of betrayal and injustice.”
After the Vallejo Police Department held a press conference in which they accused the two of wasting government resources, Huskins and Quinn were vindicated by an unexpected source. Sergeant Misty Carausu, then a police detective in Dublin, CA, had arrested Matthew Muller, an ex-Marine following an attempted kidnapping in her jurisdiction. Carausu noticed Muller’s M.O. was similar to details in the Vallejo case. When she examined the South Lake Tahoe cabin where Muller was living at the time, she found, among other creepy items, a toy gun with an attached laser pointer and duct-taped goggles. A long blonde strand of hair hung from one of the pairs of goggles, further convincing Carausu that Muller was responsible for Huskins’s kidnapping.
Muller was eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison for kidnapping, robbery, and rape in connection with the Vallejo invasion. Huskins maintains that Muller could not have acted alone, though so far he’s the only person who’s been charged. Yet Huskins still feels the sting of being a sexual assault victim who was further victimized by unbelieving police. American Nightmare gets to the heart of the disturbing burden for women in such cases. “I don’t know what needs to happen to me, what needs to happen to any woman,” Huskins says in the docuseries, “for them to be believed.”
After the case was solved, then-Vallejo Police Chief Andrew Bidou wrote a letter apologizing to Huskins and Quinn, and stating that the department’s “conclusions were incorrect.” Otherwise, the Vallejo PD offered radio silence for six years, finally releasing a public apology when contacted for a television news story. After suing the city of Vallejo for defamation, the couple ultimately received $2.5 million in an out-of-court settlement.
Watch American Nightmare on Netflix now.
