Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn were dating each other in 2015. Denise was 29 and Aaron was 30. They had met the year previous. They were living in Vallejo, California and they were working as physical therapists. Denise had moved to the area from Huntington Beach around a year prior.
Just to note as it shows up in online articles about this case, in 2005, Denise pleaded guilty in Orange County to misdemeanor driving with a blood-alcohol content over the legal limit. Her sentence included three years’ probation and a first offenders’ alcohol program, online court records show.
Denise obtained a physical therapist’s license in Massachusetts after studying at Long Island University in Brooklyn, according state online records.
Before he started dating Denise, Aaron had been engaged to Andrea Roberts.
In February 2015, Denise found out that Aaron had been contacting Andrea and they had been discussing getting back together. Denise was understandably uncertain about whether to continue the relationship. She agreed to meet with Aaron at his home on March 22, 2015 to discuss their relationship.
“I was very conflicted because I obviously was attracted to Denise,” Aaron said. But he had just gotten out of a relationship with a fiancée who he said cheated on him. “I also didn’t trust myself anymore.”
“I could see who Aaron was and the man he was and the good in him,” Denise said. “I knew that he’d be a great partner but I could see that he was struggling.”
“I finally just put my foot down and said, ‘Look, I don’t deserve this.’ And it was a couple of weeks of kind of going back and forth,” Denise said.
“I brought pizza and we sat on the couch most of the night and talked,” she said. “We talked about how it would be difficult; we had to rebuild trust. But as long as he was willing to really give this a full shot, then we could try again.”
We guess that Denise ended up staying the night at Aaron’s place and the couple went to sleep.
Aaron said that at around 2am on March 23, 105, he woke to a bright light shining in his eyes, a noise that was similar to a “stun gun” and the voice of man who demanded he and Denise lie face down on the bed.
The attacker ordered that Denise and Aaron lay still.
“I remember being asleep and hearing a voice and thinking it was a dream. … But the voice kept talking and I just remember my eyes shot open and I could see the walls illuminated with a white light that was flashing and I could see a couple of red laser dots crossing the wall, and I could hear, ‘Wake up, this is a robbery. We’re not here to hurt you,'” Denise said. “And in that moment, I just thought, ‘Oh my God. This is not a dream.'”
Denise and Aaron were bound with zip ties and were blindfolded with swimming goggles that had been blacked out with duct tape.
The couple also had headphones put on them and they heard a prerecorded message.
“There were these pre-recorded messages,” Denise said, referring to what they heard through the headphones. “They were going to give us a sedative and … if we didn’t take it, they would inject it intravenously.”
The message also said that they would be punished with face cutting or electric shocks for not obeying his commands.
“There were these pre-recorded messages,” Denise said, referring to what they heard through the headphones. “They were going to give us a sedative and … if we didn’t take it, they would inject it intravenously.”
Aaron said his pre-recorded message referred to him by name. In that moment, he said he thought to himself, “We’re in a lot of trouble and this is planned.”
At one point in the attack, the intruder seemed to realize that something had gone wrong.
“He’s being asked questions … and at some point, the intruder realizes they’ve got the wrong person,” said Melanie Woodrow, an investigative reporter with San Francisco ABC station KGO, who covered the story. “The intruder says, ‘We have a problem’ … and he says to Aaron, ‘Do Denise and your ex-fiancée look-alike?'”
“I was like, ‘Yes, they both have long, blonde hair,'” Aaron said. “And so, he said, ‘We got the wrong intel.'”
“He said, ‘This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take you for 48 hours … Aaron’s going to have to complete some tasks,'” Denise said.
Aaron was moved downstairs, where he was placed on a couch and told that a camera on the wall would be watching him and that he couldn’t leave a perimeter marked by tape on the floor. The man then used duct tape to tie Aaron’s ankles and asked him if he was comfortable.
“I asked for a blanket, and he goes, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how cold it is because we’re all wearing wetsuits.'”
The attacker told Aaron they were going to communicate with him via text and email, and that they’d even created an email address for the correspondences. Aaron said he was told to call out sick at his job and to text Denise’s boss that she had a family emergency and would be out for a week. He was also told he would have to withdraw money from his bank and that he’d have a camera monitoring his moves.
“If I went to the police, they would kill her,” he said.
Denise was then taken by the abductor and placed into the trunk of a vehicle.
Aaron has said that he passed out at around 5am and woke up a few hours later. Due to being sedated, he only had enough energy to call out sick for Denise and himself. He then passed out again until 11.30am.
He woke up to new emails and texts from the intruder. They demanded two payments of $8,500, he said. He responded to the kidnapper’s message but when he didn’t hear back, he began to panic.
Concerned that the camera the intruders installed was still monitoring him, he believed he could not call 911. Aaron’s older brother is an FBI agent, so he decided he would call him instead, but his brother instructed him to immediately call 911.
When officers from the Vallejo Police Department appeared at his home, it had been more than nine hours since Denise had been kidnapped. Aaron said the first question the police asked him when he answered the door was, “Are you on drugs?”
“I said, ‘Yes, the kidnappers drugged me,'” he said.
The police started looking around Aaron’s home. “He starts asking if I’d been partying. I tell him no. He points to some beer bottles that were neatly placed in the box next to the garbage, and I said, ‘I put them there to take them out for recycling all at once.'”
Aaron was taken to the police station for questioning. In video recordings of the interview, detective Mathew Mustard could be heard asking if there was “tension in the relationship” and if Aaron was “cheating.” Aaron said he realized the interview was taking a turn when, about 45 minutes into it, Detective Mustard leaned back in the chair and told him, “I don’t think you’re being truthful, and I don’t think anybody came into your house.”
Det Mustard can be heard telling Aaron in the videotaped interrogation he “the story you’re telling here, I ain’t buying at all.”
“I’m telling [Mustard] everything because I have nothing to hide,” Aaron
To make matters worse, the detectives had also found a small bloodstain on Aaron’s sheets.
“I knew there was an old stain on my sheet,” he said. “I’d washed those sheets multiple times. It’s just a small stain that I wasn’t able to get out. Little did I know, a quarter-sized bloodstain was going to mean that I was a murderer.”
“They said maybe we were in a fight and I pushed her down the stairs,” Aaron said. “Maybe we were experimenting with drugs. … Maybe we were into weird sex things and something went wrong.”
Aaron took a polygraph at the time and was told that he failed it. Aaron said he began to doubt his own sanity. “I thought maybe I did have a schizophrenic breakdown,” he said.
Police held a press conference on March 24, 2015.
Authorities suggested that Denise was kidnapped for ransom and asked for help in her search. Lt. Kenny Park with the department said they were doing everything they could to locate Denise.
Search teams focused on Mare Island, California and the surrounding area. Crews were using sonar along the Mare Island waterfront to help in the search. More than 100 trained search personnel spent the day near Mare Island because of its proximity to where Denise went missing, but investigators said there was no specific tip leading them to the area.
In reality, Denise had been taken to a property in South Lake Tahoe – around 3-3.5 hours drive away from Vallejo.
In the documentary, Denise speaks about two instances of sexual assault that she suffered at the hands of her attacker. He blackmailed her and made her act like the attack was consensual. The attacker told Denise that he was filming both times and that he would use the footage against her if she went to police.
On March 24, the San Francisco Chronicle received an email from an anonymous person claiming to be holding Denise Huskins. It included an audio file of a woman identifying herself as Denise Huskins, who mentioned Tuesday’s airliner crash in the French Alps to verify she was alive. Her father confirmed the voice in the file was his daughter’s, the Chronicle reported.
After the paper got this file, Aaron was given back his phone by police. A member of Aaron’s legal team noted that the phone had been put into airplane mode. When they turned airplane mode off, the phone flooded with messages. It was later discovered that the kidnapper had called the phone three times.
On March 25 2015, the kidnapper put Denise back into the trunk of a vehicle and drove her almost 500 miles to Huntington Beach, California.
The kidnapper let Denise out of the vehicle and he drove off. “I heard him drive off. I slowly counted to 10. I peeled the tape off my eyes and I was by myself in this alleyway,” she said. The kidnapper, who had taken Denise’s bags when he abducted her, had removed them from the car and placed them on the ground. “I grabbed my bags and started walking down that alley … and I looked at the corner street name and I saw Utica, which is the street that I grew up on.”
Denise realized that she’d been dropped off near her mother’s house, but when she arrived at her house, no one was there. She borrowed a cellphone from a stranger and called her father, who did not answer. After leaving a voicemail with him, she began walking to her father’s home. She said a neighbor allowed her into the house. While she waited, her father said he heard the voicemail and got word to the Huntington Beach Police Department.
Huntington Beach police officers arrived at the neighbor’s apartment where Denise was waiting and began questioning her, who recounted everything that had happened two nights earlier, including the events that unfolded after she was taken from Aaron’s home. When police asked if she’d been sexually assaulted, she told them she hadn’t. She later explained she feared that the kidnapper had threatened her and her family if she revealed two specific details: that anyone involved in the abduction was in the military or that she had been raped.
“I had no reason to believe, at that time, that they doubted me,” she said. “I was just more so afraid … that speaking to them was going to put me or my family in harm[‘s way].”
Although Denise’s parents were both in Vallejo assisting police, they contacted family back in Huntington Beach to go be with her. Eventually, a cousin, who had recently passed the bar exam and had become an attorney, insisted he be allowed to see her.
According to Denise, Det Mustard told her cousin Nick, “We’ll give immunity to whoever confesses first’ to making this whole thing up.”
On the same day that Denise was freed, Vallejo police spokesperson Lt. Kenny Park hosted a press conference where he suggested that Aaron and Denise had lied about the whole ordeal.
“Mr. Quinn and Ms. Huskins have plundered valuable resources away from our community and taken the focus away from the true victims of our community while instilling fear among our community members. So, if anything, it is Mr. Quinn and Ms. Huskins that owe this community an apology,” Park said during the press conference.
Denise hired criminal attorney, Doug Rappaport. “I shared with him about being molested as a child and thinking, too, maybe if he found out and heard how I already had been violated, and how it impacted me in my life, that perhaps some bit of him will just go, ‘OK, I won’t do this to her again. I’m not going to,'” she said.
Denise told Doug that her abductor told her that he was part of a criminal organization that included three other members. Each individual was in charge of a different part of the operation. She said her captor told her he was being instructed to make the recording as a form of collateral over Denise. Once she was released, if she attempted to go to the police, she said the kidnapper told her the group would release the recording on the internet.
Denise’s attorney asked Vallejo police to conduct a rape kit. He has said they delayed doing so. “I said, ‘We have evidence that’s going to dissipate … And they said the most callous thing I think I’ve ever heard somebody say from law enforcement,” Doug said. “They said, ‘Well, just have her sleep in her clothes and don’t take a shower and we’ll talk in the morning.'”
Denise spoke about surviving the ordeal. “You go through something like that, and every moment, every ounce of energy is about ‘How do I live to see another second?’ That is all you can think about,” she said. “The last thing that you’re thinking about is, ‘If I do survive, I need to make sure that I’m believable.'”
The kidnapper seemed to become irritated that police believed it had all been a hoax. On March 26, 2015, the San Francisco Chronicle got a new anonymous message. It contained explicit details about the kidnapping as well as photos of evidence, even showing the room where Denise had been held captive.
By this point, Aaron and Denise had not been able to be reunited.
“I just wanted to hold her. I just wanted to tell her I was sorry,” said Aaron. “I was really afraid that she wouldn’t want to see me … that she would just want to wipe her hands clean.”
The two would finally meet back up almost a week after the abduction.
Nothing seemed to happen in the case for months. Aaron and Denise lived in a state of fear. Aaron thought he might have been close to losing his job.
The break in the case came in June 2015. Police responded to a home in Dublin, California on June 5. The attacker tried to tie up a couple in the home. “When he attempts to tie up the wife, the husband jumps across the bed and tackles the suspect. … The suspect tries to get away. He, in turn, hits the husband upside the head with a Maglite-style flashlight and exits the house,” said Dublin police Sgt. Miguel Campos.
The attacker ended up fleeing the home, but left his mobile phone behind in the process.
Police called a number in the phone and pretended to be a member of the public. They asked the woman on the other end if they knew who the phone belonged to. The woman said that the phone belonged to her son Matthew Mueller. She also told them that Matthew was staying at her cabin in South Lake Tahoe.
Matthew had been a U.S. Marine for five years and graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College in California before going to Harvard Law School.
Police went to the cabin where they arrested Matthew without incident. Police have said that he looked ‘unremarkable.’
When they searched the cabin, the Dublin officers found several laptops, cellphones, a few stun guns, a lot of ski masks and an empty bed with no blankets but a sheet that appeared to have been slept on. They also discovered Muller was driving a stolen car.
“There were a number of replica squirt guns,” Det Campos said of the evidence they’d found. “One of them had just your typical pen-style laser pointer that was duct-taped to it.”
“There were several swim goggles that were duct-taped black,” Det Carausu added. “One, in particular, had a blonde hair strand attached to the duct tape. Why would there be a blonde hair stuck to goggles? [In] the Dublin home invasion, none of them had blonde hair.”
Police searched for Matthew’s name and found that although he had never been charged, he had been a person of interest in several other incidents in nearby cities. Two incidents from 2009 took place in Palo Alto and Mountain View, and involved an unknown man breaking into the homes of the female victims and threatening to rape them. Police also tracked down the owner of the stolen car, who told her that it had been stolen around the time of a kidnapping in Mare Island, where Aaron lived.
Detective Carausu tried to contact the Vallejo police with information linking Matthew to Denise’s case. Aaron’s laptop had been found at the cabin and they also found the Huntington Beach address where Denise had been dropped off in the GPS of the stolen car.
They told her to contact the FBI.
Matthew was charged in federal court in Sacramento, California, with kidnapping for ransom. He pleaded guilty to the federal kidnapping charge and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was then charged in Solano County with kidnapping for ransom, two counts of forcible rape, robbery, burglary and false imprisonment. He pleaded no contest and ended up being sentenced to 31 years for those charges.
He also pleaded guilty to robbery of an inhabited dwelling, residential burglary and false imprisonment. His state sentence will be served concurrently with the federal sentence.
It was discovered that Matthew had used a drone to spy on Denise and Aaron prior to the abduction/attack. He also played the prerecorded message to them on the night of the attack to make it look like there were multiple perpetrators.
Denise has said in the past that she does believe there may have been multiple people involved. “There were things that happened that we saw, that we heard. It just would have been impossible to have been done by one guy,” Denise said. “There are other people out there. That’s something that we’ve had to live with and somehow make peace with.”
Matthew said in court that he was “sick with shame” for the “pain and horror” he caused.
In 2018, the couple reached a $2.5 million settlement with the city of Vallejo and the police department.
Denise said that the Vallejo Police Department never came out and publicly apologized for saying what happened to them was a hoax. Instead, then-Vallejo Police Chief Andrew Bidou wrote a private letter of apology to them, saying in part that it was now clear what happened was “not a hoax or orchestrated event and that [Vallejo Police Department] conclusions were incorrect.”
The letter also said the comments from Lt. Kenny Parks were “unnecessarily harsh and offensive.” Bidou promised the department would apologize in public when Muller was indicted.
In a statement to “20/20”, Vallejo’s public information officer Christina Lee admitted, “It appears that the follow-up personal public apology did not take place.”
“The Huskins Quinn case was not publicly handled with the type of sensitivity a case of this nature should have been handled with, and for that, the City extends an apology to Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn,” the statement read.
“What happened to Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn is horrific and evil,” Chief Shawny Williams said in the statement. “As the new Chief of Police, I am committed to making sure survivors are given compassionate service with dignity and respect. Although I was not chief in 2015 when this incident occurred, I would like to extend my deepest apology to Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn for how they were treated during this ordeal.”
In September 2018, Aaron and Denise got married in Monterey, California. Aaron said their first song together as husband and wife was Dierks Bentley’s “Riser.” It is, he said, “very much about overcoming a tragedy and rising like a phoenix from the ashes.”
The couple have two daughters – Olivia born in March 2020 and Naomi born in November 2022.
“I want them to know their value and to never let anyone dictate that or determine that for them,” Denise said of her daughters. Aaron added, “More than anything, I just hope that they grow up to be like their mom. And if they do that, they’ll be OK.”
SOURCE LIST
https://people.com/american-nightmare-where-are-denise-huskins-aaron-quinn-now-8430683
https://apnews.com/general-news-4e555d234aca44b8a4a46a3ac81b712b
https://people.com/american-nightmare-where-are-denise-huskins-aaron-quinn-now-8430683