It’s been six years since the night that Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins awoke to a man’s voice saying, “Wake up. This is a robbery.”
In the moments after she realized her kidnapper let her walk free, Denise Huskins said all she wanted was to hug her parents and “finally feel safe.”It’s been six years since the night that Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins awoke in his Vallejo, California, home to a man’s voice saying, “Wake up. This is a robbery.”
Among the attendees at their wedding were the attorneys who helped defend them, and Misty Carausu, a detective from Dublin, California, who helped link Muller to their case.Huskins and Quinn met in 2014 in Vallejo, California, located in the Bay Area, where they were both physical therapists. Huskins said they were “drawn together.”
“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,” she said. Huskins said that while walking to the closet she noticed two sets of legs from what she believed to be two different people in the bedroom. Quinn had lived with his ex-fiancée in that house before their breakup, and she had only recently moved out all of her belongings. Huskins said she hoped that the confusion would result in the intruder deciding just to leave them, but that is not what happened.
Eventually, the intruder picked up Huskins and put her in the trunk of Quinn's car before driving away with her. Fearing he was putting Huskins’ life in grave danger, he dialed the police. When officers from the Vallejo Police Department appeared at his home, it had been more than nine hours since Huskins had been taken. Quinn said the first question the police asked him when he answered the door was, “Are you on drugs?”Quinn said the officers entered the house and immediately unplugged the camera that the kidnapper had left.
Quinn said the officers eventually “seemed to soften a little bit” and told him they were taking him to the police station to give a statement. But while he was there, the police also gathered DNA samples and his clothes, he said. In return, he says they gave him prison clothes to wear. “I knew there was an old stain on my sheet,” Quinn 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.”
The detectives called Huskins’ parents and alerted them that something terrible might’ve happened to their daughter. The FBI, which also got involved in the case, gave Aaron Quinn a polygraph exam -- something he was eager to take to prove his innocence -- which they say he failed. On March 24, one day after the incident, the San Francisco Chronicle received what’s known as a “proof-of-life” message from Huskins, Murphy said. In that recorded message sent by the kidnappers, Huskins spoke about a recent plane crash, to prove the message wasn’t old.
Huntington Beach police officers arrived at the neighbor’s apartment where Huskins 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 Quinn’s home. When police asked if she’d been sexually assaulted, she told them she hadn’t.
Meanwhile, Huskins’ reappearance had set off a media firestorm fueled by suggestions that her case bore striking resemblance to the book and film “Gone Girl.” The fictional story is about a woman who fakes her own disappearance as revenge against her cheating husband. When Huskins arrived in San Francisco to meet with her new attorney she finally felt safe enough to reveal all of the details of her harrowing captivity that she had been afraid to tell the police. She said that she had been raped twice by her kidnapper, which he videotaped.
“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,” Rappaport said. “They said, ‘Well, just have her sleep in her clothes and don’t take a shower and we’ll talk in the morning.’”In this Sept. 29, 2016, file photo, attorney Anthony Douglas Rappaport, left, speaks at a news conference with his clients, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn, right, in San Francisco.
“I just wanted to hold her. I just wanted to tell her I was sorry,” said Aaron Quinn. “I was really afraid that she wouldn’t want to see me … that she would just want to wipe her hands clean.” It turned out Muller was not a typical criminal. He was a U.S. Marine for five years and graduated summa cum laude from Pomona College in California before going to Harvard Law School.
“There were a number of replica squirt guns,” 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.”The goggles that Dublin Police Department Detective Misty Carausu found with a strand of blonde hair attached. Aaron Quinn and Huskins’ defense attorneys say they celebrated the developments in the case, holding a press conference in which they called for “full apologies” from the Vallejo Police Department.“What he wasn’t charged with were the sexual assaults, the robbery, the burglary against Aaron,” Rappaport said. “The reason being is that there was no jurisdiction in federal court for those crimes.”
Huskins said 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.”
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