Denise and Aaron Quinn Get the Last Word

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2:00When you're 19, you think you know where you're going to end up, but then life has a way of taking its own turns. Back in 1993, this young couple was camping. In the middle of the night, we were awakened to someone hitting the back of our tent. They were ordered out of their tent by a stranger with a gun. A towel was put over my head and my hands and feet were tied up. And then my boyfriend was tied up. The suspect then carried the female away. He brought her down to this bridge? Yes. You were fighting him as best you could. Yeah. I was trying to squirm away and then I was sexually assaulted. In the middle of what he was trying to do, he said that he saw a light and said he had to go.

2:53my boyfriend got me untied we called the police i told them what happened and it very much seemed like they maybe didn't believe me i reached out to them many times trying to find out have you guys found anything you know do you know who did this and nothing she's worried for the last 30 plus years that he was out there and he was going to return. In March of 2015, there was this really high profile kidnapping coming out of Vallejo, California. Denise Huskins went missing from her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn's home. Kidnappers stormed into Quinn's Vallejo house, bound and drugged him. We could hear what sounded like other people downstairs.

3:41I was told that I was going to be taken. I'm told that there was a ransom demand to get Denise back. For the next 48 hours I was held captive and continuously drugged and I was raped twice. To my surprise in the middle of the night he woke me up and said that he was going to release me. Relief and joy after Denise Huskins arrived home in Southern California. I get my life back only to have it all completely blown apart by the false accusations of law enforcement. Vallejo police believe Denise Huskins and her boyfriend staged assault, sending their department on a wild and expensive goose chase.

4:24Things like this never happen, so therefore we can't believe you. This was a massive story. For months, the world believed that this was a hoax. And then suddenly there's another attack. and that's what finally leads to an arrest. He was a Marine, then a Harvard Law student, then a practicing attorney. Now Matthew Muller is accused of being a monster. Our hope was now that one person's caught, they would continue to investigate. There was still so many questions that were left unanswered. Was anyone else involved? And what other victims are still out there?

5:04My name is Nick Borges. I did not investigate this case, but I wanted to give Denise and Erin answers. I told them, I've always believed you guys, and words are not enough. I'm an action guy, so I started writing letters to Matthew Muller. Dear Mr. Muller, I have followed and come to learn quite a bit about the Vallejo case involving Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn. He ended up responding. This is incredible. I did not expect him to start confessing.

5:36Tracy Smith reports. Denise and Aaron Quinn get the last word. In the pre-dawn hours of March 23, 2015, Aaron Quinn and his girlfriend Denise Huskins were asleep in his Vallejo, California home, unaware they were being watched. Around 3 a.m. we were I had spoken to a strange man saying, this is a robbery. We are not here to hurt you. Stay calm. They never saw his face, but he was oddly wearing a wetsuit. He said he was part of a group of people there to rob them, but he did all the talking. In recalling what happened to them, Denise and Aaron call him The Voice. And I saw a flashing white light on the walls and red laser dots scanning the walls.

6:27The voice instructed me to tie Aaron up with zip ties, left him on the edge of the bed. I'm tied up. He makes me hop to my closet. I can hear people downstairs going through the kitchen cabinet. I can hear a drill running. Denise was ordered to go into the same closet. There, the voice also tied her up and made them drink a sedative. Blacked out swim goggles were placed over our eyes, and eventually I was told that I was going to be taken for 48 hours, and I was going to be held until Aaron could complete some tasks for my release. Those tasks included going to a bank for ransom money. The voice took Aaron downstairs to the living room, where a security camera had been mounted to monitor him.

7:10The voice tells me that if I try to go to the police, it'll kill Denise. So I could hear him put Denise in the trunk of my car. I just hear Denise say, okay, and I'm just hoping that's not going to be the last thing I hear from her. Aaron says he soon passed out from the sedative. He woke in a stupor later that morning. The voice had taken Aaron's laptop, but had left his cell phone, saying they would contact him. Aaron says he wiggled his hands free from the zip ties, but then struggled with whether he should call for help. What was that like, weighing that decision? My thought was, if I call the police, I know I'm going to be safe.

7:49But then my fear is, am I actually killing Denise? Emergency. My girlfriend got kidnapped last night. Aaron took the chance and called 911. The Vallejo Police Department responded. As Aaron told them what happened, he says investigators began to question his story. I don't blame him for being a little skeptical, but I gave him permission to search everything, and I agreed to go down to the station to provide a statement. My whole goal, which I thought everyone's goal, was to find Denise. Aaron gave the police his cell phone and his clothes to test for evidence. He was given prison clothing to change into.

8:29And then the lead detective, Matthew Mustard, began to question him. And it's about 40 minutes into our interview, he basically leans back and says, what I'm telling him is far-fetched and he doesn't believe me. I don't think she was kidnapped from your home. I think something bad happened in your house. Not only did he appear not to believe Aaron, he seemed to be accusing Aaron. of killing Denise.

9:12Meanwhile, word got out to the media that Denise was missing. Officers converged on the home where Denise was reportedly kidnapped. Julie Watts is an investigative correspondent for CBS News California. I think immediately people were captivated. Search teams have been checking area fields. Cadaver dogs are among the searchers. Folks assumed from the beginning that she was dead. And immediately, her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, was the suspect. To Aaron, investigators were so focused on him, he wondered if anyone was looking for the people who had actually taken Denise. After being placed in the trunk of Erin's car, she was driven for a bit, transferred to the trunk of another car, and driven for hours.

9:55You think of all the possible things that are going to happen. Where am I going to be taken? Am I going to be tortured? Am I going to have to withstand God knows what? The voice took Denise to a secluded home, where she was kept blindfolded and sedated. He told her he would keep her there until his group received the ransom money. She was in and out of consciousness, but remembered him telling her they'd done this before. He then raped her. The next morning, Denise says she heard someone come to the house. Then I heard what sounded like a truck pull up to the house. Doors opened, closed, people entered, there was whispering, and then they got in the car and left.

10:38The assailant then raped her again. I told myself, no matter what, I'm not going to beg, cower, or scream. Because you thought that would keep you alive. Right. I hoped that that would keep me alive. Hours passed, but then, even without the ransom, The Voice stuck with the plan to release her, just not in Vallejo. He asked Denise where her family lived, blindfolded her and sedated her again, and drove hours south. He then released her near where she grew up in Huntington Beach. A nearby security camera caught these images of her. I heard his car drive off and started walking down this alley in turn, and I see the street that I grew up on.

11:25A neighbor called the Huntington Beach police, and the news of Denise's reappearance spread. A Bay Area woman reportedly kidnapped for ransom is safe tonight. What exactly happened to her? That's still very much a mystery. Although Denise and Aaron hadn't communicated since the attack, Denise told the Huntington Beach officers the same story Aaron had. But she too began to sense she wasn't being believed. It was, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, but well, you know, we need to figure out what's going on with Vallejo. And so it just felt like something wasn't right. Worried, Denise hired an attorney. That night, as she was making her way back to Vallejo, the Vallejo Police Department gave a press conference, saying they could not substantiate anything Aaron had told them, and that Denise would not talk to them.

12:16Mr. Quinn and Ms. Huskins has plundered valuable resources away from our community. They essentially called the case a hoax. The media came up with another label. Is she a real-life gone girl? In the first few days after the kidnapper released her, all of the headlines had the word Gone Girl in it, relating it to the blockbuster movie that had just come out, I think, the year before, where a beautiful blonde fakes her own kidnapping, and it stuck. That same night, Denise says her attorney told the Vallejo police Denise had been raped and asked to set up a sexual assault exam, hoping DNA evidence could help identify her attacker.

12:59But Denise says Vallejo police refused to order an exam until she talked to them. I could hear whoever was on the phone say, well, how do we know she was raped? She won't even talk to us. You know, just tell her not to shower, keep her clothes on, don't wash her hands, brush her teeth. Denise says Vallejo police made her wait until the next morning to come in. We're not here to judge. And we are just looking to figure out the truth. They interviewed Denise for six hours before she went to a hospital for the exam. So in a way, it's like, yeah, they had to prove to them that I was worthy enough to have the exam.

13:43The initial testing led nowhere. After cooperating with the investigators, Denise and Aaron feared they might be charged with lying to police. All the while knowing the people who attacked them were still out there. And that was, I think, the most terrifying thing, knowing they will do this again. We know that the only way that will be vindicated and the truth will come out is if they attack another family.

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14:56In June 2015, nearly three months after Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn were attacked, a home invasion was reported in Dublin, California, about an hour south of Vallejo. An intruder came in. The wife called 911 while the husband fought back. The intruder escaped, but in the chaos, he left his cell phone behind. Detectives traced it to this house in South Lake Tahoe. So they get their investigators together, and they show up at the Tahoe cabin. Search for the police! Search for the police! You'll come back inside. Inside was 38-year-old Matthew Muller. He was arrested on the spot for the Dublin attack.

15:44He is a Harvard-educated lawyer. He is formerly a Marine. He is not the type of person that you would expect. And when they searched the house, they found some interesting evidence. They found Aaron's laptop at Mueller's cabin. Authorities also searched a stolen car parked nearby. investigators looked at the car GPS and they saw that it had the GPS point where the kidnapper had dropped off Denise Huskins and in the back of the car they found goggles blacked out swim goggles with a single strand of blonde hair the hair was later confirmed to be Denise's the goggles the GPS address and the laptop, all of it was strong evidence supporting the bizarre story Denise and Aaron had been telling all along.

16:45The only way they were vindicated was not by police work. It was by other people being harmed. The voice finally had a name. Matthew Muller would be charged with Denise Huskins' kidnapping and rape. Did Mueller's arrest make you feel safe? A little safer? The arrest made us feel a little safer, but we still believe there's other people out there. But no one else was charged. Denise and Aaron steeled themselves to face Mueller in court. So you're preparing for him to go to trial? What happened? Well, he ended up taking a plea deal. Mueller ultimately received a sentence of 40 years total for the Dublin attack and their attack.

17:34Denise and Erin had hoped for a life sentence. The idea that he'll be too old when he gets out to do something like this again, I don't think that's true. Around this time, Denise and Erin filed a civil lawsuit against the city of Vallejo, claiming defamation and emotional distress. They eventually settled for$2.5 million. Did the Vallejo Police ever vindicate you? No. It was always, this case was too strange to believe. The Vallejo Police Department did not respond to our request for a comment, but they did issue a statement after the settlement, saying, The Huskins-Quinn case was not publicly handled with the type of sensitivity a case of this nature should have been handled with.

18:25Although their case seemed to be over, Denise and Aaron hoped authorities would continue to investigate Mueller for other crimes and possible accomplices. And there were still so many questions that were left unanswered. A big piece of that was, what else was he involved in? We just knew that our case wasn't the only one. You knew, but did you feel like anyone was listening to you? Well, no, that's the problem. Denise and Aaron spent years trying to move forward. They got married and started a family, and eventually decided it was time to tell their story in their own words. We can take back control of our trauma and maybe use it for good.

19:15They wrote a book and participated in the Netflix series American Nightmare, which was watched by millions of people in 2024. I was hooked as soon as it started. One of those people was Nick Borges, the police chief in Seaside, California. I'm watching this just thinking, I want to reach out to these people. I want to hug her. I want to hug him. And just like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. Though he wasn't involved in their case, Chief Borges reached out to Denise on Instagram to apologize on behalf of all law enforcement. When you read that message, what did you think? I think I got really emotional.

20:00Because it's not, we're not asking for a whole lot, you know? Like, just to be respected and listened to and treated like we have value, it meant the world to feel like we had an ally. Chief Borges invited Denise and Erin to Seaside to speak about their experiences with law enforcement. I gave them access to everything. And it wasn't enough because they had already decided I killed her. Chief Borges wanted to do more to help Denise and Aaron get answers. I don't have a problem shaking the tree a little bit and flipping rocks. He decided to write Muller in prison. I was very honest with him. I want to know if you acted alone or not.

20:47Within weeks, Muller wrote back. Essentially in his first letter back to me, he said he acted alone. So you start this kind of writing relationship with Mueller. Yeah. He sent me back a second letter, and this one was thick. In the letter, Mueller confessed to two crimes in Santa Clara County in 2009, six years before Denise and Aaron's attack. One was in Palo Alto, one was in Mountain View. He broke in, sort of disguised, and attempted sexual assault. Back then, Palo Alto police had identified Muller as a suspect because he'd been caught prowling in the area. But they didn't have enough to charge him.

21:31Now, he was coming clean. There were full-blown confessions with specific details that only the suspect would know. Muller also indicated there were even more crimes, but only teased the details in his letters. We know that Mueller did some really awful things. Vern Pearson is the district attorney of El Dorado County, where Denise Huskins was held captive. Although he was not involved with the original investigation, in 2024, Pearson also offered to help and wanted to speak with Mueller directly. Pearson thought the best way to get him to open up more was to use a strategy called science-based interviewing.

22:15One of the hallmarks of science-based interviewing is speaking to somebody without revealing any judgment you might have about either what they're saying or what you think about them as a person. It just strikes me how different what you're talking about is from the way that the Vallejo PD handled Aaron and Denise's case. Yeah, they passed judgment. That did not happen. And they just sought to confirm, confirm, confirm. and every time he would say, no, that's not what happened, they would cut him off, change the subject, go back to the theory that they had. Pearson was determined to do things differently.

22:53He brought in a highly trained FBI interviewer who specializes in this technique, and their strategy would pay off. I ordered them out of the town. Told them I had a gun.

23:21In November 2024, D.A. Vern Pearson and the FBI interviewer flew to Arizona to speak with Matthew Muller at the prison where he was serving his 40-year sentence to see what else he might confess to and figure out his motivations. He's extraordinarily manipulative, and if he's telling you anything there is a reason why he's telling you what he's telling you with an audio recorder running muller claimed he now wanted to be upfront about his past because he'd undergone a religious transformation in prison he shared that in the past he'd struggled with insomnia which led to taking long walks at night i started then looking in windows where i started general curiosity then and went kind of sexual.

24:07Mueller described a long history of voyeurism, admitting that while at Harvard Law School in the early 2000s, he set up a video camera in an office bathroom. This evidence video shows him doing the same thing years later while on vacation in Hawaii. He installed a video camera in a public restroom so he could look at it. The more space they gave Mueller to talk, the more depravity he revealed. After several hours, he began talking about yet another home invasion on the border of Contra Costa County, just two weeks after he attacked Denise and Aaron. That night, I climbed up onto the veranda, came in.

24:48Mueller described using a ladder to climb into a family's house and waking up a mother, father, and their teenage son. Tied them up, telling them that we were some sort of criminal organization. He instructed the mother to go to a bank to withdraw a ransom. After she returned with$30 ,000, Mueller threatened that if they ever told the police, he would come back and harm them. The family never reported it. So there was no crime that matched this reported back then at that time? No, there was nothing. That wasn't the only crime Mueller said he'd gotten away with. He recalled another attack, which he said was his first, back when he was a teenager in the suburbs of Sacramento.

25:36Mueller said one day he'd walk by some campsites at a state park in nearby Folsom and fixated on a young couple. He returned that night with a stolen gun. I ordered them out of the tent. I believe I put them both on their stomachs and asked them to put their hands behind their back. Mueller said he tied up the couple, then carried the woman away and down a bike trail. Took the woman across to do something bad to her. Then, he says, he saw a light nearby. He sexually assaulted her, then fled. I basically forgot about it pretty quickly. I just put it out of my mind. I didn't, it was like it didn't happen.

26:18Leaving that interview, Pearson set out to prove Mueller committed these crimes. Thank you. starting with the unreported home invasion. The interviewer had him describe the location, and we had him draw a diagram that kind of roughly showed that. We looked on Google Maps, and we eventually came up with a community that very closely matched the diagram that he had drawn to us. Pearson wondered if the ladder Mueller mentioned using might still be there, nine years later. It was a long shot, but his team asked Contra Costa investigators to search the ravine behind that house. You can imagine, it's like, hey, this was never reported to you.

26:58You guys know anything about it. But we think there might be this ladder. Would you go look for it? And a couple hours later, I get a text message that they found the ladder. But how remarkable is that? Pretty remarkable. The family, who still lived there, confirmed everything. Next, Pearson set out to find the campsite victims. His team scoured Folsom and Sacramento County records until finally one of his staffers found a four-page state parks report of an incident from August 7, 1993. At the time, Muller was just 16. We look at it and it's very close to what he described. I mean, virtually identical.

27:40Victim exited the tent with two sleeping bags and pillows and as told by subject to lay face down in the camp. This had to be it. Pearson notified the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office, and criminal investigators Kevin Papineau and Michelle Hendricks took over the investigation. Back in the day, in the 1990s, did it look pretty much like this? Essentially, up here it did. The campsites are no longer there, and original investigators have died. So Papineau and Hendricks started by retracing Mueller's steps that night. So he brings her up here. And again, she has no idea what's going on.

28:24Yeah, she doesn't know where she's going. My goodness. And that night, this place is pitch black. It must be terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. Yeah. From the report, they knew the victim's boyfriend had found her on this footbridge along the bike trail, untied her, and they had called for help. Park rangers showed up. A fulsome PD officer showed up, and they took a statement from them. And then they left. The officers left. Papineau and Hendricks also found photos officers took that night, which showed a gun they believed Mueller dropped when he fled. With no other leads to follow, they reached out to the victims.