Talking Dateline: Twisted Tale

0:00Hi, everyone. I'm Blaine Alexander, and I'm here with Josh Mankiewicz. Hi, Josh. Hello. And today we are Talking Dateline. Today's episode is called Twisted Tale. It's a story so bizarre, so full of twists, that police didn't just doubt the victims, they in fact accused them of faking the entire thing. It all started with a 2015 home invasion in Vallejo, California, where Denise Huskins was kidnapped and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn was left behind with a strange story that nobody believed. When similar stories started to come out, and a suspect was eventually apprehended, it became clear that someone dangerous had, in fact, been terrorizing the community.

0:42If you haven't heard the episode yet, it's the one right below this one on the list of podcasts. So go ahead, listen to it, and then come back here. Or, of course, you can go watch it on Peacock. And when you come back, Josh has an extra clip from his interview with a reporter who covered the case. And later, we'll talk about how Denise and Erin are doing today. So make sure you stick around for that. All right, guys. Josh, let's talk Dateline, my friend. Let's talk Dateline. Okay, first of all, we should have some kind of like viewer-listener competition as to how many times the word twisted has been used in a Dateline title for an episode because the answer is a lot.

1:21A lot. But this, okay, so Twisted Tale, let me tell you, this one threw me for a loop. I was riding an emotional roller coaster all over this story. And every five minutes, I thought that I had it solved. I said, oh, okay, these people are faking their kidnapping. Fine. So where do we go for the rest of the episode? Oh, maybe there. It just was, I did not know which way to go until close to the end. This one was good. Well, I mean, it's not every day that you get a story like this one, in which the true story is so hard to believe that police brand it phony. I mean, that's kind of, as a storyteller, that's the cops sort of doing your job for you.

2:02And then, of course, it turns out the actual story was exactly what Denise and Aaron said it was. And it was horrifying. And they went through hell. And then they sort of went through hell again because people didn't believe them. So let's talk about just the initial story that the two told, that Aaron Quinn rather told. I mean, when you look at it on its face, we're talking about zip ties, blacked out swim goggles, sedation, Valium, NyQuil, a red square with a webcam. I mean, when you listen to it, what were your just on its face? Did it sound too wild to be true? Well, by the time we were on it, I think it was clear that it was true.

2:46You know, I think we probably started making calls the first day that it happened or the first day that it got in the newspaper and we knew about it anyway. But I think that by the time we started working on this story, we already knew two things. One was that this was an incredible story. Two, the police had branded it phony. Actually, three things. And three, that it was 100 % true. So we went from that standpoint. This got the comparison to Gone Girl, the book, the movie. Have you seen the movie? Sure. I mean, Gone Girl, she vanishes and she frames her husband. And she was blonde and attractive.

3:16So that sort of matched up. But I don't think it matched Gone Girl, the plot, exactly. because I don't think anybody thought that Denise was trying to frame Aaron. People thought they were in it together, right? Yes, that it was all one big fraud that the two of them were perpetrating, which was not true. Let's talk about why that comparison was able to stick so hard, though. Because you're right. I mean, it wasn't same, same. There were some differences in the plot. But I do think that it's interesting that even in official news reports, people were saying it's a so-called gone girl kidnapper.

3:46And that stuck. Once something gets going in today's culture, particularly on the Internet, it can take hold. One of the things about journalism, which is unfortunate but true, is that certain things sort of develop a life of their own. And they kind of become true just because they've been said so many times. And so, you know, once you've heard other people describe this as the Gone Girl kidnapping, your boss at whatever radio or TV station or network you're working at says to you, well, why aren't we calling this? Let's put that up on the screen, the Gone Girl kidnapping, right? And then suddenly you've added to this snowball rolling downhill, which is in fact, you're helping this lie be told, which is this was fake.

4:33They were doing it for their own personal aggrandizement or something. And in fact, it wasn't, and it shouldn't be called the Gone Girl kidnapping. Even if sometimes internally, right? Like if you're thinking about a story and it's kind of like, oh, okay, what's the story? I can't remember her. Oh, the Gone Girl kidnapping, right? Those things just kind of become ingrained in the mind and become ingrained in the way that you discuss something. And I have to say, that news conference from Vallejo police. Whoa, boy. It's hard to think of a police department fumbling something worse than that. It wasn't just that they doubted their story.

5:07It was the kind of derisive way that Denise and Aaron were talked about. You know, it would be one thing to say, we have spent, you know, 39 hours on this. We have 112 people assigned to it. We've got detectives, we've got this, we've got that, we've got the forensics team. And we have not so far been able to substantiate the story that we're being told, right? That's one way to put it. What they said was, you know, we think this is phony. They owe people an apology. They're trying to get on a reality show. And this wasn't some Hollywood movie. This was a woman who'd been sexually assaulted, and the two of them had been scared half to death.

5:49And the repercussions of that fumble by Vallejo cost them a considerable amount of money. Why be so bold in that news conference? I don't know what happened. My dad, for the last 30 years of his career, used to do crisis PR for different companies. And a lot of the people who are his clients are people whose PR problems you might be familiar with. And his answer was frequently the same when they would come in and say, look, this terrible thing has happened, which we've done to ourselves here. And his answer was always, tell the truth, tell it all, tell it now. Now, don't let it dribble out, right?

6:32Say, okay, we made a big mistake. Here's what we said that wasn't true. Here's the actual truth. We should have gotten it right. Next time we will, we're sorry. Very hard to criticize people who do that. That was his advice, and a lot of people took it. But apparently Vallejo was not one of his clients. They did not get that message. Now, the police department did eventually end up apologizing to Denise and Aaron back in 2021, and we mentioned that in the piece. However, it took a new police chief taking over to get that apology out of them. Yes, there you go. When we come back, we'll hear an extra clip from Josh's interview with Henry Lee.

7:14He was the San Francisco Chronicle reporter who covered this case from the very beginning. He shares more of his thoughts on Matthew Muller, the man eventually tied to the crime, and why the suspect wasn't anything like what he expected.

7:31there are a lot of so many strange threads here but one of the biggest is the criminal himself matthew muller yeah u.s marine a harvard law grad i think he once taught at harvard also i think somebody who suffers from some kind of mental illness which in his case does not excuse what happened or what he did but uh he is an unlikely offender that's the thinking of the time that's part of those things, you know, that I'm talking about, like everybody calling it Gone Girl. Everybody's talking about the fact that he went to Harvard Law. Well, people who went to Harvard Law can commit awful, unspeakable crimes, just like people who couldn't get into Harvard Law.

8:10I mean, that's not like some dividing line between lawlessness and virtue. But the idea, you know, sort of that someone who's achieved a certain level of education and success can't then also do awful things. It's kind of a trope in our society and probably incorrect. It is incorrect because, I mean, when you look at some high profile cases, there are a number of people who are very educated. I mean, one that, of course, is top of mind, Brian Koberger, right? We're talking about a PhD student. There are plenty of people who are very educated, very intelligent people who've committed some heinous crimes.

8:50Ted Bundy, very well educated. Yes, yes. So certainly that doesn't nix anyone. I think what was most curious to me, though, was that what happened? The question of he seemed to be climbing. He was moving on an upward trajectory. Harvard Law teaching there. Lots of people were speaking highly of his work and what he was doing. And then something happened. And I think that it speaks to what you were saying about mental illness. Was there a break? Yeah, something starts to spiral down with him. I don't want to diagnose this guy from afar, and I'm certainly no physician. But yeah, it does feel like something went wrong.

9:23I wonder if there was this kind of desire for notoriety, the fact that he was angrily writing letters and saying, no, no, no, this did happen. I wonder if he wanted to be recognized for outsmarting people. Oh, yeah. No, no. If that was his thing. I think that absolutely played some role in this, was he wanted the credit. I mean, psychologists said this was about recognition, about control. I was trying to think whether this had ever happened before in any story that I knew of, which was that Matthew Mueller was so appalled that his crime was not being taken seriously that he started emailing the newspaper saying, no, no, no, this is not BS.

10:04This is true. And I did it. I did it. I can't think of anything like that in which the doer of the crime, the perp, actually was offended that they weren't getting the credit. I'm very curious about the San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Henry Lee. He was a very big fan. Well, first of all, he's not a San Francisco Chronicle reporter anymore. He's a TV reporter. I think he's at KTVU in Oakland. Yeah. Yeah, he went on TV, Henry did, which is a tough break for print, but great for TV because he's a very good reporter. And he's still covering crime. He's still doing almost exclusively crime and public safety.

10:40And he's really good at it. He was an interesting through line in this story, but also like almost a part of the story. He's the one who received the ransomed audio. He's the one who got the emails saying, no, no, no, she actually was kidnapped. Let's listen to an extra clip that you have from him where he shares a few more of his thoughts on those emails. One of the things that emerges from the emails is this sort of, this tone of remorse and self-loathing. That not only was the kidnapper sort of angry that he wasn't getting the attention he deserved, and that he wasn't being believed just like his victims were being believed.

11:15But one of the things that clearly comes across is this feeling that I feel bad for these people. They were done wrong, and they're being done wrong more because people aren't believing. in. This is almost like your new age hand-wringing kidnapper of the 21st century. Someone who is feeling guilt or remorse, if that is to be believed. That they feel upset that they kidnapped poor Denise Huskins. And keep in mind, they claim they were looking for what turned out to be the ex-fiancee of Erin Quinn. So they are upset. He got the wrong woman. She had to go through this ordeal. No one's believing her.

11:49No one's believing us. It was mind-boggling that a complete stranger, apparently, was responsible for what happened to them. You know, and that's part of it. The target was not Denise Huskins. It was the woman who had lived there before, which is, and no one could figure out what her connection was to Matthew Muller either. Well, I was going to ask, do we have any sense, do law enforcement have any sense as to why he was targeting different women? I do not think that that has ever been explained to me. I don't know. And by the way, long after this was over, including very recently, new information has come forward about other crimes that he was involved in that he wasn't even charged with back when we did this story and back when this was in the news.

12:31He was sentenced to two life terms after confessing to some more crimes. The producer who worked on this with me, Susan Leibowitz, she just emailed me the other day saying, look at this. And here was Matthew Mueller again in the news being sentenced to more years because of things that he had done that had not been previously, had not come to light. So, I mean, this is one of those stories where you thought it was over like five times. And it wasn't. It just kept going. Things keep piling on. Okay, when we come back, we'll talk about how Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn are doing today.

13:11Let's talk about Denise and Aaron and what this did to them. I mean, we talk about the fact that they were branded liars. You said that at work, even people were avoiding sitting next to them at lunch or in the cafeteria. I mean, they were treated as outcasts. I wonder what this says in a bigger sense about how the public law enforcement, just how society treats victims who are possibly in complicated or unbelievable cases. One of the things that I think Denise has talked about is that people don't understand how victims react. She was on a podcast and said that people frequently misunderstand how other people behave in extreme situations.

13:51And that's, you know, we see that all the time. on Dateline, how many times has the tone and tenor of somebody's remarks, either on the 911 call when they report finding the body or in their first interview with police, how often has the way you behave, not just your words, but the way you sound and your affect and your attitude, how many times has that become an issue? Yeah, it is very true. I mean, I think in every single Dateline that I've done to date, Josh, that has been a conversation piece. It has been something that's raised a question amongst investigators or something that has kept the question mark over a person maybe longer than it should.

14:34I mean, it's been something that is given a lot of weight, I think, a surprising amount of weight, you could say. The section about Denise making the recording and saying, hey, I know about the plane crash and describing personal details. I had to think, I said, you know, I've never been kidnapped. How would I react if I were to make a hostage video? And my mind immediately went to, she's probably trying to help keep herself calm. I think she did an amazing job. I really do. We never spoke with them. I was in the room with them once, but we never actually ended up sitting down and talking with them.

15:07So let's talk about, obviously, moving forward, they had their settlement. Didn't talk to them for the story, but they did get married. They have two children now, and they've spoken about the case in a Netflix documentary that has gotten a lot of attention. I think this is kind of their attempt to sort of retake control of the story. I think a lot of people that they feel sort of didn't do a good job telling it. First of all, the police, and then probably some people in journalism, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is their, it's a way to kind of, almost a way to redeem everything that happened. but also introducing the story to a different audience.

15:49There are a lot of people who don't necessarily remember when this happened. There are a number of people who are hearing this story for the first time, but more so on their terms, which has to be a powerful thing for the two of them. Josh, this was a fascinating story. Thank you so much for this conversation. I truly enjoyed it as always. Thanks, Blaine. All right. That's it for talking Dateline this week. Thanks so much for listening. If you've got a story that you think we should be covering or questions for our team, Make sure to reach out to us anytime on social at Dateline NBC. You can also call the phone number and leave us a voicemail at 212-413-5252.

16:26Josh gets those calls directly. I know it. Those come right to my cell phone and I will answer. Also, the 25th caller gets a brand new Buick. A Buick? Yeah. A prize. There you go. And if you don't want to go through that route, you can always send a voice memo in a DM on social. Oh, and speaking of Josh, don't forget to tune into season four of Josh's podcast, Dateline Missing in America, where he dives into six new cases that you may in fact be the key to solving. The first five episodes are already available now, wherever you get your podcasts.