Netflix's latest true crime series American Nightmare starts by laying out the details of a heinous crime: A woman is kidnapped from her boyfriend's home while he's tied up, drugged, and later sent a ransom. After a high-profile search throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the woman turns up, seemingly unharmed, 400 miles away at her childhood home in the O.C. The police tell the world that the whole thing was made up, with the media comparing the case to the plot of Gone Girl. Except—spoiler alert—this is more a story of police misconduct than a ripped-from-fiction hoax.
The full story of Denise Huskins' 2015 kidnapping is now the subject of a three-part series from The Tinder Swindler filmmakers Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins, which quickly hit no. 1 on Netflix following its January 17 release. With the help of archival footage, interviews, and testimony from Huskins and her then-boyfriend Aaron Quinn themselves, American Nightmare details what happened when the police became more concerned with pinning the crime on its victims rather than achieving actual justice. Read on for a breakdown of the tragic events, and to learn where Huskins and Quinn are now after the whole ordeal.
