Denise and Aaron Quinn Get the Last Word | Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ [ Insects chirping ] -When 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. My 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. I was told that I was going to be taken.
-And 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 this all, sending their department on a wild and expensive goose chase.
-Things 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? -My name is Nick Borges.
I did not investigate this case, but I wanted to give Denise and Aaron 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 Miss Huskins and Mr. Quinn."
He ended up responding. This is incredible. -I did not expect him to start confessing.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -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 3:00 a.m.,
we were awoken to a strange man saying, uh, "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.
The 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.
-The voice tells me that if I try to go to the police, they'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 cellphone, 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. But then my fear is, am I actually killing Denise? -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 them for being a little skeptical, but I gave them 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 cellphone and his clothes to test for evidence. He was given prison clothing to change into,
and then the lead detective, Mathew 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.
-Not only did he appear not to believe Aaron, he seemed to be accusing Aaron of killing Denise.
Meanwhile, 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 Aaron's car, she was driven for a bit,
transferred to the trunk of another car, and driven for hours. -You 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.
-The 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 and turned, and I see the street that I grew up on.
-A 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.
-And it was, okay, 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. -Mr. Quinn and Miss 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. But 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. They interviewed Denise for six hours
before she went to a hospital for the exam. -So in a way, it's like, yeah, I had to --
to prove to them that I was worthy enough to... -To have the exam. The 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 we'll be vindicated and the truth will come out is if they attack another family.
♪♪ -In June 2015, nearly 3 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 cellphone 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. [ Indistinct shouting ]
-Come back inside. -Inside was 38-year-old Matthew Muller. He was arrested on the spot for the Dublin attack.
-He 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 Muller'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.
-The 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 Muller'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 Muller in court. -So you're preparing for him to go to trial.
What happened? -Well, he ended up taking a plea deal. -Muller ultimately received a sentence
of 40 years total for the Dublin attack and their attack. Denise and Aaron 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 Aaron 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. -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... Although their case seemed to be over, Denise and Aaron
hoped authorities would continue to investigate Muller for other crimes and possible accomplices.
-And there was 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 -- of our trauma and maybe use it for good. -They 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 -- I want to hug her, I want to hug him,
and just say, "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 [voice breaks] really emotional.
'Cause 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 Aaron
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. -Within 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 Muller. -Yeah. He sent me back a second letter and this one was thick.
-In the letter, Muller 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. Now he was coming clean. -They 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 Muller did some really awful things.
-Vern Pierson 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, Pierson also offered to help
and wanted to speak with Muller directly. Pierson thought the best way to get him to open up more
was to use a strategy called science-based interviewing. -One of the hallmarks of science-based interviewing
is -- 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.
And they 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, you know, the theory that they had.
-Pierson was determined to do things differently. He brought in a highly trained FBI interviewer
who specializes in this technique, and their strategy would pay off. -In November 2024,
Da Vern Pierson 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 up front 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. Muller 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 Muller 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.
Muller described using a ladder to climb into a family's house and waking up a mother, father, and their teenage son.
He instructed the mother to go to a bank to withdraw a ransom. After she returned with $30,000,
Muller 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 Muller 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.
Muller 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. Muller said he tied up the couple, then carried the woman away and down a bike trail.
Then he says he saw a light nearby. He sexually assaulted her, then fled. -Leaving that interview,
Pierson set out to prove Muller committed these crimes. -Thank you. -Starting with the unreported home invasion.
-The interviewer had him describe the location, and then 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. -Pierson wondered if the ladder Muller 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.
You guys don't 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, Pierson 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.
"Victim 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. Pierson 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 Muller's steps that night. So he brings her up here. And, again, she has no idea what's going -- what's going on.
-Yeah. She doesn't know where she's going. -My goodness. -And at 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 Folsom 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 Muller dropped when he fled. With no other leads to follow, they reached out to the victims.
-And how old were you in 1993? -I was 19. In the middle of the night, we were awakened
to someone hitting the back of our tent. -We spoke to the female victim in 2025.
She's asked us not to show her face and to call her Lynn. This is the first time she's speaking publicly
about what happened to her. -The only thing I can really remember is just praying.
Praying for this to stop. Praying for him to get away. Praying that he doesn't kill me.
-Lynn says after she and her boyfriend called for help that night, it didn't feel like
the officers were taking her assault seriously. -It very much felt like they maybe didn't believe me
or believe my boyfriend. Just by their line of questioning. -Like what? -Like with my boyfriend,
they asked him, "You mean you didn't see the gun? What do you mean you didn't see the gun?"
Instead of just listening to us and believing what we were telling them. -She says she called the parks department for months
asking for updates, but nothing ever came of it. -In fact, I even stopped telling people about it as time went on.
-Lynn and her boyfriend eventually married and drew strength from each other, but Lynn says it was difficult to ever feel truly safe.
-Is there a way to describe the weight that you carry? -It's kind of hard to describe
because it's just kind of part of who you are now. For many years, I didn't go by myself out at night.
Even during the daytime, I'd make sure I would keep an eye over my shoulder of who's around and be aware of my surroundings at all times.
I didn't feel comfortable wearing shoes that I felt like I couldn't run in, so like flip-flops or sandals, just in case I need to run.
-But that began to change when she first spoke with investigators Papineau and Hendricks.
-I felt this sense of relief. I knew that I was being believed. I knew that something was getting done about this finally.
-And Lynn felt more relief when she learned her attacker was now behind bars. But she wanted him to be held accountable
for what he'd done to her. -No, you didn't get away with this. You didn't just move on with your life
and forgot that it happened. You don't get to do that. ♪♪ -To learn that he was 16 years old the first time
he attacked a couple... it made a lot of sense, but it's also just incredibly disturbing.
-Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn had long suspected Matthew Muller had attacked before, but to learn the details
and have the crimes confirmed by investigators was still devastating. -A lot of people have suffered from this man.
Someone breaking in the middle of the night, tying you up -- these are things that are nightmares.
-The voyeurism, the stalking. I think it's a way of invading people's lives to terrorize.
-In late 2024, Matthew Muller was charged with the attempted rapes in Santa Clara County,
the first attacks he'd confessed to in the letters. He was flown back to California to face those charges.
There, he was also charged with attacking the family in Contra Costa. While sitting in the Santa Clara County Jail,
Muller wrote another letter. -He sent a letter to Nick Borges, essentially indicating he had additional information
that he wanted to provide to Denise and Aaron. -He's trying to lure Denise and Aaron into coming
and talking to him. -100%. I read that letter exactly that way. -DA Vern Pierson thinks meeting with Denise,
in particular, may have been Muller's objective for confessing all along. -DA Pierson was like,
he's confessing to certain things for a reason. They're all in California. I think he wants to get back to California
in hopes that he can meet with you. -Even though they were fully aware Muller may have ulterior motives,
Denise and Aaron did still want to talk with him. Muller had confirmed and given details about other crimes
he had committed, but still maintained he acted alone in theirs. Denise and Aaron are adamant
they heard other people during their attack. -I felt like maybe of all people he would be more honest with us.
-But having already spent many hours interviewing Muller, Pierson did not want them in a room together.
-I didn't think that was a good idea. -They came up with a compromise. On February 13, 2025,
Muller and his attorney met with Pierson, the FBI interviewer, and Chief Borges at the Santa Clara County Jail.
Denise and Aaron were there, too, watching from another room. -They let him know early on in the interview,
they're observing, they're not coming in. I think that irritated him. The FBI interviewer had said
that conversation was very different. -When asked why he wanted this meeting, Muller claimed he was there to help Denise and Aaron mostly.
But when the FBI agent pushed for the answer to Denise and Aaron's question... At first, Muller didn't directly respond and talked in circles.
-I mean, he's just an incredibly frustrating human. -Eventually, Muller again denied he'd had accomplices.
But Muller did go into detail about how he said he had tricked Denise and Aaron into believing he was working with a group.
-He did various steps to make it look as though he had somebody else with him. There was multiple people.
He told us that he had used a device that he could make it sound as though he was talking to somebody downstairs
and getting a response using a recorder. -Do you believe what Muller was saying about,
"Well, I was pretending that there were other people in the room"? -I mean, I don't believe everything Muller says.
I know what we saw. We know what we heard. -Although Denise and Aaron didn't get the answers
they'd hoped for, they say that confronting Muller, even through the interviewers, was a form of reckoning.
-For us, it was more of showing that we're not scared of you. We see you. We see who you are.
-And they were determined to see Matthew Muller face justice for all the crimes their work and persistence had uncovered.
In June 2025, he was finally charged with Lynn's attack and faced a life sentence for each of the additional crimes
he was now charged with. Denise hoped this would finally lock him away forever. -I don't believe if he's ever free,
that he could help himself. I feel like he'll always figure out a way to terrorize someone in some way.
♪♪ -By the summer of 2025, Matthew Muller was convicted of all the charges brought as a result of the new investigation
spurred by Denise and Aaron. At Muller's sentencing, Lynn read a victim impact statement,
three decades in the making. -I think for so many years, feeling like my voice was silenced,
feeling like my voice could be heard finally. It felt very empowering. I got the last word.
Now you get to be silenced. -Muller was sentenced to four life terms. How does that feel that he's now serving
four life sentences for four crimes that he might have never confessed to had you not written that letter?
-Goosebumps. I have them right now. -Lynn says she felt relief knowing Muller would stay locked up while she walked free,
finally able to live without fear and enjoy old pastimes and new ones. How are you with going outdoors and camping now?
-It's -- It's easier now, and one of the ways that we were able to do that was through playing disc golf.
It gave me something to focus on outdoors that felt safe again. -She has also connected with Denise.
-She actually reached out to me on Instagram. When I saw, you know, I'm Matthew Muller's first victim,
like, I -- I was like, what? -I wanted to say thank you and just let her know that 32 years of waiting was finally over
because of her continuing to seek answers. -While Lynn finally has answers, Denise and Aaron
still questioned whether Muller acted alone. DA Vern Pierson hoped forensics could prove
if there was another assailant. Pierson learned Vallejo Police had only done preliminary testing on Denise's rape kit,
so his office had it fully tested in 2025. -Well, the results are essentially inconclusive.
-Pierson says the test showed a mixture of DNA, including Muller's, so they can't rule out the possibility
that Denise could also have been assaulted by someone else. But Pierson doesn't think so.
-Based on everything I know, I don't believe that there was an accomplice. I think that was a ruse that he created
and perpetuated very successfully. -Chief Borges isn't so sure. -Do you think Muller had accomplices?
-I think it's very possible. I certainly think it's very possible. -But Borges and Pierson both believe
Muller committed additional crimes. -Everywhere that man traveled, he was a threat.
-And Chief Borges says it's possible Muller went even further. -One of the times I interviewed him,
I asked him if he ever killed anybody. It just seemed like an inappropriate question.
He kind of told me that he didn't have the heart to do that. -Do you believe him?
-Not fully. I don't fully believe him. I mean, at what point do you actually stop?
-Chief Borges says he hasn't stopped investigating, looking for other crimes and accomplices.
-If anyone else is involved, we're coming for you. Just trust me. We're going to get you if you're involved.
-Today, Denise and Aaron continue to speak to law enforcement, trying to change how officers interview victims and suspects.
-Denise has said not being believed was more traumatic in many ways to her than the actual assaults themselves.
If that doesn't open your eyes in law enforcement, something's wrong with you. -Chief Borges says that is the biggest lesson he's learned
from Denise and Aaron. -We have to believe victims. When they come forward, we have to listen to what they say
and follow the evidence. -Despite all they've been through, the Quinns say that while their case revealed a lot of problems,
it also shows the solutions. -We understand it's a really hard job. People make mistakes.
What you're hoping is that people recognize the mistakes, they learn from the mistakes,
and it changes their actions going forward. -Again, it's bittersweet to be able to be here
and reclaim this as something positive. -And these unlikely advocates are determined
to use their voices for good. -...over us in our life. -I don't think anyone would blame you
if the two of you said, "Okay, enough. We don't need to talk about this anymore."
Why not just move on? -I think there's a sense of responsibility. The publicity was so damaging to us in the beginning,
and so I feel like in a way, having this strange, unique position, it almost seems irresponsible to not utilize it
in a positive way that can maybe help others. [ Applause ] ♪♪

A couple is attacked as they slept. They later team up with law enforcement and get their assailant to confess to more crimes. "48 Hours" correspondent Tracy Smith reports. This episode aired on March 28, 2026. Watch more full episodes of "48 Hours" on Pluto TV.

True crime. Real justice. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn recount their kidnapping ordeal and the police's disbelief, leading to a long fight for justice against Matthew Muller.

Key points

Denise Huskins' Abduction. In March 2015, Denise Huskins was kidnapped from her boyfriend's home, leading to a harrowing ordeal.
False Accusations. After her release, law enforcement accused Denise and Aaron of staging the kidnapping, leading to public scrutiny.
Matthew Muller's Arrest. Matthew Muller, a Harvard Law graduate, was arrested for the kidnapping after a subsequent home invasion.
Confessions from Muller. Muller confessed to additional crimes while in prison, revealing a history of violence.
Lynn's First Public Statement. Lynn speaks publicly for the first time about her traumatic experience.
Muller's Sentencing. Matthew Muller is sentenced to four life terms for his crimes.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I get my life back, only to have it all completely blown apart.

2:20WatchApr 3, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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