How the "American Nightmare" victims helped get kidnapper Matthew Muller to confess to more crimes
Two weeks after he drugged and kidnapped Denise Huskins from her Vallejo, California home in 2015, "American Nightmare" kidnapper Matthew Muller allegedly committed another crime in neighboring Contra Costa County.
This is just one of many alleged crimes dating back to the 1990s that would have gone unsolved if it weren't for two persistent victims: a small-town chief and a Northern California district attorney.
Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn gained worldwide notoriety when their bizarre 2015 kidnapping was featured in what Netflix said was its highest-rated documentary of 2024, "American Nightmare."
In an exclusive interview with CBS News California, Huskins and Quinn detail what happened after the documentary ends. They knew Muller had committed additional crimes, but they say Vallejo police and the FBI refused to investigate. The agencies initially accused the couple of faking her own kidnapping.
We now know that law enforcement believes their attacker, Matthew Muller, committed at least two other crimes in the month after her kidnapping, while the Vallejo Police Department and the FBI investigators publicly shamed Huskins and Quinn instead of searching for Muller.
In addition to the Dublin, Calif. home invasion originally reported in 2015, prosecutors say Muller has confessed to multiple crimes across Northern California.
That's when Dublin Police Detective Misty Carausu and Alameda County Sheriff's deputies tracked Muller to his mother's South Lake Tahoe cabin. There, they found evidence: a strand of Denise's hair attached to a pair of blacked-out swim goggles used to blindfold her. Detective Carausu's persistence in tracking down who that hair belonged to would eventually vindicate Huskins and Quinn, proving to the world that they had been telling the truth all along.
But it would be years before Huskins and Quinn would meet their "hero" in person. The three have become close since. She had turned the case over to the FBI, who the couple say were uncooperative.
Then, after the documentary was released in 2024, City of Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges reached out, offering support to Huskins and Quinn, hoping to restore their faith in law enforcement. He invited them to speak to a law enforcement group about their experience.
That's where they met El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson, who incidentally had jurisdiction in their case because Denise was held hostage and raped in South Lake Tahoe, which is in El Dorado County.
Together the five of them – Huskins, Quinn, Carausu, Borges, and Pierson – have pieced together a decades-long puzzle, solving cold case crimes linked to Muller dating back to 1993 when he allegedly committed his first kidnapping and rape at the age of 16.
The DA in that jurisdiction has not yet filed charges. However, District Attorneys in both Santa Clara and Contra Costa County have now filed charges based on the confessions, which were later confirmed through DNA testing.
The Santa Clara DA announced charges on Dec 30 related to two cold case home invasions and assaults in 2009. Muller was initially a suspect in those crimes.
On Monday, the Contra Costa District Attorney's Office announced they filed charges against Muller for a previously unreported San Ramon-area kidnapping for ransom in 2015. That home invasion allegedly happened two weeks after Muller released Huskins, but the district attorney's office said it was so traumatic the family never reported it – fearing he, or other attackers, would come back.
"The amount of coverage that our case had …. But just two weeks later, he's willing to do a very similar thing," Quinn said. "[It] shows you how brazen and emboldened he was."
"I believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg," Huskins added.
Muller has not commented on the new charges.
Over the coming weeks, CBS News California will investigate the systemic problems highlighted by this decades-long "American Nightmare."
