The "American Nightmare" Doc On Netflix Is One Of The Scariest Stories I've Ever Heard, And I Have No Idea How The Couple In It Overcame And Persevered
I finished watching this 3 part doc on Netflix a couple weeks ago and figured it was the perfect Valentines Day blog.
For anybody heading out on a date tonight with a girl they're just getting to know, this makes an excellent subject to talk about and kill some time.
For those who have seen it, I'm sure they will all agree, this story is fucking wi-wi-wild and crazy kids.
Here's the rundown from Time.
Time - Denise Huskins says that when she was released on March 25, 2015, by one of the men who had kidnapped her two days earlier, the last thing she was thinking about was ensuring everything she had been through sounded believable. But almost immediately after reaching safety, Huskins, then 29, started to realize that she had returned not only to a media firestorm, but to a brigade of law enforcement officials intent on proving she had pulled a real-life Gone Girl.
In American Nightmare, now streaming on Netflix, Huskins and her now-husband Aaron Quinn recount how their lives spiraled out of control after Huskins was taken from Quinn's Vallejo, Calif., home in the early morning hours of March 23, 2015. Over the next 48 hours, police went from trying to pin Huskins' disappearance on her then-boyfriend Quinn to framing Huskins herself as the perpetrator of a scheme similar to the faked abduction at the center of David Fincher’s 2014 thriller Gone Girl, which was based on Gillian Flynn's best-selling 2012 novel of the same name.
The three-part docuseries, from The Tinder Swindler filmmakers Felicity Morris and Bernadette Higgins, combines interviews, interrogation footage, and audio recordings to chronicle how Huskins and Quinn's story became a harrowing example of what can happen when the justice system fails the victims of a crime.
Without dropping too many spoilers, while you're watching it, as told by the people who experienced it, and seeing the police interrogation videos, you can't help but think to yourself "this was all a hoax". It seemed way too unbelievable to be real. To hell with the fact Gone Girl had just came out in theatres and was all the rage, the story just seemed far too detailed and elaborate to have been carried out as carefully and systematically as it was.
Through the first part, and some of the second, you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop, or the a-ha, "gotcha" moment to come from the police or FBI, but it's quite the opposite.
There are still a bunch of questions surrounding the case, the story, and the investigation (which I'll blog at the bottom to avoid spoilers), but all in all, just when you think you can't feel any dirtier about how these poor people were treated by law enforcement, (Mat Mustard what a grade A scumbag), along comes one of the good ones, Officer Misty Carausu to restore faith, and save the day.
It's a really fucked up story, which I can't believe wasn't bigger national news at the time it happened. (If it was, apologies, I had never heard of this up until watching this doc.)
Girls will eat this story up because their brains are fucked and their energy feeds off of crime dramas, and murder mysteries. Even if this one has a (somewhat) happier ending.
------- SPOILERS --------
Ok here were some of the questions I still had after watching this thing.
1- How the fuck did the ex-girlfriend Andrea get off scott-free in this whole thing? How was she not interrogated? The kidnapper(s) explicitly told Denise he was "sorry", they meant to kidnap Andrea, not her.
THEN, on top of all of that, they just casually throw in the fact that she's banging the dirty FBI agent who was working the case David Sesma? Are you kidding me?
2- Was there another kidnapper involved? Or was the other figure they saw in the dark that creepy manequin thing they found in his car? (Very fucked up by the way) The Huskins themselves swear to this day there were two other people involved in the break in and kidnapping.
3- Speaking of fucked up. The kidnapper. Of course this guy was a Harvard graduate right?
4- Where did Denise Huskins get all the luggage she appeared back home with? And what the hell was in it? You guys kinda just glanced over that tidbit in the doc guys.
5- A guy on twitter responded to my tweet about the drive times from Vellejo to Tahoe and where she was eventually dropped off not adding up but I couldn’t really follow what he was getting at?
