Denise Huskins & Aaron Quinn Wiki - Denise Huskins & Aaron Quinn Biography
Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins awoke in his Vallejo, California, home to a man’s voice saying, “Wake up. This is a robbery. That terrifying night, both of them were bound and Huskins was kidnapped. Huskins was held captive for just over 48 hours before being released, but the couple continued to fear for their lives with a kidnapper on the loose and the police dismissing their account of the incident as too incredible to be believed.
Today, with their assailant Matthew Muller in prison, they’ve chronicled their story in a new book called “Victim F: From Crime Victims, To Suspects, To Survivors.”
Huskins says that in the end, the couple’s experience of trauma and survival is ultimately a love story with a happy ending. Huskins and Quinn married in 2018 and had a daughter, Olivia, who was born five years to the day that Huskins was released by her kidnapper, she said.
“You can go through any kind of trauma to where it leaves you devastated and in a place where you just think, ‘This is impossible to move forward from. What do I do next?’” she told ABC News’ Amy Robach. “I think ours is an example of that. There is hope. It might take time and it might be a lot of hard work, but there is hope.”
Denise Huskins & Aaron Quinn Age
Aaron Quinn and Denise Huskins's age is unknown.
Denise Huskins & Aaron Quinn
Huskins and Quinn met in 2014 in Vallejo, California, located in the Bay Area, where they were both physical therapists. Huskins said they were “drawn together.”
“I was very conflicted because I obviously was attracted to Denise,” Quinn said. But he had just gotten out of a relationship with a fiancée who he said cheated on him. “I also didn’t trust myself anymore. I could see who Aaron was and the man he was and the good in him,” Huskins said. “I knew that he’d be a great partner but I could see that he was struggling.”
Quinn’s struggle eventually came to a head when, in February 2015, Huskins found out that Quinn had been messaging his ex-fiancée about getting back together. She said it was devastating. I finally just put my foot down and said, ‘Look, I don’t deserve this.’ And it was a couple of weeks of kind of going back and forth,” she said.
On March 22, 2015, the couple made a plan to meet at Quinn’s home in Mare Island, Vallejo, to decide if they wanted to continue their relationship.
“I brought pizza and we sat on the couch most of the night and talked,” she said. “We talked about how it would be difficult; we had to rebuild trust. But as long as he was willing to really give this a full shot, then we could try again.”
Huskins didn’t know it at the time, but her decision to visit Quinn that night would become a pivotal moment in her life. She said that after their conversation, as they went to bed around midnight, it felt like “a fresh start.”
The couple was awakened at around 3 a.m. by a man who’d broken into the house. I remember being asleep and hearing a voice and thinking it was a dream. … But the voice kept talking and I just remember my eyes shot open and I could see the walls illuminated with a white light that was flashing and I could see a couple of red laser dots crossing the wall, and I could hear, ‘Wake up, this is a robbery. We’re not here to hurt you,’” Huskins said. “And in that moment, I just thought, ‘Oh my God. This is not a dream.’”
Quinn said the moment was so shocking that it froze him in his place. Laying zip ties on the bed, the intruder told Huskins to tie Quinn’s feet together and his hands behind his back, Quinn said. Huskins said the man then told her to walk to the bedroom closet. Huskins said that while walking to the closet she noticed two sets of legs from what she believed to be two different people in the bedroom.
Huskins said the man tied her up inside and then brought Quinn to the closet and placed him inside. The intruder covered their eyes with swimming goggles that had been covered in duct tape to block their sight and put headphones on them. There were these pre-recorded messages,” Huskins said, referring to what they heard through the headphones. “They were going to give us a sedative and … if we didn’t take it, they would inject it intravenously.”
Quinn said his pre-recorded message referred to him by name. In that moment, he said he thought to himself, “We’re in a lot of trouble and this is planned. But it turned out that one important part of this plan had not gone as expected for the intruder.
“He’s being asked questions … and at some point, the intruder realizes they’ve got the wrong person,” said Melanie Woodrow, an investigative reporter with San Francisco ABC station KGO, who covered the story. “The intruder says, ‘We have a problem’ … and he says to Aaron, ‘Do Denise and your ex-fiancée look-alike?’”
At that moment, Quinn said he released a “guttural sigh.” I was like, ‘Yes, they both have long, blonde hair,’” Quinn said. “And so, he said, ‘We got the wrong intel.’”
Quinn had lived with his ex-fiancée in that house before their breakup, and she had only recently moved out all of her belongings. Huskins said she hoped that the confusion would result in the intruder deciding just to leave them, but that is not what happened.
“He said, ‘This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take you for 48 hours … Aaron’s going to have to complete some tasks,’” Huskins said.
Aaron Quinn becomes a suspect
Quinn woke up the next morning with only enough energy due to the sedatives to call out sick for Huskins and himself, and then he fell asleep again until 11:30 a.m. He woke up to new emails and texts from the intruder. They demanded two payments of $8,500, he said. He responded to the kidnapper’s message but when he didn’t hear back, he began to panic.
Concerned that the camera the intruders installed was still monitoring him, he believed he could not call 911. Quinn’s older brother is an FBI agent, so he decided he would call him instead, but his brother instructed him to immediately call 911.
Fearing he was putting Huskins’ life in grave danger, he dialed the police. When officers from the Vallejo Police Department appeared at his home, it had been more than nine hours since Huskins had been taken. Quinn said the first question the police asked him when he answered the door was, “Are you on drugs?”
“I said, ‘Yes, the kidnappers drugged me,’” he said.
Quinn said the officers entered the house and immediately unplugged the camera that the kidnapper had left. Then they continued to question Quinn about what he’d been doing before calling for help. He starts asking if I’d been partying. I tell him no. He points to some beer bottles that were neatly placed in the box next to the garbage, and I said, ‘I put them there to take them out for recycling all at once.’”
“They clearly didn’t believe him,” said Nicole Weisensee Egan, the co-author of “Victim F.” “It is soul-crushing for Aaron because he’s out of his mind worried about Denise.
“Aaron’s car is missing, and they know that he waited a substantial period of time before dialing 911. They see all of the components of what you might expect to see, objectively, in a domestic violence murder,” said Matt Murphy, an ABC News contributor and former California prosecutor.
Quinn said the officers eventually “seemed to soften a little bit” and told him they were taking him to the police station to give a statement. But while he was there, the police also gathered DNA samples and his clothes, he said. In return, he says they gave him prison clothes to wear.
During questioning, Quinn recounted what had happened the night before. He told the detectives about the goggles placed over their eyes, the specific directions they were given and the recordings that played on the headphones. But Quinn says the detectives began to ask about his relationship with Huskins.
In video recordings of the interview, detective Mathew Mustard could be heard asking if there was “tension in the relationship” and if Quinn was “cheating.” Quinn said he realized the interview was taking a turn when, about 45 minutes into it, Mustard leaned back in the chair and told him, “I don’t think you’re being truthful, and I don’t think anybody came into your house.”
Mustard could be heard telling Quinn in the videotaped interrogation he “the story you’re telling here, I ain’t buying at all.”
“I’m telling [Mustard] everything because I have nothing to hide,” Quinn said.
To make matters worse, the detectives had also found a small bloodstain on Quinn’s sheets.
“I knew there was an old stain on my sheet,” Quinn said. “I’d washed those sheets multiple times. It’s just a small stain that I wasn’t able to get out. Little did I know, a quarter-sized bloodstain was going to mean that I was a murderer.”
When Quinn’s parents and brother arrived at the police station, the Vallejo police questioned them, too.
“We were telling [the detective] what a good kid he was,” said Marianne Quinn, his mother. “They kept asking, ‘Has he ever gotten angry? Has he done drugs?’ They said maybe we were in a fight and I pushed her down the stairs,” Aaron Quinn said. “Maybe we were experimenting with drugs. … Maybe we were into weird sex things and something went wrong.”
The detectives called Huskins’ parents and alerted them that something terrible might’ve happened to their daughter. The FBI, which also got involved in the case, gave Aaron Quinn a polygraph exam -- something he was eager to take to prove his innocence -- which they say he failed.
Exhausted, worried about Huskins and anxious over the detectives’ refusal to believe him, Aaron Quinn said he began to doubt his own sanity. “I thought maybe I did have a schizophrenic breakdown,” he said. His brother, Ethan Quinn, retained attorney Dan Russo, who brought Aaron Quinn back to his office after 18 hours of police interrogation.
“I knew from experience how this was going to go down,” Russo said. “I told him, ‘Look, this is going to be a nightmare and there’s no way you’re going to be able to pinch yourself and wake up.’”
On March 24, one day after the incident, the San Francisco Chronicle received what’s known as a “proof-of-life” message from Huskins, Murphy said. In that recorded message sent by the kidnappers, Huskins spoke about a recent plane crash, to prove the message wasn’t old.
Investigators brought Aaron Quinn back to the station that same day and asked him to send a message back to the kidnapper. When he was handed his phone, Quinn says a member of his legal team noticed that it had been placed in airplane mode, even though it was the only means of communication with the kidnappers. When they turned airplane mode off, the phone flooded with messages. It was later discovered that the kidnapper had called the phone three times.
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