Alleged kidnappers contact paper
In reply to suspicions that Denise Huskins’ abduction was a hoax, email claims it was a training mission.
More than a week after Denise Huskins was taken from her boyfriend’s Vallejo home the question remains: Was it a kidnapping for ransom or one big ill-conceived hoax?
After she was found in Huntington Beach, Vallejo police called it a hoax that set officers on a wild goose chase. But the Police Department has now gone noticeably quiet, saying only that the truth will be clear soon.
What is known and indisputable is that a case that has drawn national attention has become bizarre.
On Tuesday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that it received an anonymous email from the alleged abductors, demanding that Vallejo police apologize by noon to Huskins for saying that her ordeal was a hoax or “I/we may be the direct agent of harm.”
The newspaper has received a series of emails from Huskins’ alleged kidnappers since last week, when they sent an audio recording of a woman claiming to be Huskins, who at the time was still missing.
The Los Angeles Times has also received an email from an anonymous sender, but police declined to comment about the email, and its authenticity has not been verified.
The email includes a 19page letter, in which the alleged kidnappers try to clear Huskins’ name by describing details about the reported abduction, as well as a series of auto thefts and burglaries in the area.
The anonymous sender wrote: “The Mare Island kidnapping was a training mission to test means and methods that would be used on higher net worth targets.”
The letter also describes why the group asked for $8,500.
“We chose $8,500 because it was below the $10,000 reporting threshold, and far enough below that it likely would not be flagged as part of a structured transaction under that prong of the reporting law,” the sender said.
FBI spokeswoman Gina Swankie said Tuesday that she couldn’t comment on the emails, but said the agency was aware of them.
When asked whether Huskins’ ordeal was a hoax, she said the agency doesn’t “have any conclusions.”
Investigators, she said, are still looking into the case.
From the start, Huskins’ boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, has insisted that the kidnapping was real.
He told police that Huskins, 29, had been “forcibly taken against her will” from his home between midnight and 5 a.m. March 23 and held for $8,500 ransom. He didn’t report her kidnapping until after noon because, his attorneys said, he was drugged and bound.
Quinn provided blood samples to prove that he was drugged. He also gave authorities the passwords to his email accounts and was interrogated for 17 hours by the FBI and police, his attorneys said.
Two days later, Huskins turned up in Huntington Beach, where she said her kidnappers had dropped her off. The ransom, Quinn’s attorneys said, was never paid.
That same day, authorities arranged a flight for Huskins to Northern California so they could interview her. But she never got on the plane.
Hours later, Vallejo police announced that they believed Huskins’ kidnapping was a hoax and had wasted valuable resources.
But Huskins’ and Quinn’s attorneys say that police got it wrong and that their clients are not lying.
Vallejo Police Lt. Kenny Park declined Monday to say whether they still considered the kidnapping a hoax.
He said that there were no new details and that he had “absolutely no idea” how long the investigation would take.
“At some point in the future, the picture will clear up for everyone,” Park said.