San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books: Couple traumatized by crime set the record straight.
Six years ago, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn survived a terrifying, prolonged attack in Quinn’s Vallejo home. The incident became national news and exposed them to public shaming. Huskins and her future husband endured harrowing crimes; she was kidnapped, raped and left on a roadside. Vallejo police responded by calling them liars.
Soon thereafter, Huskins began writing about the ordeal. It was a period of intense pain and frustration, and Huskins’ journal entries were a way of coping with the “doubt and resistance” she said she encountered from Vallejo police. The writing also allowed her to “hold on to all of these details” that officers found implausible. When police interrogated her, Huskins recalled in a recent video interview, “I was being treated like I was crazy. Like, ‘What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense; it’s impossible.’ And I said, ‘It is possible, because it happened.’ ”
Her agonizing memories are at the heart of “Victim F: From Crime Victims to Suspects to Survivors,” a powerful new book that raises important questions about policing, journalism and social media. Cowritten with investigative reporter Nicole Weisensee Egan, Huskins and Quinn’s book is an urgent appeal for fairness and empathy.
Seated beside his wife at their Santa Cruzarea home, Quinn described a public shaming prodded by a police department that impugned him and Huskins. The day Huskins was found, a Vallejo officer told reporters that she and Quinn “owe this community an apology” for depriving “true victims” of investigators’ full attention. Quinn said these falsehoods by police and others constituted an indefensible misrepresentation. “Our trauma was hijacked,” Quinn said.
In 2018, Huskins and Quinn settled with Vallejo for $2.5 million. But only this spring, however, did Vallejo’s new police chief offer his “deepest apology to Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn for how they were treated.”
Their ordeal began on March 23, 2015, Huskins and Quinn write, while they were asleep in Quinn’s thenhome in Vallejo when a stranger — later identified as
Matthew Muller — barked, “Wake up. This is a robbery.” Muller drugged Huskins and Quinn with what he told them was a mix of an overthecounter sleep aid and a prescription antianxiety drug. He used zip ties to immobilize them and placed headphones on their ears.
Muller played a recording, Quinn recalled, identifying himself as part of “a blackmarket group hired to retrieve” debts. For reasons that remain unclear, Muller, a disbarred lawyer, expected to find Jennifer Jones, Quinn’s exwife, at Quinn’s house. ( Jennifer Jones is a pseudonym.) The recording said Muller would take Jones for 48 hours. Instead, he kidnapped Huskins by placing her in the trunk of a car. He then repeatedly drugged her and raped her twice. Two days later, she was dropped off near her mother’s Southern California home.
Vallejo police immediately suspected Quinn, interrogating him for 18 hours and suggesting he killed Huskins. When Huskins turned up alive, police switched their focus. Now they said that the couple was perpetrating a hoax that resembled “Gone Girl,” the novelturnedmovie about a woman who fakes her own disappearance. Their “tunnel vision,” Quinn said, caused police to miss numerous clues.
Vallejo police were forced to change course again in June 2015 when officers investigating a Dublin home invasion gathered evidence suggesting Muller was the culprit in that breakin. Police connected Muller to the attacks on Quinn and Huskins when they found a strand of hair resembling Huskins’ on a pair of goggles in his possession.
Muller was convicted of kidnapping Huskins and is serving a 40year federal prison term. Huskins and Quinn maintain that at least two others were with him, but Muller is the only person to face charges.
The couple married in 2018. Their first child, a daughter, was born five years to the day after Muller released Huskins. Huskins, 35, and Quinn, 36, are both physical therapists. They hope their book inspires change in policing.
“When you get in that interrogation room,” Quinn said, “the police are legally allowed to lie to you.” He added, “And if they were doing that to me, as a 30yearold highly educated white male, they’re doing that to everyone.”
Several states are considering legislation that would prevent officers from lying during interrogations; Quinn said such laws should be enacted across the country. As the subject of a protracted grilling, he believes police should be prohibited from conducting interrogations that last for more than four hours at a time.
The crimes were national news, and some reporters quickly accepted the police’s version of events. The couple’s plight, Quinn said, should remind journalists to “question, question, question”: “They shouldn’t be stenographers for the police.”
Huskins, the target of numerous hateful Facebook comments, later reached out to people who wrote awful things about her. Some remained unsympathetic. But a few “apologized profusely,” she said. This reinforced her belief that, as she writes, “We must meet hate with love. We must meet ignorance with empathy.”
Publishing “Victim F” has been “cathartic, in that I can finally release it from myself,” Huskins said. “We can literally put it in tangible form, close the book, put it on the shelf. It’s out in the world. What the world does with it now is one thing, but it’s released from us.”