Netflix Doc Rips Into Police Who Branded Victim As A Hoaxer

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Aaron Quinn called 911 just before 2 p.m. on Monday, March 23, 2015, saying that intruders dressed in scuba suits had broken into his upscale Northern California home in the middle of the night, tied him up and drugged him, kidnapped his girlfriend, Denise Huskins, and demanded ransom. Police had questions: Why did he wait so long to call authorities? Why was he so calm? And when he admitted that just the evening before, the couple had talked about his recent attempts to get back together with his ex-fiancée, their interview began to turn into an interrogation.

To investigators, this wasn’t a kidnapping ― it was murder, and the boyfriend did it. And then when Huskins reappeared, they refused to believe the abduction was real. Netflix’s new docuseries “American Nightmare,” which premieres Wednesday, is a scathing rebuke of authorities’ handling of what became known as the “Gone Girl” case: Huskins was accused of faking her kidnapping like the character in Gillian Flynn’s novel who staged her death and framed her husband for her murder.

Huskins was alive, stuffed in the trunk of a car that was being driven to a remote cabin. If the police hadn’t confiscated Quinn’s phone — on which he’d already received a call from the kidnapper — and set it to airplane mode, they could have been able to see and potentially trace the kidnapper’s subsequent ransom calls to within about 200 yards from the spot where Huskins was being held. She was raped there, more than once, and forced to wear darkened swim…