Upcoming Netflix Doc Examines 'Gone Girl' Case — Where Cops Claimed Kidnapping Was Hoax

Netflix's "American Nightmare" examines the harrowing ordeal of Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn

In March of 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, were awakened in the middle of the night by armed intruders.

The intruders, who were allegedly wearing scuba suits, bound the young couple with zip ties and forced them into a closet in Aaron's Vallejo, Calif., home.

In the closet, they were drugged and blindfolded with blacked-out goggles. They were told that the attackers were part of a well-organized, highly-trained group that collected financial debt.

The attackers' plan was to kidnap Denise and return her after Aaron paid a ransom. Denise was taken captive to a remote location, where she was drugged and raped twice by her abductor. She was released two days later on March 25 near her mother's home in Huntington Beach, Calif.

In the interim, Aaron recounted the terrifying ordeal to the Vallejo police. But, despite his unwavering account of what had happened, police didn’t believe his story.

Instead, they considered him suspect number one in what they presumed was Denise's murder.

Related: California Man Makes First Federal Court Appearance in Gone Girl Kidnapping Case

After Denise was released, police still publicly cast doubt on the couple's account, declaring in a press conference that the story didn’t make sense. The case became known — erroneously — as the "Gone Girl" kidnapping, referencing the popular book and movie about a woman who faked her own kidnapping.

Now, their story is being made into a three-part series called American Nightmare, set to be released on Netflix on Jan. 17. (An exclusive trailer is shown below.)

Co-directed by Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris, the series “is a damning indictment of the confirmation bias too often at play in our criminal justice system,” according to a press release.

"American Nightmare will challenge the assumptions of any true crime fan: How can we trust a news media so thirsty for clicks? Why are we still so reluctant to believe women? And what happens to victims when the institutions that are sworn to protect them… don’t?" the release reads.

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After their nightmare, it took three months and a chance discovery before the couple received a modicum of justice. In June 2015, police investigating a case involving a masked intruder some 40 miles away in Alameda County, Calif., found evidence connected to Denise and Aaron's case in the possession of a former Marine and disbarred Harvard-educated immigration attorney named Matthew Muller.

Related: California Couple in 'Gone Girl' Kidnapping Files Claim Against City

Muller, 44, pleaded guilty in 2016 to one count of federal kidnapping. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. He faced additional state charges including kidnapping, two counts of rape by force, robbery and burglary. But in November 2020, he was found mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Denise and Aaron, both physical therapists, sued the City of Vallejo for defamation and in 2018 won a $2.5 million settlement.

In 2021, the couple released a book Victim F: From Crime Victims to Suspects to Survivors, which they wrote with former PEOPLE senior writer Nicole Weisensee Egan.

Had Muller not been caught, “I don't know if I would've had the confidence to be able to return to work knowing that people would still think that I'm some con artist or hoaxer,” Denise tells PEOPLE. “A big part of our job is putting our hands on people, quite literally, to help facilitate their healing. And a big piece of that is trust and how can you trust someone who lied about something so significant as a kidnapping? I'm not sure where we'd be.”

Related: Calif. Woman Falsely Accused of Hoax 'Gone Girl' Kidnapping Says Real Abductor Didn't Act Alone

“Those months in between were unsustainable and we weren't able to go back to work,” Aaron tells PEOPLE. “Partly because of trauma and partly because they wouldn't let us. Who wants to hire a hoaxer? So that's a big challenge in the digital age. You can't move towns and get away from it. Anyone can just search you and then decide 'I don't want to work with this person,' or 'I don't want to hire this person.'"

Why Muller targeted them remains unknown.

"Like many victims, or many people have gone through tragedy, you don't get all the answers,” says Aaron. "And that can be a sticking point to recovery. So for us, we don't rely on finding those answers, but what we have to do is move forward in the unknown and focus on things that matter the most to us, like our family, our kids, our work. Those are sustainable things. And having the answers of why they targeted us doesn't change what we do as far as moving forward.”

"I hope people come away from after they see the film, that this isn't a bizarre kidnapping,” adds Aaron, who was interrogated for 18 hours by police. “What's quite bizarre is just the absolute lack of any sort of investigation. All the evidence was there to catch Muller and the other perpetrators within the first 24 hours, but the police put their head in the sand and said there was no sky. So that is the scary part, is that the confirmation bias and tunnel vision will just lead them to do nothing."

"This case didn't require Sherlock Holmes," Aaron adds. "This required basic police work.”

Netflix’s American Nightmare releases globally on Jan. 17.

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