The plethora of podcasts, documentaries and bingeable TV series has led to swathes of the global population being infected by a condition known as true-crime brain. So many tales of white suburban women’s abduction and annihilation have fuelled both content and extreme paranoia (although queer, Black and Indigenous women have far more reason to feel at risk than the women who feature here).
David Fincher and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl satirised and solidified the sense that we may be surrounded by criminal masterminds, with its hero, Amy Dunne, concocting an elaborate plan to fake her murder and frame her husband, Nick (as any true-crime brain sufferer knows, the husband always did it). But, as Netflix’s new docuseries American Nightmare reminds us, beautiful blond women from suburbia aren’t safe, the husband doesn’t always do it and the police have watched Gone Girl, too.
American Nightmare examines the tragic case of Denise Huskins, who in 2015 was kidnapped, drugged, raped and held hostage by a violent home intruder. Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, was the prime suspect. Quinn was interrogated and tormented by police in the 48 hours that his girlfriend was missing. When Huskins reappeared, seemingly unscathed, she was accused of faking the kidnapping.
What we see Quinn describe to the police – how the intruders came into their home while they were sleeping, restrained him with zip ties, blindfolded him with swimming goggles and drugged him with cold medicine before leaving with his girlfriend – does seem far-fetched. But the three-part series, made by the team behind the Netflix behemoth The Tinder Swindler, shows how the narrative that was spun was far more outrageous than the truth.
An even more disturbing story than Gone Girl emerges through the typical combination of grainy real-life footage, clipped news reports, talking heads and re-enactments. The investigation, which immediately treated Huskins and Quinn as suspects, not victims, was more concerned with spinning a yarn than getting justice for people who went through unspeakable brutality at the hands of a violent sadist.
While the first episode focuses on the story the police and the media latched on to, the second starts with a harrowing first-hand account of the abduction from Huskins. She methodically describes the events of her kidnapping and rape, which is then reenacted by actors. This is terribly hard to watch. She seems a long way from being the maniacal manipulator painted by the media. Any inconsistencies in her account, any emotional numbness in the weeks that followed, seem very much a consequence of the trauma she endured.
Having lived through one nightmare, Huskins and Quinn then faced another. The police, press and public believed that either he was a monstrous partner or she was a scheming woman out to screw over an innocent man. Almost a decade later, Quinn still seems in disbelief that, after his girlfriend survived torture, she had to give her statement to a police department that was holding press conferences calling her a liar.
What elevates this documentary above the normal schlocky true crime fare is how it makes the true crime audience complicit in the media storm in which Quinn and Huskins found themselves. But American Nightmare also has a hunger for the ghoulish details: some of the re-enactments are slowed down to make sure the viewer gets every grisly detail. At times, Quinn and other victims clearly struggle to give testimony; it is unclear why a series focused on a botched investigation needs such detailed accounts of their assaults.
The perpetrator of this violence, Matthew Muller, eventually pleaded guilty, but by the end of the third episode it is devastatingly clear that Muller was able to terrorise multiple women because the truth – that these crimes were cruel and impersonal – wasn’t as titillating as, well, a twisted David Fincher thriller. As Huskins says of her ordeal: “It’s not that crazy. It happened.”
• American Nightmare is on Netflix now
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