All language subtitles for American Nightmare (2024) - 01x03 - Part Three_ The Others.NF.WEBRip.x264-EDITH+FLUX.English.C.orig.Addic7ed.com

County emergency.

We have a break-in
at North Terracina Drive in Dublin.

They are out there right now.

I'm hiding
in the bathroom right now.

My husband is fighting with them.

They have our daughter.

Listen. Talk to me, okay?
How many people?

In the dark, we can't really see.

There was a laser light
that was pointing at us.

Wanting us to turn around. We were in bed.

Okay.

My husband's calling me.

He... He ran away already!

He ran away.

I arrive on scene,
and I know from the 911 call

that there's a family
that lives here inside.

There's been a home invasion robbery.

The husband is covered in blood,
and he's holding a rag to his face.

He told me that the daughter is safe,

and the suspect has run out the back door.

As we searched the back,
we come across zip ties and duct tape.

And we make sure to bag that evidence.

We know that the suspect
is wearing all black,

and he's possibly hopped over this fence.

The dog starts tracking back
here on this trail,

but there's miles and miles
of fields up here,

so it's gonna make him hard to detect.

Who is this suspect? Why is he here?
Why did he choose this house?

What did he want inside this home?

And then the daughter comes up to me.

She says,
"On the counter, there's a phone."

"I think he left it behind."

When we locate the subscriber
for the cell phone number...

...a female answers the phone.

And I ask her if she knows
whose phone number this is,

and... and she says, "Oh yeah, I know.
That's my son's phone number."

And she provided his name...

Matthew Muller.

He's a former Marine.

A Harvard Law graduate.

We did locate some previous reports

in which he was a suspect in some, uh,
sexual batteries and attempted rapes.

So this leads me to suspect
that in our Dublin incident,

his intentions were
to tie up the parents in the house,

um, and to rape
their 22-year-old daughter.

We tell his mom something very innocent.

"We just want to get the phone
back to him. Do you know where he is?"

And she says, "He's... He's staying
at my cabin in South Lake Tahoe."

South Lake Tahoe is a vacation spot

which is about 140 miles north
of our location.

We can't be sure he's still there.

So we need to get to that cabin
before he finds out we're coming

and has a chance to flee.

I get a call from my sergeant,
and he says

we're going to go
to South Lake Tahoe to make an arrest

on a home invasion
that occurred in Dublin.

Do you want to join us?

It was going to be
my first case as a detective.

And I said, "Hell yeah, I do. Sign me up."

It's gotta be the next one.

I'm thinking to myself,

"What's gonna happen?"

Ambushes, barricades.
Does he have, you know, guns?

We don't wanna make any noise.
We wanna be sure we're silent.

We want to be sure
we take him by surprise.

- Search warrant! Search warrant!
- We got a search warrant!

I got an open door on the left.
I got an open door on the left.

Search warrant! Search warrant!

Holding! Holding!

- Clear.
- Clear. Clear.

Coming out the back.
Look around the back.

They're in the back.

And then...

Turn the fuck around!

We'll come back inside!

I see Muller being handcuffed.

He was very quiet, composed. No emotions.

I tell him,
"I'm going to take a photo of you."

He looks relatively normal.

Like your average
all-American white male adult.

I go back in the house.

It was just a mess.

It smells kind of...

what would be a good word? Stale.

When we're searching everything,

we're finding things
that tie him to our crime.

We find zip ties and duct tape.

Just like he left at the Dublin house.

Toy guns that are painted.

One of them has a laser attached to it.

In Dublin, he awoke the victims
with a laser shining on their face.

So this is all starting to fall together.

But as I'm standing in this house,

I noticed that the windows were covered.

I could feel
that there was much more to it.

The bedroom was just very dirty.

And I get this sense
that something else has happened here.

In the bathroom,
we find a NyQuil bottle, a syringe.

Something inside you says,

"Oh, this is... this is weird,
and this isn't right."

And then we find a stolen vehicle.

It's a white Mustang.

With Matthew Muller's ID inside of it.

The GPS is up and it has
all of these different addresses.

Why was he driving
to these different places?

And who was he with?

In the trunk,

I see what looks like a torso,

dressed in black.

It's a blow-up doll.

Made to look like...

he wants someone
to mistake it for a human being.

I have no idea what he's using this for,

but it's... it's creepy.

And then we find the nylon belt.

And in the pocket is a pair of goggles,

and the eyes are duct-taped.

As I'm pulling them out,
I see a single strand of blond hair.

Oh my God.

Who does this hair belong to?

I don't think it was someone
who gave it up willingly.

Are they alive? Are they dead?

We have to find out
who this hair belonged to.

By June 2015...

I just feel lost.

Afraid because the kidnappers
are still out there.

We're still worried about whether or not

we're gonna be prosecuted and charged
with committing a hoax.

Denise and I stay at our parents' house,
or with friends...

We feel like fugitives,
uh, like we're on the run.

I open up my Facebook,
and I'm just inundated with abuse.

And reading through it...

...is so frustrating.

I mean...

it was so insulting.

Having people believe
that I'm this type of person

who would put my family through this.

That I would make
this huge, elaborate lie for...

for what I don't... I don't know.

It was crushing.

Can't work.

Too traumatized to work.
I don't know if they'll let us go back

if we wanted to,
because we're the hoaxsters.

Our attorneys
are both working, like, tirelessly

to try to get the police and the FBI
to actually look for the kidnappers.

But months have gone by,

and the only thing that they're doing
is continuing to look at us.

And then, almost by accident, we find out
that the lead case agent, David Sesma...

- This is David Sesma.
- Hi. I'm with the FBI.

...used to date my ex, Andrea,

who was the intended target
of this whole thing.

There's absolutely no way
Sesma should be on this case.

It's a clear, unequivocal,
black-and-white conflict of interest.

So I write to the office
of Inspector General,

explain the situation.

Their response,

"The appropriate authorities
found his conduct 'unproblematic.'"

Is this why the investigation's
not being followed through?

Is this why evidence is being ignored?

Like, it's not paranoia anymore.
It just... Now it feels personal.

We're just two people
going against the FBI.

In the meantime,
like, what do we do?

Do we just kind of live
behind closed doors

for the rest of our lives?

We're not safe anywhere.

When we get back to the station,
I'm thinking,

"How and where do I begin searching
for a victim with blond hair?"

Matthew Muller came up
in several different incidents

that occurred in Northern California.

The first one I look at was in 2009.

It happened 40 miles
from the city of Dublin, in Palo Alto.

So I call Palo Alto PD,

explain to the detective
we have Matthew Muller in custody.

He cuts me off and says,

"I have a photo on my desk,
and I've been staring at him since 2009."

"He was a person of interest
in our sexual assault case,

but I could never prove that it was him."

Palo Alto PD have
a home invasion case so terrifying,

locals are afraid to go to bed at night.

He actually physically restrained her,
uh, blindfolded her.

At approximately 3:30
in the morning,

a 32-year-old woman was woken up by a man
who was dressed in all-black clothing.

He ties her up,
forces her to drink NyQuil,

puts surgical tape over her eyes,
and tells her that he's going to rape her.

She's pleading with the suspect
telling him she'd been raped before.

He tells her that he doesn't want
to victimize her again

and decides to leave her alone.

Three weeks prior, Matthew Muller was
stopped by a Palo Alto police officer

because he had seen him
jumping out of the bushes

nearby an apartment complex.

And so, Matthew Muller
became a person of interest.

But there was no DNA or evidence
tying Matthew Muller to this case,

and the case is still open now.

There's a lot of similarities
between this case

and the items I found in South Lake Tahoe.

But there's no mention of goggles
in the report.

So I know
that there's another victim out there,

and I had to find out who she was.

Prior to becoming
a law enforcement officer,

one of my girlfriends was
a victim of sexual assault.

She is the reason why I became a cop.

I wanted to be the one
that was the voice for these victims

and prosecute the suspects

and send them to prison
for a very long time.

I am working after hours,

and I'm getting more and more
emotionally drawn to this case.

And then I read
about another case in 2009.

Just eight miles from Palo Alto.

In a town called Mountain View.

In 2009, I was in my thirties.

I was in a relationship,
but, uh, living alone.

That night, I woke up
around 4:30 or five o'clock thinking,

"Oh good. I have
a little bit extra time to sleep in."

Um, and then...

I felt this very heavy pressure
on... on top of me.

I was screaming, and I just keep hearing,

"Tracey, Tracey, Tracey!
It's okay, Tracey. Tracey!"

And he told me if I didn't stop screaming,
he was going to gag me.

He restrained me with zip ties,

made me drink something
that would make me sleepy.

And blindfolded me with a pair
of swim goggles that had been blacked out.

He tells me,

"Well, now I have some bad news."

"Um..."

"Unfortunately, now
I'm gonna have to rape you."

And...

And then the...
then just the panic took over,

and I started just begging,

"You don't need to do this."

"Please don't do this.
Please don't do this."

You know, "I gave you... I gave you
everything you wanted. You did..."

You just start bargaining, right?
You just start saying,

"Please, please, please, please,
please don't do this."

And...

I remember him
being very silent for a while.

And then I hear him sigh and he says,

"I can't do this."

"I'm sorry. I know this is
really gonna mess you up for a long time."

"You might want
to think about getting a dog."

"A dog would be good protection for you."

"Um, it might prevent something like this
from happening again."

He, all of a sudden,
has this change of heart,

to try to look like the good guy.

He actually gives her,
like, crime prevention advice

on how not to be a victim in the future.

But Tracey has long brown hair.

The goggles that I collected
could not have been used on this woman.

When the police arrived,
the officer asked me,

"Are you sure
you just didn't have a bad dream?"

And I... I just remember saying,

"Well, no, I... it wasn't a dream."

"How would I get these marks
if it was a dream?"

"No. This is real.
Like, look, this really happened to me."

They talked to my boyfriend.

Asked him was I an attention seeker?

Was I prone to making up stories?

Did he believe that
this really could have happened?

I was flabbergasted, honestly.

I knew he existed.

I knew that this would
most likely happen again,

and I was very frustrated

that the police
weren't taking it seriously.

As time goes on,
I'm just trying to hold on to hope.

All I want is for someone to believe me.

The first time...

when I was assaulted, I was 12.

I was just a child and it was unexpected

and I didn't know what to do and...

I blamed myself. I was ashamed.

And a couple of years later,

I found out that he molested another girl.

And I felt incredible guilt
that I didn't say something sooner.

And I'm 19,

and it happens again.

I'm at a friend's house, a close friend.

We're with a small group of people.

We've been drinking.

I fall asleep on the couch,
and I wake up. My pants are off.

And some guy's fingers are inside of me.

I thought, "Okay,
this time I'm gonna report it."

"I'm going to say something."

I get to the police station,
and in the parking lot,

I met with an officer
who basically talks me out of it.

He says, "You know,
really it's a 'he said, she said.'"

"There's not gonna be any proof."

And then, here I am...

literally taken
in the middle of the night.

My body stolen and violated.

And it's still...

They don't believe me.

I don't know what needs to happen to me...

what needs to happen to any woman
for them to be believed.

I mean, it just seems hopeless.

I can't give up searching
for a victim with blond hair.

And that's all I really cared about.

And so, I decided to go back
to the white Mustang.

The vehicle was stolen
seven months previously.

In the city of Vallejo.

I contact the registered owner,

tell him, you know,
that we have the Mustang,

it was involved in a home invasion,

and he stops me and says,

"Hmm. Have you heard
of the Mare Island creeper?"

And I thought to myself,

"Where is Mare Island?
And who's the creeper?"

Mare Island is connected
by a tiny bridge to Vallejo.

It's a quiet neighborhood.

But in 2014,

there was a bunch of students
that were being harassed by a male subject

who would basically peep
into their windows,

take photos, and then would scurry away.

Night after night after night,
this man was terrorizing the neighborhood,

and the cops aren't doing anything.

So they decided
to take matters into their own hands.

A couple of students follow the man home

and realize that he, too,
lives on Mare Island.

And they do a further search
and find out that he's ex-military...

and a lawyer.

And in my brain, I'm thinking,

"The Mare Island creeper
is Matthew Muller."

Holy shit.

They reported all of these incidents
that occurred to the police,

but the investigation stopped.

How could the police
have not followed up on this guy?

They had leads.

And then he tells me
that in March of 2015,

the Mare Island creeper cases stop.

He said, "You know, it was around
the same time of the Gone Girl case."

"You know, the Gone Girl case?"

And I had no idea
what he was talking about.

I google
"Vallejo kidnapping Gone Girl case."

All of these articles pop up.

Kidnapping for ransom mystery
involving a 30-year-old woman

taken forcibly in the night
from a home on Mare Island.

She was taken from
an address on Kirkland Avenue

where the Mare Island creeper was
committing his Peeping Tom crimes.

The suspect restrained them
with zip ties

and then covered their eyes
with blacked-out swim goggles.

My heart is racing. My stomach is turning.

That woman
who claims she was kidnapped

has turned up safe and unharmed
this morning in Huntington Beach.

The GPS in the Mustang
had Huntington Beach on it.

And then...

I see this picture of a white woman

with long blond hair.

Oh my God. The blond hair
that I have on those goggles

is hair that matches
the hair that Denise has.

Police are now saying
it was all a wild goose chase.

It was all a hoax, an elaborate hoax.

They're calling this woman a liar
on national news,

but I just wanted
to reach through the computer

and just give her a hug and say,

"I got you."

So I call Vallejo PD.

I'm so excited and so amped up,
like, "Let's get this solved right now!"

And I get no answer.

But I am like the annoying ex-girlfriend
that never goes away.

So I continue to call them.

And call them.

Finally, I get transferred to a detective
and he says,

"The case was turned over to the FBI,
so we're no longer investigating it."

"You might want to call them."

"Okay. Um, give me the phone number."

So he gives me the phone number
to the FBI agent, David Sesma.

And I hang up the phone,
like, "Okay, that was useless."

And I call David Sesma.

And I tell him,

"We have a suspect in custody,
um, very similar to the suspect

that was involved
in the kidnapping of Denise Huskins."

"You guys deemed it a hoax."

He snapped back and said,
"We never called it a hoax."

I said, "Well, anyways,
I have this person in custody

that you may be interested in speaking to
because the cases are so similar."

And he said,

"Okay, well, send me all the information
that you have, and we'll look at it."

And I thought, "That's it?"

I was so disappointed.

We set up a meeting with the FBI

to go over the evidence
that we found in South Lake Tahoe.

I show them the zip ties,

duct tape...

and they were curious.

But when they see the water gun
that we had collected,

they told us
that this was the exact same gun

that the kidnappers
had photographed and emailed

to, uh, the San Francisco Chronicle.

And then when I show them the photo
of the goggles with the blond hair,

they look visibly shocked.

They realize that maybe they were wrong

and they need to further investigate
the Vallejo incident.

I get a call from the US attorney.

And he tells me, "Doug, I think
we may have a break in the case."

He says, "We have a man.
We're holding him in custody right now."

"There is evidence that links him
to the crime against Denise and Aaron."

Can you imagine my shock?

Breaking news at noon
in the mysterious Vallejo kidnapping saga.

Major break in a strange kidnapping case
in California.

A kidnapping case that was once compared
to the movie Gone Girl.

There's been an arrest
in the Denise Huskins kidnapping.

This was real all along.

Denise and Aaron were telling the truth.

I'm floored.

Authorities initially said
Huskins was lying about her kidnapping.

Now we've learned from the arrest warrant
that Denise reported

she was sexually assaulted by her captor.

Oh God.

I mean, the news is just overwhelming.

There's millions of different questions
running on... in our minds.

A suspect
has now been identified by the FBI.

Matthew Muller graduated
from Harvard Law in 2006

and was a research assistant there
for the next three years.

He told detectives he's bipolar
and suffers from Gulf War Illness.

Muller had been working
as an immigration lawyer in San Francisco,

but was disbarred earlier this year.

I'm looking at this man.

I'm, like, sick to my stomach.

I'm just trying to process...

the situation.

Because the man
who held me captive and raped me,

I never knew what he looked like.

But then there's video footage.

He's seen here
in this story on Univision.

They had said, up until today, is that,

"No, we will not even let you
have your day in court."

The cadence of how he spoke, the rhythm.

I know it's him.

Hearing him, seeing him
validated that this all was real.

And I felt that frustration
and that anger of like,

"See? It wasn't that fucking crazy
'cause it happened."

"Why didn't you listen to us?"

"Why didn't you
take what we said seriously?"

After the arrest of Matthew Muller,

the only thing in this world
that I want to see

is the affidavit.

An affidavit is a document
that law enforcement puts together

that details every step
of an investigation.

When I read it,
it becomes patently obvious

that law enforcement did very little work

into the actual crime of kidnapping.

What they did focus their attention on
was prosecuting Denise and Aaron.

They were blind to the fact
that a real crime had been committed here.

So I read about the polygraph and it says,

"The exam was completed...

with unknown results."

Agent French told me
I failed it miserably,

not even a question.

Aaron, there's no question in my mind
that you failed this test.

So he's just lying to me.

Lying through his teeth
to just break me down.

Then I see that there's a section
in this affidavit

that goes over the SART exam.

A SART exam is
a sexual assault examination

that's given at the hospital
to victims of sexual assaults.

According to this affidavit,

there was no physical evidence
of non-consensual sex.

Denise spent
hours and hours and hours

going over each detail
about the sexual assault.

And I played along...

'cause I didn't know what else to do.

Not every rape
is going to be physically damaging.

I mean, this is the fucking FBI.
Like, they should know better.

Then I read that while Aaron
was in the Vallejo Police Department,

he told the police that the kidnappers
were going to contact him on his phone.

But what does law enforcement do?

They put it on airplane mode.

Law enforcement
didn't turn Aaron's phone on

until that next evening,

when they discovered
that two calls had come in.

These were traceable calls.

And they were traceable

within 200 meters...

...of where Denise was being held.

Oh my God.

If they had actually monitored his phone...

they could have saved me
from the second rape.

Yeah.

And then, as we were
still going through all of this,

we get a call from the FBI.

They tell us that they are sure
that Muller acted alone

and they're not looking for anyone else.

These are the same investigators
that said I killed Denise.

The same investigators
that said it was a hoax.

And now the same investigators
are saying he acted alone.

We know there's other people out there.

And the police are gonna let them
skate through

because it's the easiest thing for them.

Keep moving, guys!
Keep it clear!

Clear, please!

Clear, please!

The police refused
to follow the evidence,

and the media all laughed along the way.

I want to stand up there...

and look every damn one of them
in the face

while they learn the truth.

I'm sick of hiding.

I don't have anything to hide from.

Nearly four months ago,
we told you that Denise Huskins was right.

That she was not only innocent
of perpetrating a hoax,

but that she was a victim
of a very serious and violent crime.

Seeing Denise and Aaron out in public,
they're not saying anything,

but their emotions spoke volumes.

I regret my part in this
because they went through hell.

We're thinking that
we're covering this story,

the salacious story of a lifetime,
and it all went horribly wrong.

Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn
held their heads up high

in the face of public shame
and humiliation.

I had this overwhelming sense of relief.

And to know that she was going to be
validated was everything to me.

That she was not a liar.

And how dare we, as law enforcement,
ever say something like that.

A man who has pled guilty
to the kidnapping of Denise Huskins

will be sentenced today.

This will be Huskins's
and Quinn's first time coming face-to-face

with Matthew Muller.

In that entire time in captivity...

I was a body to him behind these goggles.

I never saw him, and he never saw me.

And I knew that standing up there,

I was going to turn to him
and make him see me.

And I stared right at him,
and I said his name,

"Matthew Muller...

...now we meet face-to-face, eye-to-eye."

"I am Denise Huskins,
the woman behind the blindfold."

And, um...

I took myself back that day.

Okay.

Okay, good morning. We are on the record.

This is the recorded video deposition
of Andrew Bidou.

During the civil case,
a tip came in,

and it's about the chief of police,
Andrew Bidou.

According to the anonymous source,

before the Vallejo Police Department
had a national press conference

in which they called
Denise and Aaron liars,

Andrew Bidou told Officer Park to

"burn that bitch."

Ms. Huskins has plundered
valuable resources away from our community

while instilling fear
amongst our community members.

So if anything, it is Ms. Huskins
that owes this community an apology.

Do you recall anyone saying

any words to the effect
of "burn that bitch"

in respect to Ms. Huskins
on the day of March 25th?

I've never heard anybody say that.

And I start figuring out,

"Okay, how do I make it
so you look like a monster?"

The end of 2017...

we find out that Misty Carausu
would like to talk to us.

I wanted to meet them.
I felt like it was time.

They walk in... Sorry.

They walk in and I see her,
and she looks exactly the same

as she did on... on the news.

We just hugged
and we just talked for a while.

It was very emotional.

And I tell her...
...how all I've wanted this whole time

was someone in law enforcement
to call a hero

and that she's our hero.

If Misty didn't connect Muller to us,

I've no idea where we'd be.

We're lucky out of this.

♪ True love will find you in the end ♪

We got married.

We moved to the coast
and started a new life.

And in March 2020,
I gave birth to our daughter, Olivia.

And then we had
another little girl, Naomi.

And so, uh, it feels like
our family is complete.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

♪ This is a promise with a catch ♪

I want them to know their value

and to never let anyone

dictate that or determine that for them.

More than anything, I just hope
that they grow up to be like their mom.

And if they do that, they'll be okay.

Yep.