‘American Nightmare’: Start Your Year Off with Rage at Police Incompetence!

American Nightmare is the latest entry in true crime from Bernadette Higgins and Felicity Morris—the minds behind The Tinder Swindler. American Nightmare delivers all true crime’s hallmark twists, turns, and searing rage at the world we live in. But mostly rage at the police who failed their citizens over and over out of, apparently, sheer pigheaded laziness. And also, in part, some rage at the documentary makers themselves.

Be warned: this article gives a lot away about the series. But by the end, hopefully, you’ll see why it had to.

In 2015, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn were attacked in a home invasion. Denise was kidnapped and held for days in a remote location before being released. Both Aaron and Denise went to the Vallejo Police Department—and instead of investigating the crime, the police decided it was all a hoax. They repeated that lie over and over again in the media, alongside images of Denise’s face and comparing her to the character of Amy from the movie Gone Girl. In fact, when Denise recounted again and again the details of her horrific experience, they told her to her face that her story had “discrepancies.”

Denise’s lawyer demanded, “What discrepancies?”

An FBI agent allegedly responded to the question with “Have you seen Gone Girl?”

The authorities were hell-bent on their tunnel vision view, which was apparently swayed more by a popular movie than by the flesh-and-blood victim sitting in front of them.

In reality, ex-Marine and disbarred lawyer Matthew Muller had perpetrated the crime against Denise, as well as a number of others in the area. He’d been discovered as a peeping tom in the same town where Denise was kidnapped—not discovered by the police, who refused to investigate, but by a group of neighbors who tracked him to his house. The Vallejo police followed the same template of behavior in Denise’s case: just refuse to investigate, and it’ll go away.

The kidnapper and rapist, at times, appeared to believe that he was acting with kindness toward his victims. He told one of his victims, after he had bound her and told her that he was going to rape her, that she should get a dog—that a dog would be good protection for her. He poured two glasses of wine for himself and Denise before assaulting her, as if pampering a date.

The predator had decided that he was a good guy, despite the evidence of his actions. The police seemed to make the same determination about themselves, despite refusing to follow any evidence at all, including traceable phone calls that could have led them to Denise, where she was being held.

The Vallejo Police and FBI agents involved, including FBI agent David Sesma, who (get this) used to date Aaron’s ex-fiancee, failed on literally every level here. American Nightmare becomes an infuriating trek through the hell that women go through to be believed about sexual violence.

The Vallejo police won’t even listen to a detective, Misty Carausu, in a nearby jurisdiction who literally put all the pieces together and then repeatedly calls trying to get anyone at Vallejo PD or the FBI to talk to her. She traced Muller’s crime spree, his textbook escalation from peeping tom to rapist, and had Muller in custody for a near-identical attempted rape and kidnapping. She also had in evidence a strand of Denise’s hair stuck to the goggles he used to blindfold her, at the location where she was held.

It’s Misty who becomes the actual hero of the story, working backward from that one strand of hair to make the connections between Muller and his bevvy of other crimes, including his kidnapping of Denise.

The levels of idiocy from the Vallejo Police Department are astounding—so incredibly, destructively lazy and self-satisfied that it almost makes you thankful for the exploitative true crime genre, because that genre is now blowing them up on Netflix. I’m personally very glad that Google is going to spit up results connected to this absurdity for folks like David Sesma. Especially since there was absolutely no disciplinary action taken as a result of their hideous betrayal of the trust that the victims placed in them.

But I’m also saving a sliver of disdain in this equation for the filmmakers. Where in The Tinder Swindler it made sense to frame some of the series from the perspective of the subjects’ con—telling his phony story as if it were real—in American Nightmare it’s absolutely not acceptable to portray the story the way the series does.

American Nightmare frames it as an open question in the first and even most of the second episode if Denise and Aaron are making the whole thing up. We’ve seen this recently with The Curious Case of Natalia Grace—the documentary presents without challenge, for the sake of drama and tension, the abusers’ version of events at the outset of the series, and then proceeds to pretend not to know if Natalia was actually an adult posing as a child (she wasn’t).

Making the victims in these true crime stories appear to be culpable as a method of storytelling is, to say the least, gross. The whole genre of true crime is gross enough without this weird twist on victim blaming and shaming.

Yes, it makes for damn good TV—in fact, viral smash hits. But really? Let’s find some new formats, folks.