Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. At around 2 p.m. on March 23rd, 2015, a 911 call came in to the Vallejo, California, police department from this man who sounded totally drunk or high on a drug or something, claiming that his girlfriend was missing and she'd been kidnapped.
But his story just didn't make any sense.
When the officers got to the man's house, he opened up the door and he looked totally deranged and his house seemed off somehow.
And also his house had this very weird chemical smell.
And then when the officers asked the guy, you know, to give us some more information, he would launch into this totally bizarre story about men wearing wetsuits who had lasers on their hands.
And so the police are like, what is this? but the police would follow up on what he had to say because this guy's girlfriend really was missing and they would uncover a story that was even more bizarre than the 911 caller story had been but before we get into that crazy story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week once on monday and once on thursday So, if that's of interest to you, the next time the Amazon Music Follow button is out of town, go into their house and completely demolish their master bathroom and replace it with a very well-used summertime music festival porta-potty.
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Late on the afternoon of March 22nd, 2015, 29-year-old Denise Huskins reached for her buzzing cell phone, and when she saw who was texting her, she immediately felt this knot of anxiety in her stomach.
It was her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, and right now, at least according to Denise, they were off, and likely it was going to stay that way.
But now, Aaron was texting Denise, saying he really wanted to talk to her and would she please come over. it was a sunday and denise was home alone in her little apartment in vallejo california which is inside the san francisco bay area and denise really just did not have it in her to go talk to her ex-boyfriend really she didn't have plans to go out anywhere she just wanted to stay in and so she typed back that she was in for the night and this would have to wait But as soon as she sent that text, immediately she got another text from Erin.
For a long minute, Denise just sat there on the couch looking at her phone, wondering what she was going to do.
Denise and Erin had met the previous summer after Denise had moved to Vallejo from Boston, Massachusetts to work at a hospital in Vallejo called Kaiser Hospital.
Denise had her PhD in physical therapy, and Kaiser Hospital had a great physical therapy program, especially for people with brain and spinal cord injuries.
And Kaiser Hospital was also where Erin worked.
She and Erin had been immediately attracted to each other.
Aaron was tall and fit, with dark hair and piercing eyes, and he loved to cook.
And Denise, she was blonde and blue-eyed and very outdoorsy and driven.
And so pretty much right away, Aaron and Denise would get into these intense conversations where they each would kind of dive in to the other person's life.
I mean, they were really connecting on a deep level.
But even though they both clearly got along great and they were really connecting, their relationship got off to kind of a rocky start.
Aaron had actually been engaged to be married before he met Denise, but Aaron's fiance had cheated on him and so he had ended the relationship.
And it was during that time, right after this relationship had ended, that he met Denise.
And so Denise was kind of like a rebound and she kind of felt like a rebound.
But again, they're getting along great and so both were optimistic that it was more than that.
And so Aaron and Denise had officially begun dating in the fall of 2014, but seven months later, so in March of 2015, when Denise was getting these text messages from Aaron, at least in Denise's mind, their relationship really was done.
Because Denise had caught Aaron texting his ex-fiance, basically begging her to get back together with him.
And so Denise felt really hurt. You know, she understood that that was a really intense relationship.
And of course, Aaron would still have feelings for his ex to some degree, but she felt really betrayed.
And so she told Aaron that that was it. But it was really painful for Denise because she did love Aaron, even though she knew, you know, this relationship likely wasn't going to work.
And now here Aaron was blowing up her cell phone with text messages to meet up and talk.
And he just wasn't taking no for an answer.
And so Denise finally typed out this long message back to Aaron, basically saying, look, I don't feel comfortable coming to your house.
It's the house that you shared with your ex.
I don't want to go there. You know, we can talk another time.
I think for right now, what you need to focus on Aaron is kind of like recording me, take me out on dates and show me that you really want to be with me because right now there's no trust. and aaron to his credit wrote back to denise and basically said yes i'm definitely willing to do that i want to put in the work to win you back i care about you denise but he said you know i really have something important to tell you and i just don't feel comfortable talking about it anywhere else besides at my house so please can you just come over tonight it's really important that i see you And at first, Denise really did just kind of hold the line and she told Aaron that, no, I'm not going to come to your house.
But again, Aaron, he just would not let it go.
And he really seemed actually very eager to see Denise and it made Denise feel special.
And so eventually she kind of gave it up and said, you know what?
Okay, I'll come by. And after that, Denise got up off the couch, she got dressed, she called their favorite pizza place and ordered some pizza that she would pick up and bring to his house for them to eat that night.
And then she headed out to her car and pulled out of her driveway.
At about 5.30 p.m. that night, Denise arrived at Aaron's two-story home on Mare Island, which is actually just a little peninsula in Vallejo, California.
And Denise, she grabbed the pizzas off the passenger seat.
She grabbed her overnight bag because she was optimistic that, you know, they're about to have a great talk and maybe rekindle and maybe she'll stay the night.
And so with her things and her pizza, she walked up to the front door and knocked.
The next day was a Monday, and Aaron and Denise were both scheduled to work at the hospital that day.
But at around 7am that morning, Aaron called into the hospital sick and said he couldn't come in, and Denise sent a text message to her boss saying that a family emergency had just come up and she would not be at work all week.
When Denise's boss got this text message, immediately he was like, this doesn't make any sense.
First of all, Denise never missed work, so this was totally anomalous.
And he also knew that Denise was applying for this very prestigious orthopedic fellowship that she needed to submit the paperwork for by Friday.
And he knew she had a lot of work to do on this paperwork that basically required her to be at work that week to get it all done.
And so if she was missing the week, then it looked like she would not be applying for this fellowship.
And that just seemed totally unusual because Denise was really serious about this fellowship.
And so Denise's boss wrote back to her and just said, you know, I understand you have an emergency.
You know, we're here if you need us, you know, take whatever time you need.
And then a few hours later, her boss checked his phone again and he saw that she had not written him back.
And so Denise's boss was like, wow, I guess, you know, she really must be dealing with some serious family emergency that's keeping her from using her phone.
About seven hours later, at around 2 p.m. on this Monday, where Aaron and Denise have not shown up for work, there was a 911 call that came in to the Vallejo Police Department, and the person making the 911 call was Aaron.
And Aaron's voice was totally slurred, and then he told this very confusing story about some sort of kidnapping, and then he begged police for help.
Two police officers happened to be near Mare Island, where Aaron lived.
And so within two minutes of this 911 call coming in, those two officers were knocking on Aaron's front door.
And when Aaron let them inside, these officers noticed three things in quick succession.
The first was Aaron was obviously drunk or high.
He was under the influence of some substance.
He just did not seem right. two there were at least a dozen empty beer bottles lining a back wall in the kitchen and three the entire house reeked of cleaning chemicals one of the officers immediately turned to aaron and said are you on drugs and aaron would say yes i am on drugs but these drugs were given to me by the kidnappers The officers immediately exchanged confused glances, looked back at Aaron, and then just said, okay, well, we're going to take a look around.
And so the officers wound up going upstairs, and as they went upstairs, that cleaning chemical smell got stronger and stronger, and they made their way into the master bedroom, and they saw the ground had obviously been recently vacuumed, and that cleaning smell was really strong in here.
The sheets on the bed were all gone, except for the fitted sheet that sat over the mattress.
And so the officers were about to leave the master bedroom and keep looking when one of the officers stopped and he noticed something on the bed and he called the other officer over and they walked over and they looked down and sure enough on the bed was about a quarter-sized drop of blood.
The police officers left the master bedroom and they went back downstairs where Aaron was and they walked up to him and said, okay, tell us again what happened with these kidnappers and what's going on here.
And Aaron would launch into a totally bizarre story.
Through slurred speech, Aaron would say 12 hours earlier, so around 3 in the morning that morning, so early, early Monday morning, Aaron said he was in his house with his girlfriend, Denise, when suddenly these men wearing wetsuits broke into the house and they immediately tied up Aaron and Denise and then made them wear these goggles that had been all taped up so once they were on your face, you couldn't see anything.
Aaron would tell the police that the intruders, in addition to wearing wetsuits, they also were carrying guns, tasers, also laser pointers, and also very high-powered flashlights.
And so when they came in, there were all these lights and beams everywhere.
I mean, it was totally chaotic. Aaron then explained to police that after he and Denise had been tied up and had these goggles on, the men in wetsuits came over to them and put headphones on each of them and then they played this recording which had this weird soothing music and then somebody narrating telling Aaron and Denise that they were not in any danger, that this was just a robbery and to stay calm and nothing would happen to them. so aaron and denise had done just that they tried to follow orders and then at some point the headphones came off and both aaron and denise were told to go to separate rooms and they kind of fumbled their way into the separate rooms at which point the men demanded they give up their banking information and passwords and aaron and denise did that they gave up all their banking info and then aaron and denise were brought back into the living room they were tied back up again and then even though aaron and denise couldn't actually see this they They heard the sound of somebody apparently coming in that sounded like a doctor who then took Aaron and Denise's blood pressure before administering this drug to them that made them both very sleepy.
And then before Aaron and Denise passed out from this drug, Denise was taken by the intruders.
And the intruders told Aaron that they had rigged a camera system inside of his house to watch him so he couldn't leave to go save Denise.
And so Aaron basically just stayed in the house until he fell asleep from this drug.
And then when he woke up again and managed to get his restraints off, he saw that Denise really was gone.
And so Denise had to be with the kidnappers.
After Aaron was done telling this totally weird story, which again, you got to remember, as he's talking, he sounds totally drunk.
And so they kept having to ask him to say again what he was saying.
And, you know, Aaron's just kind of loopy.
And so the whole thing is just so weird.
And so when Aaron was finally done telling the story, the two officers just stared at him in silence.
And then the officers looked at each other and without even saying anything, they both were thinking the same thing.
Probably this guy has killed his girlfriend, Denise, and after he killed her, he must have spent time cleaning the house, which is why they smelled all the cleaning chemicals.
And then maybe when he was done, you know, he felt bad about what he had done.
And so he began drinking beers to kind of cope with what he had done.
And that's why all those empty bottles were there.
And that's why he was acting so drunk right now.
And then at some point he had worked up the courage to call 911 and pretend that he didn't know where his girlfriend was and make up this whole alibi about these weird kidnappers that came in and did this stuff.
But obviously it was just a ruse. This guy killed his girlfriend.
That's what happened. And so finally, one of these officers spoke to Aaron and they said, you're going to need to come to the station with us and explain yourself.
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It didn't take long for the police in Vallejo to launch this massive search all over Mare Island to look for Denise.
And at this point, they were kind of looking for a body because based on what was going on in Aaron's house and the story he told, it did seem like very likely she had been murdered and disposed of somewhere. so they had dogs out and dive teams out in the water they had hundreds of volunteers looking everywhere and at the same time aaron was brought to the police station and they began going over every single detail of his story trying to get more information about these kidnappers because as much as they didn't believe him they did need to officially rule out that there was no kidnapping and so they needed all the information about these kidnappers who they were what they looked like what they sounded like everything And at the same time police were talking to Aaron, police also brought in Denise's roommate and they asked the roommate, do you know anything about Denise's relationship with Aaron?
And the roommate would say, you know, those two have had a very troubled relationship.
And the roommate would say that, you know, as far as they understood, Aaron and Denise were not a couple anymore. so police would actually go over to aaron in the police station and they would say hey you know we have people saying that you and denise who you called your girlfriend you know you guys were not dating you had broken up you know explain yourself and aaron would say well actually you know that's why denise was coming over before all this kidnapping happened she was coming over so we could reconcile and we did we had reconciled we were back together when the kidnappers in wetsuits came inside the house But the more police looked into Aaron's kidnapping story, the less it made sense.
And it really didn't make sense to begin with.
And so really, it just got weirder and weirder and weirder.
Like for one, Aaron said that he and Denise had been kind of forced to give up their banking information and their passwords.
And they did that. They gave that up to the kidnappers.
But when police looked into Aaron and Denise's banking records, there was no money withdrawn.
The only activity on either of those accounts was on Aaron's account.
Two hours before Aaron called 911, he called his credit card holder and attempted to get them to give him a large cash advance so he could buy a boat.
When police asked Aaron about the strong cleaning chemicals smell in his house, Aaron absolutely denied doing anything to clean his house.
He didn't know how that happened. Also, Aaron would tell police that these kidnappers had actually wanted a ransom to be paid to them, but he said it was only for $8,500.
And so police are like, why would these kidnappers take Denise and run away with her and risk very serious jail time for $8,500?
It just seemed way too low for what they were doing.
And then there was another weird detail that came out of interviewing Aaron at the police station.
One of the police officers had noticed that Aaron's eyes were totally dilated, his pupils were huge.
And for a little while, police had thought maybe that was because he was on some drug or something which can cause your pupils to dilate.
But based on the weirdness of the story that Aaron was relaying to them, they actually began to suspect that Aaron was having a schizophrenic break.
That is a symptom of a schizophrenic break.
Schizophrenia is a very serious mental illness that often begins to appear in young adults, and Aaron was only 30 years old, so he's at the right age for this to happen.
And while schizophrenia does not make people violent, it does make people very paranoid, and it also can cause hallucinations and mental disturbances.
And so when police were looking at the details of Aaron's story about men in wetsuits breaking into his house and taking his blood pressure before stealing his girlfriend, but also cleaning his house at some point,
That just seemed so weird and kind of crazy that it did seem to kind of lined up with schizophrenia.
By 9 p.m. on March 23rd, so seven hours after Aaron had called 911 to report Denise missing, the Vallejo police decided they needed to call in the FBI because this was just so weird.
And we have this missing person who could have been kidnapped or maybe they're dead or hurt or something.
I mean, there was just so much going on with this case.
They needed backup. And when the FBI arrived in Vallejo, the first thing they did is they took Aaron and they gave him a lie detector test and he failed it completely.
And after finding out he had failed it completely, he immediately lawyered up.
By the next day, March 24th, there were over 100 different search teams all across Mare Island and around Vallejo, California looking for Denise.
Police sonar had also picked up a body-sized mass out in the bay, but so far the divers had not been able to find it.
Aaron, by this point, had gotten his lawyer and left the police station.
And by now, Denise's picture was all over the news and newspapers.
It was up on posters on telephone poles all over town.
And TV news channels were parked outside of Aaron's house, just waiting for him to come out or waiting for any activity.
But despite all this activity, the detectives and the FBI agents that were working this case had really not made any significant progress.
All they thought was, Aaron's definitely hiding something.
But then something changed. A little bit afternoon on March 24th, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who was camped outside of Aaron's home got a very weird email.
The email was from the kidnappers, the wetsuit-wearing, blood-pressure-taking kidnappers who broke into Aaron's home and took Denise.
And in this email to the reporter, it said that Denise was fine, and there actually was a recording of Denise's voice reading that day's news, which confirmed that she was alive at least as recently as that morning.
But there were two very suspicious things about this email.
The first one was the recording of Denise's voice, the proof of life recording.
Well, she did not sound in any way stressed.
She sounded utterly calm, like she was reading the news, like it was completely no big deal.
And the second thing that was very suspicious was the email address the kidnappers had used to message this reporter was an email address that belonged to Aaron.
When this reporter told police about this, investigators were like, you know what, this actually doesn't make this any more clear.
This makes things exponentially more confusing.
Denise did appear to be alive, which was a good thing, but it now really appeared that Aaron was involved in whatever was going on here, and based on how calm Denise sounded on this recording, she could be involved in it too.
And investigators' suspicions only grew when they went to Aaron and they asked him, you know, have the kidnappers tried calling you at any point?
And Aaron would say, yes, they have. And he showed them his phone.
Well, the police would trace the phone calls that Aaron claimed had come into his cell phone from the kidnappers.
And when they traced the kidnapper's number, they found it was connected to a burner phone.
A burner phone is something that drug dealers will use because it's totally anonymous.
It's like a one-time-use cell phone that you use temporarily, you have this number temporarily, and then when you're done with the phone, there's no history that you personally had that cell phone.
But, police were clever and they figured out where this burner phone was actually purchased from and it was purchased from a nearby target and they looked at the security footage of around the time when this phone this burner phone was purchased from this target and they saw the person who had bought it walk out of the store and the person who had bought this burner phone was this white man who was tall and fit with dark hair and it basically looked exactly like aaron And then two days later on March 25th, Denise herself walked up to her mother's home in Huntington Beach, California, which is roughly 400 miles south of Vallejo, California, where she went missing.
And so Denise's mother was not home when Denise showed up on her doorstep.
And so Denise wound up going to the next door neighbor and using their phone to call her father.
And Denise's story that she would tell her dad was even more bizarre than Aaron's story.
She said she had been held captive by four men in the small room, and these men would tell her that they were simply doing a task for a client, and what they were doing now with her was just following their protocol.
Denise would tell police that she was well taken care of while she was in captivity.
They let her eat food, they gave her water, they even let her shower and brush her teeth.
Denise initially was very open to speaking to Vallejo police detectives about what happened to her, but when they said the FBI really wanted to talk to her and they would literally send a jet to her in Huntington Beach and fly her back to Vallejo, she refused.
And then, like Aaron, she immediately lawyered up and stopped talking.
And so by this point, all the investigators are like, there's no way these two actually got kidnapped.
This whole thing is some weird elaborate hoax and now they know they've been caught and so they're going quiet.
And so that night that Denise was found on March 25th, the Vallejo police held a press conference and told the public that they do not believe these two were ever kidnapped.
They don't really know what happened, but at this point they are not pursuing kidnappers and the public should not be worried about rogue kidnappers in the area.
But after this press conference, the police couldn't help but think to themselves, why would these two people who are successful, you know, they come from good families, they have loads of future prospects, I mean, their lives were good.
Why would they stage this hoax? What do they stand to gain?
It really just didn't make any sense. For weeks, the investigation into whatever happened to Aaron and Denise continued, but there was virtually no progress.
The media was still very interested in this case.
It was totally salacious, and they had dubbed this case the Gone Girl case in reference to a movie about a woman who fakes her own kidnapping.
As for Denise and Aaron, they stayed lawyered up and the only message they put out to the public was that they were telling the truth.
And so really this case just didn't make sense to anybody until about two and a half months later on June 5th, 2015.
Early that morning, a police officer in a town called Dublin, which is just south of Vallejo, California, found a piece of evidence that basically broke the Gone Girl case wide open.
The evidence this police officer found was a cell phone.
Not a burner phone that's totally anonymous, but a real cell phone that is registered with a phone company and therefore is registered with an individual person.
And police were able to trace this cell phone back to its owner.
And this discovery would lead investigators 200 miles to the northeast of Vallejo to the small remote cabin in South Lake Tahoe, California.
And at this cabin, police would find a stolen car, a white Mustang.
And the white Mustang actually belonged to someone who lived in Vallejo.
And so with their guns drawn and their dogs at the ready to be released, the police and the FBI, they opened up the door to this cabin and inside was a tall, fit and slender white man with dark hair.
The cabin was a total mess, with discarded food and trash and piles of clothes everywhere, but none of that really stood out to the police.
Instead, what stood out to them as they're yelling at this guy to stay where he is, is all around the cabin, all over the ground, kind of on top of all the trash and mess, were things like laser pointers, and high-powered flashlights, and zip ties, and goggles, like swim goggles, with tape all across the front of them blocking out your view.
The police had finally found one of the kidnappers.
And while this kidnapper looked exactly like Aaron, he was a tall, fit, slender white man with dark hair, it wasn't Aaron.
In fact, neither Aaron nor Denise had ever met this person, and this person, this kidnapper, had never met Denise or Aaron.
There was absolutely no connection between them.
This kidnapper's name was Matthew Muller, and he was a 38-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer and former Marine who had totally just crashed and burned out of his law practice and then took up this life of committing all these totally bizarre crimes.
It would turn out the totally weird stories that Aaron and Denise had told police about what had happened to them was all true.
The only thing they got wrong was there wasn't multiple people breaking into the house in wetsuits.
It was only ever one person. It was Matthew Muller, the guy behind all this.
And maybe just kind of in their panic and not knowing what's going on, Aaron and Denise had kind of thought, oh, there's multiple people here.
But there wasn't. It was just Matthew. Also, it would turn out Aaron and Denise were not the first people that Matthew had done this to.
The reason that police officer in Dublin, California had found that cell phone, which broke the case wide open and led police to this cabin in South Lake Tahoe, was because on the night that officer found the cell phone, so June 5th, Matthew Muller had attacked another couple in the middle of the night in their home.
But that couple had been able to fight Matthew Muller off, and Matthew had dropped his cell phone in their home before he fled.
And so when this couple had reported this to police, that was how they got that cell phone.
In terms of Mueller's motivation for doing what he was doing, well, Mueller was absolutely brilliant, like borderline genius, super smart guy, but he was extremely mentally unwell.
He had severe psychosis, and he was also bipolar, and so basically he wasn't seeing reality for what it was.
And at some point, in one of his kind of psychotic fits, he had somehow came across Aaron and Denise and become absolutely obsessed with them.
He began surveilling them non-stop with a drone for three weeks before he attacked them, learning their patterns and who they talked to and what they did.
And in fact, Aaron, when he found out that was what Matthew was doing, watching him and Denise with a drone, Aaron would tell police, oh my goodness, I actually remember one night before the kidnapping looking up and seeing this glinting light in the sky, and he thought, that looks like a drone, why is it out here?
But Aaron was a normal person and didn't suspect that somebody who was totally unhinged was spying on him with a drone, and so he had forgotten about it.
And so after Mueller had surveilled Aaron and Denise for three weeks using his drone, he was ready.
And so in the middle of the night, he broke into Aaron's house wearing a wetsuit.
He tied up Aaron and Denise and he put those goggles on both of them so they couldn't see anything.
And then he put on those headphones on both of them that played the soothing music and also had that narration where it was telling them, hey, you're going to be fine.
This is a robbery. Just stay calm and do what you're told.
But after these headphones went on both of them, Matthew would sexually assault Denise.
And in fact, at least one other victim of Matthew Muller has come forward since his arrest to say that she too was sexually assaulted by Matt.
And so after Matt had taken Denise and left Aaron's house with her, you know, Aaron, he did fall asleep from the drug he was given from Matthew.
And then when he woke up the next morning, he managed to get out of his restraints.
And, you know, he's still affected by the drug that was in his system.
And he sees that Denise is gone. And so the first thing he does is, oh, my God, I need to find a way to pay the ransom to this kidnapper.
Because, again, the kidnapper, Matthew, had said around Aaron that he wanted $8,500 and so Matthew thought he could get that money.
And so he called his credit card company and asked for that cash advance for $8,500 to pay this ransom.
But when they asked Aaron why he needed this money, he didn't want to give up that it was for a ransom because he didn't want the kidnapper to know that he had talked to authorities, he was worried about Denise.
And so kind of in a panic, Aaron just told the credit card company that he was buying a boat, but really it was for the ransom.
Also, Aaron was the one who called in to Kaiser Hospital for both him and Denise, saying they were missing work.
He did this because Matthew at some point had instructed Aaron that he would have to do that or something would happen to Denise.
And so again, he's just kind of following the instructions, hoping that he can get Denise back.
As for the email that the San Francisco Chronicle reporter got that apparently was from the kidnappers but was sent from Aaron's email account, well that really was the kidnapper, Matthew Muller, sending this email to the reporter.
He just used a special program to basically hijack Aaron's email address.
And as for Denise sounding very calm in her proof-of-life recording that was attached to that email, well, the thought is, Denise was very likely in shock at the time she was asked to record this, and so it sounded like she was relaxed, but really she wasn't.
Also, just a random side note that I'm sure some of you will have questions about, we don't know why Aaron's house smelled like chemicals.
It's assumed that, you know, maybe when Aaron and Denise were all tied up and couldn't see anything because of their goggles, that Matthew Muller, I guess, walked around their house and cleaned it, but we don't know for sure.
Matthew Muller is currently serving a 40-year sentence in prison for federal crimes, and just recently he was sentenced to an additional 31 years in prison for state crimes that were in connection to the kidnappings of Aaron and Denise.
Aaron and Denise would go on to sue the city of Vallejo, California for basically mistreating them.
You know, they had been telling the truth the whole time, but nobody took them seriously, and they would win $2.5 million.
Aaron and Denise would go on to get married, they would have a baby, and they would write a book together about their experience, which is called Victim F, From Crime Victims to Suspects to Survivors.
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