Netflix is back with another true crime series – and, this time, it focuses on a case that was dubbed the "real-life Gone Girl."
Back in 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn were both drugged by an intruder at their home in California, who then kidnapped Denise and held her for ransom. When Quinn went to the police for help, he found himself under investigation – and suspicions were raised further when Huskins reappeared two days later, unharmed, outside her parents' house. Local police said they believed the kidnapping had been staged and demanded that the couple apologize to the public.
Per Netflix's description, the three-part docuseries "unravels the consequences of our cultural rush to judgment, and the damage done when law enforcement decides the truth can’t possibly be true."
Gone Girl, a novel by Gillian Flynn, first published in 2012, that was adapted into a movie by David Fincher in 2014, follows Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), a woman who fakes her own abduction and whose husband Nick (Ben Affleck) is the police's prime suspect in her disappearance.
The new series comes from Raw TV, the production company responsible for another Netflix true crime hit: 2022's The Tinder Swindler. That documentary centered on the Scandinavian women who were conned out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by Shimon Hayut, a man who pretended to be Simon Leviev, the son of a diamond tycoon, on the dating app Tinder. He reeled in victims by taking them on expensive dates and forming long-distance relationships, before asking them to take out lines of credit for him under their names – in order to pay for what he claimed to be extensive security needs.
American Nightmare is streaming now. For more, fill out your watch list with our picks of the other best Netflix documentaries.
