Content warning: This story discusses sexual assault.

There are dual horror stories at play in the Netflix series American Nightmare.

When Aaron Quinn called 911 on the afternoon of March 23, 2015, to report that his girlfriend, Denise Huskins, had been kidnapped early that morning, the dispatcher asked why he hadn’t called sooner.

He’d been tied up and drugged, he explained, but that was the first indicator that his story was going to be met with resistance every step of the way.

Within hours, police in Vallejo, Calif., and the FBI were telling Quinn not only that they didn’t believe him, but that he’d failed a lie detector test and it would be much better for everybody if he just admitted what he did to Huskins.

“She’s gone and you know she’s gone,” an agent told him in one of the interrogation recordings shown in American Nightmare. Quinn was destroying his family by denying it, the agent said, adding, “You’re going to be that cold, calculated, brutal serial-killing monster that strangled the life out of her, killed her, and then callously dumped her body somewhere where we’ll never find it.”

But then, barely 36 hours later, Huskins turned up alive.