Vallejo police Mat Mustard.
Mat Mustard is a key character in the new Netflix docuseries, “American Nightmare.”
There will be spoilers for the show in this story because it so closely tracks with real life.
As fans know, Mathew Mustard is the suspicious detective who makes it clear that he does not believe Aaron Quinn’s story that his girlfriend, Denise Huskins, was kidnapped in 2015 from the couple’s home. Quinn told detectives an elaborate story: He said he was tied up and that the kidnappers put swimming googles on his head and drugged him before abducting Huskins.
But was it a real-life version of the movie “Gone Girl?” And where is Detective Mat Mustard today?
Here’s what you need to know:
Mat Mustard Was Promoted to Police Sergeant With the Vallejo Department
Vallejo policeMat Mustard (r) getting an award.
In March 2023, the Vallejo Sun reported that detective Mustard is now a sergeant with the Vallejo Police Department. For years, Mustard ran the Vallejo Police Officers Association. In short, the “American Nightmare” case did not derail his career.
It later turned out that Mustard was completely wrong; Quinn was telling the truth, and Huskins was really abducted. In fact, the pair received $2.5 million in a settlement with the City of Vallejo. An U.S. Marine named Matthew Muller kidnapped Huskins, according to Today, and is serving a 40-year prison sentence.
Huskins’ lawsuit against Mustard and Vallejo says, “Plaintiffs allege, among other things, that Mustard told Quinn’s brother that Quinn was having a schizophrenic breakdown, had murdered Huskins, and made false statements about the intruder’s camera, and told Huskins’s family she fabricated her disappearance to ‘re-live the excitement’ of an earlier molestation.”
In 2015, despite all of that, Mustard was named the officer of the year by the Vallejo Police Department, the Appeal reported.
The controversies didn’t stop there. Mustard was later involved in a whistleblower’s controversy.
Vallejo Sun reported that a former police Captain, John Whitney, made accusations against Mustard in a wrongful termination suit that Whitney filed in 2022. He accused Mustard of failing “his written sergeant’s exam,” leading Mustard to not receive a promotion, but he said Mustard “then advocated for changes to the exam, which then-police Chief Andrew Bidou accepted, leading to Mustard’s promotion.”
“Captain Horton and I both protested this for a good amount of time in the chief’s office, with Mat Mustard saying that this is how it should be done,” Whitney testified, according to Vallejo Sun. “The chief ultimately went with what Mat Mustard wanted.”
Mustard served as the head of the Vallejo Police Officers Association from 2009 to 2020, according to the Times Herald. The newspaper reported that Mustard stepped down after “an article by The Appeal discovered that as president of the union (which defends officers accused of crimes or misconduct), Mustard was also in charge of several investigations. That included deciding whether the actions of Vallejo police officers were lawful when they shot someone on-duty.”
According to the Times Herald, Mustard sent the newspaper a lengthy email bashing the publication for being unfair to police.
As of 2016, Mustard’s pay with benefits was already listed at more than $225,000, according to Transparent California.
Detective Mat Mustard Has Been Accused of Other Controversies Over the Years
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One of the many controversies that involved Mustard included accusations of racist comments.
According to Vallejo Sun, Mustard was also accused by a “a Black subordinate accused Mustard of mistreatment, including using a racial slur. An investigation found Mustard didn’t use the word ‘boy’ with racist intent.”
According to KQED, Mustard was accused of making a racist joke when the area was undergoing power blackouts. Mustard called the town of Dixon “as dark as Coley’s a**,” referring to a Black man who lived in that town. A Black officer believed the joke was directed at him, the television station reported.
In another incident, Mustard was accused of trying to pressure a forensic pathologist to change the cause of death in a woman’s death; a man was later acquitted of Jessica Brastow’s 2012 death in a homicide trial, The Appeal reported.
In that instance, the pathologist Susan Hogan “told Mustard there was no physical evidence that the sock was used to choke: the victim, so he asked her: ‘What will it take for you to call this a homicide?’ Hogan later said, according to The Appeal.
In her dictated notes on the autopsy, she said, “Mat Mustard wants this to be a homicide, and there is no way I could call this at this point, and I’m not going to be pushed into it, so he can go kiss my a**,” the Appeal reported.
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