Prosecutors have announced new charges against a man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted a Northern California woman in what was initially thought to be a hoax and became known as the “Gone Girl” kidnapping.
Matthew Muller, 47, the man who kidnapped Denise Huskins in Vallejo in 2015, now faces charges in two home invasion cases from 15 years ago.
Muller broke into women’s homes in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009 with the intention of raping them, the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office said.
A new lead and advances in forensic DNA testing allowed the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, along with Palo Alto and Mountain View police, to identify Muller in the cases.
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Matthew Muller, a disbarred Harvard-educated immigration lawyer, was eventually arrested for Huskins’ kidnapping after his forgotten cell phone implicated him in a similar home invasion. (Solane County Sheriff’s Department)
Muller’s DNA was found on the straps he used to tie up one of the victims in one of the 2009 cases, the district attorney’s office said.
Muller now faces two felony charges of assault during a home invasion for the 2009 crimes. If convicted, He faces life in prison, officials said.
“The details of this individual’s violent crime may seem written for Hollywood, but they are tragically real,” said District Attorney Jeff Rosen. “Our goal is to ensure that this defendant is held accountable and never hurts or terrorizes anyone again. Our hope is that this nightmare is over.”
In the early hours of September 29, 2009, officials said Muller broke into a woman’s home in Mountain View, assaulted her, tied her up, made her drink a mixture of drugs and said he was going to rape her. After convincing him, the victim, who officials say is in his 30s, suggested the victim get a dog and then fled.
Less than a month later, on Oct. 18, officials said Muller broke into a Palo Alto home, where he performed the same routine and bound and gagged a woman in her 30s. He then made her drink Nyquil and began assaulting her, before being persuaded to stop. Muller gave the victim advice on crime prevention and then fled.
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Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn appear at a press conference with attorney Doug Rappaport (left) on Thursday, September 29, 2016 in San Francisco, California. Huskins and Quinn were victims in the bizarre Vallejo kidnapping case in March 2015. Matthew Muller has pleaded guilty to kidnapping Huskins. (Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Both cases were investigated at the time and remained unsolved.
Muller came to national attention six years later as the subject of “American Nightmare,” a Netflix documentary series that chronicled his kidnapping in the 2015 “Gone Girl Hoax” of Vallejo resident Denise Huskins and her harrowing 48 hours in captivity.
On March 23, 2015, Muller broke into a home in Vallejo. where he used drugs, and tied up Huskins and her boyfriend. He kidnapped Huskins, took her to a cabin in South Lake Tahoe and sexually assaulted her. Two days later, Muller drove his victim to Southern California and released her.
Vallejo police initially believed the invasion and kidnapping were a hoax orchestrated by her boyfriend Aaron Quinn, a twist that was deemed by the media as a “real-life ‘Gone Girl,'” referencing the hit Ben Affleck thriller and novel “Gone Girl’. ” in which a small-town woman fakes her own murder to get back at her cheating husband.
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The Vallejo Police Headquarters is seen in Vallejo, California on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. (Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Although they said at a news conference that they were treating the case as a kidnapping, KRON4 reported, Vallejo police suspected Quinn of killing his girlfriend and making up his account. According to the docuseries, he underwent 18 hours of interrogation.
The couple sued the Vallejo Police Department for $2.5 million, but not before enduring months of public scrutiny.
Huskins and Quinn told filmmakers Misty Carausu, a rookie detective who solved the case, was their hero. On June 5, 2015, a couple was woken up in the middle of the night by an almost identical home burglary.
After contacting police in the Bay Area, NBC Bay Area reported, Carausu learned that Muller had been a suspect in a Palo Alto home invasion in 2009. Also at the scene were a pair of swimming goggles, blackened with duct tape, with blonde it was confirmed to her.
While the woman hid in a bathroom and called the police, her husband managed to fend off the attacker. But he left behind crucial evidence: zip ties, duct tape, a glove and a cell phone.
Carausu traced the phone to the stepfather of a man named Matthew Muller, a Harvard-educated immigration attorney and Navy veteran.
At that moment Carausu contacted the FBIand Muller was arrested on June 8 for the home invasion in Dublin, California.
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Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn are pictured at a press conference. They both hired lawyers after being publicly accused of faking the home invasion, and feared losing their jobs as physical therapists. (MIKE JORY/THE TIMES-HERALD via AP)
Evidence in his home, including Quinn’s laptop, eventually linked him to Huskins’ kidnapping. Muller’s confession matched Quinn and Huskins’ stories perfectly, right down to the audio recordings, the darkened goggles and the liquid tranquilizers.
Muller pleaded guilty to one count of federal kidnapping in September 2016 and was sentenced to 40 years behind bars. Muller also faced state charges of burglary, theft, kidnapping and two cases of rape by force.
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Vallejo police publicly accused Denise and Aaron of staging their ordeal and welcomed a barrage of negative press before their attacker was arrested for a similar burglary at their home. (Associated Press)
But he was deemed incompetent stand trial for those charges in November 2020, the documentary said. Müller is said to have suffered from the ‘Gulf War disease’ after his military service, and his lawyer claimed he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, NBC News reported.
Muller was subsequently sentenced to 31 years in prison in 2022 after pleading no contest to two counts of forcible rape of Huskins.
He is currently incarcerated in federal prison in Tucson, Arizona.
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Huskins and Quinn previously told People magazine that they have no idea why Muller targeted them.
‘Like a lot of victims, or a lot of people who did that experienced tragedy“You’re not going to get all the answers,” Quinn told the magazine. ‘And that can be a bottleneck for recovery. So for us, we don’t depend on finding those answers, but what we have to do is move forward into the unknown and focus on the things that matter most to us, like our family, our children, our work. Those are sustainable things. And having the answers to why they targeted us doesn’t change what we do when it comes to moving forward.”
The couple married in 2018, released a book about their ordeal in 2021 and welcomed daughters in 2020 and 2022.
Christina Coulter of Fox News Digital and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Stepheny Price is a writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business. Story tips and ideas can be sent to stepheny.price@fox.com
