Man who kidnapped California woman in what was initially called a hoax faces new charges

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — A man who kidnapped and sexually assaulted a Northern California woman in what became widely known as the “Gone Girl” kidnapping has been charged with two 15-year-old home invasion sexual assaults, prosecutors announced Monday.

Prosecutors allege Matthew Muller, 47, broke into a woman’s home in Mountain View, California, in September 2009, attacked her, tied her up and made her drink medications. He then told the woman in her 30s that he was going to rape her, but she convinced him not to, prosecutors said. Muller left after recommending the woman get a dog.

The following month, prosecutors say he broke into a home in Palo Alto, California, bound and gagged a woman and forced her to drink Nyquil. He started assaulting the woman in her 30s, but she also convinced him to stop, prosecutors said.

Muller has been charged with two felony counts of committing a sexual assault during a home invasion. The charges carry a possible sentence of life in prison. He is currently serving a 40-year prison term for the 2015 kidnapping.

“The details of this person’s violent crime spree seem scripted for Hollywood, but they are tragically real,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Our goal is to make sure this defendant is held accountable and will never hurt or terrorize anyone ever again. Our hope is that this nightmare is over.”

Muller’s lawyer, public defender Agustin Arias, said they have no comment about the new charges.

The new charges came after testing evidence based on a “new lead,” according to prosecutors. District attorney criminalists found Muller’s DNA on straps he used to bind one of the victims, officials said.

Muller, a disbarred, Harvard-educated attorney, pleaded guilty to the 2015 kidnapping of Denise Huskins. He was also sentenced in 2022 to 31 years in state prison after pleading no contest to two counts of forcible rape of Huskins.

Huskins was abducted by a masked intruder who broke into her boyfriend’s home in Vallejo, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, told detectives he woke up to a bright light on his face and that intruders had drugged, blindfolded and tied both of them up before kidnapping Huskins in the middle of the night. Quinn also said the kidnappers were demanding an $8,500 ransom.

A Vallejo police detective interrogated Quinn for hours, at times suggesting he may have been involved in Huskins’ disappearance. Quinn took a polygraph test which an FBI agent told him he failed, the couple said later in a book about their ordeal.

Huskins, who was 29 at the time, turned up unharmed two days later outside her father’s apartment in Huntington Beach, a city in Southern California, where she said she was dropped off. She reappeared just hours before the ransom was due.

That same day, police in Vallejo announced in a news conference that they had found no evidence of a kidnapping and accused Huskins and Quinn of faking the abduction, which spurred a massive search.

After Huskins’ release, Vallejo police erroneously likened her kidnapping to the book and movie “Gone Girl,” in which a woman goes missing and then lies about being kidnapped when she reappears.

Investigators dropped that theory after Muller was arrested by police in Dublin, California, for a similar home invasion. Authorities said they found a cellphone that they traced to Muller and a subsequent search of a car and home turned up evidence, including a computer Muller stole from Quinn, linking the disbarred attorney to the abduction.