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 domestic assaults, officials said. prosecutors announced Monday. .
Prosecutors allege that Matthew Muller, 47, broke into a woman's home in Mountain View, California, in September 2009, assaulted her, tied her up and made her drink prescription drugs. 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, tied and gagged a woman and forced her to drink Nyquil. He began assaulting the woman, in her 30s, but she also convinced him to stop, prosecutors said.
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Muller has been charged with two felony counts of assault during a home invasion. The charge carries a possible life sentence. He is currently serving a 40-year prison sentence for the 2015 kidnapping.
“The details of this individual's violent crime may seem written for Hollywood, but they are tragically real,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “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.”
Müller's attorney, public defender Agustin Arias, said they have no comment on the new charges.
The new charges came after testing evidence based on a “new lead,” prosecutors said. Prosecutors found Muller's DNA on the straps he used to tie up one of the victims, officials said.
Muller, a disbarred Harvard-educated lawyer, pleaded guilty to kidnapping Denise Huskins in 2015. He was also sentenced to 31 years in prison in 2022 after pleading no contest to two counts of forcible rape of Huskins.
Huskins was kidnapped 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 that he woke up to a bright light on his face and that intruders had drugged, blindfolded and tied them both up before kidnapping Huskins in the middle of the night. Quinn also said the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $8,500.
A Vallejo police detective questioned Quinn for hours, at times suggesting he may have been involved in Huskins' disappearance. Quinn took a polygraph test that an FBI agent told him he had failed, the couple later said in a book about their ordeal.
Huskins, who was 29 at the time, showed up unharmed two days later outside her father's apartment in the Southern California city of Huntington Beach, where she said she had been dropped off. She showed up just hours before the ransom was due.
That same day, police in Vallejo announced at a press conference that they had found no evidence of a kidnapping and accused Huskins and Quinn of faking the kidnapping, prompting a massive search.
After Huskins' release, Vallejo police falsely compared her kidnapping to the book and movie “Gone Girl,” in which a woman goes missing and then lies about her kidnapping 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 that Muller stole from Quinn that linked the disbarred attorney to the kidnapping.
