‘Gone Girl’ Kidnapping Victims Helped Police Solve 2009 Silicon Valley Attacks, Prosecutors Say

Two victims of a horrific kidnapping and sexual assault plot are being applauded for their activism, which helped authorities solve two unrelated Silicon Valley home invasion sexual assaults that occurred nearly 15 years ago.

Matthew Muller — a former U.S. Marine turned Harvard-educated immigration lawyer — now faces two more felonies punishable with life in prison and could still be facing even more charges in other jurisdictions.

The new charges solidify authorities’ beliefs that Muller had been breaking into women’s homes and sexually assaulting them long before he kidnapped and assaulted Denise Huskins in Vallejo and South Lake Tahoe in 2015. That case received national attention after Vallejo police dismissed the case as an orchestrated hoax, comparing it to the movie Gone Girl, in which a woman fakes her own abduction.

Since then, Huskins and her now-husband Aaron Quinn have become advocates for crime victims, speaking to law enforcement across the country, writing a book and starring in the hit Netflix docuseries, American Nightmare, released a year ago.

In March, Quinn and Huskins spoke at a training session for police officers across the state, hosted by Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges, who reached out to the couple after watching the Netflix show. That month, Borges allegedly started corresponding through letters with 47-year-old Muller, who allegedly confessed to unsolved home invasions in Mountain View and Palo Alto in 2009.

Muller, who is serving a 40-year federal prison sentence for kidnapping Huskins, allegedly wrote to Borges in a signed declaration dated May 6 that he developed the “idea to raid a home and rape a woman” in the fall of 2009 while “in a manic state,” according to police reports prosecutors provided to KQED.

Brian King, Deputy Santa Clara County District Attorney in the sexual assault unit, said Huskins and Quinn’s advocacy for crime victims directly contributed to his office charging Muller with the attacks near Stanford University.

“It was because of that collaboration between those Vallejo victims and Chief Borges that new evidence was developed, which led to us retesting the DNA,” King said. “That’s how I like to think about this case: It took a situation that was awful in Vallejo, which gave impetus to an effort to train law enforcement, which then led to a new break in this case, which has led to us being able to file charges and get justice for these victims.”

In an email to KQED this week, Borges thanked the hard work of law enforcement agencies, including the El Dorado District Attorney’s Office, which has jurisdiction over South Lake Tahoe.

“We expect developments in the next several days,” he wrote, declining to comment further.

The 2009 attacks

This week, prosecutors charged Muller with two new felonies — both sexual assault and burglary-related — that carry mandatory life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.

According to police reports, the newly filed cases share many details similar to Huskins’ kidnapping, including a suspect dressed in all black entering a woman’s residence, drugging them with Nyquil, and tying up the victims before stating he was going to sexually assault them. In one other case besides Huskins, the attacker gathered bank account numbers, PINs, and email passwords. In both Silicon Valley cases, Muller allegedly gave his victims crime prevention advice, like getting a dog, before leaving.

Muller lived in Menlo Park in 2009 and liked to hike the Stanford Dish.

“During that time, he started to go on prowling expeditions near the Stanford campus,” King said. “As part of that, he formed the idea to break in and rape women in the area.”

In the first incident on Sept. 29, 2009, Muller allegedly broke into a Mountain View home, where a woman in her 30s — who appeared in the Netflix documentary — was drugged, bound and blindfolded with a pair of swim goggles. The man in black assaulting her said he “had to” rape her, but she was able to persuade him not to. That investigation stalled out in 2011, reports show.

Police had stopped Muller while he was walking in the area four days prior, telling them he was there past midnight because he was a visiting Stanford professor seeing a friend.

In the second Silicon Valley case, Muller allegedly committed a similar break-in and attack at a home in Palo Alto’s College Terrace neighborhood on Oct. 18, 2009. Bound by Velcro straps, a Stanford student convinced her attacker to stop sexually assaulting her. The victim told police she had attended an event Muller organized at Harvard the year prior.

Palo Alto police named Muller as a suspect in the College Terrace attack five days later. When contacted by police over the phone, Muller allegedly said that “he knew what it was about as he had read the story about the College Terrace incident,” and he would “cooperate with anything” police needed, according to police reports.

But Muller “abruptly” fled to Utah in November 2009, leaving a note for his then-wife that he was “going completely off the grid” as it was “the least extreme thing” he could do to avoid exposing people “to criminal liability,” according to his 2015 plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

Muller returned to California soon after and, in 2011, was admitted to the California bar.

King said police collected a DNA sample from Muller in 2009, but analysis at the time was inconclusive. Over the next 15 years, the technology improved and a recent and more sensitive DNA test by the Santa Clara County Crime Laboratory of the Velcro straps used to detain the victim in the Palo Alto case “turned up as a match for Mr. Muller,” King said.

The ‘Gone Girl’ kidnapping

The home invasion, kidnapping and rape of Huskins in 2015 was a strange, detailed plot that involved sending letters to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter purporting to be “a group of elite criminals who were perfecting their kidnapping-for-ransom tactics” and conducting surveillance on potential victims, according to the Department of Justice.

While several victims in cases Muller has been charged with say they believe there were multiple people involved, authorities found audio files on Muller’s computer of people talking softly to one another, which they believe were played to make it seem like there were more people there.

“There’s no evidence before us that would lead us to be able to say that there were other people involved,” King said, adding they can’t “say definitively that there were or were not multiple people involved.”

In March 2015, Muller broke into Quinn’s Mare Island home, where he was asleep with Huskins, and threatened them with a stun gun and a water pistol spray-painted black with a laser pointer attached to it. He bound and drugged them before taking Huskins — blindfolded with blacked-out swim goggles — to South Lake Tahoe, where he raped her twice, claiming he was making a blackmail video his associates wanted.

Meanwhile, Quinn was interrogated at the Vallejo Police Department for 18 hours, mainly by Det. Mat Mustard, who told Quinn he didn’t believe his “elaborate” story.

“I’m a puzzle-maker, and I put a lot of puzzles together,” Mustard told Quinn, as shown on American Nightmare. “So now I get out my puzzle pieces, and I start figuring out, ‘Okay, how do I make it so you look like a monster?’”

Two days after the kidnapping, Muller drove Huskins down to her parents’ home in Huntington Beach despite Quinn not paying the $17,000 ransom.

Huskins didn’t want to speak with Vallejo police. In return, then-Chief Andrew Bidou allegedly told department spokesperson Lt. Kenny Park to “burn that bitch” at a press conference where Park said Huskins participated in “an orchestrated event and not a kidnapping.”

Muller sent anonymous emails to the Chronicle saying that Huskins’ kidnapping was real and chastised police for not believing her.

Muller is arrested

Muller was finally arrested following a June 2015 home invasion in Dublin where a masked suspect broke into a home, but the father of a 22-year-old woman fended him off. The suspect left a cell phone behind, which Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies traced to Muller’s South Lake Tahoe home, where they found evidence from the Vallejo kidnapping, including a single strand of Huskins’ hair on a pair of blacked-out swim goggles.

After Muller was taken into custody, Dublin Police Detective Sgt. Misty Carausu was investigating the source of the yet-to-be-identified blonde hair on the goggles and soon learned from Palo Alto police that Muller was a suspect in the 2009 attack there.

In June 2015, the FBI obtained an arrest warrant for Muller related to Huskins’ kidnapping, saying in an announcement that “Muller may have committed similar crimes elsewhere.” Palo Alto and Mountain View police were still looking at Muller for those attacks, as middle-of-the-night home invasions where victims are restrained and blindfolded are rare.

Huskins and Quinn sued the city of Vallejo in 2016 for defamation, saying “VPD took its cues from Hollywood” by spreading its Gone Girl theory instead of investigating the crime. The city settled the lawsuit for $2.5 million.

Muller pleaded guilty to a federal kidnapping charge and was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2017. The Mountain View and Palo Alto attacks were mentioned in his plea agreement with federal prosecutors. So was another home invasion attack in Palo Alto in 2012, but DNA on “bump keys” — or those made to open any door by the same manufacturer — left at the scene “was not related to Muller,” although detectives at the time said “Muller may be responsible for this incident,” according to reports.

In 2022, after being found competent to stand trial, Muller pleaded no-contest in Solano County to charges including rape, robbery, kidnapping and false imprisonment and was sentenced to 31 years.

After Muller confessed to being involved in the 2009 attacks, Seaside Police’s Borges contacted Palo Alto police, who had the 2009 DNA samples retested, something King said may not have happened if it weren’t for Borges’ relationship with Quinn and Huskins and their training with law enforcement about how to treat victims.

“Those trainings were aimed with the goal of making sure what happened to those victims in Vallejo never happens again,” King said.

Muller allegedly wrote to Borges that his willingness to cooperate wasn’t from his newfound remorse or being a born-again Christian “but instead of a common goal of [protecting] victims and strengthening laws for future potential victims.”

Borges told Palo Alto police that he believed that Muller would talk with detectives about his past crimes, as he “was remorseful and wants to confess [to] all his past crimes,” according to police reports.

Muller was extradited this week from federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, to make his first court appearance on Monday in Santa Clara County, where he is set to remain while facing the new charges. His next court date is set for Jan. 17, when he will be able to enter a plea.