SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — A man has been charged with two counts of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a Northern California woman in what became known as the “Gone Girl” kidnapping, prosecutors announced Monday. A case of home invasion and sexual assault against a 15-year-old.
Prosecutors say Matthew Muller, 47, broke into a Mountain View, Calif., woman’s home in September 2009, attacked her, tied her up and forced her to drink drugs. Prosecutors said he then told the woman, who is in her 30s, that he was going to rape her, but she talked him out of it. Mueller left after suggesting the woman get a dog.
The following month, prosecutors said he broke into a home in Palo Alto, Calif., bound and gagged a woman and forced her to drink Nyquil. Prosecutors said he began assaulting the woman, who was in her 30s, but she convinced him to stop.
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Mueller was charged with two felony counts of burglary. The charges carry a potential life sentence. He is currently serving a 40-year sentence for a 2015 kidnapping.
“The details of this man’s violent crime spree may seem like they were written for Hollywood, but they are tragically true,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Our goal is to ensure that this defendant faces justice. Take responsibility and never hurt or terrorize anyone again. We want this nightmare to end.
Mueller’s attorney, Public Defender Agustín Arias, said they had no comment on the new charges.
Prosecutors said the new charges were filed after testing evidence based on “new leads.” The district attorney’s criminal expert found Mueller’s DNA on the tape he used to bind the victim, officials said.
Mueller, a disbarred Harvard-educated attorney, pleaded guilty to the 2015 kidnapping of Dennis Heskins. In 2022, he pleaded no contest to two counts of forcibly raping Haskins and was sentenced to 31 years in prison.
Haskins was kidnapped by a masked intruder who broke into her boyfriend’s home in Vallejo, the San Francisco Bay Area. Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, told detectives he woke up with a bright light on his face and that the intruders drugged, blindfolded and tied up the Heskins before abducting them in the middle of the night. Quinn also said the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $8,500.
A Vallejo police detective questioned Quinn for several hours, at times suggesting he might have been involved in Heskins’ disappearance. Quinn took a polygraph test and FBI agents told him he failed, the couple later said in a book about their ordeal.
Two days later, Haskins, then 29, showed up unharmed outside her father’s apartment in Huntington Beach, Southern California, where she said she had been transported. Just hours before the ransom was due, she reappeared.
That same day, Vallejo police announced at a press conference that they had found no evidence of a kidnapping and charged Heskins and Quinn with faking the kidnapping, triggering a massive search.
After Heskins was released, Vallejo police mistakenly compared her abduction to the book and movie “Gone Girl,” in which a woman disappears and then falsely claims she was kidnapped when she reappears.
Investigators abandoned that theory after Mueller was arrested by police in Dublin, California, for a similar burglary. Authorities said they found one of Mueller’s cellphones, and subsequent searches of the car and home turned up evidence, including a computer Mueller had stolen from Quinn, linking the disbarred attorney to the kidnapping.
