Vallejo kidnapper Matthew Muller charged in 15-year-old South Bay attacks

PALO ALTO, Calif. - Matthew Muller, the man who abducted Denise Huskins in Vallejo, sparking a case in which police initially accused her of staging her own kidnapping, has now been charged by Santa Clara prosecutors with breaking into women's homes in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009 with the intent to rape them.

Muller, 47, was named in a complaint filed in November by the Santa Clara County DA's office, which asked Mountain View and Palo Alto police to send all evidence back to the DA crime lab for further testing. Criminalists said they found Muller's DNA on straps he used to bind the Palo Alto victim.

"Both of these cases the defendant broke into a woman's home, tied them up, bound them, made them drink things to make them intoxicated, and did this for the purpose of raping them," said District Attorney Jeff Rosen.

 Muller has been transferred to Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose. On Monday, he appeared in Superior Court but did not enter a plea to two felony counts of assault with intent to commit rape during a burglary for the 2009 crimes.

In September 2009, authorities said Muller broke into a woman's home in Mountain View, attacked her, tied her up, made her drink a concoction of medications and said he was going to rape her. But the woman persuaded him against doing so. He then suggested she get a dog for protection and took off, authorities said.

In October 2009, investigators say Muller broke into a Palo Alto home, bound and gagged a woman and made her drink Nyquil. He began assaulting her before the victim persuaded him not to, prosecutors said. He again gave this victim crime-prevention advice before leaving, authorities allege.

Both cases went unsolved.

Following a new lead, the District Attorney’s Office coordinated with the Palo Alto and Mountain View police departments to send all evidence back to the DA Crime lab for further testing.

DA criminalists found Muller’s DNA on straps he used to bind one of the victims, prosecutors said. 

The police agencies and the District Attorney’s Office then conducted follow up investigation that resulted in the current charges.

 Rosen also credited the work of Seaside police chief Nick Borges, who hosted Huskins and Quinn in March at a training session for police across the state. The couple urged law enforcement not to fall victim to tunnel vision in solving a case. 

Their ordeal - as well as the then-unsolved Mountain View and Palo Alto cases - were profiled in the Netflix docuseries "American Nightmare" earlier this year.

Borges watched the docuseries and apologized to the couple on behalf of law enforcement.

"We’re here because there’s so many lessons to be learned where the police really screwed up. I don’t know how else to say it," Borges said at the training session.

It was Borges who began writing to Muller in prison. Authorities say Muller made admissions as to his involvement in the Mountain View and Palo Alto cases. 

On Monday, Rosen, referring to the Vallejo investigation said, "We're not perfect in law enforcement, and I think it's fair to say that there were mistakes made in this investigation." But now, the prosecutor said, "We're able to bring this perpetrator to justice and that this nightmare is over."

In March 2015 in Vallejo, Huskins' then-boyfriend Aaron Quinn, called police, saying that an intruder dressed in a wetsuit broke into their Vallejo home, tied him up and abducted Huskins. Quinn said the intruder made both of them drink something that made them sleepy. 

Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn appear at a news conference with attorney Doug Rappaport in San Francisco, Calif. on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016. Huskins and Quinn were victims in the bizarre Vallejo kidnapping case in March 2015. Matthew Muller has plea

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From the start, police were skeptical of Quinn's claims. During a lengthy interrogation, a detective suggested that Quinn had killed Huskins.

But then Huskins turned up alive days later near her family's home in Southern California. Vallejo police labeled the whole thing a hoax. They said the couple led them on a wild goose chase.

Eventually, Muller, a former Marine and disbarred lawyer, was convicted of kidnapping and raping Huskins. He assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe cabin before driving to Orange County, where he let her go. In 2022, he was sentenced to 31 years in prison on state charges for rape. In federal court, he received a 40-year sentence for the kidnapping.

Dublin police helped crack the case by identifying Muller as a suspect while they investigated a similar home invasion.

Huskins and Quinn, who are now married, sued Vallejo and received a $2.5-million settlement.

Henry Lee is a KTVU crime reporter. E-mail Henry at Henry.Lee@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @henrykleeKTVU and www.facebook.com/henrykleefan