40-year sentence in Vallejo kidnap ordeal
Former San Francisco immigration attorney Matthew Muller will spend 40 years behind bars for a shocking Vallejo kidnapping that grabbed wide attention but was initially dismissed as a hoax by police.
Sacramento federal Judge Troy Nunley handed down the sentence, which included five years probation, during an emotional hearing Thursday afternoon, in which the victims spoke publicly for the first time since the horrific ordeal began in March 2015.
Muller’s two victims in the case, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, each addressed their abductor, speaking with measured words but ultimately breaking into tears as they detailed their ordeal.
“I knew this was probably it for me. My life was coming to an end and I made peace with that,” Huskins, 31, said of being kidnapped and raped twice by Muller, a Harvard Law School graduate.
“Once released, I couldn’t fathom the pain that was to come,” she added. “I felt like a little girl, scared, wanting to hear the voices of my parents saying, ‘It’s OK.’ ”
Huskins and Quinn, 31, said
the trauma they endured was compounded by the suspicions of Vallejo police, who initially did not believe them.
“Within an hour of being released, I was a suspect accused of making this up,” Huskins said. “I lost my job and my health insurance at a time when I most needed care.”
Quinn said the pain inflicted on him and Huskins endures, even in their sleep.
“How many times do I have to wake up Denise from a nightmare, and how many times does she have to do this to me?” he said, reading from a written statement.
At times, he addressed Muller directly.
“You strategically destroyed our lives,” Quinn said. “I cannot and will not ever be the same. My family will not ever be the same.”
After the couple spoke, Muller, 39, addressed the court.
“There’s nothing I can say,” he said from his seat, wearing his orange, Sacramento County jail clothes. “I’m sick with shame that my actions have brought such devastation. I hope my imprisonment can bring closure to Aaron and Denise and I’m prepared for any sentence the court imposes.”
Those were the only words he spoke except for briefly answering the judge twice, saying he understood court procedures. He sat upright the entire hearing, blinking rapidly at times with a wide stare, listening intently to every word uttered in court
Muller, who acted as head of Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program in 2008 after spending four years in the Marine Corps, pleaded guilty to the crime last year.
He agreed to cop to the charges in exchange for prosecutors not asking for more than a 40-year sentence.
The court’s probation department, though, recommended Muller get life in prison in its presentencing report.
Muller’s attack on the Vallejo couple came without warning, although he had apparently been planning the attack for months and had sneaked into Quinn’s Mare Island home before, authorities said.
Shortly before 2 a.m. on March, 23, 2015, the well-built prowler dressed in all black, slipped into the house where he found the couple asleep in bed.
He bound his victims before playing detailed instructions on a recorded message, all the while taking precautions such as checking their blood pressures and heart rates.
With a cocktail of NyQuil and Valium, Muller drugged Quinn and took off with Huskins, switching cars en route to his hideout that authorities believe was his parents’ South Lake Tahoe vacation home.
Huskins on Thursday recalled being bound on the floor that day, listening as Muller scrubbed the bathroom floor and bathtub. In her mind, she said she imagined he was cleaning up the remains of other victims.
She was determined to not let her abductor have the satisfaction of seeing her in pain.
“If this were my last moment, I would not go out screaming in terror,” she said.
Over the next two days, Muller forced his hostage to have sex with him, telling her he was part of an organized group of criminals, while appearing to show compassion for her situation.
In order to survive, Huskins went along with the charade as Muller forced her to kiss him and pretend they were a couple while he raped her.
“That will haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said to Muller. “I know you did that on purpose to leave your mark on the most intimate parts of my life.”
As she underwent the horror, police in Vallejo cornered Quinn in an interrogation room at police headquarters, subjecting him to hours of intense questioning, apparently unconvinced by his story.
The next day, The Chronicle received a “proof of life statement” from Huskins’ kidnapper.
As teams of searchers — some with cadaver dogs — fanned out around Mare Island looking for Huskins, the woman remarkably turned up safe at her father’s home in Huntington Beach (Orange County), where her kidnapper drove her.
“It blew my mind how arrogant he was – how sure he was he wouldn’t get caught,” Huskins said. “Before releasing me, he had the nerve to say he wished we met under different circumstances.”
But even as she recuperated in Huntington Beach, police in Vallejo and agents from the FBI’s Fairfield branch dismissed the ordeal as bogus. Vallejo police Lt. Kenny Park got up before national television cameras and called the incident an “orchestrated event” and demanded the couple apologize for what he labeled a hoax.
For several days after, The Chronicle received bizarre and raving letters from Huskins’ apparent kidnapper, providing details of the crime, while purporting to be part of a band of “Ocean’s Eleven, gentlemen criminals.”
Things might have ended there, but less than three months later, on June 5, 2015, Muller broke into a Dublin family’s home — a crime that was remarkably similar to the Vallejo home invasion.
But when the husband fought back, Muller ran away, leaving his cell phone behind. Authorities tracked the phone and Muller to the South Lake Tahoe home, where they found evidence linked to the Vallejo kidnapping.
Thursday’s sentencing, though, likely isn’t the end to the strange saga. Muller could face local charges for crimes against Quinn. Muller is also a suspect in at least three similar attacks in Mountain View and Palo Alto.
The Solano County District Attorney’s Office told Quinn’s attorneys in June that prosecutors would not file any criminal charges in the case until the federal matter was resolved.
Huskins and Quinn, meanwhile, have filed a lawsuit against the city of Vallejo and its police department for defamation of character and constitutional-rights violations.