Vallejo kidnap suspect talked of acting alone, FBI says
A disbarred Harvard-educated lawyer accused in a string of bizarre and frightening crimes, including the March kidnap-for-ransom of a Vallejo woman, was recorded saying he acted alone and had suffered a “psychotic break” because of an unspecified vaccine, a new FBI document reveals.
Matthew Muller, 38, a former San Francisco immigration attorney, appeared in court Wednesday on burglary, attempted robbery and assault charges stemming from a bungled June home invasion in Dublin. His attorney asked a judge to toss evidence that police seized from a cell phone that Muller allegedly dropped at the crime scene — evidence that also led authorities to him in the kidnapping of Denise Huskins from her boyfriend’s home on Mare Island in Vallejo.
Muller has been named as a suspect in the Vallejo case but has not been charged. As they try to decide whether to prosecute him, authorities aren’t completely dependent on the evidence they discovered
through the search of the cell phone. Muller’s own words could come back to haunt him.
He told a reporter during a jailhouse interview in July that “some kind of supposed side effect from a vaccine” had prompted him to kidnap Huskins on March 23, and that although the kidnapper had sent e-mails to The Chronicle portraying the abduction as the work of a gang of gentleman criminals, he had committed it alone, FBI Special Agent Wesley Drone wrote in an affidavit for a search warrant issued Friday by a federal magistrate judge in Sacramento.
Conversation recorded
Muller and the reporter, KPIX-TV’s Juliette Goodrich, agreed that much of the discussion would be “off the record and on background,” Drone wrote. However, authorities at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin recorded their conversation and passed it along to the FBI. Authorities said jail visitors and inmates are warned that their discussions may be recorded.
Muller, who was disbarred this year, was suspected in a series of strange and violent attacks on women in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009, along with the attack on the Dublin couple that ultimately led to his arrest.
But it was the kidnapping of Huskins at the home of her 30-year-old boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, that exploded into the national spotlight.
Vallejo police didn’t believe the couple’s story about how a masked assailant, dressed in all black, broke into the home, tied them up, drugged the pair and took off with Huskins, only to release her two days later at her family’s home in Huntington Beach after sexually assaulting her.
During a news conference after Huskins’ safe return, Vallejo police Lt. Kenny Park called the story a hoax. That’s when an unidentified person began sending a series of lengthy e-mails to The Chronicle saying he was the kidnapper and part of a group of “Ocean’s Eleven” gentleman criminals.
Muller was arrested June 8 at his parents’ South Lake Tahoe vacation home. Authorities would not say at the time whether they were looking for other suspects, but according to his recorded conversation with Goodrich, “Muller said that there was no gang and that it was just him,” Drone wrote.
Other incidents
The FBI affidavit also goes into other incidents in which Muller was a suspect but was not charged. One happened in Mountain View in September 2009, when a 27-year-old woman was startled awake in her home by a man dressed in black wearing a ski mask, authorities said.
The assailant, whom the victim described as “polite,” handcuffed her, placed blackedout swim goggles on her eyes, and forced her to drink NyQuil before rifling through her electronic devices, probing for passwords, Social Security numbers and other personal information. Huskins’ kidnapper also forced his victims to wear blacked-out swim goggles and is believed to have drugged the couple with a NyQuil-like substance.
A month after the Mountain View incident, an assailant broke into a 32-year-old woman’s home in Palo Alto and sexually assaulted her. Authorities later learned that the woman had attended a 2008 event that Muller organized at Harvard University, the FBI affidavit said.
Detectives tried to speak with Muller in October 2009 about the attacks. He initially agreed to be interviewed, but later changed his mind and disappeared, authorities said.
Muller’s then-wife reported him missing a month later after getting a note from him that, according to court documents, said, “I am going completely off the grid — no phone, e-mail, credit cards, etc., so please do not try to track me as it will only draw attention. Any commotion at the apartment is also not likely to go unnoticed.”
Muller later contacted his family, saying he had mental problems and lived in “terror most of the time and can’t keep up appearances any longer,” the FBI said.
Two days later, he called his wife from Utah and she picked him up, Drone said.
Dublin break-in
Wednesday’s court hearing concerned a June 5 incident in which Muller allegedly broke into a couple’s home on North Terracina Drive in Dublin around 3:25 a.m. and tried to tie them up. The husband fought off the attacker, who left his cell phone behind as he fled, authorities said.
Chung Yen said he got hit by a flashlight and tried to fend off the attacker while his wife called 911.
In a bluff that appeared to pay off, Yen said he told his wife to “get the gun.” The assailant ran out a back door. Yen does not own a gun
Muller’s lawyer, Thomas Johnson, said that police searched the cell phone without a warrant and that any evidence they obtained from it should be suppressed.
Muller, who was a sergeant in the Marines, a Harvard Law School graduate and immigration lawyer before authorities tied him to the recent crimes, remains at the Santa Rita Jail.