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Prosecutors have announced new charges against a man who abducted and sexually assaulted a Northern California woman in what was initially believed to be a hoax and became known as the abduction of “The Missing Girl”..
Matthew Mueller, 47, the man who kidnapped Denise Haskins in Vallejo in 2015, is now charged with two counts of home invasion dating back 15 years.
According to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, Mueller broke into the women’s homes in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009 with the intent to rape them.
Thanks to the new finding and advances in forensic DNA testing, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, along with Palo Alto and Mountain View police, were able to identify Mueller in these cases.
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Matthew Mueller, a Harvard-educated and disbarred immigration attorney, was finally arrested for kidnapping Haskins after he was implicated in a similar home invasion through his forgotten cell phone. (Solan County Sheriff’s Department)
Mueller’s DNA was found on straps he used to tie up one of the victims in one of the 2009 cases, prosecutors said.
Mueller now faces two felony counts of sexual assault during a home invasion for the 2009 crimes. In case of conviction, he faces life in prison, officials said.
“The details of this man’s violent crimes seem made for Hollywood, but they are tragically real,” said District Attorney Jeff Rosen. “Our goal is to make sure this defendant is brought to justice and never hurts or terrorizes anyone again. We hope this nightmare is over.”
In the early hours of September 29, 2009. officials said Mueller broke into the woman’s home in Mountain View, assaulted her, tied her up, forced her to drink a mixture of drugs and told her he was going to rape her. After the victim, who officials said was in his 30s, convinced him to back off, he offered the victim a dog and then fled.
Less than a month later, on Oct. 18, officials said Mueller broke into a home in Palo Alto, where he performed the same procedure, tying and gagged a woman in her 30s. He then forced her to drink Nyquil and began assaulting her before he was persuaded to stop. Muller gave the victim advice on crime prevention, then fled.
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Denise Haskins and Aaron Quinn appear at a press conference with attorney Doug Rapoport, left, in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016. Haskins and Quinn were the victims of the mysterious Vallejo kidnapping case in March 2015. Matthew Mueller pleaded guilty to kidnapping Haskins. (Paul Chin/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Both cases were investigated at the time and remained unsolved.
Mueller gained national attention six years later as the subject of “American Nightmare,” a Netflix docuseries about the 2015 kidnapping of Denise Haskins of Vallejo and her harrowing 48 hours in captivity.
On March 23, 2015, Mueller broke into Vallejo’s home, where is the drug and tied up Haskins and her boyfriend. He kidnapped Haskins, brought her to a cabin in South Lake Tahoe, and sexually assaulted her. Two days later, Mueller drove his victim to Southern California and released her.
Vallejo police initially believed the break-in and kidnapping was a hoax orchestrated by her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, a twist that the media deemed a “real-life ‘Gone Girl,'” referring to Ben Affleck’s hit thriller and novel Gone Girl, in which the wife of a small town stages its own murder to get revenge on a cheating husband.
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Vallejo Police Department headquarters in Vallejo, California on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. (Paul Chin/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Although they said at a press conference that they were treating the case as a kidnapping, KRON4 reports, the Vallejo Police Department suspected Quinn of killing his girlfriend and create your account. According to the documents, he was interrogated for 18 hours.
The couple sued the Vallejo Police Department for $2.5 million, but not before enduring months of public scrutiny.
Haskins and Quinn told filmmakers Misty Carazzo, the rookie detective who solved the case, that their hero. On June 5, 2015, the couple woke up in the middle of the night to an almost identical home invasion.
After contacting police departments in the Bay Area, NBC Bay Area reported, Karausu learned Mueller was a suspect in a 2009 home invasion in Palo Alto. Also at the scene were swimming goggles darkened with duct tape to which blonde hair was attached.
While the wife hid in the bathroom and called the police, the husband managed to fight off the attacker. But he left behind important evidence: shoelaces, duct tape, gloves and a cell phone.
Karausu tracked down the phone of a man’s stepfather named Matthew Mueller, a Harvard-educated immigration attorney and Marine Corps veteran.
At this moment Carazzo contacted the FBIand Mueller was arrested for a home invasion in Dublin, California on June 8.
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Denise Haskins and Aaron Quinn are pictured at the press conference. They both hired lawyers after being publicly accused of faking a home invasion and feared losing their jobs as physical therapists. (MIKE JORY/THE TIMES-HERALD via AP)
Evidence in his home, including Quinn’s laptop, finally linked him to the Haskins kidnapping. Mueller’s confession was completely consistent with Quinn and Haskins’ stories, right down to the audio recordings, dark glasses and liquid sedatives.
Mueller pleaded guilty to one count of federal kidnapping in September 2016 and was sentenced to 40 years behind bars. Mueller also faced state charges of theft, robbery, kidnapping and two cases of violent rape.
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The Vallejo Police Department publicly accused Denise and Aaron of staging their ordeal, welcoming a barrage of negative press before their attacker was arrested for a similar home invasion. (Associated Press)
But he was declared incompetent appear before the court for those charges in November 2020, according to the documentary. Mueller allegedly suffered from “Gulf War sickness” in his wake military service and his attorney argued that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, according to NBC News.
Mueller was then sentenced in 2022 to 31 years in state prison after pleading no contest to two counts of aggravated rape of Haskins.
He is currently incarcerated in a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona.
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Haskins and Quinn previously told People magazine that they had no idea why Mueller targeted them.
“Like many victims or many people who have been affected survived the tragedyyou’re not going to get all the answers,” Quinn told the magazine. – And this can become an obstacle for recovery. So for us, we don’t count on finding those answers, but what we have to do is move forward into the unknown and focus on the things that matter most to us, like our family, our kids, our work . These are sustainable things. And having answers to why they targeted us doesn’t change what we do moving forward.”
The couple married in 2018, published a book about their ordeal in 2021, and gave birth to daughters in 2020 and 2022.
Christina Coulter of Fox News Digital and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Stephenie Price is a contributing writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business. Story tips and ideas can be sent to [email protected]
