SAN JOSE — Matthew Muller, whose notorious 2015 kidnapping of a Vallejo woman inspired the Netflix documentary “American Nightmare,” has formally admitted to committing two Santa Clara County home invasions six years earlier, following a renewed investigation spurred by his prison letters to a California police chief.
Muller, 47, has been held in the Main Jail in San Jose since Dec. 27, after he was transferred from a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. He was arraigned three days later on two felony charges of assault with intent to commit rape during a first-degree burglary.
Friday, he admitted to committing two home invasions in 2009 during which he held captive, interrogated, and threatened to rape two women in separate instances in Palo Alto and Mountain View.
Muller is now being investigated for similar attacks elsewhere in Northern California from the past three decades, including a kidnapping in San Ramon from the same timeframe as the Vallejo case.
He is already serving a 40-year federal prison sentence and a concurrent 31-year state prison sentence related to the 2015 kidnapping and rape of Denise Huskins Quinn after he surveilled then broke into the Vallejo home she shared with her now-husband Aaron Quinn. The case attracted international attention after Vallejo police wrongly called the kidnapping a hoax perpetrated by the victims, only for Muller himself to contact a news reporter to corroborate the crime.
While Muller was serving his sentence in Arizona, Nick Borges, police chief for the Monterey County city of Seaside, struck up a letter-writing exchange with him, leading to correspondence that amounted to confessions to the home invasions in the South Bay.
About a week after he was charged with those crimes, Contra Costa County authorities announced that they were charging him with a 2015 kidnapping in San Ramon, which reportedly took place two weeks after the Vallejo case, but which only surfaced in recent months after Muller implicated himself in the letters.
Authorities are investigating suspicions that Muller’s criminal patterns date as far back as 1993 — when he was 16 — and could involve as many as a half-dozen total kidnappings.
The first South Bay attack Muller admitted to committing occurred Sept. 29, 2009, when he allegedly broke into a woman’s Mountain View home, with the victim telling police that she woke up to a man in a ski mask pushing her face down in her bed and telling her he was committing an identity theft robbery.
The intruder handcuffed her and bound her ankles with “some sort of Velcro restraint,” made her drink Nyquil and used her phone to make several calls and also send text messages to her employer stating that she was calling in sick. The woman said the man stated his intent to rape her but that she was able to persuade him to change his mind and flee.
A few weeks later, on Oct. 18, Muller broke into a Palo Alto home and ambushed a sleeping woman while wearing a mask over his head. A police report states that she described a man speaking in a “low growl” — as if he was “knowingly trying to disguise his voice” — while restraining her with fabric fasteners on her ankles and arms, putting plugs in her ears, and covering her eyes with surgical tape.
The woman was also made to drink Nyquil. At some point, the man also stated his intention to rape her before she told him about a past sexual assault, which apparently caused him to relent. He then warned her against calling police and left.
Muller was considered a suspect early on, but DNA analysis was inconclusive. In April and May, Borges reportedly received letters from Muller in which he volunteered information implicating himself in the 2009 home invasions.
Borges shared that information with Palo Alto police, prompting a renewed investigation that reexamined DNA traces from the fabric fasteners used in the home invasions and matched Muller to the two Santa Clara County cases.
At a Jan. 7 news conference in Seaside, Borges, Huskins Quinn and Quinn, and El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson described how they affirmed suspicions of Muller as a serial kidnapper and captor.
Borges — a self-avowed true-crime buff — said after watching “American Nightmare” he messaged Huskins Quinn and Quinn on Instagram, which led to their participation in a police seminar training hundreds of officers to conduct effective victim interrogations and avoid the embarrassing mistakes by police in Vallejo, which ultimately paid a $2.5 million settlement to the couple. Soon after, Borges proposed writing to Muller to see if they could get him to confirm his involvement in other similar crimes.
Muller wrote back to Borges and reportedly confessed to the South Bay cases with the stated intent of exposing police failures, and also mentioned a San Ramon kidnapping which to that point had never been reported. Pierson and FBI agents flew to Arizona, and Muller reportedly told them about his crimes that apparently began with a kidnapping in 1993, for which details are still being kept under wraps.
During that two-day prison interview, Pierson said Muller further implicated himself in the San Ramon kidnapping, in which two men and a woman were held captive until they paid Muller thousands of dollars for their release. Muller reportedly recounted how he carried a ladder two miles to the victims’ home while he was planning the intrusion. That tip was sent to the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, which in November found the ladder still in a nearby ravine that Muller described.
Authorities say those three victims, who have requested anonymity, did not report the alleged crime because of fear of retaliation by their then-mystery assailant. Their accounts have fueled three new kidnapping-for-ransom charges against Muller.
Staff writer Jakob Rodgers contributed to this report.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.