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Matthew Muller, whose kidnapping and sexual assault of a Northern California woman served as the subject of Netflix’s true crime documentary American Nightmare, has now been charged with other break-ins and assaults from years prior.
Matthew Muller — the man dubbed as the “Gone Girl” kidnapper and subject of the Netflix documentary American Nightmare — has been charged with break-ins and assaults from years earlier, prosecutors announced Monday.
Muller (circle above), who pleaded guilty in the 2015 kidnapping and sexual assault of Denise Huskins (pictured above left), has now been charged in connection with two other home invasions from 2009, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office said.
The first attack, which took place on September 29, 2009, saw Muller allegedly break into a woman’s home in Mountain View, California tie her up, and force her drink a mix of medications before telling her he was going rape her, prosecutors said.
The woman “persuaded him against it,” prosecutors said, noting that Muller allegedly suggested she get a dog and fled the scene.
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The second break-in came on October 18, 2009, just weeks later, with prosecutors saying Muller allegedly broke into a home in Palo Alto, bound and gagged a woman and forced her to drink NyQuil, prosecutors said.
“He then began to assault her, before being persuaded to stop,” prosecutors said. “Muller gave the victim crime prevention advice, then fled.”
The break-ins and assaults were discovered while investigators were “following a new lead,” tying them to Muller after sending all the evidence from both scenes for further testing. Thanks to “advances in forensic DNA testing,” prosecutors said, Muller’s DNA was recovered from straps used to bind one of the victims.
Muller, a former a U.S. Marine who attended Harvard Law School, faces two felony counts of committing a sexual assault during a home invasion, prosecutors said.
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He is currently in a federal prison in Arizona and is expected to be arraigned Monday.
Muller first made headlines in 2015 after he broke into a home in Vallejo, where he drugged and tied up Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn (pictured above right), prosecutors said. He kidnapped Huskins and took her to a cabin in South Lake Tahoe, where he sexually assaulted her, prosecutors said.
Quinn went to the police, who started to consider him a suspect.
After holding Huskins captive for two days, Muller drove her to Southern California and released her.
Once Huskins was freed, the couple was then accused of a hoax, and a media circus ensued with some suggesting the case mirrored the movie Gone Girl — and book of the same name — in which a woman, played by Rosamund Pike, stages her disappearance in order to frame her husband (Ben Affleck).
At the time, the public accused the couple of wasting the police department’s resources, but they were ultimately exonerated when Muller was arrested for Huskins’ kidnapping in June 2015, after he was identified as a suspect in a separate home invasion in Dublin, California.
He pleaded guilty in 2016 to Huskins’ kidnapping and in 2022 to her sexual assaults, prosecutors said, and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Huskins and Quinn later filed a defamation lawsuit against the Vallejo Police Department in 2016, for falsely accusing them of staging the kidnapping, and were ultimately awarded $2.5 million.
The case, and their story became the subject of the Netflix documentary American Nightmare, released earlier this year. In the doc, the pair revealed they relocated to California’s central coast and got married in 2018.
They would go on to welcome two daughters Olivia, in 2020, and Naomi, in 2022.
