Man suspected in Vallejo kidnapping once dismissed as hoax

VALLEJO — Police called it a hoax, while the victims said it was a traumatic ordeal — and on Monday, federal agents said the bizarre springtime kidnapping-for-ransom of Denise Huskins was indeed for real.

Harvard Law School graduate and embattled attorney Matthew Muller, 38, of Sacramento County is suspected of the home invasion, kidnapping and sexual attack on the 29-year-old Vallejo woman, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed Monday.

The case, as unusual as it is sensational, captured national attention as details of the saga — which included the kidnapping, a drugging of the boyfriend, and a paltry $8,500 ransom — slowly unfolded.

The specifics were apparently too much for Vallejo police, who called the incident bogus during a news conference after Huskins showed up at her family’s Huntington Beach home two days after the FBI said she was taken.

But in the days after her safe return, someone claiming to be her abductor began sending The Chronicle elaborate details of the crime, while demanding police apologize to the woman.

Huskins and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Aaron Quinn, held hands and stood silently beside their two lawyers at a hastily called news conference Monday in downtown Vallejo.

“Today is a fabulous day,” said attorney Douglas Rappaport. “Our clients have been nothing but cooperative throughout. Today the Vallejo Police Department owes an apology to Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn.”

The lawyers refused to allow the pair to speak, saying they did not want to compromise the FBI investigation. The young pair stood stoically with grim expressions, occasionally with eyes closed and their fingers entwined.

Dan Russo, Quinn’s attorney, said of the suspect: “We think this guy watched too much TV.” He criticized the Vallejo Police Department for concluding the kidnapping was fabricated, and said its erroneous conclusion may have led to the suspect’s remaining at large and in a position to commit a June robbery and assault in Dublin.

“In a short period of time, the (Vallejo police) decided it was a hoax,” Russo said. “That only works in Batman movies, not in real life.”

The lawyers said their clients had received no apology from Vallejo police.

“We want the Vallejo police to do their job,” Russo said.

Muller wasn’t hard for the FBI to locate once they decided he was their suspect: He was already in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in connection with a crime that bore unmistakable similarities to the Vallejo kidnapping.

It was not immediately clear if he had acted alone in Huskins’ alleged kidnapping. Federal authorities would not say if they were looking for anyone else in the case.

Arrest in Dublin attack

Police arrested Muller on June 8 at what was apparently his parents’ South Lake Tahoe vacation home for an alleged attack at a couple’s Dublin home three days earlier. On June 17, Alameda County prosecutors charged him with first-degree burglary and assault with a deadly weapon in the case.

Details from the bungled burglary ultimately helped the FBI connect Muller to the March kidnapping, and on June 25, federal agents met with Dublin police and Alameda County detectives to follow up with the investigation, said Gina Swankie, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Sacramento office.

In the Dublin attack, the assailant had tried to tie up a husband and wife inside the home on North Terracina Drive, but the man fought back and the two struggled for four minutes while the wife ran to the bathroom and called 911, FBI Special Agent Jason Walter wrote in the complaint. The attacker fled but dropped his cell phone in the hallway of the home.

Authorities traced the phone back to an address in Orangevale (Sacramento County) where records show Muller as residing — and which is associated with Muller’s parents. On Monday, nobody answered the door there, and the mailbox was piled thick with uncollected envelopes.

Palo Alto case

A speedboat sat in the driveway of the neatly kept home, and a campaign poster for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hung in the window.

Muller is also being looked at by police for home invasion crimes on the Peninsula in which a black-clad masked man entered homes, targeting women in their 30s, dating back to late 2009, authorities confirmed Monday.

Palo Alto police Lt. Zach Perron said investigators believe Muller may be responsible for an Oct. 18, 2009, case in which a young woman was bound and blindfolded in her home on the 2000 block of Amherst Street at 3:30 a.m. by a masked man wearing black clothing, described as tall and lean.

“He is a suspect in our case from 2009,” Perron said. “It is an open and active investigation. We will see what information will come to light in the latest case and see if anything can help us find a missing piece. There was never enough probable cause to bring a case to the district attorney.”

During the Palo Alto investigation, Perron said, detectives learned that a “very similar” home invasion crime occurred in the 1900 block of Silverwood Avenue in Mountain View on Sept. 29, 2009, involving a similarly lean, masked suspect who blindfolded the victim.

“We don’t get very many of these at all,” Perron said Monday. “It was a super-unusual crime — any time you have a home invasion robbery in the middle of the night, in which the victims are restrained and blindfolded, that makes it unusual.”

In Dublin, Paul Harika, 40, said Monday that he remembered officers banging on his door the night of June 5 requesting permission to go through his backyard after his neighbors’ house had been broken into.

“We put in some motion-sensing lights in the back,” he said. “I know some other people put in cameras, and we make sure to close all the windows at night because I heard he got in through an open window.”

When he was arrested, Muller told Alameda County sheriff’s detectives that he served in the Marines from 1995 to 1999 and suffered from “Gulf War illness and psychosis, and in 2008 was diagnosed with bipolar disorder,” according to the complaint.

He told detectives that he had attended Harvard from 2003 to 2006 and taught there from 2006 to 2009.

Disbarment troubles

A Harvard spokeswoman said Monday that Muller had graduated from law school there, but said he was a clinical fellow and research assistant and was never on the faculty.

Muller became a member of the State Bar of California in 2011 but in January was recommended for disbarment as of July 19. For at least some of his time as a lawyer, he worked for Kerosky, Purves and Bogue, a San Francisco law firm specializing in immigration services. He was known as a tech-savvy attorney with a taste for defending human rights.

His disbarment troubles began as a dispute over legal fees. Muller did not respond to the State Bar’s notice of disciplinary action, nor did he fight the court’s entry of default on his behalf — all moves that contributed to his impending disbarment. He was ordered to refund $1,250 to the client he was found to have poorly served.

The State Bar court noted in the documents that he told the senior trial counsel assigned to the case that he could not be “present at the status conference due to poor health.”

Muller’s Sacramento attorney, Tom Johnson, said he expected his client in federal court in the coming weeks. Muller remains in Santa Rita Jail with a federal hold placed on him, along with the pending charges out of Alameda County.

“We look forward to him being brought to federal court and to begin his defense,” Johnson said Monday.

The March kidnapping case drew national attention after Huskins disappeared from Quinn’s Mare Island home on March 23 and mysteriously showed up two days later at her family’s home more than 400 miles away in Huntington Beach (Orange County).

The FBI’s complaint against Muller includes the e-mails sent to The Chronicle and police that contained numerous details of the kidnapping. The e-mails made assertions that the abduction was conducted by several kidnappers, and that the group ran an elaborate car-theft operation on Mare Island for months and had burglarized several homes, taking car keys and personal information stored on home computers.

In one message, the sender identified the group as “sort of Ocean’s Eleven, gentlemen criminals.” The writer said they had turned to kidnapping for ransom because they “did not want to stay thieves or criminals forever. What we really wanted was to complete one or two big jobs and then to do whatever we felt like for the rest of our lives.”

The sender said his gang was made up of three core members, two with college educations.

FBI spokeswoman Swankie would not say if authorities are searching for any other suspects in the crime. Federal officials, however, continue to explore that angle, asking anyone who may have been a victim of a similar crime to call authorities.

Consistent accounts

The night of the alleged abduction, the e-mails’ writer said, the team drilled holes in a window pane to release a lock to enter Quinn’s home. The sender said the team used plastic squirt guns with “strobe flashlights and laser pointers” duct-taped on them to mimic firearms.

During the alleged crime, Quinn and Huskins were given headphones playing “calming music and some spoken instructions” while the crew went to work with plans to monitor Quinn electronically so he would not go to authorities, the sender wrote. Then they put the woman into the trunk of Quinn’s car and drove off, the e-mail said.

The FBI’s account of the kidnapping did not contradict the messages sent to The Chronicle.

Huskins had told police that she was sexually assaulted twice by one of her captors and that the attacks were recorded to “use it against her ... in case she reports the kidnapping to authorities,” the FBI’s Walter wrote.

The woman was later given an examination, but no physical evidence of non-consensual sex was found, authorities said.

It was all a case of mistaken identity, the sender wrote in one e-mail to The Chronicle. They thought someone besides the woman they kidnapped would be in the house.

Police suspicious

In an earlier e-mail to The Chronicle, the sender said, “We dropped (the woman) off at her home in Huntington Beach because it was more or less equidistant to the Bay Area and because we were horrified at what we had done.”

Police stopped talking publicly about the case early on, after declaring that the couple had wasted police resources and that their report was a hoax.

Quinn had apparently waited several hours after the alleged abduction to contact police, and when Huskins was found safe two days later, police said there was “no evidence to support the claims that this was a stranger abduction or an abduction at all.”

A representative of the Vallejo Police Department on Monday said the department would not comment on the case, and in response to queries handed out copies of an FBI news release announcing the arrest warrant for Muller.

“We are not holding our breath that we’re going to get an apology,” Russo said Monday.

Chronicle staff writers Vivian Ho, Melody Gutierrez and Jaxon Van Derbeken contributed to this report.

Evan Sernoffsky, Kale Williams and Steve Rubenstein are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com, kwilliams@sfchronicle.com, srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky, @sfkale, @SteveRubeSF