Matthew Muller guilty of rape and false imprisonment in intricate attack which authorities first dismissed β to their cost β as staged. A man who sexually assaulted a northern California woman who was kidnapped from her home in what police initially thought was a hoax was sentenced on Friday to 31 years in state prison. Muller also pleaded guilty to robbery of an inhabited dwelling, residential burglary and false imprisonment, the DA said.
His state sentence will be served concurrently with the federal sentence. Muller, a Harvard-trained but disbarred attorney and ex-marine, concocted a plan so elaborate and bizarre that at first police accused the couple of lying, drawing national headlines.
Muller used a remote-controlled drone to spy on Huskins and Aaron Quinn before he broke into their San Francisco Bay Area home with a fake gun on 23 March He then tied up the couple and made them drink a sleep-inducing liquid, prosecutors said. They were blindfolded while Muller played a pre-recorded message that made it seem as if there was more than one kidnapper.
Muller put Huskins in the trunk of his car, drove her to his home in South Lake Tahoe and held her for two days before driving her nearly miles and releasing her in her hometown of Huntington Beach, near Los Angeles. During and after the kidnapping, Muller used an anonymous email address to send messages to a San Francisco reporter claiming Huskins was abducted by a team of elite criminals who were practicing their tactics.
After her release, Vallejo police called the kidnapping a hoax and erroneously likened it to the book and movie Gone Girl, in which a woman goes missing, reappears, then lies about being kidnapped. Investigators dropped that theory after Muller was arrested by police in Dublin, California , for a similar home invasion. Authorities said they found a cellphone that they traced to Muller and a subsequent search of a car and home turned up evidence including a computer Muller stole from Quinn.
