‘American Nightmare’ kidnapper Matthew Muller gets life sentences for South Bay home invasions
SAN JOSE — Matthew Muller was sentenced to two lifetime state prison terms Friday for holding women captive during two Santa Clara County home invasions in 2009, six years before he gained worldwide infamy for a 2015 Vallejo kidnapping that inspired a fervent true-crime media following and would turn out to be just a slice of his professed serial criminality.
Muller, who turned 48 on Thursday, pleaded guilty Jan. 17 in a San Jose courtroom to two felony charges of assault with intent to commit rape during a first-degree burglary, related to previously unsolved nighttime attacks on sleeping women in Mountain View and Palo Alto reported 16 years ago.
On Friday, the two victims, identified as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, gave statements to the court — one of them speaking in person and the other through a statement read by Deputy District Attorney Brian King — describing the continual, lasting traumatic effects of Muller’s assaults.
Doe 1, the Mountain View victim, told the court that the attack “profoundly impacted my life at the time and to this day.”
“I can’t put in words how terrified and powerless I felt,” Doe 1 said. “In the months that followed this incident I had extreme difficulties sleeping … I was afraid of my male coworkers because I didn’t know who it was that assaulted me.”
She continued: “There’s relief to me today knowing that justice is being done but I also hope that the defendant … doesn’t ever have this chance to do this again and inflict this type of terror on anyone else.”
Doe 2 recalled in her statement how Muller “seemed to take pleasure” in tormenting her, and said she continues to have crippling flashbacks of his attack.
“After the assault, I was terrified constantly that I was being watched or followed by someone whose face I had not seen and identified,” Doe 2’s statement read. “I would involuntarily relive the assault … 15 years later it still happens every few months or so. The erosion of my basic sense of well-being has had a sustained impact of my life in large and small ways.”
Muller did not give a statement prior to his sentencing by Superior Court Judge Cynthia Sevely, who remanded him back to federal prison.
He has been held in the Santa Clara County Main Jail in San Jose since Dec. 27, after he was transferred from a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, where he was incarcerated and serving a 40-year sentence following his conviction for the Vallejo kidnapping. He is also serving a concurrent 31-year prison sentence for the rape of kidnapping victim Denise Huskins Quinn, after the sexual assault was prosecuted separately in state court. He was also given another concurrent 10-year prison sentence in Alameda County for a Dublin home invasion that led to him being captured for the first time.
His overall prison time, which had been previously limited to the 40 years of the federal term, will now increase because the new South Bay sentences are required to be served on top of his existing state sentences.
Shortly after he was charged with the South Bay crimes, Contra Costa County authorities announced that they were charging him with a 2015 kidnapping in San Ramon that reportedly took place two weeks after the Vallejo case. The San Ramon case only surfaced in recent months after Muller implicated himself last year in a pattern of crimes that could involve as many as a half-dozen total kidnappings dating back as far as 1993, when he was 16 years old.
The Santa Clara County cases were definitively linked to Muller after a renewed investigation that was spurred by a chance letter-writing exchange initiated by Nick Borges, police chief in the Monterey County city of Seaside.
Borges told reporters at a Jan. 7 news conference that after watching “American Nightmare” — a popular 2024 Netflix documentary on the Vallejo case — he messaged Huskins Quinn and her husband Aaron Quinn on Instagram. That contact 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, where the city ultimately paid a $2.5 million settlement to the couple.
In March 2015, Muller surveilled, then broke into, the Vallejo home Huskins Quinn shared with her now-husband, held them captive and subjected them to psychological probing before fleeing with Huskins Quinn. He took her to a home in the Lake Tahoe area, where he held her captive again before releasing her in Southern California.
He was arrested in June 2015 in connection with a home invasion in Dublin, and subsequent search warrants recovered evidence from the Vallejo kidnapping, including a video of him assaulting Huskins. The case attracted international attention because Vallejo police wrongly called the kidnapping a hoax, prompting Muller to contact a news reporter to confirm the crime occurred.
Borges, with the support of Huskins Quinn and Quinn, wrote to Muller in prison; in the ensuing correspondence Muller reportedly confessed to the South Bay cases and other crimes with the apparent intent of helping police improve their practices. That included a reference to a San Ramon kidnapping that had never been reported. That led to multiple police and prosecutor visits to Muller in prison, including from authorities in Santa Clara and El Dorado counties.
The first South Bay attack Muller admitted to was reported Sept. 29, 2009, after he 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. The woman said the man said he was going to rape her but that she persuaded him to change his mind and flee.
On Oct. 18, 2009, Muller broke into a Palo Alto home and ambushed a sleeping woman while also wearing a mask. A police report states that she described a man speaking in a “low growl” 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. He also stated his intention to rape her before she told him about a past sexual assault, which apparently caused him to relent and leave.
Muller was considered a suspect early on, but DNA analysis was inconclusive. About a year ago, after being contacted by Borges, Palo Alto police and the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office renewed the investigation, which reexamined DNA traces from the fabric fasteners used in the 2009 home invasions and found a match with Muller.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Staff writer Jakob Rodgers contributed to this report.