SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — A man was kidnapped and sexually assaulted Northern California woman In what became widely known as the “Gone Girl” kidnapping, two 15-year-olds have been charged with domestic sexual assaults, prosecutors announced Monday.
Prosecutors allege Matthew Mueller, 47, broke into a woman’s home in Mountain View, California, in September 2009, attacked her, tied her up and made her drink prescription drugs. He then told the woman in her 30s that he was going to rape her, but she convinced him not to, prosecutors said. Mueller left after recommending that the woman get a dog.
The next month, prosecutors said he broke into a home in Palo Alto, California, bound and gagged a woman and forced her to drink Nickel. Prosecutors said he began assaulting the woman in her 30s, but she also convinced him to stop.
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Mueller has been charged with two felony counts of sexual assault during a home invasion. The charges carry a possible penalty of life imprisonment. He is currently serving a 40-year prison sentence for a 2015 kidnapping.
“The details of this individual’s violent crime spree seem like they were scripted in Hollywood, but they are tragically real,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Our goal is to make sure this defendant is held accountable and that he never hurts or terrorizes anyone again.” “Our hope is that this nightmare will end.”
Mueller’s lawyer, Public Defender Augustin Arias, said he had no comment on the new charges.
The new charges came after testing evidence based on “new evidence,” according to prosecutors. Prosecutors found Mueller’s DNA on tapes he used to link one of the victims, officials said.
Mueller, a Harvard-educated lawyer, pleaded guilty in court 2015 kidnapping Dennis Hoskins. He was also sentenced in 2022 to 31 years in prison after pleading no contest to two counts of forcible rape of Haskins.
Hoskins He was kidnapped By a masked intruder who broke into her boyfriend’s house in Vallejo, a city located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, told investigators that he woke up with a light shining on his face and that the intruders drugged, blindfolded and bound them before kidnapping Hoskins in the middle of the night. Quinn also said the kidnappers demanded a ransom of $8,500.
A Vallejo police detective questioned Quinn for hours, suggesting at times that he might have been involved in Hoskins’ disappearance. Quinn took a lie detector test and was told by an FBI agent that he failed, the couple later said in a book about their ordeal.
Hoskins, who was 29 at the time, appeared unharmed two days later outside her father’s apartment in Huntington Beach, a Southern California city where she said she was dropped off. It reappeared just hours before the ransom was due.
On the same day, police in Vallejo announced in a press conference that they had done so No evidence of kidnapping was found Hoskins and Quinn were accused of faking the kidnapping, which led to a massive search.
After Hoskins was released, Vallejo police wrongly likened her kidnapping to the book and movie “Gone Girl,” in which a woman disappears and then lies about her kidnapping when she reappears.
Investigators shot down that theory after police arrested Mueller in Dublin, California, for a similar home invasion. Authorities said they found a cellphone that they traced to Mueller, and a subsequent search of the car and home turned up evidence, including a computer Mueller had stolen from Quinn, linking the disbarred lawyer to the kidnapping.
