Feds accuse Harvard law grad in kidnapping that police initially considered a hoax
At one point, police in Vallejo, California, suggested that a 29-year-old woman’s claim of being kidnapped in March from her boyfriend’s home and held for ransom was a hoax, and blamed her and her boyfriend for wasting law enforcement resources.
However, their disbelief now appears to have been mistaken. A suspended immigration lawyer was arrested last month in a different criminal case involving a botched invasion of another California couple’s home. Now that lawyer is a suspect in the Vallejo kidnapping case, too.
Authorities say a cellphone dropped in the bungled home invasion last month in Dublin, California, was linked to Matthew Muller, 38. Muller was charged with burglary and assault with a deadly weapon. Similar facts in the two cases led investigators to link the two crimes. Other evidence also pointed to Muller as a suspect, according to the Los Angeles Times (sub. req.) and the San Francisco Chronicle. A subsequent San Francisco Chronicle story provides additional details.
Late last month, a FBI agent accused Muller of kidnapping in a filed federal criminal complaint. Although it does not name the claimed victims (referring to them as Victim M and Victim F), the crime described occurred at the same time and an attached affidavit gives an account with the same details which were provided by Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn in the Vallejo kidnapping, the Times reports.
Huskins and her boyfriend, Quinn, said they were awakened by a blinding light around 3 a.m. Quinn was reportedly tied up, drugged and blindfolded with swimming goggles that had tape over the lenses. Huskins was allegedly abducted, held for an $8,500 ransom and sexually assaulted. Two days later, she appeared more than 400 miles away at her family’s home in Huntington Beach.
In the Alameda County case, Muller is accused of trying to tie up a husband and wife in their Dublin home in the middle of the night. However, the man fought him and the woman ran to a bathroom and called 911. After the suspect fled, authorities traced a cellphone found in the home’s hallway to Muller.
Authorities are now investigating to determine whether Muller might have been involved in any other crimes. They have asked any other possible victims to come forward.
“We don’t get very many of these at all,” Lt. Zach Perron of the Palo Alto police department, which is investigating similar crimes from 2009, told the Chronicle on Monday. “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.”
A search of a stolen vehicle near a home where Muller was arrested found his driver’s license; goggles with a hair the same color as Huskins’ stuck to them with duct tape; and numerous other items, including a water pistol with a flashlight and a laser pointer. The FBI said a photo of a similar device had been emailed to a newspaper by someone claiming to have been responsible for Huskins’ March abduction, according to the Associated Press and the Washington Post (reg. req.)
Attorneys for Huskins and Quinn have demanded that the Vallejo police apologize for their initial treatment of the case. “The idea that in a short period of time they decided it was a hoax, that only works in Batman movies,” said Daniel Russo, Quinn’s attorney, at a Monday press conference quoted by the Times.
Russo added that other perpetrators may be involved. “What I want for the Vallejo PD to do is to do their job. Go out, find out if there are other guys, get them in custody as soon as possible. And next time, think before you talk.”
Muller, a 2006 Harvard Law School graduate, later worked at Harvard as a clinical fellow and research assistant, and oversaw the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program when its director was on sabbatical, the Chronicle says.
According to a California State Bar page, he was admitted in 2011, became inactive in 2013 for failing to pay fees and was placed on involuntary inactive status in 2014 and 2015. A court decision (PDF) in the legal ethics case, which Muller did not contest, recommended disbarment.
Muller worked as a immigration lawyer for Reeves and Associates, in the firm’s San Francisco office. But by October 2011 the firm sought a restraining order concerning information it said he stole during his employment there, the Chronicle reports.
A partner at Kerosky, Purves & Bogue told ABC News that Muller worked there for approximately one year around 2012; his termination involved no allegations of any criminal conduct. In April 2012, Muller was featured in an ABA Journal photo gallery about some of the country’s “techiest lawyers.”
Muller’s defense attorney, Tom Johnson, told the Washington Post that bipolar disorder had had a “tremendous impact” on his client’s life during the past five to seven years.
In addition to pleading not guilty, “we’ll also explore how his mental illness, which has been ongoing and debilitating, factors into his defense,” Johnson told the Post.
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Emails said to be from ‘gentleman’ kidnappers demand apology for police hoax conclusion”
