'American Nightmare' Rapist Confesses to More Bay Area Kidnappings From Years Ago, Authorities Say

Matthew Daniel Muller — a former U.S. Marine and Harvard-educated lawyer turned convicted kidnapper and rapist at the center of the Netflix docuseries American Nightmare — is facing three more felony charges, as investigators continue to unravel his string of crimes dating back decades.

The 47-year-old, who is serving a 40-year federal prison sentence for the 2015 kidnapping and rape of Denise Huskins in Vallejo, has recently confessed to additional crimes he committed in multiple Bay Area counties, authorities allege.

The Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday announced that Muller had confessed to detaining three people in San Ramon and extorting tens of thousands of dollars from them in March 2015, just two weeks after kidnapping Huskins.

The three victims hadn’t reported the crime to police out of fear, said Simon O’Connell, Contra Costa’s chief assistant district attorney. He noted that his office was only alerted of the crimes last month after local and federal investigators began questioning Muller about other allegations.

“Unlike a traditional cold case where law enforcement is working up from a crime that was known but a perpetrator was unknown, this was just the opposite,” O’Connell said. “They were working with an admission to a crime without any victim known or location specific as to where those crimes had occurred.”

Using details Muller allegedly provided them, investigators say they were able to locate the victims in that case. On top of his existing sentence, Muller now faces three counts of felony kidnapping for ransom, which carries a mandatory life sentence with the possibility of parole.

“One can imagine, just based on the nature of those charges, an incredibly traumatic event transpired,” O’Connell said. “There were concerns not knowing who the person was, who was committing this kidnapping for ransom. They didn’t feel safe, and for that reason, we will endeavor to protect their identity for as long as possible as we pursue the prosecution of Muller.”

Last week, prosecutors in Santa Clara County also filed two felony charges against Muller for home invasions and sexual assault committed near the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto and Mountain View in 2009. In those cases — in which Muller also faces life in prison — he allegedly broke into women’s homes, bound and drugged them, and either sexually assaulted them or threatened to do so.

Muller is currently being held in Santa Clara County, where he’s scheduled to make a plea on those charges on Jan. 17.

Authorities allege Muller confessed to his various crimes in signed affidavits and interviews as part of a recent correspondence with Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges, who reached out to Muller after watching the Netflix documentary and inviting Huskins and her husband, Aaron Quinn, to speak at a police training last year.

In March 2015, Vallejo police initially rejected claims made by Huskins and Quinn — her boyfriend at the time — that the two had been drugged, bound and blindfolded by masked intruders, dismissing it as a hoax and declining to follow up on any leads, comparing it to the movie Gone Girl.

But the couple’s claims were validated after a Dublin police detective connected Muller to a similar type of attack at a Dublin home months later. That discovery, in turn, came after authorities raided Muller’s South Lake Tahoe home and found a blonde hair sticking to a pair of blacked-out swim goggles, which Huskins told police her kidnapper had put on her before she was driven away.

Huskins’ claims that she was then held captive for two days and raped twice were subsequently corroborated in the case that led to Muller’s conviction. The city of Vallejo later settled a lawsuit with Huskins and Quinn for $2.5 million.

At a press conference Tuesday in Seaside, near Monterey, Huskins said she spoke to one of Muller’s other victims after learning of the newly announced criminal charges.

“She just said, ‘I didn’t know how much I needed this,’” said Huskins, who along with Quinn, has become an advocate for victims’ rights, and been applauded by law enforcement for helping other victims find closure.

Muller also recently confessed to committing his first kidnapping and sexual assault in 1993, when he was 16, authorities said, but declined to provide further details on that investigation.

“That’s two decades of this mindset that he was living in by the time our case came about,” Huskins said, adding investigators found storage units filled with equipment he used “to facilitate terrorism.”

“It’s something that he’s crafted and perfected over a long period of time, and then now to find out, two weeks after our kidnapping, he attacked again,” she said. “This man had all the markers of the serial predator.”