‘Gone Girl’ kidnapper charged in home invasions from years earlier
Dublin Police Services, FILE
(CALIFORNIA) — The man who pleaded guilty to kidnapping and sexually assaulting a Northern California woman in a case that became known nationwide as the “Gone Girl” kidnapping has now been charged with other break-ins and assaults from years earlier, prosecutors announced on Monday.
Matthew Muller — who pleaded guilty in the 2015 kidnapping and sexual assault of Denise Huskins — has now been charged in connection with two other home invasions from 2009, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office said.
In the first attack, on Sept. 29, 2009, Muller allegedly broke into a woman’s home in Mountain View, tied her up, forced her drink a mix of medications and told her he was going to rape her, prosecutors said. The woman “persuaded him against it,” and Muller then allegedly suggested she get a dog and fled the scene, prosecutors said.
Weeks later, on Oct. 18, 2009, Muller allegedly broke into a home in Palo Alto, bound and gagged a woman and forced her to drink NyQuil, prosecutors said. “He then began to assault her, before being persuaded to stop,” prosecutors said. “Muller gave the victim crime prevention advice, then fled.”
Muller faces two felony counts of committing a sexual assault during a home invasion, prosecutors said.
Muller, who is currently in a federal prison in Arizona, is expected to be arraigned Monday.
On March 23, 2015, Muller broke into a home in Vallejo, where he drugged and tied up Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, prosecutors said.
He kidnapped Huskins and took her to a cabin in South Lake Tahoe, where he sexually assaulted her, prosecutors said.
Quinn went to the police, who started to consider him a suspect.
After two days held captive, Muller drove Huskins to Southern California and released her.
Once Huskins was freed, the couple was then accused of a hoax, and the case set off a media firestorm fueled by suggestions that the case mirrored the book and movie “Gone Girl.”
Muller was arrested for Huskins’ kidnapping in June 2015 when he was identified as a suspect in a home invasion in Dublin, California.
Muller pleaded guilty in 2016 to Huskins’ kidnapping and in 2022 to her sexual assaults, prosecutors said.
The case became the subject of the Netflix documentary “American Nightmare” released earlier this year.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday directed the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to prepare the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 immigrants awaiting deportation from the U.S.
ABC News’ Phil Lipof on Wednesday spoke with Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law, to discuss the plan for the military base in Cuba.
ABC NEWS: The director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, Karen Greenberg. Karen, thanks for being with us. We are talking about an American military base on foreign soil. What does that mean for immigrants’ access to due process?
KAREN GREENBERG: OK, so first, it’s not really foreign soil in the United States’ terms — it’s an outpost of the United States. And that’s always been one of the confusing things about Guantanamo.
What it is is a place where, repeatedly, the United States has sought to place individuals without the kinds of protections by law that they have in the United States on the homeland, as we’ve seen with the detention of war on terror detainees. And also, you know, we can talk about the migration center as well, but it is not correct to call it on foreign soil. It is on a U.S. base located in Guantanamo Bay.
ABC NEWS: All right, so you’ve been to that facility where they’d be held at Guantanamo Bay. What challenges will the administration face in trying to implement the plan?
GREENBERG: So one big challenge that they’re going to face is basically the numbers he was throwing around. He threw out 30,000 — I don’t know that they have the capacity for that, but I have never heard that before. At the height that I knew about it, in the old days and the ’90s, I think they held 21,000 at the most.
They’ve held refugees repeatedly. In current context, President Biden talked about using it for migrants as well, but never, and we’re using it now for some intercepted asylum seekers and migrants. But that kind of capacity, that kind of number, hasn’t been thrown around before.
So I’m assuming that will mean they will need to build up some kind of facility, not just for the numbers they’re talking about in terms of migrants, but also for the guards, the health facilities, etc., etc., that we’ll need there.
And just to make a point there, they had to build Guantanamo detention facility, also, you know, for the war on terror detainees. And they did that very rapidly. They did it within 100 days, and built, you know, state-of-the-art maximum security prisons and housing for those who would need to attend to them. So it can be done quickly.
ABC NEWS: As you point out, the base has been used to hold much smaller numbers of immigrants for years. What could some of their experiences tell us about Guantanamo?
GREENBERG: Well, the reports are not good. And I want to say that it’s not just the past reports that are not good. It’s also, there was a report released in September by the International Refugee Assistance Project, which sort of detailed the conditions that migrants are held in currently at Guantanamo, which included unsanitary conditions, mistreatment, not to mention this sort of fuzzy legal status.
So I don’t think that’s projected well in the past, there’s also been in these prior times, in the ’70s and the ’90s also, you know, allegations of, and documents of mistreatment and unsanitary conditions, etc.
ABC NEWS: Certainly a lot to work out moving forward. Karen Greenberg, thank you.
(NEW YORK) — The Justice Department and attorneys representing a group of FBI employees who sued over a list compiled of personnel who worked on cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol reached a temporary deal Friday to ensure the list won’t be released publicly pending further legal proceedings.
The agreement by the Justice Department states “the government will not disseminate the list … to the public, directly or indirectly, before the Court rules on Plaintiff’s anticipated motions for a preliminary injunction.”
If DOJ leadership were to change their minds and release the list, they would need to provide two business days’ notice to attorneys and the court, per the agreement.
The anonymous group of FBI agents had sought a temporary restraining order to keep the FBI from releasing the names on a list the bureau collected as part of what the plaintiffs’ lawsuit says is the agency’s plan to engage in “potential vigilante action” to retaliate against government employees who worked on Jan. 6 cases or Donald Trump’s classified documents case.
After several hours of grueling back and forth during a hearing Thursday, the Justice Department’s attorney, Jeremy Simon, was able to commit that the DOJ itself would not further disseminate the list pending further proceedings in the case — but that answer did not satisfy either the judge or plaintiffs’ attorneys because Simon said he could not ensure that other parties in the government would not be able to release the list in some form.
Simon noted he had no reason to believe the list has been shared beyond DOJ leadership, and ultimately was able to relay from a superior that there’s been no “official” dissemination of the list after it was handed over by the FBI.
“What does that mean?” pressed U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, questioning whether the list could have been unofficially leaked outside of the department.
Simon said he had no reason to believe it had been leaked but couldn’t commit under oath that the list wouldn’t be shared or released by a separate government entity outside of DOJ.
“You represent the government,” Judge Cobb said. “The White House wants this information. Does the government have present intent to publicly release names of FBI agents that worked on Jan. 6 cases?”
“People who have the list don’t have present intent,” Simon replied.
Simon further said he had difficulty getting approval from superiors about language they could agree upon to further bind the government from releasing the list, citing other major civil rulings that the department has faced in just the past several hours.
The parties reached an out-of-court agreement on Friday that restricts the government from releasing the list pending further proceedings. The court set a preliminary injunction hearing over the list for March 27.
Earlier Thursday, attorneys for the agents argued that the release of the list would have serious consequences.
“Our argument is that the threat to national security is so extreme that we cannot risk letting it happen first, and then trying to put it back together,” said attorney for the agents Margaret Donovan in arguing for the temporary restraining order.
“I appreciate that, and I’m sympathetic to that argument,” Judge Cobb said. “A fear of something happening is not sufficient, even if — you know — the fear is a serious one.”
Lawyers representing the plaintiffs warned that the Trump Administration and DOGE head Elon Musk have demonstrated a willingness to publicly name officials they’ve accused of wrongdoing, such as the 51 former intelligence officials who wrote a letter about the Hunter Biden laptop and were later stripped of their security clearances in a Day-1 executive order by President Donald Trump.
“We have seen Elon Musk, working for the so-called DOGE agency, release names of individuals in public service. We have seen Jan. 6 pardonees very active on social media around the time of the survey, anticipating that the names would be released,” Donovan said. “We have a good faith reason to believe that those names may get out.”
In a court filing submitted Thursday morning, the Justice Department urged the judge hearing the case to reject the plaintiffs’ request to impose a restraining order blocking any public release of the list.
DOJ attorneys argued in the filing that the motion for the restraining order is based largely on speculation and that the FBI agents have failed to show they face any imminent threats in connection with the list.
Trump pleaded not guilty in 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House, and, separately, to charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The classified documents case was dismissed last year by a federal judge, and both cases were subsequently dropped following Trump’s reelection in November due to a longstanding DOJ policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Justice, under new leadership following the inauguration of Donald Trump, has told legal service providers who receive federal funding to stop providing legal orientation and other work intended to support immigrants at immigration courts.
In a memo obtained by ABC News, the DOJ ordered all such legal providers on Wednesday to “stop work immediately” in those areas.
“This email is to send you notification to stop work immediately pursuant to the Executive Order on the following task orders,” the memo said. The programs listed in the memo include the Legal Orientation Program; the Immigration Court Helpdesk; the Family Group Legal Orientation Program; and the Counsel for Children Initiative.
Legal service providers are usually present at immigration courts across the country to help individuals navigate immigration court proceedings and handle legal paperwork.
“The suspension of these longstanding programs could leave hundreds of thousands of vulnerable immigrants — including children and families — without access to basic legal information and representation,” a spokesperson for Acacia Center for Justice told ABC News in a statement.
The directive from the DOJ comes a day after ABC News reported that four top officials within the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review — the DOJ’s office that oversees immigration courts — were removed from their positions.
Experts and advocates told ABC News that, without a lawyer, migrants are left to navigate the different avenues of relief alone, filling out documents in a foreign language and arguing their case before a judge.
As ABC News previously reported, DOJ data from 2023 showed that only 56% of unaccompanied minors in immigration courts were represented by counsel, forcing thousands of unaccompanied young migrants to represent themselves before federal immigration judges.
One of the programs listed in the DOJ memo –The Counsel for Children Initiative — provides legal representation to children in immigration court proceedings.
The total immigration court backlog of children and adults has surged to a record high of 3.5 million cases.
