Remember the wild kidnapping of Denise Huskins, who was snatched from her Vallejo home in March 2015 and two days later turned up at her parents’ Huntington Beach home, only to have police suspect she was a “Gone Girl” in on a hoax?
Cops don’t think so now that her abductor, Matthew Muller, was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday at a hearing in Sacramento.
Muller, a Harvard-trained lawyer who served in the Marines, pleaded guilty in September to kidnapping, in a court deal that spared him a life sentence.
He’d used a remote-controlled drone to spy on Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn before breaking into their home, tying up the couple, blindfolding them and making them drink a sleep-inducing liquid. Muller also played a recording that made it sound as if there was more than one kidnapper.
Muller moved Huskins to the trunk of his car, drove her to his home in South Lake Tahoe and held her there for two days before dumping her off in her hometown of Huntington Beach. After Huskins appeared with her family to share her ordeal with reporters, the Vallejo Police Department called the kidnapping a hoax, likening it to the movie Gone Girl. That’s the one where a woman purposely goes missing, leaving her husband to come under intense suspicion for her disappearance.
After Muller was later arrested in an attempted robbery at another San Francisco Bay Area home, a search of his car turned up a computer stolen from Quinn and other evidence from the abduction. The Vallejo Police Department apologized, but Huskins still sued the city and two police officers for alleged defamation and inflicting emotional distress.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.