Vallejo, Calif. (AP) — A man who sexually assaulted a Northern California woman kidnapped from her home where police initially thought she was mischievous was sentenced to 31 years in state prison on Friday. The official said.
Matthew Muller, who has already been sentenced to 40 years in federal crime, did not challenge the two rapes of Denise Haskins, who were dragged from his home in Vallejo, the county in 2015, in Solano County. I was sentenced in the High Court. The law firm said.
Muller also pleaded guilty to house robbery, burglary, and imprisonment, the district attorney said. His state judgment is provided at the same time as the federal judgment.
Muller, a Harvard-trained lawyer and former Marine, had a very elaborate and bizarre plan that initially accused police of lying couples and drew national headlines.
Mueller uses a remote-controlled drone to spy on Haskins and Aaron Quinn to restrain a couple and induce sleep before breaking into a house in the San Francisco Bay Area with a fake gun on March 23, 2015. The prosecutor said he had given him the liquid. .. While Muller was playing the pre-recorded message, they were blindfolded and appeared to have multiple kidnappers.
He put Haskins in the trunk of his car, drove him to his home in South Lake Tahoe, where he was detained for two days, then drove nearly 500 miles and released him at his hometown of Huntington Beach near Los Angeles.
During and after the kidnapping, Muller used an anonymous email address to send a message to San Francisco reporters alleging that Haskins had been kidnapped by a team of elite criminals practicing tactics.
After her release, Vallejo police called the kidnapping a hoax and mistakenly compared it to a book or the movie “Gone Girl.”
Investigators abandoned the theory after Mueller was arrested by police in Dublin, California for a similar burglary. Authorities said they found a cell phone that reached Mueller, and subsequent car and home searches found evidence containing a computer stolen from Quinn by Computer Mueller and linked the banned lawyer to kidnapping.
Investigators said they found a video recording Mueller placing a camera in his bedroom and sexually assaulting a blindfolded victim twice.
Vallejo police apologized for initially disrespecting the couple’s story. In 2018, her husbands, Haskins and Quinn, reached a $ 2.5 million settlement with the city.
Muller was found guilty of federal abduction and sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2017. His defense alleged that Muller was involved in a mental illness.
In court, Mueller said he was “embarrassed and ill” because of the “pain and fear” he caused.
Haskins heard and testified to the ruling on “the hell we survived,” and told the court that she thought she would be killed and suffer a nightmare at night.
The state accusation was filed against Muller in 2018. Muller pleaded not guilty to his charges. However, the proceedings were put on hold last year as Mueller was admitted to Napa State Hospital and he was ordered to take antipsychotics until he was declared psychic.