Harvard-Trained Lawyer Arrested in Kidnapping Case

Matthew Muller arrested for allegedly kidnapping California woman
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 13, 2015 6:15 PM CDT
Harvard-Trained Lawyer Arrested in Kidnapping
In this March 25, 2015 file photo a news crew reports in front of the home a woman who was abducted in Vallejo, Calif.   (Chris Riley/Vallejo Times-Herald via AP, file)

A Harvard-trained attorney has been charged in a home invasion and kidnapping that police once considered a hoax, KCRA reports. The FBI has arrested 38-year-old Matthew Muller—who was already being held in another home invasion case—for the kidnapping of Denise Huskins in Vallejo, Calif. According to Huskins' boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, kidnappers broke into the home on March 23, "forcibly drugged" the couple, and had Huskins bind Quinn with zip ties, NBC Bay Area reports. The kidnappers allegedly put headphones on Quinn playing a pre-recorded message that said the victims would be cut or electrocuted if Quinn failed to follow instructions.

Huskins was gone when he woke up, Quinn says, and a message on his cellphone told him to pay $8,500 for her return. She turned up two days later in her hometown of Huntington Beach, 400 miles away, just hours before the ransom was due, and police declared the kidnapping a hoax. But Huskins and Quinn disagreed; Huskins even said she had been sexually assaulted twice during her ordeal, but doctors found no evidence of rape. When Muller was arrested in a similar home-invasion case, the FBI investigated him and found physical evidence tying him to the kidnapping, according to an FBI affidavit. A former Marine with bipolar disease and Gulf War Illness, Muller was disbarred as a lawyer this year, the AP reports. (More home invasion stories.)

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