Vallejo kidnapping: How the evidence measures up

Authorities have amassed an unlikely collection of evidence — everything from a stolen Ford Mustang to blacked-out swimming goggles and a spray-painted water pistol — that they say points to a former Marine and Harvard-trained lawyer as the mastermind of one of the most unusual crimes in recent memory. Much of the material seized from Matthew Muller, 38, appears to bolster the account of a Vallejo woman and her boyfriend — a tale initially dismissed as fabrication by the city’s Police Department — that she was kidnapped in the middle of the night March 23 and held for two days before being dropped off at her mother’s home in Orange County. In them, the anonymous author claimed to be the leader of an “Ocean’s Eleven” group of gentlemen criminals who had started out by stealing cars and graduated to something much more sinister — a kidnapping “training mission.” The e-mails — in particular the 10,000-word missive sent March 28 — are alternately boastful of the group’s exploits and apologetic for the crime, dismissive of Vallejo police, and minutely detailed about how the abduction of 29-year-old Denise Huskins from her boyfriend’s Mare Island home was planned and carried out, and ultimately went awry. Authorities picking through the e-mails in deciding whether to charge Muller in that case have found evidence to back up some of the narrative supplied by the writer, and other elements have been corroborated by Huskins and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Aaron Quinn. “We are three acquaintances, two of us college graduates, who followed a path we did not think would lead to such horrific crime,” said the author of the March 28 e-mail. When he was interviewed by the FBI hours after the kidnapping, Quinn said an assailant had placed swim goggles with tape over his eyes, keeping him from seeing anything, according to an FBI criminal complaint filed against Muller. Huskins, interviewed by agents after she was released in Huntington Beach on March 25, said she had awakened to “several” suspects holding guns with red lasers, the FBI said. In the March 26 e-mail, the writer says Huskins and Quinn each woke up with a red dot on their faces looking down what appeared to be an assault pistol with rail mounted illumination and laser sight. [...] it was an amateurishly spray painted water pistol with a laser pointer and flashlight duck taped (sic). ... Agents who searched the car, the South Lake Tahoe residence, the home where Muller lived with his mother in Orangevale (Sacramento County) and Muller’s self-storage unit in Vallejo have turned up no real weapons. The March 28 e-mail says the plan was to choose a couple, take them into custody in the middle of the night, and ask them detailed questions about every aspect of their lives. Quinn says he and Huskins were separated, and he was ordered to give up checking and credit card information, along with e-mail account information and the password to his Wi-Fi router. Quinn said the assailant gave him a set of headphones playing a recording that said his girlfriend would be kidnapped so the group could collect “financial debts.” Huskins was ordered to restrain him with zip ties, and he was duct-taped and left on a sofa with scissors he could use to free himself when he awoke, he said. Police who responded to the initial kidnapping report noted that a motion-sensor camera had been attached to the ceiling of Quinn’s home, the FBI said. [...] authorities found a blood-pressure cuff and zip ties in a search of Muller’s storage locker in Vallejo, according to court documents filed by the FBI. Quinn’s blood was tested for drugs March 23, but results from a state lab have not come back yet, the FBI’s criminal complaint said. Money, according to the March 28 e-mail: “The Mare Island kidnapping was a training mission to test means and methods that would be used on higher net worth targets.” The FBI’s criminal complaint against Muller is silent on whether another woman had previously lived in the home. The FBI’s criminal complaint against Muller says Vallejo police determined after the kidnapping that “numerous crimes” described in the March 28 e-mail had in fact been committed. Most noteworthy,” the criminal complaint said, were “swim style goggles that had tape covering the lenses, which ... had a long blonde hair stuck in the duct tape. In the trunk, the document said, was “a Super Soaker-type water pistol that had been spray-painted black and had a flashlight and laser pointer taped to it,” like the one described and shown in a photograph in the March 26 e-mail. There was also a cell phone that had the same picture of the water pistol sent in that e-mail. The car’s navigation system contained the Huntington Beach address where Huskins was released, the criminal complaint said. In searching the South Lake Tahoe vacation home, authorities also found a laptop that was similar to the one that Quinn said was stolen during the kidnapping, federal agents said. The evening of March 25, Vallejo police spokesman Lt. Kenny Park told reporters that the incident was “an orchestrated event and not a kidnapping,” and said police manpower had been wasted. The FBI’s criminal complaint says he was “an active contributing member of Nextdoor.com, a website that contains a blog dedicated to community issues on Mare Island, including crimes that occur there.” Vallejo police found that crimes cited in the March 28 e-mail had been discussed on the website, the FBI said — implying that whoever wrote the e-mail could have learned about those crimes by following the blog. The FBI’s criminal complaint also hints that authorities became suspicious of Huskins’ account of being sexually assaulted during her ordeal, and wondered about a stretch of several hours when she dropped out of sight of law enforcement after her release. When she first spoke to Huntington Beach police shortly after she was freed March 25, she “denied that any sexual assault had occurred,” the FBI document says. Police let Huskins go and arrangements were made for her to meet FBI agents and return home, but “she could not be located and did not make any attempts to contact any members of law enforcement, even after numerous requests through family members by FBI” and Vallejo police, the FBI said. On March 27, Sesma interviewed Huskins again and told her there were “inconsistencies with specific details to her earlier statements regarding the events surrounding her kidnapping and the sexual assault,” the criminal complaint said. Neither e-mail sent to The Chronicle mentions a sexual assault, but the March 28 missive does say, I felt that the team member handling Ms. Huskins was going to give up and go to authorities.