Matthew Muller, the notorious kidnapper whose most infamous crime was detailed in the Netflix documentary “American Nightmare,” appeared Friday in court and pleaded guilty to two additional crimes.
Wearing a brown Santa Clara County jail uniform, Muller, 47, replied with a taciturn series of “yes” answers as Superior Court Judge Cynthia A. Sevely confirmed he was admitting guilt in two home invasions in 2009. In both cases, Muller broke into homes in the early hours, bound his female victims and attempted to drug and sexually assault them.
In total, Muller is now suspected or convicted in at least six violent crimes, beginning when he was 16.
“This extremely dangerous person left a trail of traumatized and terrified victims,” Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen said. “It took the collective courage of his victims and determined law enforcement officers to stop him. This nightmare is over.”
The Santa Clara charges against Muller came about as a result of the work of an unlikely team of law enforcement officers and the two victims in the Vallejo case, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn. Over the last 10 months, the pair said, they obtained clues about the crimes — and even confessions — from Muller before approaching local authorities with jurisdiction in the incidents.
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“We knew there was more to this from the beginning, and clearly how things were handled from the beginning led to a lot of errors,” Huskins said in an interview last week. “We didn’t really have anyone in law enforcement that we trusted and we felt were doing this case justice.”
The first Santa Clara County incident took place on Sept. 29, 2009, when a Mountain View woman in her 30s told police she awoke to find a man on top of her. According to a description of the case from the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, Muller demanded she drink a medicated beverage, then tied her up and said he was going to rape her.
The woman was able to persuade him to stop his assault, according to the district attorney’s office. Before leaving, Muller allegedly told her that she should get a dog for protection.
About three weeks later, on Oct. 18, 2009, a woman in nearby Palo Alto awoke to find Muller on top of her, according to the district attorney’s office. He tied the woman up and forced her to drink Nyquil.
Again, the woman was able to persuade him to stop, according to prosecutors. And again, before leaving, he gave the woman “crime prevention advice,” according to the district attorney’s office.
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Last week, Muller was also charged in another new case, in the Contra Costa town of San Ramon, after authorities examined evidence brought to light through Huskins’ and Quinn’s investigative efforts.
After “American Nightmare” came out, Huskins and Quinn were contacted by an unlikely ally: the police chief in the Monterey Bay town of Seaside, Nick Borges. He had seen the documentary and wanted to help.
That Borges had nothing to do with the case didn’t stop him from becoming involved. He invited Huskins and Quinn to speak to law enforcement in Seaside to share their belief that police interrogation methods that focused on Quinn’s guilt had sent the investigation down the wrong road.
Borges also persuaded the detective ultimately responsible for Muller’s arrest, Misty Carausu, to come.
The four met with El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson, who has jurisdiction in the county where Huskins was held captive — and the seeds of a new investigation were planted.
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At lunch after the law enforcement conference, Huskins and Quinn told Borges about their frustrations, and a desire to reach out to Muller personally to seek answers. But the couple feared that could present risks. Borges offered to write Muller on their behalf.
Muller wrote back, giving details of other crimes and even legal declarations with confessions.
Armed with the new information, Pierson, who had been working with the FBI and other agencies, in November traveled to Tucson to interview Muller in person. Over two days, according to Pierson, Muller shared more details, including information on a Northern California attack he claimed to have committed when he was 16. That case is still under investigation, Pierson said.
Attorney Anthony Douglas Rappaport, left, speaks at a 2016 news conference with clients Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn. The couple reached a $2.5-million settlement with the city of Vallejo after police falsely accused them of fabricating Huskins’ kidnapping.
(Sudhin Thanawala / Associated Press)
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In Huskins’ case, which the Netflix documentary is based on, Muller broke into her Vallejo home in March 2015 and drugged and bound her and her then-boyfriend, Aaron Quinn. Muller blindfolded them with swim goggles and gave them medicine to make them sleepy. He put headphones on Quinn and played recordings designed to make Quinn think he was dealing with more than one kidnapper.
Muller then put Huskins into Quinn’s car and drove off with her, eventually taking her to his family’s cabin in South Lake Tahoe. He held her there for two days and sexually assaulted her, before driving her across California and releasing her in Huntington Beach.
Initially, Vallejo police dismissed Quinn’s account of his girlfriend being spirited away by a kidnapper — or kidnappers — who put headphones on him and made him drink a substance that made him sleepy. Officers interrogated Quinn for hours, brushing aside his story and theorizing he was behind her disappearance.
When Huskins turned up, police grew more suspicious, questioning how a kidnapping victim could reappear hundreds of miles away wearing sunglasses and carrying an overnight bag.
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Huskins “did not act like a kidnapping victim,” retired Vallejo Police Capt. James O’Connell later said in a sworn statement.
Police tried to get Huskins and Quinn to turn on each other and admit there had been no crime, offering immunity to whoever flipped first, according to statements from their family members.
Then, police went public with that sentiment. “There is no evidence to support the claims that this was a stranger abduction or an abduction at all,” Police Lt. Kenny Park said in a statement at the time. “Given the facts that have been presented thus far, this event appears to be an orchestrated event and not a crime.”
However, less than three months later, evidence gathered from a June 5, 2015, home invasion robbery in the Bay Area community of Dublin helped authorities link Muller to the kidnapping. That case led authorities and Carausu, the detective, to the Muller family’s South Lake Tahoe cabin, where they found, among other things, Quinn’s computer, goggles and tape with a strand of long blond hair.
Huskins and Quinn, who later married, sued the Vallejo Police Department for defamation and reached a $2.5-million settlement in 2018.
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Muller, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former Marine, pleaded guilty in 2016 to kidnapping Huskins. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to additional charges of sexually assaulting her. Until he was transported to Santa Clara County to face the new charges, he was serving his 40-year sentence at a federal prison in Tucson.
Muller is expected to return to Santa Clara County Superior Court on Feb. 21 for sentencing.
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
