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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In his mid ’70s, it’s only natural that the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar should turn his attentions to reflecting on lives lived, and questions of how one wants life to end with his latest film.

But in boiling down and adapting the Sigrid Nunez novel “What Are You Going Through” into “The Room Next Door,” Almodóvar has conjured up the blithe, arid banalities of Woody Allen at his most pretentious. He squanders two Oscar winners and an Emmy winner in a drab, lifeless story in which characters recite passages from poetry and James Joyce from memory and watch Buster Keaton’s silent classic “Seven Chances” as they ponder a planned suicide and melodramatic strings drone on in the score.

All that’s missing are a few mentions of “Mahler”and you’d have yourself a companion piece to any one of a dozen later Allen films, the ones without a laugh or a light moment to recommend them.

Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a busy, best-selling author of “fictionalized” biographies and non-fiction who learns of an old friend’s cancerous decline from a mutual acquaintance who comes to a book signing.

Martha (Tilda Swinton) was once a combat correspondant. Now she’s in a New York hospital, longing to go home. As booked-up Ingrid — not a “close” friend — sets aside bigger and bigger chunks of her days to take Martha’s calls and visit her once she comes home to her roomy Manhattan flat to recover from her latest treatment, they reminisce over their careers — especially Martha’s.

They talk about “New York in the ’80s,” Martha’s daughter, flashing back to the troubled Vietnam vet father the child never knew and joke about a “shared lover,” and chuckle as they compare “enthusiastic” notes.

Martha also lets on as to how she’s prepped herself for “the end,” and how her “experimental treatment…survival feels almost disappointing.”

When things take a turn, Ingrid is who Martha confides in. She figures that her life of fame won through risk in war zones means “I deserve a good death.” Ingrid’s involvement drifts towards “the ask.” Martha wants to take a “suicide pill.” She wants to do it in Woodstock, in a posher-than-posh AirBnB. And she wants Ingrid in “The Room Next Door” when she does it — for companionship, and for dealing with the legal complexity of what comes after.

Whatever life there was in the Nunez novel seems bleached out of this meandering, claustrophobic melodrama that that Ingrid finds herself trapped in. That “shared lover” (John Turturro) is still in her life, a friend she can confide in and get advice from.

But this extraordinary situation barely takes on the gravitas demanded. Some anecdotes do nothing to illuminate character or this predicament. And the comic possibilities — this is like asking a casual acquaintance of long standing to oh, babysit, dogsit, help you move, co-sign a loan or the like.

Why didn’t Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld ever get around to assisted suicide as an “inconvenience?”

Moore is too good an actress to not let us feel the gut-punch of this turn of events. Swinton, who takes on a cadaverous in the later acts, easily fits our mental picture of a famous female war reporter — flinty, a little butch, blunt about her success and her failings and pragmatic about her goals.

Ingrid’s last goal is to die with dignity, with a writer she trusts perhaps taking an interest in her journals and by extension, her life story. That’s cynical, but letting Ingrid (and the viewer) figure that out had all sorts of dramatic possibilities.

It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here. The epilogue that comes after a disappointing third act feels like both a stunt and one last let down that a legendary filmmaker delivers in adapting a novel he was either too serious about, or that he didn’t take seriously enough.

Rating: PG-13, suicide, profanity

Cast: Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Nivola and John Turturro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:43

It was an improbable place. An artist collective known as JJU, or John Joyce University, hidden in the foothills of Altadena, resembled a 1960s fever dream of communal living. That such a community could exist in modern Los Angeles was a miracle to those residing there, until — in a single harrowing night — the Eaton fire swallowed it whole.

If you haven’t heard of it, that’s because it wasn’t actually a university. It was a compound of two neighboring properties — mansions, bungalows and converted garages — affectionately named after the 77-year-old carpenter who resided there for 26 years. He was the guy you went to if you wanted to borrow a book, had a maintenance issue or just wanted to talk philosophy. About 30 artists lived and worked together, sharing art studios, supplies, the tools of their various crafts and how-to knowledge.

Joyce saw all kinds of artists come and go over the years; composers, sculptors, painters, performance artists, poets and art professors.

“We also raised amazing kids,” he said, noting the many families who came through.

Joyce uses the word “we” liberally when talking about JJU, because the compound was all about the benefits of togetherness. He shared videos and photos of community dinners in the grand dining room and of walls covered with art from those who had once lived there. A number of clips featured artists working in various areas of the house while a performance artist named Michelle Garduno danced or napped with a CPR doll. Everybody, Joyce said, donated a piece of art to the community upon leaving.

“The whole notion of individualism is a complete fraud,” Joyce said. “We had common areas where people could do whatever they wanted. We had a photo studio set up. We had painting studios going on. We had shows in there. We used it for everything. Even the yard — there were lots of big sloppy paintings in the yard.”

The main house had a lending library filled with art books and catalogs, and people from the surrounding community came for annual parties. The diversity of the neighborhood — a melting pot from around the world — was also part of the area’s cosmic draw.

“There were working-class people next to JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] people, next to Caltech people, next to Hollywood people,” Joyce said. “Everybody got along.”

Painter Susannah Mills, who for the last decade lived in a converted garage at JJU, said that one mansion on the compound was built in 1890 by a French artist and later became an orphanage run by Catholic nuns. Its current owner, Jeff Ricks, bought it more than 30 years ago and began populating it with artists, including Joyce, who also managed the property.

Mills said that when she first arrived at the compound, Joyce helped her get set up. He made sure she had the art supplies and furniture she needed.

“From that point forward, I knew I had just found this misfit community,” Mills said. “That’s what we were like. Many of us were people without families. We all had dogs and cats, and we were all artists. I never worried about anything. I always felt safe there. We all just loved each other.”

The community built an exhibition area called the Narrow Gallery in one of the houses, and that’s where Mills staged her first show. Her rent was less than $1,000 per month; Ricks never raised it. The low living expenses gave her the freedom to work as an end-of-life guide; she also worked at the Altadena Community Church, an inclusive, social-justice-oriented congregation where she helped book events for community organizations. (The church also was destroyed in the Eaton fire.)

Residents of JJU were friendly with the people living at Zorthian Ranch, another nearby collective also lost to fire. The 48-acre artists colony was on land that muralist Jirayr Zorthian bought in the 1940s, turning it into a sprawling outpost for his family and eventually a summer arts camp for children. Zorthian ran in bohemian circles and threw parties that attracted Andy Warhol, Charlie Parker and Bob Dylan.

A figure-drawing class at Zorthian Ranch in Altadena.

(Hannah Ray Taylor)

For as long as she’s lived in Altadena, Mills said, Zorthian has served as a community hub. It hosted donation-based figure-drawing and mosaic classes, as well as workshops on how to shear sheep and spin wool. Zorthian’s granddaughter, Julia, lived at the ranch, along with about more than a dozen docents and artists, and she said the community thrived in the ordered lawlessness of the unincorporated area.

“Because Los Angeles is such a regulated city, it can be really hard to just exist as an artist,” she said. “So being able to live in a space where somebody is allowing for flexibility outside of these harsh rules and regulations gave people room to flourish.”

The utopian sense of self-determination flagged a bit after the fire, when everyone in the community scattered to the wind, but Joyce cited a great desire to rebuild. Text chains are flourishing, and an idea is fermenting about using shipping containers as living quarters.

Joyce was the last JJU resident on the property early Jan. 8, when a house across the street literally exploded from what he thinks may have been a gas leak. An ember from that fire raced on the wind and lodged into a 50-foot palm tree by the main JJU house. Gales whipped the fronds into a frenzy, causing the tree to spray embers like a sprinkler. The world around Joyce erupted in flames. Even the gravel looked like it was burning.

Joyce was holding a garden hose.

“I never felt so weak in my whole life,” Joyce recalled. “Those flames, and the sound. … It was a huge, powerful, angry animal.”