Further Reading Man, located after he left phone at robbery, now pleads guilty to kidnapping

Local media reported Tuesday that the two victims are now engaged to be married—just days after speaking at Muller's sentencing hearing—and that Muller could face fresh criminal charges brought by local prosecutors in Solano County.

In a statement issued last week, just after his sentencing hearing, federal prosecutors said that Muller, himself a disbarred attorney and former United States Marine, got what he deserved.

“Muller had advantages in life that most people only dream of, yet he used his considerable intelligence to plan and execute the physical assault and psychological torture of two innocent strangers,” United States Attorney Phillip A. Talbert said.

“It is difficult to imagine the level of suffering that Muller inflicted on his victims. The sentence handed down today takes into account that suffering and strives to ensure that Muller will never again commit such crimes.”

During a June 2016 hearing, Muller’s lawyer unsuccessfully tried a novel legal argument, that even though his client abandoned his phone at the scene of the burglary—which ultimately led authorities to find him and link him to the kidnapping—he had a privacy interest in the phone. (Over three months after that hearing, Muller pled guilty to the kidnapping.)

Further Reading Crook who left his phone at the scene has “no reasonable expectation of privacy” The kidnapping case, as outlined in court filings, was wild and harrowing.

A Vallejo woman and her boyfriend were bound with zip-ties and made to wear blackened swimming goggles. The man was instructed to send $15,000 to secure her release, while she was eventually driven to her hometown in Southern California and released two days later. As the Sacramento Bee reported, investigators believed the kidnapping story that the couple told them was a hoax—until the victims spoke out in public, and the kidnappers even contacted the Vallejo Police Department to insist the story was authentic.

As the e-mail described: