SACRAMENTO — As authorities were serving a search warrant on Marvin Mutch’s Vallejo home, seizing electronic devices in search of child sexual abuse material, Mutch reportedly told investigators he was the victim of a hacker who was trying to ruin his life.
It was a similar refrain to the story Mutch had repeated for decades, after he was convicted of drowning 13-year-old Cassie Riley in a Union City creek. In that case, his pleas of innocence rang loudly enough to attract a KQED documentary crew, which covered Mutch’s struggles to gain parole after four decades behind bars and 21 denials. Mutch gained his freedom in 2016, avoiding legal trouble until last May, when a cybertip about suspicious led Solano County Sheriff investigators to his home, according to court records.
What they found, according to the criminal complaint, was a trove of “media files” depicting young children being sexually assaulted, including one video authorities described as showing a girl “approximately 3 or 4 years old” being raped by a man, and others that “depict girls ranging in age from 2 to 8 years old being sexually assaulted in a variety of ways.” The files were saved on a thumb drive where authorities also found Mutch’s resume, articles he’d written, and pictures of him with “various community and civic leaders,” who aren’t named in the complaint.
Now, Mutch, 69, has been charged with possessing child sexual abuse material and being a felon in possession of an unregistered pistol, both felonies. At a Sept. 12 court appearance, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremy D. Peterson ordered Mutch to be detained pending trial, citing both his potential danger to the community and risk of flight. Mutch is in the Sacramento County jail, court records show.
When sheriff’s deputies were raiding his home last May, Mutch had excuses for both alleged crimes at the ready, according to the criminal complaint. He blamed the child pornography possession on a hacker, possibly named “Dimitry,” and told police that he had the gun “only did so for a short time because he took it from a drug-addicted friend for safekeeping,” and was planning to give it to SFPD in an upcoming gun buyback program.
The FBI is skeptical of Mutch’s hacker claims.
“The type of ‘hack’ Mutch believed he suffered (i.e., breaching multiple cellular phones, computers, and external storage devices such as USB drives) is called a ‘polymorphic’ intrusion and is almost certainly beyond the sophistication level of even state-affiliated actors such as foreign security agencies from Russia, China, and the like,” FBI Special Agent Carla Ceccon wrote in the criminal complaint, adding that Mutch, “provided no indication during his interview with law enforcement officers that any ‘hackers’ had victimized him in ways that one would expect to see in a true computer compromise situation, such as by emptying his financial accounts or stealing his identity.”
In 1974, when he was just 18, Mutch was arrested and charged with murdering Cassie. Media reports at the time said the girl’s body was discovered by her father, “naked from the ankles to the neck,” in a Union City drainage after she failed to return home one afternoon. At Mutch’s 1975, his own sister testified against them as her mother screamed “liar” at her from the gallery. Jurors convicted Mutch, who maintained at trial and thereafter that he had a solid alibi and was innocent.
In 2017, after Mutch’s release from prison, KQED released its documentary, “The Trials of Marvin Mutch,” raising his profile as “symbol for reform and rehabilitation,” one of the film’s producer’s told KQED in 2017. His supporters included the USC Gould’s School of Law’s Post Conviction Justice Project, which represented him before the parole board, then heralded his release from prison, publicly describing Mutch as an advocate for nonviolence and who had served as a mediator inside prison walls.
“I had a long path to freedom,” Mutch told the law school in 2017. “What kept me going was to keep looking forward to see what was on the horizon.”
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