Nestled at the foot of the Catskill Mountains is the quiet village of Roscoe, New York, one of the country’s top fishing destinations. Fishermen from all over the world come here to explore its crystal clear waters, some in search of the elusive “two-headed trout” of the local legend.
But recently, this bucolic setting has become the backdrop for a multistate manhunt by a cold-blooded killer, Roy Den Hollander, 72, whose killing across the country ended on a dirt road just north of Roscoe’s Beaverkill River.
“This is Trout Town USA,” says local stylist Brie Tallman, “things like that don’t happen here.”
Tallman recalls the turmoil that unfolded on July 20, 2020, when FBI and New York State Police investigators invaded the small village after a highway patrol located Den Hollander’s body along Ragin Road, killed by a self-inflicted shot to the head. Authorities quickly identified him as the prime suspect in a deadly attack on the Honored Esther Salas, New Jersey’s first Latin federal judge.
“It was definitely something huge,” says Tallman. “We had a mystery going on that everyone was trying to solve.”
Investigators gathered the timeline of what preceded the horrible roadside scene in Roscoe, discovering that the now deceased New York City lawyer and who called himself an anti-feminist had started his macabre expedition a few days earlier in the San Bernardino Mountains, to east of Los Angeles. On July 11, pretending to be a delivery man, Den Hollander drove to the home of rival human rights lawyer Marc Angelucci and shot and killed him on his porch.
A week later, on the other side of the country, Den Hollander appeared at the home of Judge Salas in New Jersey, who had presided over one of his many frivolous lawsuits against what he considered male discrimination. Again, pretending to be a delivery man, he opened fire, killing Salas’ 20-year-old son Daniel Anderl and seriously injuring Salas’s husband, lawyer Mark Anderl.
CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith reported this case for “48 hours” in “The Delivery Man’s Murders”.
Police sources told CBS News that Angelucci’s address, as well as a FedEx envelope addressed to Judge Salas, were found inside the killer’s car located in Roscoe. Researchers believe that Den Hollander Angelucci and Salas took aim because of his complaints against the two, and let’s say a .380 caliber gun located next to his body connects him to all three victims.
New York State Police
But it is not yet clear why he chose the remote part of Upstate New York to end his life after destroying the lives of other innocent people.
Writings posted on the Den Hollander website reveal that the Sullivan County location is where his family spent summers during their childhood. In the 1950s, his parents bought land along Ragin Road and built a cabin, just a few thousand meters from where he committed suicide.
“He knew it was a safe haven,” says Tallman. “It’s the perfect place to hide, I think.”
As a lifelong resident of Roscoe, Eric Hamerstrom met Den Hollander when he was young. “At that time, some of the kids here called him ‘Babyface’.” Like most children their age, they spent the summer swimming under the covered bridge.
“We saw him almost every day going to the beach,” says Hamerstrom. “All I can imagine is that he must have had a pleasant time here when he was a child.”
Den Hollander wrote that he and his older brother, Frank, wandered through the woods with other boys getting into mischief and later, in their teens, chased girls.
“If you’re going to end your life, where are you going?” asks Les Mattis, who lives in front of Den Hollander’s old hut. “You are not going to do this in the middle of New Jersey, on some highway. Here, you will be in a place where perhaps as a child you felt safe and at home.”
Along the banks of the Beaverkill River, it is difficult to imagine a more idyllic scenario for growth, and yet a manuscript written by Den Hollander and discovered by researchers, partly memoirs, partly manifest, did not detail the nostalgia of simpler times. On the contrary, Den Hollander’s reflections on his childhood reported a dark and tortured past that may explain his motivation to return to the northern forests.
“He was an unusual and unstable person,” said FBI special agent Joe Denahan. “One of the themes we saw was that he was very angry.”
“As his own words made clear, his motives, his unfulfilled desires, his unmet needs, had nothing to do with women,” says Joe Serio, who met Den Hollander in Russia in the 1990s. “They were all about with his childhood and everything to do with one woman in particular: his mother. ”
In the rambling of Den Hollander, a 1,700-page self-published book titled “Stupid Frigging Fool,” he addresses his abject contempt for his mother, to whom the book is dedicated: “To the mother, may she burn in hell.”
“She didn’t love him, nor did she like him,” says Serio. “According to him, she regretted it and let him know that.”
“From 5 or 6 years old to adolescence”, writes Den Hollander, “she always shouted at me that she should have listened to my father and never had me”. This cruel statement, he says, was repeated during his childhood.
He tells how his mother blamed him for all the ills of his life and claims that she even tried to poison him as a child. An examination of his writing reveals the wounds of a deeply traumatic childhood. So why would he choose to return to the origins of so much pain and suffering?
“If I were writing a novel about this story,” says Serio, “it would make your character go back to the place he apparently hated the most, to mock his mother, who so often did the same to him. Regardless of how one might feel disregarded. in life, when there is nowhere else to go, that symbol since the early years – home – may be the only place that touches me. ”
It was revealed that in his last days, Den Hollander faced terminal cancer. Out of time and at the end of his rope, he ended his life with a crash, alone at the edge of a dirt road, haunted by his memories and demons. Maybe that’s all he had.
“The hand of death is on my left shoulder,” he wrote. “The only problem with too long a life is that a man ends up with so many enemies that he can’t even score points with all of them.”
There is no publicly known evidence that Den Hollander harmed another person, but inside his car, investigators were nervous to find a list of more than a dozen names, including several judges, that officials suspect were potential targets.
“Thank God he didn’t come here to shoot more people,” says Mattis. “I was glad he didn’t have a score to settle here.”