Located in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, lies the sleepy village of Roscoe, New York, one of the country’s top fishing destinations. Fishermen from all over the world come here to explore its pristine waters, some in search of the elusive “two-headed trout” of local legend.
But recently, this bucolic setting has become the backdrop for a multi-state hand hunt for a cold-blooded killer, Roy Den Hollander, 72, who ended up in a mess across a dirt road just north of Roscoe’s Beaverkill River.
“It’s Trout Town USA,” says local stylist Brie Tallman, “things like that don’t happen here.”
Tallman recalls the melee that took place on July 20, 2020, as FBI and New York State police investigators descended on the small town after the road patrol located the body. of Den Hollander along Ragin Road, killed by a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head. Officials quickly identified him as the prime suspect in a deadly attack on the Honorable’s home Esther Sales, New Jersey’s first Latin federal judge.
“It was definitely a huge thing,” Tallman says. “We had a mystery that everyone was trying to solve.”
Investigators conjugated the timeline of what preceded the horrific scene on Roscoe Highway, and found that the now-dead New York lawyer and anti-feminist had begun her macabre expedition days earlier in the mountains of Roscoe. San Bernardino east of Los Angeles. On July 11, posing as a delivery man, Den Hollander went to the home of human rights lawyer Marc Angelucci and shot him dead on his porch.
A week later, on the opposite side of the country, Den Hollander appeared at the home of Judge Salas in New Jersey, who had presided over one of his frivolous lawsuits against what he perceived as male discrimination. Again, posing as a delivery man, she opened fire, killing Salas ’20-year-old son, Daniel Anderl, and critically injuring Salas’ husband, lawyer Mark Anderl.
CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith reported on the case for “48 hours” “The killers of the delivery man.”
Law enforcement sources tell 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 Den Hollander directed by Angelucci and Salas due to his complaints against both of them, and they say that a .380 caliber pistol located next to the body connects him to the three victims.
New York State Police
But it is still unclear why he chose the remote area of upstate New York to end his life after destroying the lives of other innocents.
Writings posted on Den Hollander’s website reveal that the site in Sullivan County is where his family spent their summers during their childhood. In the 1950s, his parents bought land along Ragin Road and built a hut, a few thousand yards from where he committed suicide.
“I knew it was a safe haven,” Tallman says. “I think it’s the perfect place to hide.”
As a lifelong resident of Roscoe, Eric Hamerstrom knew Den Hollander as a child. “Back then, some of the kids here called him ‘Babyface.'” Like most children his age, they spent summers swimming under the covered bridge.
“We’d see him almost every day going down to the beach,” Hamerstrom says. “The only thing I can imagine is that I must have had some nice moments here as a kid.”
Den Hollander wrote that he and his older brother, Frank, would roam the woods with other naughty young boys and later, in their teens, chase girls.
“If you’re going to end your life, where are you going?” asks Les Mattis, who lives opposite Den Hollander’s old cabin. “You won’t do it in downtown New Jersey on any road. Here you’ll be in a place where maybe as a kid you felt safe and at home.”
Situated on the banks of the Beaverkill River, it is difficult to imagine a more idyllic setting for growing up, and yet a manuscript written by Den Hollander and discovered by researchers, partial memories, partial manifesto, did not detail the nostalgia of simpler times . On the contrary, Den Hollander’s reflections on his childhood recounted a dark and tortured past that may explain his motivation to return to the northern forests.
“He was an unusual, unstable person,” says FBI Special Agent Joe Denahan. “One of the issues 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 knew Den Hollander in Russia in the 1990s. “They had everything to do with her childhood and everything to do with a particular woman: her mother.”
In the informative 1,700-page book published by Den Hollander, entitled “Stupid Frigging Fool,” he disputes his abject contempt for his mother, to whom the book is dedicated: “To Mother, May She Burn in Hell.”
“She didn’t love him or even like him,” Serio says. “According to him, she regretted it and let him know.”
“From the age of 5 or 6 until I was a teenager,” Den Hollander writes, “I was often called out that I should have listened to my father and never had me.” This cruel statement, he claims, was repeated throughout his childhood.
He explains how his mother blamed him for all the ills of his life and states that he even tried to poison him as a child. An examination of his writings reveals the wounds of a deeply traumatic childhood. So why would you decide to go back to the origins of this pain and suffering?
“If you were to write a novel about this story,” Serio says, “it would make your character go back to the place he seems to hate the most in order to slide his mother’s nose, which so often did the same thing to him. of course how one could have felt in life, when there is no place left to go, this symbol of the first years – the home – may be the only place he discovers “.
It was revealed that in his last days, Den Hollander had been facing terminal cancer. Out of time and at the end of the rope, he ended his life with an explosion, alone by a dirt road, chased by his memories and demons. Maybe that’s all he had left.
“The hand of death is on my left shoulder,” he wrote. “The only problem with a life lived too long is that a man ends up with so many enemies that he can’t even get the score with all of them.”
There is no public evidence to indicate that Den Hollander harmed anyone else, but inside his car, investigators were annoyed to find a list of more than a dozen names, including several judges, that authorities suspect were possible goals.
“Thank goodness he didn’t come here to shoot more people,” Mattis says. “I was glad I didn’t have scores to settle here.”