Nestled in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains lies the sleepy village of Roscoe, New York, one of the premier fishing destinations in the country. Fishermen from all over the world come here to explore the pristine waters, some looking for the elusive “two-headed trout” of local legend.
But recently, this rural setting has become the scene of a multi-state manhunt for a cold-blooded killer, Roy Den Hollander, 72, whose massacre 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 this don’t happen here.”
Tallman recalls the fight that took place on July 20, 2020, when FBI and New York State Police investigators reached the small hamlet after a highway patrol found Den Hollander’s body along Ragin Road, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head . Officials quickly identified him as the prime suspect in a deadly attack on the honorable Member’s home Esther Salas, Latina’s first federal judge in New Jersey.
“It was definitely a big thing,” says Tallman. “We had a mystery that everyone was trying to solve.”
Investigators compiled the timeline of what preceded the gruesome roadside scene in Roscoe, and found that the now-deceased New York City attorney and self-proclaimed anti-feminist had earlier started his macabre expedition days in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles. On July 11, posing as delivery man, Den Hollander drove to rival men’s rights attorney Marc Angelucci’s home and shot him on his porch.
A week later, on the other side of the country, Den Hollander appeared at Judge Salas’ home in New Jersey, who had led one of his many frivolous lawsuits against what he considered male gender discrimination. Again he posed as a delivery man and opened fire, killing Salas’s 20-year-old son, Daniel Anderl, and seriously injuring Salas’s husband, lawyer Mark Anderl.
CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith reported on the case for “48 Hours” in “The Deliveryman Murders.”
Law enforcement sources tell CBS News that Angelucci’s address, as well as a FedEx envelope addressed to Judge Salas, were found in the killer’s car in Roscoe. Researchers believe Den Hollander directed Angelucci and Salas because of his alleged grievances against both of them, and say a .380 caliber pistol next to his body links him to all three victims.
New York State Police
But it remains unclear why he chose the remote part of Upstate New York to end his life after destroying the lives of innocent others.
Writings on Den Hollander’s website show that the site in Sullivan County is where his family spent summers during his childhood. In the 1950s, his parents bought some 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,” Tallman says. “It’s kind of a perfect place to hide, I guess.”
As a lifelong resident of Roscoe, Eric Hamerstrom knew Den Hollander as a young boy. ‘At the time, some kids called him’ Babyface. ‘ Like most children their age, they spent their summers swimming under the covered bridge.
“We saw him go to the beach almost every day,” says Hamerstrom. “I can only imagine he must have had a good time here as a child.”
Den Hollander wrote that he and his older brother, Frank, would roam the woods with other young boys who were mischievous and later, in their teens, chased girls.
“If you’re going to end your life, where are you going?” asks Les Mattis, who lives opposite Den Hollander’s former hut. “You’re not going to do it on a freeway in the middle of New Jersey. Here you are in a place where as a child you may have felt safe and at home. ‘
Standing along the banks of the Beaverkill River it’s hard to imagine a more idyllic setting in which to grow up, and yet a manuscript written by Den Hollander and discovered by researchers was part memoir, part manifesto, no detail from nostalgia to simpler times. On the contrary, Den Hollander’s reflections on his youth told a dark and haunted past that could explain his motivation to return to the northern woods.
“He was an unusual and unstable person,” said Joe Denahan, FBI special agent. “One of the themes we saw was 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 his childhood, and everything to do with one particular woman: his mother.”
In Den Hollanders crawling, 1,700-page self-published book entitled “Stupid Frigging Fool”, he draws on his bitter disdain for his mother, to whom the book is dedicated: “To Mother, May She Burn in Hell.”
“She didn’t love or even like him,” says Serio. “He says she was sorry about him and let him know.”
“From the age of 5 or 6 until I was a teenager”, writes Den Hollander, “she often yelled at me that she should have listened to my father and never me.” That vicious statement, he claims, was repeated throughout his childhood.
He tells how his mother blamed him for all the ailments in her 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 origin of such pain and suffering?
“If I were to write a novel about this story,” says Serio, “I would have his character return to the place he apparently hated the most to thump up his mother, who so often did the same to him. You would have felt rejected in life, if you have nowhere to go, that symbol of the early years – the house – is perhaps the only place that comes to the fore. ‘
It turned out that Den Hollander had to deal with terminal cancer in his last days. Out of time and at the end of his rope, he ended his life with a bang, alone on the side of a dirt road, haunted by his memories and demons. Maybe that was all he had left.
“The hand of death is on my left shoulder,” he wrote. “The only problem with living too long is that a man ends up with so many enemies that he can’t even score them all.”
There is no publicly known evidence that Den Hollander has harmed anyone else, but in his car, detectives found a list of more than a dozen names, including several judges, whom authorities suspect may have been targets.
“Thank God he didn’t come here to shoot more people,” says Mattis. “I was just glad he didn’t have any bills here to settle.”