Why did a crazed gunman kill himself in a remote town in upstate New York after a spate of murders across the country?

Nestled in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains lies the sleepy village of Roscoe, New York, one of the nation’s premier fishing destinations. Anglers from all over the world come here to explore its crystal-clear waters, some in search of the elusive “double-headed trout” of local legend.

But recently, this bucolic setting has become the backdrop for a multi-state manhunt for a cold-blooded killer, Roy Den Hollander, 72, whose murderous frenzy across the country ended on a dirt road just north of the Beaverkill River from Roscoe.

“This is Trout Town USA,” says local stylist Brie Tallman, “things like this don’t happen here”.

Tallman remembers the melee that took place on July 20, 2020, as investigators from the FBI and New York State Police descended on the small hamlet after a highway patrol located the body of Den Hollander along Ragin Road, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Authorities quickly identified him as the prime suspect in a deadly attack on the Hon. Esther Salas, First Latin American Federal Judge of New Jersey.

“It was really something huge,” says Tallman. “We had a mystery going on that everyone was trying to solve.”

Investigators pieced together the timeline of what preceded the gruesome roadside scene in Roscoe, finding that the now-deceased New York lawyer and self-proclaimed anti-feminist had started his grisly expedition days earlier in the San Bernardino Mountains. east of Los Angeles. On July 11, posing as a delivery boy, Den Hollander went to the home of rival men’s rights lawyer Marc Angelucci and shot him dead on his porch.

A week later, across the country, Den Hollander showed up at the home of Judge Salas in New Jersey, who had presided over one of his many frivolous trials against what he considered sex discrimination masculine. Again, posing as a delivery boy, he opened fire, killing Salas ’20-year-old son Daniel Anderl and seriously injuring Salas’ husband, lawyer Mark Anderl.

CBS News correspondent Tracy Smith reported on this case for “48 hours” in “The Deliveryman Murders”.

Police sources told CBS News that Angelucci’s address, as well as a FedEx envelope addressed to Judge Salas, was found inside the killer’s car in Roscoe. Investigators believe Den Hollander targeted Angelucci and Salas due to his perceived grievances against the two of them, and say that a .380 caliber handgun located next to his body connects him to the three victims.

But it’s still unclear why he chose remote northern New York State to end his life after destroying the lives of other innocent people.

Writings posted on Den Hollander’s website reveal that Sullivan County is where his family spent the summers as a child. In the 1950s, his parents bought land along Ragin Road and built a cabin just a few thousand feet from where he committed suicide.

“He knew it was a safe haven,” says Tallman. “It’s kind of the perfect place to hide, I think.”

As a permanent resident of Roscoe, Eric Hamerstrom knew Den Hollander as a young boy. “At the time some of the kids here called him ‘Babyface.’“ Like most kids their age, they spent their summers swimming under the covered bridge.

“We saw him almost every day going down to the beach,” says Hamerstrom. “All I can imagine is that he must have had a good time here as a kid.

Den Hollander wrote that he and his older brother, Frank, would roam the woods with other young boys making fun, and later as a teenager would chase the girls.

“If you’re going to end your life, where are you going to go?” asks Les Mattis, who lives across from the old cabin in Den Hollander. “You’re not going to do it in the middle of New Jersey on a freeway. Here you’ll be in a place where maybe as a kid you felt safe and at home.”

Standing along the banks of the Beaverkill River, it’s hard to imagine a more idyllic place to grow up, and yet a manuscript written by Den Hollander and discovered by investigators, partly in memory, partly overt, did not detail the nostalgia. simpler times. Rather, Den Hollander’s thoughts on his childhood recounted a dark and tortured past that may explain his motivation to return to the northern woods.

“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 clearly showed, his motivations, his unmet 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 one woman in particular: her mother.”

In Den Hollander’s rambling 1700 page book “Stupid Frigging Fool”, he complains of his abject contempt for his mother, to whom the book is dedicated: “To Mother, May She Burn in Hell”.

“She didn’t love him and didn’t even love him,” Serio said. “According to him, she regretted it and let him know.”

“From the age of 5 or 6 until adolescence,” writes Den Hollander, “she often cried out to me that she should have listened to my father and never had me”. This vicious statement, he claims, was repeated throughout his childhood.

He tells how his mother blamed him for all the evils in his life and claims that she even tried to poison him as a child. An examination of her handwriting reveals the wounds of a deeply traumatic childhood. So why then would he choose to go back to the origins of such suffering and suffering?

“If I wrote a novel about this story,” Serio says, “I would bring his character back to the place he apparently hated the most to thumb his nose at his mother, who did the same to him so often. . how much we could have felt isolated in life, when there is nowhere left to go, this symbol of the early years – the house – may be the only place that calls out to us. ”

It was revealed that in his final days, Den Hollander had been dealing with terminal cancer. Out of time and at the end of his rope, he ended his life in style, alone at the edge of a dirt road, haunted by his memories and his demons. Maybe that’s all he had left.

“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 with all of them.”

There is no publicly known evidence that Den Hollander harmed anyone else, but inside his car, investigators were baffled to find a list of more than a dozen names, including several judges, whom authorities suspect to be potential targets.

“Thank goodness he didn’t come here to shoot more people,” Mattis says. “I was just glad he didn’t have a score to settle here.”