The anti-feminist lawyer suspected of ambushing a federal judge’s family has now been linked by the FBI to the similar murder of a rival attorney in California a week earlier—a development that one men’s rights activist called “the craziest plot twist in the world.”
The FBI’s announcement came after The Daily Beast reported that investigators had determined that Roy Den Hollander was in California when Marc Angelucci was gunned down at his home.
The FBI office in Newark did not say what other evidence it had uncovered to pin the California slaying on Den Hollander.
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Investigators have been tracing the movements of Den Hollander, 72, since he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Monday morning, hours after he allegedly went to the New Jersey home of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas and shot her son and her husband.
In Hollander’s car they found a FedEx package addressed to Salas, as well as papers that mentioned Angelucci, the activist who was murdered a week earlier at his home in Crestline, California. Detectives quickly began looking into Hollander’s travel history.
“We do see him in California on the relevant dates,” one law-enforcement source told The Daily Beast on Wednesday, before the FBI announcement.
Den Hollander had once been a member of the National Coalition for Men (NCFM), the organization where Angelucci volunteered, until he was drummed out.
The two men had filed dueling lawsuits, challenging the military’s male-only draft policy, on opposite coasts. But while Angelucci scored a huge win in his case in February, Den Hollander’s was still pending in New Jersey—in Salas’ courtroom.
Paul Elam, the men’s rights activist who called the connection between the two crimes “the craziest plot twist,” nevertheless said Den Hollander “had a motive to kill Marc Angelucci, one that I've known about for years.”
Elam said he once told NCFM’s president, Harry Crouch, that he had concerns about Den Hollander—and Crouch told him that Den Hollander was carrying a grudge.
“Harry said very much that Roy was furious, and beyond words furious, absolutely enraged that NCFM and Marc Angelucci were getting into the Selective Service case. He viewed that as something proprietary for him,” Elam said in a Facebook video earlier this week. “He viewed it as his domain and he saw Mark’s work in that response as a intrusion into his space… he was livid.”
In online screeds, Den Hollander made it clear that he blamed Salas for robbing him of a legal victory in the Selective Service case. Bizarrely, he also referred to her as a “hot Latina” and said he wanted to ask her out on a date—then slammed her as “lazy and incompetent.”
Den Hollander, who was dying of melanoma, reportedly also had a photo of the chief judge of New York State with him, along with several other people—raising the specter of a hit list he was working his way through.
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