POLICE BOOKS - David McElligott

About the New York State Police

In 1913, a construction foreman named Sam Howell was murdered during a payroll robbery in Westchester County. Because Westchester County was a very rural area then, there was no local police department and Mr. Howell's murderers escaped, even though he identified them before he died.

his vicious crime spurred Mr. Howell's employer, Moyca Newell (left) and her friend, Katherine Mayo (right), to initiate a movement to form a State Police department to provide police protection to rural areas.

As a result of their efforts, the State Legislature established the New York State Police as a full service police agency on April 11, 1917.

Since the first 237 men rode out of their training camp on horseback to begin patrolling rural areas, troopers have been there to fulfill the law enforcement needs of the people of New York State with the highest degree of fairness, professionalism and integrity.

During the 1990s, the New York State Police focused on three primary objectives: dealing with the rising tide of violent crime, much of it drug related; increasing cooperative ventures with local law enforcement agencies to more efficiently and effectively provide police services to the people of New York; and preparing for the challenges of the rapidly approaching 21st Century.

Source:

troopers.state.ny.us/

Introduction/History/

David McElligott was a senior investigator for the New York State Police. According to the New York State Police, “the special prosecutor investigating the Troop C evidence tampering scandal recently warned two New York State Police supervisors that they could face disciplinary action for their roles. The two, David McElligott and Karl Chandler, then retired. They supervised three investigators who admitted faking evidence.”

David McElligott co-authored Good Cop/Bad Cop: A True Story of Murder and Mayhem. According to the Publisher’s Weekly, “Two days before Christmas in 1989, Tony Harris, his wife, Dodie, and their children, Shelby and Marc, were murdered in their home in Ithaca, N.Y. This upper-middle-class family was killed by Michael Kinge, a black ex-convict who used and then had his mother use credit cards stolen from the Harris house. McElligott of the state police largely supervised the police work, although he was suspicious of fingerprint evidence adduced by investigator David Harding to prove that Kinge's mother was present during the slayings.” The author, “carefully document the unraveling of Harding's career as he confessed to falsifying evidence to win a number of prosecutions, including that of Mrs. Kinge, and advance his career.”