Excerpt from Mounted Justice: True Stories of the Pennsylvania State Police
Early one Saturday morning in August, 1913, a peculiarly brutal murder was committed at Maaikenshof, the estate of my friend Miss M. Moyca Newell, in Bedford Hills, New York. The victim was Sam Howell, a fine young American, contractor's foreman on a building job. The murderers were four aliens; their motive, to seize the pay-roll that Howell, unarmed, was carrying to the building site.
The four did not get the pay-roll, for the reason that Sam Howell, characteristically, gave his life in its stead. But, although fully identified, they escaped scot free, and walk to-day, as far as that crime is concerned, unpunished and undisturbed.
If an overseeing Olympian, weary of the slackness of mankind, had ordained a tragedy especially to show the futility of all existing provision to cover such an event, the result could not have been more complete. Howell's gallant sacrifice, with the immediate consequences, showed in detail and beyond all question that our hoary sheriff-constable system leaves country districts in time of need without protection worthy of the name. The conditions then uncovered were at once humiliating and intolerable; and so, out of sorrow and shame, was born New York State's movement for a State Police.
The star of this movement shone from Pennsylvania, whose magnificent State Police Force was then in its eighth year of service.
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