George Edward Ted Price, a 31-year-old White male, died in Thermopolis, Wyoming, on August 31, 1921, in the hard, violent atmosphere of Prohibition, when law officers were still trying to choke off the small bootlegging operations that flourished in the rough spaces between town and open country. Price was serving as a deputy sheriff in Hot Springs County when he and other officers moved to arrest a man they believed was involved in running moonshine.
What should have been an arrest turned into a gunfight, sudden and close, the kind of encounter that left almost no room for retreat once the first shot was fired. Price was struck and fatally wounded in that exchange, and the incident entered local memory not as an unsolved disappearance or a quiet killing, but as a deadly clash between law officers and a suspected bootlegger.
The suspect identified in the online memorial and archival sources is Elsworth Mullendore. Those sources describe Mullendore as the man officers were trying to take into custody for running moonshine, and they state that he was shot during the same confrontation. He did not survive long enough for the case to move into the usual next stage of criminal proceedings; the available sources indicate he died the following day from the wounds he received in the gun battle. Because the named suspect was mortally wounded in the same episode, the record located online does not show a later arrest, formal prosecution, trial, or conviction arising from Price's killing. Instead, the case seems to have ended almost as soon as it began, with both the deputy and the accused bootlegger dead within roughly a day of each other, leaving behind the stark outline of a deadly attempted arrest rather than a long court battle.
What remains in the surviving online record is the shape of the moment itself: a young deputy stepping into a dangerous enforcement action during one of the most combustible periods in early twentieth-century Wyoming, and a suspect who answered that pressure with gunfire. Modern memorial pages preserve Price chiefly as an officer killed in the line of duty, and they consistently tie his death to the attempted apprehension of a bootlegging suspect in Thermopolis. The details that survive are not richly layered with courtroom testimony or later confessions, because the violence closed the matter almost immediately. Even so, the outline is clear: George Edward Ted Price was killed while trying to make an arrest, Elsworth Mullendore is the suspect named in the online sources, and no later arrest or prosecution appears in the historical trail that remains accessible online.
