Augustine P. Cate, 47, male, was the night marshal of Goldfield, Colorado, walking his rounds in the predawn quiet of September 21, 1902, when a glow inside a downtown drug store caught his attention. Slipping through a rear entrance to investigate a suspected break-in, he confronted a burglar amid shelves of medicines and glass, and was met by gunfire. Two rounds struck him in the chest.
Though mortally wounded, he managed to return fire in the darkened shop before collapsing, dying within minutes in the same room he had entered to protect.
The killer bolted into the night, leaving no clear trail. In the immediate aftermath, townspeople and fellow officers scoured alleys and tailings piles on the hillside above the district, but the shooter eluded them. Contemporary summaries and later law-enforcement memorial records agree on the stark outcome: the assailant who shot the night marshal during the drug-store burglary escaped and was never formally brought to justice for the crime.
Newspaper dispatches in the following weeks floated a lead: an escaped state-prison convict known as Dinwoodie had been captured after a prolonged chase and was “supposed to have been responsible for the murder of the night marshal of Goldfield” not long after his breakout. The report hinted at a tenuous link between the fugitive and the Goldfield shooting, but surviving official accounts do not record a charging or conviction, and later memorial listings maintain that Cate’s killer was never apprehended.
