Craig Price

Victims
4
Years active
1987 / 1989
Location
Warwick, Rhode Island, USA
Method
Stabbing with knife
Status
Tried as a juvenile because of his age and due for release at twenty-one under Rhode Island law as it then stood. Never released; convictions for offences in custody have added years, and in January 2019 he pleaded guilty in Florida to attempted murder and received twenty-five years plus ten of probation.

Price was born on October 11, 1973 and lived in the Buttonwoods neighbourhood of Warwick, Rhode Island. In July 1987, aged thirteen, he broke into a house and stabbed Rebecca Spencer, twenty-seven, to death. The case went unsolved. In September 1989, aged fifteen, he broke into another house in the same neighbourhood and killed Joan Heaton, thirty-nine, and her daughters Jennifer, ten, and Melissa, eight, stabbing them repeatedly.

He was arrested days later and confessed to all four. Because he was fifteen, Rhode Island law at the time required that he be tried as a juvenile and released at twenty-one with his record sealed, whatever he had done. The state could not change that retrospectively, and the prospect of his release in 1995 caused a public crisis in Rhode Island and drove the reform of the state's juvenile sentencing law. The Rhode Island press called him the Warwick Slasher, and he took the name Iron Man in custody.

He has never been released. He has instead accumulated a series of convictions for offences committed in custody, assaults on staff and inmates, contempt, extortion, each adding years, and this roster's note about sentences totalling twenty-nine years between 1991 and 2007 describes that accumulation rather than any sentence for the murders. He was transferred to Florida in 2017 and was later sentenced there for stabbing another inmate.

He is a case where the punishment for four murders has been assembled retrospectively out of prison discipline, and it is now very long. In January 2019 he pleaded guilty in Florida to the attempted murder of a fellow inmate, stabbed with a homemade knife in 2017, and was sentenced to twenty-five years followed by ten years of probation, to be served in Florida. Before that plea his tentative release date had been in November 2019. He is held at the Union Correctional Institution at Raiford, and on the current sentence he will not be released before the 2040s.