In September 1989 the police in Warwick, Rhode Island, arrested a fifteen-year-old high school freshman named Craig Price for the murders of three of his neighbors, a mother and her two young daughters, and he calmly confessed to them and to the killing of another woman in the same neighborhood two years earlier, when he was thirteen. He was a month short of his sixteenth birthday. Under Rhode Island law as it then stood, that meant he would be tried as a juvenile, released when he turned twenty-one, and have his record sealed. He boasted that he would "make history" when he got out. He never has.
He was born on October 11, 1973, and grew up in the Buttonwoods neighborhood of Warwick. He already had a record for petty theft. On the night of July 27, 1987, at thirteen, he broke into a house two doors from his own, took a knife from the kitchen, and stabbed Rebecca Spencer, twenty-seven, fifty-eight times. The case went unsolved for two years.
On September 1, 1989, high on marijuana and LSD, he broke into the home of Joan Heaton, thirty-nine, another neighbor. He stabbed her fifty-seven times in the kitchen while her ten-year-old daughter Jennifer watched, then stabbed Jennifer sixty-two times. Her younger sister Melissa, eight in most accounts and seven in others, had also seen her mother attacked; he crushed her skull and stabbed her thirty times. He struck so hard that the handles broke off the knives and the blades stayed in the bodies, one of them lodged in Jennifer's neck. Because his records were sealed, how brutal the killings had been was not widely known for years.
According to law-enforcement officials he showed no remorse when he confessed. As for motive, he said that racism from white people, going back to his early childhood, had played a part, and that the first time he wanted someone to die was when a group of white adults shouted racial slurs at him and tried to run him down with their car when he was a small boy.
The prospect of his release caused a public crisis in the state. The legislature changed the law so that juveniles could be tried as adults for serious crimes, but the change could not be applied to Price retrospectively. Residents formed Citizens Opposed to the Release of Craig Price to lobby for keeping him locked up, pointing to the savagery of the killings and to the view of state psychologists that he was a poor prospect for rehabilitation. The Rhode Island press called him the Warwick Slasher; in custody he took the name Iron Man.
What kept him in prison was what he did there. While he was held at the Rhode Island Training School, and later at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston, he was charged with criminal contempt for refusing a psychological evaluation, with extortion for threatening a corrections officer, with assault, and with violating probation by fighting. He was given an additional ten to twenty-five years, depending on his cooperation with treatment. In 2004 Rhode Island transferred him to Florida because of his violence.
The pattern continued there. On July 29, 2009, in a fight with another inmate, a corrections officer trying to break it up was stabbed in the finger with a homemade shiv Price was carrying, and he was moved to another prison. That March he had been denied parole, and his release date was set for May 2020. On April 4, 2017, at the Suwannee Correctional Institution in Live Oak, Florida, he was accused of stabbing a fellow inmate, Joshua Davis, with a five-inch homemade knife. On January 18, 2019, he was sentenced to twenty-five years for it.
He is often described as the youngest serial killer in American history. The punishment for the four deaths in Warwick was capped by the law of 1989 at a few years in juvenile custody, and the decades he has served since have been assembled out of what he did behind bars. The Warwick case was the subject of Denise Lang's book A Call for Justice, published in 2000.