In September 1989 the police in Warwick, Rhode Island, arrested a 15-year-old neighbor for the stabbing deaths of Joan Heaton, 39, and her daughters Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8. The boy, Craig Price, confessed to those three killings and to a fourth that had gone unsolved for two years: the death of Rebecca Spencer, 27, a mother of two who lived a few doors from his family in the Buttonwoods section of the city.
Because he was 15, his case went to Family Court. On September 21, 1989, he admitted sufficient facts to be adjudicated delinquent on four murder charges and two burglary charges. That is the legal record of the four deaths, and it is not a criminal conviction. The most the court could do was commit him to the state Training School until his 21st birthday, which fell in 1994. He was never tried for any of the killings, and under the law as it stood he could not be.
The prospect of his release at 21 led to changes in Rhode Island law, to a long public campaign by a Warwick detective and the victims' families, and to a series of new prosecutions. He was convicted of extortion four days before he was due to go free in October 1994, and later of criminal contempt for years of refusing court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. Further crimes in prison followed, in Rhode Island and in Florida, where he was sent in 2004. In January 2019 he pleaded guilty in Florida to the attempted murder of a fellow inmate and was sentenced to 25 years.
NBC News described Buttonwoods as a working-class section of Warwick. In 1989 Price lived there with his parents in a small ranch house. NBC News, in a later account of the case, described him as a big teenager who played football, 5 feet 10 inches tall and about 240 pounds, with a young face. He was friendly and popular with his friends. He had a minor record of petty burglaries.
The families he was later found to have killed were his neighbors. NBC 10 News (WJAR) in Providence reported that Rebecca Spencer lived a few doors from him, and that the Heaton home was a few hundred yards from hers.
Rebecca Spencer was 27 and the mother of two children. On the night of July 27, 1987, Price, then 13, went into her yard, broke into her house, and stabbed her to death, according to the facts he later admitted and the account given by NBC News. The Rhode Island Supreme Court, describing the case in 2011, recorded that her death was caused by multiple stab wounds.
No one was charged. The killing remained unsolved for two years. The Boston Globe Magazine, in a 2017 essay by the journalist Mark Arsenault, wrote that he went undetected through that time.
Joan Heaton was 39 and lived with her two daughters, Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8. Her family later appears in the court record: her siblings and the administrator of her estate brought a civil suit against Price in 1994, which reached the state Supreme Court in 1997.
On the night of September 4, 1989, the date given by the Rhode Island Supreme Court, Price entered the Heaton home and killed all three. NBC News reported that he used kitchen knives that Joan Heaton had bought that day. In its 2011 opinion the Supreme Court wrote of an "unusual homicidal fury" in the way he killed his victims, two of them young girls, and called the crimes unprovoked.
The three deaths frightened the neighborhood, and police searched the area. Investigators knew from the evidence that the killer had cut himself. Price had a deep cut on his finger, and his explanation of how he got it did not hold up. NBC News reported that this was what first drew police suspicion to him.
Two physical clues followed. A bloody sock print at the scene matched his foot, which NBC News gave as size 13, and the knives used in the killings were found in a shed in his family's backyard. Both points are also in the Associated Press account of the case published in 2011.
About two weeks after the Heaton killings, Warwick police arrested him. His mother sat beside him at the police station as he confessed to all four killings, NBC News reported. The confession was taken by Detective Tim Colgan, who had been the first officer at the Heaton scene, assisted by Detective Kevin Collins. Price's admission to the Spencer killing closed a case that had been open for two years.
The Boston Globe Magazine essay of 2017 says the killings caused panic in the area and that another 15-year-old, who was innocent, had been arrested before Price. Other reports do not mention that arrest.
Rhode Island law in 1989 did not allow a 15-year-old to be tried as an adult for these killings. On September 21, 1989, in Family Court, Price admitted sufficient facts to be adjudicated delinquent on four murder charges and two burglary charges, one for entering the Heaton home and one for entering the Spencer home. The Supreme Court later summarized the admitted facts as including multiple stab wounds and blunt-force trauma.
The court committed him to the Rhode Island Training School until his 21st birthday, the maximum the Family Court could impose. Under the law then, his juvenile record would also have been sealed, NBC News reported. On the same day, the trial justice ordered a psychological or psychiatric evaluation as part of a treatment plan. The court intended him to receive intensive psychiatric treatment before his release, and it retained two psychiatrists at state expense, Dr. Shervert Frazier and Dr. Wesley Profit.
Because the case was a juvenile matter, Price has no criminal conviction for any of the four deaths. The point mattered in later litigation. In 1997 Justice Flanders of the state Supreme Court wrote, in a separate opinion in the Heaton family's civil case, that under Family Court law a delinquency adjudication is not a criminal conviction.
On November 16, 1989, Price stopped taking part in the court-ordered evaluations. He acted on his lawyer's advice. His fear, as the Supreme Court later described it, was that anything he told the doctors about the killings might be used to have him civilly committed under the state's Mental Health Law, keeping him confined past 21. He claimed a privilege against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment and the state constitution.
Over the next four years the Family Court ordered him again and again to cooperate. The Supreme Court listed orders on February 15, 1990; April 26, 1990; October 25, 1990; October 24, 1991; October 22, 1992; and October 19, 1993. The Family Court justice told him that he had no Fifth Amendment right to refuse and assured him that the treatment would not be used to hold him beyond 21. The court appointed a guardian ad litem for him and asked his parents for help. He went on refusing at every hearing, and in October 1992 he acknowledged that he knew about the order.
In a report in October 1990, Dr. Profit wrote that there could be "no doubt that Craig Price is a murderer of the serial type," and that he suffered from a major mental illness for which treatment was required. He also concluded that Price was unlikely to improve without treatment.
The idea that someone who had admitted four killings would go free at 21, with his record sealed, caused public anger in Rhode Island. The General Assembly acted quickly. The Providence Phoenix reported in 2004 that in 1990 the legislature expanded the law allowing Family Court judges to waive juveniles into the adult system, extending it to defendants under 16. The Public's Radio, writing in 2021, said that within months of the killings lawmakers cited the case in letting children be tried as adults for crimes that carry a life sentence. The change could not be applied to Price after the fact.
Under the system that followed, the state can ask the Family Court in certain cases to waive a juvenile to adult court; a juvenile convicted as an adult is then treated as an adult for sentencing and parole. NBC News wrote that a 15-year-old who committed such crimes today would be referred to adult court and would likely face life without parole.
A second change was aimed at Price himself. Jeffrey Pine, elected attorney general in 1992, pressed for what became known as the Craig Price Bill, which passed in 1994. It allowed judges to consider a person's criminal record when deciding on psychiatric commitment. Pine consulted Greg McCrary, an FBI expert on violent offenders, who described Price as highly likely to kill again; state psychologists reached similar conclusions, NBC News reported. "There was something fundamentally wrong with a system that allowed someone who killed four people to simply go free at 21," Pine said.
Detective Kevin Collins made it his goal to keep Price in custody. With the victims' families he formed a group called Citizens Opposed to the Release of Craig Price, known as CORP. It held rallies and fundraisers and paid for banners towed by airplanes, NBC News reported. "Craig Price is a serial killer stopped temporarily at four killings," Collins said.
State officials joined in. At a gathering in June 1994, Governor Bruce Sundlun told the crowd that everyone in state government wanted to "blow out the candle on Craig Price and keep him behind bars." Price, for his part, shouted as he left court on one occasion, "When I get out I'm going to smoke a bomber," according to NBC News.
The Heaton family also went to court. On April 26, 1994, Joan Heaton's siblings, with the administrator and a beneficiary of her estate, sued Price in Superior Court on nine counts, among them wrongful death and unjust enrichment, and asked the court to apply the state's Criminal Royalties Distribution Act of 1983 to any money he might make from telling his story. The trial court dismissed all but the royalties count and, in February 1995, ruled for the family on that one. On May 5, 1997, in Bouchard v. Price, the Rhode Island Supreme Court held the wrongful-death claims barred because they were filed more than three years after the deaths, and it struck down the royalties act entirely as a violation of the First Amendment, finding it reached any expression about a crime and was not narrowly drawn. The majority held that Price counted as a "criminally responsible person" under the act despite his juvenile status; Justice Flanders, concurring, disagreed on that point.
In 1994, with Price's 21st birthday approaching, the attorney general's office asked the Chief Judge of the Family Court to hold him in contempt for refusing treatment. On June 27, 1994, the Chief Judge found Price, then 20, in civil contempt. The finding was coercive: he was to be held at the Adult Correctional Institutions until he agreed to treatment, for no more than one year. He was already at the ACI serving a Superior Court sentence by then.
Price moved on July 1, 1994, to purge the contempt, and in late August and early September he met with a forensic psychiatrist retained by the court, Dr. Richard Barnum. Dr. Barnum reported afterward that Price had lied to him about the events of the killings. On June 8, 1995, the Chief Judge refused to lift the contempt, finding that he had not truly cooperated.
Meanwhile the state brought a criminal charge. On August 4, 1994, it filed a felony complaint in Family Court accusing him of criminal contempt for his refusals between November 16, 1989, and July 6, 1994. The Family Court ruled on November 14, 1994, that criminal contempt was a misdemeanor and could carry no more than one year. The state appealed, and on March 26, 1996, the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed, holding that the one-year limit in the state's general statute did not restrain the courts' own power to punish contempt (State v. Price, 672 A.2d 893).
The case went to a jury. After a four-day trial Price was found guilty of criminal contempt. About two months after the verdict, the court sentenced him to 25 years, with 10 to serve and 15 suspended, followed by probation. NBC News dated the sentence to May 1997 and named the judge as Albert DeRobbio, Chief Judge of the Family Court, who made the suspended part depend on good behavior and on accepting treatment. "I did not feel that I could, in conscience, sentence him to life on a contempt charge," DeRobbio said. The contempt term was made consecutive to the extortion sentence he was already serving.
On April 18, 2003, the Supreme Court affirmed the conviction (State v. Price, 820 A.2d 956). It rejected his arguments that he had a Fifth Amendment right to refuse, that following his lawyer's advice was a defense, that the prosecutor had struck an African American juror because of race, that the civil contempt finding barred a second punishment, and that the charge came too late. The court said the Family Court had already used all its power to punish him for the killings, so the civil-commitment risk he feared did not create a privilege.
The conviction that kept him from leaving custody at 21 came from an incident at the Training School. On October 1, 1993, a juvenile program worker strip-searched Price at a short-staffed moment and found four cigarettes and a lighter. When the worker said he would have to report it, Price became agitated and, by the worker's account, threatened to have him "snuffed out." Witnesses disagreed about whether he said those exact words. The next day a disciplinary board gave Price two days' lockup for having contraband.
On October 21, 1993, a Family Court justice asked the State Police to look into the episode. On June 8, 1994, a grand jury indicted Price for simple assault and extortion. Before trial his lawyer, Robert Mann, argued that he had been singled out because his release was near and because he refused the mental health examination. The trial justice disagreed, and so did the Supreme Court later, noting that the prosecution followed an investigation the Family Court had ordered. "The test is whether someone portrayed as larger than life evil gets a fair shake," Mann said.
The trial opened on October 3, 1994, in Providence Superior Court; the judge refused to allow television cameras. On October 7, 1994, the jury convicted Price on both counts. The Associated Press, in 2011, reported that the verdict came four days before his scheduled release that October and that he was sentenced to seven years; NBC News gave the sentence as 15 years, with seven to serve and eight suspended. The Supreme Court affirmed on February 10, 1998, holding that extortion turns on the defendant's intent to compel, not on how a reasonable victim would react (State v. Price, 706 A.2d 929).
Price served his adult sentences at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston. In 1998 he was found to have violated his probation, and seven years of the suspended part of his contempt sentence were revoked, raising his time to serve on that sentence to 17 years with eight suspended, according to the Supreme Court's 2011 opinion.
Other charges followed. NBC 10 News listed assault and probation violations for fights in prison among the cases that lengthened his confinement. The Boston Globe Magazine wrote of fights with officers that led to several assault charges and of an inmate beaten in the prison law library. WPRI 12 in Providence reported in 2015 that his sentences at that point were for assaulting an inmate and a correctional officer at the ACI, not for the killings, and that he had 43 infractions there, seven of them dismissed or reduced to warnings.
Mark Arsenault first wrote to Price in 2002 and interviewed him that year in the state's supermax prison for a Providence Journal profile that appeared in 2004. In his 2017 essay he described Price as intelligent, funny and quick to laugh, and said the two had corresponded for about 15 years, mostly by mail, though they no longer discussed the killings. Price told him of a hope to marry and raise a large family. The essay does not report any expression of remorse.
In 2004 the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, which considered him a security risk at the ACI, sent Price to Florida under an interstate compact, as WPRI reported. NBC 10 News said in 2018 that state corrections officials had judged it too dangerous to return him to the general population in Rhode Island. In 2004 Price complained, as NBC News reported, that "the state was effectively organized not to rehabilitate me, but to incarcerate me." Florida officials refused NBC News an interview with him on security grounds.
He also kept up his challenge to the contempt sentence. On August 23, 2004, he applied for postconviction relief, arguing double jeopardy, poor work by his appellate lawyer, an excessive sentence under the Eighth Amendment, and unfair handling of the probation revocation. The Family Court denied the application in February 2005. When the appeal reached the Supreme Court in 2011, Price, acting as his own lawyer from Florida, asked to argue in person; the corrections department and the attorney general's office objected, citing the cost of transport and the risk to safety, NBC 10 News reported. On December 2, 2011, in Price v. Wall, the court affirmed the denial. It found the double jeopardy claim already decided and without merit in any case, and it held that the 25-year contempt sentence was not grossly disproportionate given his "repeated and defiant refusal" to obey the court's orders. The attorney general's office issued a statement welcoming the decision and calling the four killings "unprovoked" and "unusually brutal."
In Florida he continued to accumulate discipline. Arsenault visited him at Florida State Prison in 2013. In 2009, during a fight with another inmate, Price stabbed a correctional officer in the hand with a homemade weapon, WPRI reported, citing court documents. He was found guilty on four counts and given two and a half years, to be served after his Rhode Island sentence ran out. Florida took away 365 days of his "gain time" for the incident; Rhode Island, at first, took away none of the good time he had earned there.
That gap became a news story in 2015. WPRI's Target 12 team reported that Price had earned more than 1,500 days of good time, enough to cut more than four years from his Rhode Island sentence, despite his record of infractions. Rhode Island had changed the law in 2012 so that people serving time for murder could not earn good time, but the change was not retroactive, and Price was not serving time for murder in any case. "I have a statutory duty, I am the director of the department and I follow the law," said A.T. Wall, the corrections director. The retired Warwick detective Kenneth Anderson was blunt: "Shame on them." After the reports, officials added 40 days to his sentence, WPRI said in 2017.
In December 2014, according to a Florida Department of Corrections report from Suwannee described by NBC 10 News, Price spat on a correctional officer and made threats against officers in which he referred to having killed the children in 1989. On March 16, 2015, the Rhode Island Parole Board denied him parole, his fourth denial. The attorney general's office filed a complaint in Superior Court alleging probation violations based on the 2009 stabbing and the 2014 spitting incident, and said it wanted him returned to Rhode Island at the end of his Florida term; he then had about 12 years of suspended sentence with probation left on his Rhode Island convictions, NBC 10 News reported. How those probation complaints were resolved was not reported.
On April 4, 2017, at the Suwannee Correctional Institution in Florida, Price attacked a fellow inmate with a homemade knife. According to court documents described by WTXL and WPRI, prison video recorded the attack. The inmate fled the cell, but Price caught him and kept stabbing him until two officers and two other inmates restrained him. The man was taken to a hospital and survived. A second inmate was also injured and later released from the hospital, WPRI reported. Court documents did not say what set off the attack. The Rhode Island Department of Corrections confirmed the incident, and Price was placed in administrative confinement.
The Florida Department of Corrections' Office of Inspector General sent the case to the State Attorney's Office for the Third Judicial Circuit, which charged him with attempted murder and possession of contraband in a prison. Prosecutors described a "premeditated design" and an "intent to kill." He was arraigned on August 3, 2017, with a court-appointed lawyer, and entered no plea that day. A judge denied bond. The trial date moved repeatedly at the defense's request; by September 2018, the prosecutor said, his lawyer had asked for six continuances.
At that point his Rhode Island sentences had expired, and he was serving the Florida term for the 2009 stabbing, with a tentative release date in December 2019. On January 18, 2019, with trial set to begin on January 28, he pleaded guilty to attempted murder. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation, according to the Suwannee County Clerk of Courts, as reported by NBC 10 News.
As of January 18, 2019, Price was in the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections, beginning a 25-year sentence for attempted murder.
Several points about the case appear in conflicting forms.
His ages. The Rhode Island Supreme Court records that he was 15 in September 1989, and the press consistently says he was 13 in July 1987. Patch, in 2017, described him as between 14 and 16 when the killings took place; that range does not match the court record.
The legal outcome. Some news reports say he was "convicted as a juvenile" of the four killings. The court record is an admission of sufficient facts and an adjudication of delinquency, which, as Justice Flanders wrote in 1997, is not a criminal conviction.
The extortion sentence. The Associated Press gave seven years; NBC News gave 15 years with seven to serve. Both may describe the same sentence; neither report says so.
Release dates. Before the 2019 plea his expected release from custody was reported variously as July 2018 with good time for the Rhode Island sentence (NBC 10 News, March 2015), 2018 and "fluid" (WPRI, April 2015), October 2017 for Rhode Island and 2020 overall (WPRI, 2017), December 2020 (NBC News), and November or December 2019 (NBC 10 News and WPRI, 2018 and 2019). These shifted as good time was added or taken and as new sentences were imposed.
The law change. NBC News wrote that the legislature passed the new waiver law within a month of his arrest; the Providence Phoenix dated the expansion to 1990, and The Public's Radio said "within months."
An earlier arrest. The Boston Globe Magazine essay says an innocent 15-year-old was arrested before Price. Other reports do not mention it.
Labels. The press has called him the Warwick Slasher, and a Warwick detective and a court-retained psychiatrist have described him in those terms. He was never tried for any killing, and the only court findings are the juvenile adjudication and the later adult convictions.
July 27, 1987: Rebecca Spencer, 27, is killed in her home in Warwick. The case goes unsolved.
Night of September 4, 1989: Joan Heaton, 39, and her daughters Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8, are killed in their home.
September 1989: Price, 15, is arrested about two weeks later and confesses to all four killings.
September 21, 1989: In Family Court he admits sufficient facts to be adjudicated delinquent on four murder charges and two burglary charges; committed to the Training School until 21; evaluation ordered.
November 16, 1989: He stops cooperating with the evaluation.
1990: The General Assembly expands juvenile waiver to defendants under 16 (Providence Phoenix).
February 1990 to October 1993: Six Family Court orders to cooperate.
October 1990: Dr. Wesley Profit's report.
October 1, 1993: Threat to a Training School worker.
1994: Craig Price Bill passes.
April 26, 1994: Heaton family civil suit filed.
June 8, 1994: Indicted for extortion and simple assault.
June 27, 1994: Found in civil contempt.
August 4, 1994: Criminal contempt complaint filed.
October 7, 1994: Convicted of extortion and simple assault.
March 26, 1996: Supreme Court rules contempt is not capped at one year.
May 5, 1997: Bouchard v. Price strikes down the royalties act.
May 1997: Sentenced to 25 years, 10 to serve, for criminal contempt.
February 10, 1998: Extortion conviction affirmed.
1998: Probation violation; seven years of the suspended term revoked.
April 18, 2003: Contempt conviction affirmed.
2004: Sent to Florida under an interstate compact.
2009: Stabs a correctional officer in the hand during a fight; later found guilty on four counts.
December 2, 2011: Price v. Wall affirms denial of postconviction relief.
March 16, 2015: Rhode Island parole denied.
April 4, 2017: Stabs a fellow inmate at Suwannee Correctional Institution.
January 18, 2019: Pleads guilty to attempted murder; 25 years plus 10 years probation.