Craig Price killed four of his neighbours in Warwick, Rhode Island. The sentence he received for those four killings ran out on his twenty-first birthday. Everything that has kept him in prison for the thirty-one years since was earned after he was convicted.
He was thirteen on the night of July 27, 1987, when he broke into a house two doors from his own in the Buttonwoods neighbourhood, took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed Rebecca Spencer, twenty-seven, fifty-eight times. That case went unsolved. Two years later, on September 1, 1989, he broke into another house in the same neighbourhood and killed Joan Heaton, thirty-nine, and her daughters Jennifer, ten, and Melissa, eight. He was fifteen.
He was arrested within days, a month before his sixteenth birthday, after a detective noticed a deep cut on his hand. He confessed to all four. Officers who took the confession described no remorse in it.
Rhode Island law then decided the rest. A fifteen-year-old had to be tried as a juvenile, and a juvenile had to be released at twenty-one with his record sealed, whatever he had done. There was no mechanism for a murder exception, because nobody drafting the statute had imagined needing one. Four killings therefore carried a juvenile disposition, fixed to expire on his twenty-first birthday, October 11, 1994, a little over five years after the last of them.
He is widely described as the youngest serial killer in American history. The claim is repeated more often than it is examined, and it depends on definitions the sources making it do not usually state. What is not in dispute is the age: thirteen at the first killing, fifteen at the other three.
The state spent five years trying to find a way round its own statute. Rhode Island residents organised against his release. The legislature passed a law allowing juveniles to be tried as adults for serious crimes, and it could not be applied to him, because it was not retroactive. Price understood the position exactly and said he would make history when he got out.
What eventually held him was not any of that. It was a cigarette.
In late 1993 a guard at the training school found cigarettes taped to Price's thigh and began writing him up. Price threatened the guard's life. That was an offence committed by a person over eighteen, which made it an adult matter regardless of where he was being held, and it could be prosecuted in adult court on its own terms. He was indicted, tried in the first days of October 1994, and convicted eight days before the release date.
Asked to speak at sentencing, he told the court the system had once again done a good job creating a monster, a boogeyman nobody wants to see in their dreams, let alone living across the street, and not just any boogeyman but a black one. He had grown up as one of very few Black children in Warwick. Whatever weight that carries, the sentence he received for threatening a guard was fifteen years with seven to serve, which is a great deal more than the offence would ordinarily draw, and the judge has said what he heard that day affected him.
From there the pattern set. The Attorney General brought criminal contempt proceedings when Price refused to take part in a psychiatric programme, and a jury convicted him: twenty-five years, ten to serve. He fought correctional officers in 1996, stamped on an officer in 1998, and assaulted an inmate in 2001. He was moved to Florida. In 2017 he stabbed another inmate with a weapon he had made, and in January 2019 he pleaded guilty to attempted murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years followed by ten years of probation. He is held at Union Correctional Institution at Raiford. Before that plea his tentative release date had been November 2019. He will not now be released before the 2040s.
Set the two columns side by side. Four murders: a juvenile disposition ending at twenty-one. Everything else, all of it committed in custody: something over fifty years.
There are two ways to read that and both deserve saying.
The first is that the system worked. A statute written without foresight produced an intolerable result, the state could not lawfully undo it, and prosecutors used the only instruments they had, which were the offences he kept committing in front of them. He was not framed and nothing was invented. Each conviction rests on conduct a jury found proved.
The second is that a man's confinement for murder was reconstructed, after the fact, out of prison discipline, and that this only worked because he obliged. The threat to the guard was the break in the case, and it came eleven months before the deadline. Had he served those five years quietly, the law as it stood would have released him at twenty-one and sealed the file, and the state's position was that it could do nothing about it.
Both readings are true at once, and the case is usually told as only the first.
What the archive can say plainly is narrower than what is usually written about him. He has been convicted of four murders and of a long series of offences committed inside. He has never been released. Predictions about what he would do if he were are not findings, and this archive does not carry them, whatever they were worth when the last version of this page made them.
Rebecca Spencer was twenty-seven. Joan Heaton was thirty-nine. Jennifer Heaton was ten and Melissa Heaton was eight. The disposition passed for their deaths expired in 1994, and no adult sentence has ever been imposed for any of them.