On the night of September 4, 1989, Joan Heaton and her two daughters, Jennifer and Melissa, were killed in their home in Warwick, Rhode Island. Joan was 39. Her girls were 10 and 8. Before the month was out, the police had questioned a boy from the same Buttonwoods neighborhood, a 15-year-old named Craig Price, who lived there with his parents. He confessed. He also admitted a killing no one had connected to him: two summers earlier, when he was 13, he had killed another neighbor, Rebecca Spencer, a 27-year-old woman whose death had gone unsolved since July 1987.
Four people had died, two of them children, and the person who admitted killing them had not yet turned 16. Rhode Island’s law had an answer for him, and it was not the answer most of the state wanted. Under the juvenile code as it stood in 1989, he could be held only until his 21st birthday. Everything that happened to Craig Price afterward, a string of rulings by the state Supreme Court, a lawsuit by the Heaton family, a rewritten juvenile code, a prison transfer to Florida and a guilty plea to attempted murder, flows from that one deadline.
In the late 1980s the families at the center of the case lived within a short walk of one another in the Buttonwoods section of Warwick. Rebecca Spencer lived a few doors from the Price family, NBC 10 News in Providence reported, and the Heaton home was a few hundred yards from hers.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court recorded the dates with care. Rebecca Spencer was killed in her home on the night of July 27, 1987. No one was charged, and the case stayed open for two years. Joan Heaton and her daughters were killed in their home on the night of September 4, 1989. In 2011 the court looked back on what it called the "unusual homicidal fury" of the killings and described the crimes as unprovoked.
The investigation of the Heaton deaths moved quickly. Police recovered the knives used in the killings and matched a sock print to the teenager’s foot, NBC 10 News reported. Questioned, Price confessed to the deaths of Joan, Jennifer and Melissa Heaton, and then to the death of Rebecca Spencer. With that admission, a case that had stood unsolved for two years was closed.
Because he was 15, his case belonged to the Family Court. On September 21, 1989, he admitted sufficient facts to be adjudicated delinquent on four murder charges and on two burglary charges, one for each home. That admission is the whole of the legal record of the four deaths. It is not a criminal conviction, and Rhode Island law does not treat it as one. As Justice Flanders of the state Supreme Court would put it in 1997, a delinquency adjudication is "not deemed a criminal conviction." There was no trial and, under the law of the day, there could not have been one in an adult court.
The disposition was the maximum available. The Family Court committed him to the Rhode Island Training School until his 21st birthday. On the same day it ordered a psychological and psychiatric evaluation as the first step of a treatment plan, and it retained two specialists at state expense to design one: Dr. Shervert Frazier and Dr. Wesley Profit. The court’s purpose, as the Supreme Court later described it, was to give him treatment so that he could return to the community when his commitment ended.
On November 16, 1989, Price stopped talking about the killings and withdrew from the evaluations. He did so on his lawyer’s advice. The fear, which the lawyer shared, was that whatever he told the doctors could be used to have him civilly committed under the state’s Mental Health Law, keeping him confined past 21. He claimed the protection of the Fifth Amendment.
The Family Court did not accept the refusal, and it did not let the matter drop. It ordered him to cooperate on February 15, 1990; April 26, 1990; October 25, 1990; October 24, 1991; October 22, 1992; and October 19, 1993, reissuing the last order at a hearing two days later, after he had turned 20. It appointed a guardian ad litem for him and asked his parents to help. He refused every time.
Dr. Profit’s reports from those years are among the starkest documents in the file. He wrote that there could be "no doubt that Craig Price is a murderer of the serial type," and warned of "an extremely foreboding prognosis" if the boy went on refusing evaluation and treatment. Without treatment, he concluded, the risk of similar crimes would remain.
The arithmetic of the case was plain to everyone in Rhode Island: a person who had admitted four killings would leave state custody in 1994, at 21. The General Assembly answered in 1990. The Providence Phoenix, looking back in 2004, reported that the case prompted the legislature that year to broaden the law allowing a Family Court judge to waive a juvenile into the adult system, so that it reached defendants under 16. The Public’s Radio, writing in 2021, said that within months of the killings lawmakers used the case to allow children to be tried as adults.
The statutes bear the 1990 date. Since then, Rhode Island law has let the attorney general ask the Family Court to waive jurisdiction over a child of any age charged with an offense that would carry life imprisonment for an adult, and over a child of 16 or older charged with any felony. To grant waiver, the court must find probable cause and must find that the child’s history, or the brutal or premeditated nature of the offense, makes adult prosecution necessary to protect the public. The same 1990 laws created a middle path called certification: a certified child is tried by a jury, and if convicted can be given a sentence that runs past the 19th birthday, with the years after 19 served in the adult prisons. Jeffrey B. Pine, writing as attorney general in 1997, described waiver as available for youths of 16 or older charged with a felony and for any juvenile charged with an offense punishable by life imprisonment.
None of it changed Price’s case. His adjudication had been entered in September 1989, and his commitment still ran only to his 21st birthday. Decades later, when lawmakers debated parole for young offenders, The Public’s Radio noted that those changes would not apply to him either. His deadline stood.
Joan Heaton’s family went to court on its own account. On April 26, 1994, her siblings, the administrator and a beneficiary of her estate, and the state’s general treasurer filed a nine-count civil suit against Price in Superior Court. Six counts sought damages for wrongful death. Others asked the court to bar him from profiting from the deaths and to declare him subject to the Criminal Royalties Distribution Act of 1983, a Rhode Island law that would have diverted to victims any money a criminal earned from telling his story.
The trial court dismissed every count but the royalties claim on August 16, 1994, and ruled for the family on that one on February 24, 1995. Both sides appealed. On May 5, 1997, in Bouchard v. Price, the Rhode Island Supreme Court held that the wrongful-death claims were too late, filed more than four and a half years after the deaths against a three-year limit, and that his age did not stop the clock. It agreed that Price counted as a "criminally responsible person" under the royalties act despite his juvenile status. But it then struck the act down in its entirety, holding that it singled out expression about crime and was not narrowly drawn, in violation of the First Amendment. Justice Flanders, concurring, would have decided the case more narrowly: in his view a juvenile who admits facts in Family Court has not admitted a felony, and the act did not apply to Price at all.
By 1994 the state had run out of patience with the evaluation orders, and the attorney general’s office asked the Chief Judge of the Family Court to hold Price in contempt. On June 27, 1994, the Chief Judge did, finding him in civil contempt and sending him to the Adult Correctional Institutions until he agreed to cooperate, for no longer than one year. The contempt was coercive rather than punitive; he held the key to his own release from it.
Four days later, on July 1, he moved to purge the contempt and agreed to be evaluated. In late August and early September 1994 he met with Dr. Richard Barnum, a forensic psychiatrist retained by the court because the earlier experts were no longer available. Dr. Barnum reported that Price had lied to him about the killings. On June 8, 1995, the Chief Judge refused to lift the contempt, finding that there had been no real cooperation.
The state, meanwhile, had begun a second line of attack. On August 4, 1994, it filed a felony complaint in Family Court charging Price with criminal contempt for his refusals between November 16, 1989, and July 6, 1994. His lawyers argued that contempt was a misdemeanor at common law and could carry no more than a year, and on November 14, 1994, the Family Court agreed. The state appealed. On March 26, 1996, the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed, holding that the courts' inherent power to punish contempt was not capped by the one-year limit in the statute on common-law offenses.
The case went to a jury in a trial that lasted four days, with the Chief Judge of the District Court assigned to preside. The jury found Price guilty, and in 1997 he was sentenced to 25 years, 10 to serve and the rest suspended with probation, the suspended part conditioned on staying out of trouble and accepting treatment, NBC 10 News reported. The term was made consecutive to a sentence he was already serving. That sentence had come from four cigarettes and a lighter.
On October 1, 1993, a juvenile program worker at the Training School strip-searched Price and found four cigarettes and a lighter hidden on him. Price seemed nervous and asked whether he would be disciplined. The worker said he had to report it. When Price read the disciplinary report, he became agitated and yelled at the worker, by the worker’s account saying, "I’m going to have you snuffed out." Price denied threatening to kill him. A disciplinary board gave him two days in lockup for the contraband.
The episode might have ended there. Instead, on October 21, 1993, a Family Court justice asked the State Police to look into whether a crime had been committed, and on June 8, 1994, a grand jury indicted Price for simple assault and extortion. Price was now an adult, and these were adult charges.
His trial was set for October 3, 1994. The defense argued that he had been singled out for prosecution, and it asked to have the proceedings televised; the trial justice rejected both requests. On October 7, 1994, the jury convicted him on both counts. NBC 10 News reported that the verdict came four days before his scheduled release, and that he was sentenced to seven years for threatening to kill a guard. The Rhode Island Supreme Court affirmed the extortion conviction on February 10, 1998, holding that the crime turns on the defendant’s intent to compel, not on how a reasonable person in the victim’s place would have reacted. It also rejected his claims that a Black juror had been struck because of race and that the prosecution was selective.
He did not go home at 21.
Price fought the contempt conviction for years. In 1998 he was found to have violated his probation, and seven years of the suspended part of the contempt sentence were revoked, leaving him 17 years to serve with eight suspended. On April 18, 2003, the Rhode Island Supreme Court affirmed the contempt conviction. It held that he had no Fifth Amendment privilege to refuse the evaluation, because the Family Court had already done the most it could to him for the killings and the only risk he faced was civil commitment, not further criminal punishment. Following his lawyer’s advice, the court added, was no defense to contempt.
On August 23, 2004, he applied for postconviction relief, arguing double jeopardy, ineffective appellate counsel, an excessive sentence and an unfair probation revocation. The Family Court denied the application in February 2005. By the time the appeal reached the Supreme Court, Price was acting as his own lawyer, from a prison in Florida. In a handwritten brief of nearly 100 pages, NBC 10 News reported in February 2011, he asked the court to vacate the contempt sentence as "unduly harsh and unconstitutional" and to let him argue in person. "The appellant was a fifteen (15) year old juvenile," he wrote. The Department of Corrections opposed bringing him back, citing the cost of transport and the risk to safety, and the attorney general’s office joined the objection. In a filing reported by NewsOne, a lawyer for the state described a record that included "four particularly brutal murders, extortion and blackmail, criminal contempt, and numerous violent assaults upon correctional officers."
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 event, and it held that the 25-year sentence was not excessive given that he had "repeatedly and defiantly refused to obey a series of court orders." Attorney General Peter Kilmartin issued a statement the same day, welcoming the ruling and describing the four killings as "unprovoked" and "unusually brutal."
Price was sent to Florida in 2004, under a prisoner exchange between states, and he has been held there since, NBC 10 News and Patch reported. The reasons given differ. NBC 10 News in 2011 said he had been transferred at his own request; in 2018 it reported that Rhode Island corrections officials had judged it too dangerous to house him in the general population at home.
Florida added to his record. In 2009 he stabbed a prison guard with a homemade weapon, NBC 10 News reported, and he received additional time for it. In March 2015 the Rhode Island Parole Board denied him parole for the fourth time, according to its administrator, Matthew Dengnan. The state Department of Corrections said he would finish his Rhode Island sentence in 2018 and then serve about two and a half years on the Florida assault charge.
That spring the NBC 10 News I-Team reported on a Florida Department of Corrections disciplinary report from the Suwannee prison. A correctional officer had reported that Price spat on him and made repeated threats against officers, at one point invoking the killing of the children in 1989. The Rhode Island attorney general’s office filed two motions describing Price as a probation violator and said it intended to bring him back to Rhode Island when his Florida term ended; he still had about 12 years of suspended sentence and probation on his Rhode Island convictions. The motions had not been heard when the report aired.
On April 4, 2017, at the Suwannee Correctional Institution in north Florida, Price stabbed a fellow inmate, according to a court document described by WTXL in Tallahassee. The injured man was taken to a hospital and was reported in stable condition the next afternoon, Patch reported, quoting J.R. Ventura, a spokesman for the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. Price was placed in administrative confinement. Asked whether he might be returned to Rhode Island, Ventura said, "We don’t want to speculate about that."
The Florida Department of Corrections' Office of Inspector General sent the case to the State Attorney’s Office for the Third Judicial Circuit, and by August 2017 Price faced charges of attempted murder and possession of contraband in a prison. At his arraignment on August 3, 2017, he appeared with a court-appointed lawyer and no plea was entered, Patch reported, citing the office of State Attorney Jeff Siegmeister. A conviction, the report noted, could keep him in prison for the rest of his life.
The trial did not come quickly. In September 2018, Assistant State Attorney Sandra Rosendale told NBC 10 News that the defense had just been granted "the sixth continuance by his attorney," moving the trial from September 24 to October 22. Price, then 44, was still serving an earlier sentence. If he were not convicted, Rosendale said, his tentative release date was December 15, 2019.
The trial was finally set for January 28, 2019. Ten days before it, on January 18, Price 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, NBC 10 News reported. Until that day the Florida Department of Corrections had listed his tentative release date as November 5, 2019.
As of that plea, Craig Price, 45, was in the custody of the Florida Department of Corrections at the start of a 25-year sentence. The four killings in Warwick had produced a juvenile disposition that ended in 1994. The years he served after that were imposed for other things: a threat in a training school, years of refusal in the Family Court, violence in prison.
Price has been called a serial killer by the press and by people who dealt with him. In the court record the phrase appears in a psychologist’s report, and NBC 10 News and Patch have used it in headlines. The legal record is narrower: an admission of sufficient facts and a delinquency adjudication on four murder charges, never a trial or a criminal conviction for any of the deaths. Patch has also referred to him as "The Warwick Slasher."
Several details appear in conflicting forms. Patch, in 2017, described him as between 14 and 16 years old at the time of the killings; the Supreme Court gives his age as 15 in September 1989, and NBC 10 News gives 13 for July 1987. The attorney general’s 2011 statement spoke of four murders in 1989; the court dates the first to July 27, 1987. NBC 10 News reported that the extortion verdict came four days before his scheduled release, while NewsOne put it one week before. His expected release date shifted repeatedly between 2015 and 2019, as good time and new sentences were counted: July 2018 for the Rhode Island term alone, late 2020 overall, then December 15, 2019, and November 5, 2019, before the plea of January 2019 replaced them all.
The question of why he was moved to Florida in 2004, at his own request or because Rhode Island considered him too dangerous to hold, has been answered both ways in the same station’s reporting.
• July 27, 1987: Rebecca Spencer, 27, is killed in her home in Warwick, Rhode Island. The case goes unsolved.
• September 4, 1989 (night): Joan Heaton, 39, and her daughters Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8, are killed in their home in Warwick.
• September 1989: Craig Price, 15, a neighbor, confesses to the Heaton killings and to the killing of Rebecca Spencer.
• 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 withdraws from the court-ordered evaluation.
• 1990: The General Assembly broadens juvenile waiver to defendants under 16 and creates certification.
• February 15, 1990, to October 19, 1993: Six Family Court orders to cooperate.
• October 1, 1993: The threat to a Training School worker.
• April 26, 1994: The Heaton family files a civil suit.
• June 8, 1994: Indicted for simple assault and extortion.
• June 27, 1994: Found in civil contempt and sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions.
• August 4, 1994: Criminal contempt complaint filed.
• October 7, 1994: Convicted of simple assault and extortion.
• March 26, 1996: The Supreme Court rules that criminal contempt is not capped at one year.
• May 5, 1997: Bouchard v. Price strikes down the Criminal Royalties Distribution Act.
• 1997: Convicted of criminal contempt; 25 years, 10 to serve.
• February 10, 1998: Extortion conviction affirmed.
• 1998: Probation violation; seven suspended years revoked.
• April 18, 2003: Criminal contempt conviction affirmed.
• 2004: Sent to Florida under a prisoner exchange.
• 2009: Stabs a Florida prison guard; additional time imposed.
• December 2, 2011: Price v. Wall affirms the denial of postconviction relief.
• March 2015: Denied parole in Rhode Island for the fourth time.
• April 4, 2017: Stabs a fellow inmate at Suwannee Correctional Institution.
• August 3, 2017: Arraigned on attempted murder and contraband charges.
• January 18, 2019: Pleads guilty to attempted murder; 25 years in prison and 10 years of probation.