Craig Price: The Teenager Who Terrified Rhode Island

The Babyfaced Teen Hiding a Nightmare in Suburban Rhode Island

In the late 1980s, Warwick, Rhode Island looked like a Norman Rockwell calendar: modest homes, trimmed lawns, and neighbors who nodded politely without really knowing each other. But under that buttoned-up calm, something brutal was taking shape, and it started two doors down from normal.

Craig Price didn’t look like a threat. At first glance, he was a big teenage kid with a football build and a grin that made teachers think he was polite and moms think he was safe. That smile? It did a lot of heavy lifting. Because behind it, Craig was already unraveling.

His home life was chaos. Inside the Price family’s ranch-style house, the air was thick with yelling, fear, and the kind of tension that makes kids flinch when the front door opens. Craig didn’t push back at home, though. That fear went inward—until it started leaking out.

He didn’t turn into the school bully overnight, but the signs were there: outbursts, weird detachment, and a growing habit of lashing out. People noticed he wasn’t quite like the other kids, but no one connected the dots. Not yet.

Craig was angry. And he was about to start finding places to put that rage.

Rebecca Spencer’s Murder: The Beginning of Something Much Worse

Craig was thirteen when he broke into a neighbor’s house. Two doors down from his own. The kind of distance you walk without thinking. The woman who lived there was twenty-seven-year-old Rebecca Spencer. Whether Craig knew her by name or only from passing glances, no one knows for sure. But what he did that night was deliberate.

He wasn’t looking to steal anything. He wasn’t desperate. He was angry, and he wanted to take that anger out on someone who couldn’t fight back.

He grabbed a knife from Rebecca’s kitchen and moved through the house like he had nothing to lose. When he found her alone, he stabbed her fifty-eight times. That number alone tells you everything you need to know about the level of violence he was capable of.

Rebecca never had a chance. There was no struggle, no time to call for help, and no one suspected the teenager with the round face and polite smile. There was no connection between them that the police could find.

So they moved on. And so did Craig.

Two years went by. Rebecca’s case sat unresolved. Warwick had decided this was a one-time horror story. But Craig? He was still close by. Bigger now. More confident. And still holding on to everything he hadn’t been able to say out loud.

At fifteen, he walked out of his house and across the shared yard. In the house next door lived Joan Heaton, thirty-nine, along with her two daughters. Jennifer was ten. Melissa was seven. They thought they were safe in their own home. Every other night, they had been.

Craig had other plans.

The Heaton Family Murders: A Community Frozen in Fear

Craig had killed once before, and that was all it took to start building a pattern. He broke into the Heatons’ home and headed straight for the kitchen. Joan Heaton had bought a new set of knives that same day. Craig took one of them and got to work.

He went for the strongest first. Joan was thirty-nine and the only adult in the house. She was also the only one who might have been able to stop him. Craig stabbed her fifty-seven times. The attack was furious and relentless.

But unlike Rebecca Spencer, Joan hadn’t been alone.

Her daughters, ten-year-old Jennifer and seven-year-old Melissa, were there. They saw what happened to their mother.

When Joan no longer posed a threat, Craig turned to Jennifer. He stabbed her sixty-two times. His anger had not burned out. It was accelerating.

That left Melissa. Seven years old, alone, and terrified. Craig didn’t rush. He stabbed her thirty times and then beat her until her skull fractured.

He didn’t leave quietly. He stabbed all three with such force that the knife handles snapped off. The blades stayed in their bodies. One was still lodged in Jennifer’s neck when police arrived.

The town of Warwick stopped cold. People kept their kids home from school. They added extra locks to their doors. Police officers went door to door, trying to track down someone who had crossed a line the town didn’t even know existed.

Craig hadn’t left town. He hadn’t even left the neighborhood.

The Arrest of Craig Price: Clues Hidden in Plain Sight

Just a few hundred yards from the Heaton home stood the Price house. And while Craig still had that same harmless smile, police were already paying attention to him.

By that point, Craig had a short but active record. Mostly break-ins. Enough to make investigators wonder if someone who could sneak into houses might be capable of worse.

It wasn’t a solid lead, but with two murdered children and a mother found brutally attacked, the police weren’t passing on anything. They went to the Price house and asked to speak with everyone.

The rest of the family had alibis. Nothing suspicious, nothing out of place. Then there was Craig.

He had a deep cut on one of his fingers. He didn’t have a good explanation for it.

That mattered, because whoever had killed the Heatons had bled. The killer left behind their own blood at the scene. They also left behind a sock print. Men’s size thirteen.

Craig wore size thirteen.

The puzzle was starting to come together. And then investigators found pieces of the knives used in the Heaton murders. Not blocks of evidence. Not theories. Physical remnants, hidden in Craig’s backyard shed.

He was arrested just days before turning sixteen.

At the police station, his mother cried while her son—still a legal minor—sat beside her. Craig didn’t try to deny anything. He admitted to killing Joan Heaton. He admitted to killing Jennifer and Melissa. And then he confessed to Rebecca Spencer too.

He was done hiding. In his mind, the game was over.

Because he was still under eighteen, Craig couldn’t be tried as an adult. The most the state could do was sentence him to a youth correctional facility. He would stay there until his twenty-first birthday. After that, he would walk free. And the record of what he’d done would be sealed.

Craig Price’s Legacy and the Long Fallout of a Legal Loophole

Craig wasn’t quiet about what came next. He told people he was going to “make history” once he got out. That wasn’t a theory. He said it out loud.

The idea that someone could murder four people before their sixteenth birthday and then get released before twenty-two set off alarms across Rhode Island. His case kicked off a wave of legal reform. Lawmakers moved to make sure minors could be tried as adults for violent crimes. The problem was, those changes couldn’t be applied to Craig retroactively.

So while the state scrambled to close that loophole, Craig sat in juvenile lockup, waiting. But if there was one thing working in the public’s favor, it was that Craig could not, for the life of him, stay out of trouble.

His own behavior became the reason he didn’t walk out at twenty-one.

He ended up in an adult prison for repeated violent outbursts. His earliest shot at parole was 2009. But right before his hearing, Craig got into a fight with another inmate. He stabbed the guy with a makeshift weapon and injured a corrections officer in the process.

Parole was denied. He was transferred to a different facility.

Then in 2017, he did it again. Another inmate. Another stabbing. This time, the court handed him another twenty-five years. And with every year that passes, his freedom slips a little farther out of reach.

Craig Price did “make history.” He holds the record for being the youngest known serial killer in the United States.

And if there’s any justice at all, that record will stay his.