# America's YOUNGEST Serial Killer Ever

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 29 Jan 2025, 1 h 03 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO5526021077.mp3

Today's episode is on America's youngest EVER serial killer, Craig Price. Who was just 13 years old when he killed Rebecca Spencer and 15 when he murdered a family of 3. Known as the Warwick slasher, Craig is an infamous killer in his hometown in Rhode Island. Trigger Warning: racism, child murder Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] Coming to ABC and Hulu. Amanda Riley was a mother, wife,
[0:04] speaker at her church, and then she got diagnosed with cancer.
[0:08] A beloved young Christian woman fighting a battle undeserved.
[0:12] We thought she was God's gift, but she was a liar.
[0:15] Why would somebody fake cancer? From the number one smash hit
[0:18] podcast. It was only a matter of time
[0:20] until Amanda's whole world came tumbling down.
[0:22] You're. Not going to believe this?
[0:24] Amanda premieres Thursday night, January 30th on ABC and stream
[0:29] on Hulu. America's youngest ever serial
[0:32] killer was just thirteen years old when he got away with his
[0:36] first ever murder, but that was just the start of the horrors
[0:41] that he would go on to commit while he was still a child.
[0:47] Today we're going to be talking about a serial killer case, and
[0:49] this serial killer is known as the Warwick slasher.
[0:53] Just a couple of trigger warnings before we get into the
[0:55] case. This one has themes of racism
[0:58] and it also covers the murder of two children.
[1:01] So if either of those are things that you don't really want to
[1:03] hear about right now, I completely understand.
[1:06] Click out of the video. Hopefully I'll get to catch you
[1:08] again some other time with a different video, but for now,
[1:10] look after yourself. And with all that being said,
[1:13] I'm going to get into the case. So today's case takes place in
[1:17] Warwick in Rhode Island in the USA in the late 80s.
[1:20] Number 60 in AS Ave. was home to the Heaton family, which was
[1:24] made-up of 39 year old mother Joan Heaton and her two young
[1:28] daughters, 10 year old Jennifer and seven-year old Melissa.
[1:32] Joan was previously married to a Sergeant named John Heaton who
[1:36] was the father of both of her children.
[1:38] However, sadly he took his own life just a few years before
[1:42] this case. So at this point in time, it was
[1:45] just the three girls together taking on the world.
[1:48] The Heaton family were very, very close, possibly because of
[1:52] losing their father. All three girls were just
[1:55] really, really close together. They did everything together.
[1:59] The girls confided in their mother and John herself was
[2:02] really close with her own sister and her mother.
[2:05] It was a very like female LED family, it was just all girls
[2:11] all supporting each other. But on September 4th, 1989,
[2:15] John's mother and her sister were getting a bit worried about
[2:18] her. It was Labor Day weekend, well
[2:20] actually Labor Day weekend had just finished and they hadn't
[2:24] seen seen her or heard from her. They hadn't got a text or a call
[2:28] or anything, which was very unusual.
[2:31] They normally spent like little holidays and stuff together.
[2:34] They normally celebrated together, went out together
[2:37] whenever they had time off. But this time was completely
[2:40] different and with no explanation.
[2:42] By the Monday they were calling her phone, texting her over and
[2:46] over again, calling anyone she knew, and they just just
[2:49] couldn't get through to her. And so her mother and her sister
[2:52] on that Monday morning decided to go down to Joan's house and
[2:55] see if she was OK. They knocked on the door, but
[2:58] they got no response. Joan didn't come.
[3:01] And so they kept knocking, they kept shouting, but no one was
[3:04] coming to the door. And at this point they managed
[3:07] to make their way in the house. I don't know how.
[3:09] I think one of them likely had a spare key, but they made their
[3:12] way into the house. And there in the hallway, they
[3:15] saw the most horrifying thing. There was blood covering
[3:20] absolutely every surface, the walls, it was all over the
[3:23] floor. And then in the hallway, there
[3:26] was this big bundle of sheets that was also covered in blood.
[3:31] They feared what could have been in that bundle of sheets.
[3:34] And so her mother and her sister called the police, who came down
[3:38] and found that this was the body of Joan Heaton.
[3:42] She had been murdered. Her body had been bundled up in
[3:45] these sheets and then just left in the hallway.
[3:48] And what's even worse, her two young daughters were also found
[3:53] murdered just feet away from their mother's body.
[3:57] All three bodies were transferred to the morgue where
[3:59] autopsies were performed. And this is where the true
[4:02] horrors of their murders were revealed.
[4:05] Joan Heaton, the mother, had been brutally attacked in so
[4:09] many different ways. More than just being stabbed,
[4:12] which is what they knew from looking at her body, she had
[4:15] cleared stab wounds all over her.
[4:18] But it was more than just that. She'd been strangled as well.
[4:21] She'd been beaten by her attacker.
[4:23] She had blood pooling and just general trauma all over her body
[4:27] where she'd been beaten or like thrown to the floor.
[4:30] And she even had a fractured skull, which they don't really
[4:33] know how that came about, probably just from being thrown
[4:36] around by her attacker. But on top of that, the
[4:38] pathologist counted 57 stab wounds all over her body in
[4:43] total, and they really were all over her body.
[4:45] Even on her face, which you don't see all that often.
[4:48] You don't see a murderer specifically targeting someone's
[4:52] face. That's a very, I don't know if
[4:54] you're stabbing someone's face, you're not really trying to kill
[4:57] them. You're just letting out anger
[4:59] and like steam there, I guess of the two daughters, it was 10
[5:04] year old Jennifer that actually had the most stab wounds out of
[5:07] all three of them. She had 62, a 10 year old little
[5:11] girl. She also had a fractured skull,
[5:14] which again, it's not really clear how that came about other
[5:17] than just, you know, the the aggression of the attack in
[5:20] general. I think it could be possible
[5:22] that they'd maybe been laid on the floor as they were being
[5:25] stabbed and then maybe tried to get up but they were pushed back
[5:28] down and then that's when their head like hit the floor maybe
[5:31] maybe fractured their skull somehow that way. 7 year old
[5:34] Melissa, the youngest of all of the victims, actually had her
[5:38] skull pretty much crushed completely.
[5:41] They all had these different skull fractures and injuries,
[5:45] but like I said, Melissa's was completely crushed.
[5:48] It seemed as though the attacker had used one of the kitchen
[5:51] stools to just beat her over the head with repeatedly.
[5:55] Melissa had also been stabbed as part of her attack.
[5:59] I don't know how many times all three of them had been stabbed.
[6:02] All three of them had these injuries to their skulls.
[6:05] And one of the two young girls, I don't, I'm not sure which
[6:08] victim it was, but one of them was found with the knife blades
[6:12] still inside of her, suggesting that the attack had been so
[6:16] vicious, so savage, so aggressive that the knives had
[6:21] broken inside them. And their attackers just kept on
[6:25] going. They just found another knife
[6:27] and just kept going. The handles of these knives were
[6:29] not found anywhere near the scene.
[6:31] They weren't found in any kind of searches.
[6:34] So it's believed that the attacker probably took them away
[6:37] with him. And as part of the autopsy, the
[6:39] pathologist could even tell how long the three victims had been
[6:42] dead for. And it turns out they've been
[6:45] laid dead in that house 3 days. They were killed at the very
[6:49] start of the weekend and their bodies weren't found until the
[6:52] the Monday. One thing was very interesting
[6:55] about how this murder scene was found.
[6:58] All three of the victims, it wasn't just Joan, all three of
[7:01] them were covered by something. The attacker had covered up each
[7:06] of the dead bodies before leaving.
[7:08] Joan had been wrapped up in loads of sheets.
[7:10] I've read in different sources that one of them was covered
[7:13] with a rug, one of them was covered with a blanket.
[7:15] But it just makes you wonder why, like for what reason the
[7:19] attacker went out of their way to cover up these bodies before
[7:22] fleeing the scene. Was it because they felt guilty?
[7:26] Could they have even felt remorse?
[7:27] Or were they just embarrassed or ashamed of what they've done?
[7:31] Or they didn't want to think about what they've done?
[7:33] Or I really don't. I don't know what the thought
[7:37] process was there wasn't like they were trying to clean up the
[7:40] scene at all by any means. So I wonder, I wonder why.
[7:44] So crime scene investigators got to work at the scene and because
[7:49] there was so much blood absolutely everywhere downstairs
[7:52] in this house, blood analysis was a really big part of this
[7:56] case. And they actually managed to
[7:57] find a pretty big footprint in the blood, like it was more like
[8:02] a sock print and want a footprint.
[8:04] It was just like the shape of a foot, a very big one, bigger
[8:08] than any of the victims, bigger than Jones and obviously bigger
[8:11] than the kids. So it must have been the
[8:13] attackers. It was measured and it was found
[8:16] to be about a man's size 13. So a really Bigfoot this, the
[8:22] attacker that they're looking for must be a big guy.
[8:25] This already narrowed down their suspect range by like quite a
[8:28] lot. Not that they had any individual
[8:30] suspects, but just generally people that they think could
[8:34] have done it. It narrowed down that, but that
[8:36] was kind of all they really had right now.
[8:39] The crime scene didn't OfferUp any more clues or any more
[8:42] evidence as to who could have done this.
[8:44] There was just that footprint. Well, actually there was one
[8:47] more thing. Pathologists think they found a
[8:51] fourth blood sample in that house.
[8:54] So there were the three victims and then one more type of blood.
[8:58] They didn't know whose blood this was, probably the
[9:01] attackers, but this suggested that the attacker had probably
[9:05] hurt themselves at some point during the stabbings.
[9:09] Maybe they've missed and like stabbed their own hand or their
[9:12] own arm. So then this was another piece
[9:15] of evidence to use to maybe try and find a suspect.
[9:18] Maybe they should look for big tall men with some sort of hand
[9:22] injury or like a bandage around their wrist or something along
[9:26] those lines. So a few days go by and this
[9:29] triple murder is all over the news because it's, it's so
[9:32] tragic. It's so heartbreaking.
[9:34] It's so scary that someone that is capable of killing a single
[9:38] mother and her two young daughters is just out there in
[9:41] the world at large. They could strike again at any
[9:44] moment. So everyone was talking about
[9:46] this case, but there was one person who lived very close to
[9:51] the Heaton's that all of this just sounded way too eerily
[9:56] familiar. A man came forward to police who
[9:59] said that he had lost his sister in a very similar murder just
[10:05] two years prior. And that murder took place in
[10:08] the exact same neighborhood. The victim of this other murder
[10:12] from two years ago, her name was Rebecca Spencer.
[10:15] She was 27 years old at the time.
[10:17] She was actually a mother of two.
[10:19] She was freshly divorced. So she was, she'd just come out
[10:23] of having a family, a husband, these two kids, and now she was
[10:27] a single mother. And she was determined to give
[10:30] them a really, really good life. She went back and got her GED,
[10:33] which is like the basic high school qualification over there
[10:38] in America. She went and got her GED so that
[10:41] she would then be able to go on and get a better job to support
[10:44] her two kids. For the time being.
[10:46] She was living just down the road from where Joan Heaton
[10:49] lived with her two kids and their cat.
[10:51] And I believe she was living with her brother or her brother
[10:54] was like staying there with them at the time.
[10:56] And at the time of her murder, she was actually in the process
[10:59] of moving out of that house and moving into a new one with her
[11:03] brother and the two kids. And they were going to like
[11:06] start fresh after the divorce. They were literally deers away
[11:10] from moving house in July of 1987.
[11:12] Pretty much everything was in boxes.
[11:15] Everything apart from like the mattress and the TV so that they
[11:18] could sleep and have a little bit of entertainment, but
[11:21] everything else was boxed. And I think for that reason, the
[11:23] two kids weren't staying there at this point in time.
[11:26] They might have been staying with their dad or something, I'm
[11:28] not entirely sure, but all I know is that it was only Rebecca
[11:32] in the house on the night of her murder.
[11:34] Her brother actually worked the night shift, so I think he was
[11:37] also sleeping on that mattress on the living room floor.
[11:40] But they would just kind of take turns.
[11:42] So he'd be out at work during the night while she was asleep,
[11:44] and then he would come back in the morning, fall asleep, and
[11:47] she would go out and do her job. And that's exactly what was
[11:50] supposed to happen. On July 28th, her brother got
[11:54] home from his night shift. He was exhausted.
[11:56] He was ready to go to bed. But when he arrived at the
[11:59] house, the front door was open. And so he walked in and walked
[12:04] into the living room. And there he found his own
[12:07] sister murdered in a pool of her own blood on the living room
[12:12] floor. Karl phoned the police, who
[12:14] started a crime scene investigation, and Rebecca's
[12:17] body was transported to the morgue.
[12:20] Her autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed 58 times in the
[12:25] top half of her body. And that's actually insane.
[12:28] You, you hear these numbers in true crime videos and they
[12:31] become like slightly normalized when it comes to like insane
[12:35] criminals. Stabbing someone 5060 times
[12:37] doesn't sound like as much as it actually is in reality.
[12:42] Imagine how much time and effort and energy you would have to
[12:47] exert to do that same action upwards of 60 times over and
[12:52] over again. There's also the probability
[12:54] that the attacker is trying to hold the victim down.
[12:57] Maybe they're trying to fight them off, so that's even more
[12:59] energy. Like whenever I hear of a killer
[13:03] stabbing someone 5060 even 100 times, you just wonder how, how
[13:09] on earth that is even humanly possible.
[13:11] It must be like all the adrenaline and the anger, like
[13:14] swirling up inside them that just makes them keep going and
[13:17] going and going for like minutes at a time.
[13:19] Frenzied. Stabbing someone for so long
[13:22] must be a very tiring process. You must really want to do that
[13:28] in order to do it. Like you must really want to
[13:31] make sure that that person is not coming out of this alive.
[13:34] If you're stabbing them 60 times.
[13:35] There is probably no chance of survival there.
[13:38] He knows he has just killed his victim.
[13:40] Again, this tells police quite a bit about their attacker that
[13:43] it's either a really big, you know, strong, physically strong
[13:47] person able to do that, or alternatively, it's a really
[13:51] angry person who has just been filled with a lot of adrenaline
[13:56] due to this emotion. And that is what's like been
[13:58] able to power them through all of that physical, what's the
[14:04] word physical exertion. The actual crime scene itself
[14:08] offered up virtually no clues or leads or evidence at all.
[14:13] There was nothing that the killer had left behind or, you
[14:16] know, there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing.
[14:18] Police spoke with neighbors, but there were no witnesses.
[14:21] No one saw or heard anything. And Rebecca Spencer's murder
[14:25] quickly went cold. It was unsolved.
[14:28] There was there was some crazed attacker out there at large
[14:33] getting away with this. Police had no suspects.
[14:36] They had nowhere left to look. And so eventually, they kind of
[14:40] stopped trying. And Rebecca Spencer's killer, at
[14:43] this point in the case, her brother has heard this triple
[14:47] murder of John Heaton and her two kids.
[14:49] Rebecca Spencer's murder still isn't solved.
[14:52] And so he got in touch with the police and he said, look, these
[14:55] seem very, very similar. Please can you look into my
[14:58] sister's murder parallel to the Heaton murder investigation?
[15:02] These two cases are very, very similar for a number of reasons.
[15:05] First of all, there's even just the geography of them.
[15:09] It happened down the road. It's literally the same stretch
[15:12] of Rd. You just kind of go around the
[15:13] corner and in as Ave. turns into a different St. and then that's
[15:17] where that's where Rebecca Spencer lived.
[15:20] It's literally a 2 minute walk, a 2 minute walk between both of
[15:23] those houses. So immediately this is looking
[15:27] like the killer probably lives close by maybe in that exact
[15:30] same neighborhood or maybe it's just a ploy.
[15:33] Maybe they don't live anywhere near.
[15:35] Maybe they kill in this specific neighborhood for a reason, who
[15:38] knows. Another characteristic that was
[15:40] the same between both of these cases was the fact that a knife
[15:43] was used in all four killings. They'd all been stabbed and
[15:48] actually overkill was a big part of all of these murders.
[15:52] They had been stabbed way more times than is necessary to kill
[15:56] them. The attacker just kept going and
[15:58] going and going. Especially those young girls
[16:01] would have likely been dead after like 10, even 20 stab
[16:06] wounds. But he just kept going. 62 is
[16:10] insane. And actually the knives, the
[16:12] specific knives that were used to stab all the different
[16:15] victims were all knives that were taken from their own
[16:20] kitchens. So the attacker in both
[16:22] instances had broken into the victims home the the woman's
[16:27] home, found a knife in her kitchen and then used her own
[16:30] knife to stab her to death. This killer just seemed like
[16:34] someone who very much enjoyed inflicting excess violence and
[16:39] aggression on young women and girls.
[16:43] There were a lot of things that pointed to this being a repeat
[16:47] killer. And now that they had killed
[16:49] three more people, if this was true, they were looking for a
[16:53] serial killer. There was a serial killer at
[16:56] large, and it seemed this serial killer lived very close by,
[17:01] perhaps in the same neighborhood.
[17:03] So police focused on what evidence they did have of the
[17:07] killer or potential evidence that they had.
[17:09] So, for example, he had sized this 13 feet.
[17:12] They imagined that he was a very big guy, very tall, strong,
[17:16] probably like quite broad kind of guy.
[17:18] And there was also the possibility that he had some
[17:21] sort of injury from the previous murders.
[17:23] He might have stabbed himself in the process.
[17:25] So maybe they were looking for someone with stitches or a cut
[17:28] or a bandage, something like that.
[17:30] So police start making their way around the neighborhood, taking
[17:33] stock of all the men, interviewing different people
[17:35] here and there. And then all of a sudden, one of
[17:38] the officers spotted something. So there were these two 2
[17:41] detectives out driving in the same police car and one of them
[17:45] pointed to this rather tall looking man on the side of the
[17:48] street and they were like oh hey, what about him?
[17:50] The other police officer in the car looked over at this guy that
[17:53] his colleague was pointing at and he was like oh hang on, I
[17:56] know him. Turns out this very tall, very
[17:59] large man that they'd seen walking down the road wasn't
[18:02] actually a man at all. It was a 15 year old boy.
[18:05] He was just very big for his age.
[18:07] He was over 6 foot tall. He was upwards of £300.
[18:11] He, he was an athlete. He was just a very big, very big
[18:14] 15 year old boy. This officer recognized the 15
[18:17] year old boy because in his free time, the officer was actually a
[18:20] basketball coach for the local kids and this was one of the
[18:24] kids that he coached. So the officers pulled their car
[18:27] over to him and they like flagged him down to come over
[18:30] and talk. This kid's name was Craig Price.
[18:33] And as he walked over to the car, now that he was front on,
[18:37] police noticed that he had a bandage around his hand.
[18:41] So he walks over to the car. They're chatting to him through
[18:44] the window for a little bit. And then one of them brings up
[18:46] this bandage. And they said, oh, what have you
[18:48] done to your hand? And Craig tells this story about
[18:51] how a couple of days ago he got like blackout drunk.
[18:54] He's 15 years old. He got blackout drunk and then
[18:57] punched through the window of an of a car in the neighborhood.
[19:00] So police just kind of accepted his story in the moment, kept
[19:03] chatting to him and then drove away.
[19:06] When they got back to the police station, they decided to check
[19:08] out Craig's story. So they start looking on the
[19:11] system for any reports of like, car robberies or car vandalism
[19:16] in that neighborhood from the past few days.
[19:18] But there was none. Before we get into today's
[19:20] episode, I just want to thank our sponsor, Love and Pies.
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[22:00] for sponsoring. No one had reported having their
[22:03] car window smashed it. So now police are quite
[22:06] suspicious of Craig Price. Why had he lied about this
[22:11] injury on his hand? So they called him up and they
[22:13] asked him to come down to the police station again.
[22:15] They wanted to question him again, mainly about his hand.
[22:19] So he came down to the police station with his parents because
[22:22] again, he was a minor, he was 15, so he couldn't be questioned
[22:26] alone. He came down with his parents.
[22:28] He was asked again what he did to his hand and he told this
[22:31] exact same story actually about how he went out punched his car.
[22:34] Police really thought he was lying about this car story, but
[22:38] he wasn't going to admit that he was lying.
[22:41] And so they asked if he would be willing to take a lie detector
[22:44] test to tell that exact same story again, that he got drunk
[22:47] and punched a car window. But then they would know if he
[22:51] was lying about it or not. And Craig actually agreed.
[22:54] He was like, yeah, sure, I'll do it.
[22:56] But the results of that lie detector test came back that
[22:59] Craig was lying about how he injured his hand.
[23:02] So now police had proof. This didn't say that he was a
[23:06] murderer. It just said that he was lying
[23:08] about how he hurt his hand. But still, that's suspicious
[23:11] that he won't tell police the truth that he had.
[23:14] He'd stuck to this fake story so many times whenever he was
[23:18] asked. There was a lot of suspicion
[23:19] against Craig Price at this point in time.
[23:22] What was he trying to hide? So police started digging into
[23:25] him a little bit more. They wanted to know who Craig
[23:28] Price was. And so they started opening up
[23:31] interviews with everyone in his life, his family, his friends,
[23:35] school friends, teachers, anyone that knew Craig.
[23:38] And from this they started to find out a lot of dark secrets
[23:43] about Craig's childhood. Craig Chandler Price was born on
[23:46] October 11th, 1973 into a working class family in
[23:51] Massachusetts. When Craig was about four or
[23:53] five years old, his family upped and moved to Warwick in Rhode
[23:57] Island, which was a very, very white area at the time.
[24:01] And racism was still very prevalent.
[24:04] And Craig would experience a lot of racism growing up.
[24:07] We don't even know the half of it.
[24:09] There's only a few incidents that are actually like detailed
[24:12] as part of this case. But I know that this was like a
[24:15] daily thing for him. There was just so much tension
[24:19] and aggression towards this, this innocent little kid who has
[24:23] done nothing other than be born. It was a lot of older white kids
[24:27] that would be like aggressive towards him, shouting things at
[24:30] him, sometimes even violent towards him.
[24:33] Actually, some of the worst offenders of racism towards
[24:36] Craig Price were adults. Like fully grown, fully
[24:41] developed adults were being horrid to this child.
[24:46] He would get shouted at in the streets, he would get taunted,
[24:49] he would be called slurs. And I know I said that people
[24:53] would on occasion get physically violent, but that was actually
[24:57] quite a rare thing, especially as Craig grew up because like I
[25:01] say, he was very physically intimidating.
[25:04] He was over 6 foot nearly £300. He was clearly a very strong
[25:09] person that could hold his own, so people didn't try to
[25:13] physically harm him a lot. Well not with their own bare
[25:17] hands. People would try to hurt Craig
[25:21] in other ways where he couldn't really fight back.
[25:24] You'll see in a second, but his really big height, his really
[25:29] big frame was quite an advantage to him for a few different
[25:33] reasons. He loved it when it came to
[25:35] sports. It made him super good at like
[25:38] anything he tried. He was really, really good at
[25:41] basketball and football. His teammates gave him the
[25:43] nickname Iron Man because he was literally like the other teams
[25:47] just could not get past Craig Price.
[25:49] He was like he was just so wide and broad and like he was like a
[25:54] unit. He was just such a good team
[25:56] member to have because he was really good at defense.
[25:58] He was really tall so he could shoot.
[26:00] He was he was really good at sports.
[26:02] Craig just really liked being a big guy because it gave him the
[26:07] opportunity to look intimidating when he needed to.
[26:11] He could be scary when he wanted to be, which meant that people
[26:14] did keep their distance more often than not.
[26:16] But personality wise, Craig Price was the complete opposite
[26:20] of scary and intimidating. He was actually supposedly very
[26:24] soft spoken, rather timid actually.
[26:27] He was like he was interested in other people.
[26:31] He would have really long conversations.
[26:34] He was just very interested in getting to know you and and
[26:37] talking about what you want to talk about.
[26:39] He was he was very social in that way.
[26:41] He was known to be very funny. He was like the jokester of his
[26:45] family. He was always cracking jokes.
[26:46] He always had people laughing just in general.
[26:49] Craig seemed to be a very likable person.
[26:52] He was he was quite popular in the way that not many people
[26:55] disliked him, but very few people actually knew what a dark
[27:01] side Craig Price had to him. His friends were the only people
[27:04] that saw even a glimpse of what he was capable of.
[27:09] They would all go out together in the in the dead of night and
[27:12] go and rob houses together. They would break into their
[27:15] neighbors houses and they would steal anything and everything
[27:19] they could that was of value. They would steal any cash that
[27:21] was laying on the side. They would ransack their own
[27:24] neighbors homes and then just run back home at the end of the
[27:27] night and pretend they were sleeping.
[27:28] And Craig would even do this on his own.
[27:31] So don't think he was just being like led by this group of other
[27:35] kids. Like no, he enjoyed this.
[27:37] He got his own fulfillment out of it.
[27:39] He would go out and do it so low if his friends didn't want to
[27:42] rob houses with him. From a very young age, Craig
[27:44] didn't have very many morals or ethics or empathy for his
[27:51] victims. He just did whatever Craig
[27:53] wanted to do. By the way, he's very, very
[27:55] young when this started. He was about 12 when him and his
[27:58] mates went out and started robbing houses. 12 years old,
[28:01] you're breaking in to people's houses.
[28:04] I couldn't even imagine that me at 12 years old, I was scared
[28:08] talking back to my teachers, never mind breaking into
[28:10] someones house. And actually it was at 12 years
[28:12] old when he was caught for his first robbery.
[28:16] He was, they were literally caught in the act of breaking
[28:19] into a neighbors house and stealing things.
[28:21] Craig was arrested and sent to court where he was ordered to
[28:24] complete six months of counseling in the hopes that
[28:27] they could reform this bad kid back into like a good citizen.
[28:32] You know, maybe he was just going down a bad path, but six
[28:35] months of counselling could hopefully fix that and make him
[28:38] a law abiding citizen again. Honestly, he got off pretty easy
[28:41] to say that this wasn't the first time he'd robbed a house.
[28:43] I don't know if police were aware of that, but he was a
[28:46] multiple time offender and he just got, he just had to go to a
[28:49] psychiatrist's office once every week for six months.
[28:52] And he did, he completed all his counselling.
[28:55] They signed him off to say like, yeah, cool.
[28:57] He's he's done every, everything that he was ordered to do and
[28:59] the court order was over. And then Craig Price went right
[29:02] back to committing crimes. He had not changed an inch.
[29:05] He was hanging out with the exact same friends.
[29:08] They were committing the exact same crimes.
[29:10] But now there was the introduction of drugs and
[29:13] alcohol as well. His friends introduced him to
[29:16] drinking almost every single day.
[29:19] They were smoking weed. They were smoking normal
[29:21] cigarettes. And on occasion they would even
[29:23] get in like drugs, hallucinogenics classes, I don't
[29:27] think they're classes over there in America, but like cocaine,
[29:30] like the bad ones, everything was unsupervised.
[29:33] These kids are 12/13/14 years old and they're doing any drug
[29:37] that they can get their hands on, like they were doing LSD
[29:40] just in each others gardens and then just like going on their
[29:43] bikes on the street like normal kids.
[29:45] It's this case really kind of scares me in that way that these
[29:49] were such normal kids with the things that they would do day
[29:53] in, day out. They would do sports, they would
[29:54] go to school, they would play out on the street on their
[29:56] bikes, play hide and seek, like even really young kid kind of
[30:02] games, but they would also be really high on drugs at the same
[30:05] time. And then and then play a game
[30:07] and then go and rob a house in the evening.
[30:09] It's like it's, it's really actually sad seeing like these
[30:15] kids lives that they are still kids, but they're really not
[30:17] acting like it. They would even mix these drugs
[30:20] and alcohol quite a lot, like they were drinking most nights
[30:23] and then they would just do these drugs on top of it, which
[30:25] is so dangerous. And they had no like not even
[30:29] any older kids supervising them. They were the oldest kids.
[30:33] 12/13/14 It was at this point when he was like trying all
[30:37] these substances that Craig started bunking off school.
[30:40] He was like skipping days of school at a time, which he
[30:44] didn't really see to be an issue at at the beginning because
[30:47] Craig had always been really naturally smart.
[30:50] He was one of those kids that didn't really have to try.
[30:52] He didn't really need to study. He would still pull good grades
[30:55] just naturally. So in his head, he's thinking on
[30:58] a couple of days off here and there isn't really going to
[31:00] affect my grades overall. But this was a very slippery
[31:04] slope. The more days he had off, the
[31:06] more he enjoyed it, the more he wanted off.
[31:08] And in the end, he was barely going to school.
[31:11] He was genuinely really getting behind on his school work.
[31:14] It got to a point where his school actually made him reset a
[31:18] year. They made him go back a year
[31:20] because he missed so much time. He just was no longer on the
[31:24] same level as other kids his age.
[31:27] He didn't know enough. So he he had to go back and sit
[31:30] that year again with a bunch of younger kids.
[31:32] So now he was like separated from all his friends during
[31:36] school hours. And I can't imagine how
[31:38] frustrating that would have been.
[31:40] Even though it's his own fault, I think he was quite embarrassed
[31:43] by this. And he also just didn't enjoy
[31:45] school anymore because he wasn't with his friends.
[31:48] And so in turn this made him not go even more.
[31:51] He would just spend most of his days during the day playing out
[31:54] with other kids on the street, other kids that had bumped off.
[31:58] And even though I keep like emphasizing the rage and saying
[32:00] that they were, they were such young kids.
[32:03] Don't get me wrong, these kids knew what they were doing.
[32:05] They knew that robbery was wrong.
[32:07] They knew they shouldn't have been mixing drugs and alcohol.
[32:09] They'd heard all this. They'd had all the education.
[32:12] Their parents didn't like that they would committing crimes.
[32:14] A lot of their parents didn't even know.
[32:16] I know Craig's parents didn't know at the time, but I think a
[32:19] couple of the kids parents knew because they were from like, not
[32:23] as great families. All that being said, these kids
[32:26] knew what they were doing. They knew that they were
[32:28] committing crimes. They knew that they were putting
[32:31] other people at risk and like, hurting other people, stealing
[32:35] other people's belongings, but they didn't care.
[32:37] They didn't care about the effects that their actions had
[32:41] on other people. They have no empathy for their
[32:43] victims. So, yeah, this group of preteens
[32:46] and young teenagers would spend most of their time just playing
[32:49] out on the streets, well, on on their St. like their
[32:53] neighborhood streets, which you would think is like one of the
[32:56] safest places for kids that age to play out, like right outside
[33:00] their home where their parents are.
[33:02] And that is the case most of the time, but not really for Craig
[33:06] because as one of the only black kids in his whole in his whole
[33:10] area, it didn't really matter where he was.
[33:13] He was always targeted and attacked and harassed by
[33:18] racists. On one particular occasion,
[33:20] Craig and all of his mates were doing a bike rice down their St.
[33:25] and they were all like setting up on one side of the street
[33:27] when they noticed a couple of older white kids hanging around
[33:32] Craig, his mates just kind of ignore it, it's just a couple of
[33:34] other kids, they keep working on their bikes and all of a sudden
[33:37] they hear these older kids shouting racist slurs at Craig.
[33:42] This was unfortunately something that Craig had to deal with
[33:45] quite often, almost every single day, and so by now he had a
[33:50] particular way that he would go about it.
[33:52] His main thing was to just stay calm, take deep breaths and
[33:56] don't show any emotion. Just ignore them.
[33:59] Don't let them know that they've hurt you or upset you.
[34:02] Just ignore them. Keep going with whatever you're
[34:04] doing and hopefully they will just give up and leave.
[34:08] That was how he always dealt with racists shouting things at
[34:12] him, harassing him. He ignored everything.
[34:16] And don't get me wrong, it really, really affected him, but
[34:19] he was just good at putting on this front.
[34:21] Like inside it really, truly devastated him that he he
[34:26] couldn't be treated the same as his friends, that he couldn't go
[34:29] out and just have a bike race without being harassed and
[34:33] attacked for the way that he looked.
[34:35] He wanted nothing more than to shout back at these boys and to
[34:39] to hurt them the way that they'd hurt him.
[34:42] But he knew that it wasn't worth it and so he would just ignore
[34:45] them. And that's what he did on this
[34:46] particular day. He was ignoring these older boys
[34:49] and they didn't like that. They kept shouting at him and
[34:51] shouting at him. They weren't getting a response.
[34:53] And so one of them then grabs a golf ball and throws it at
[34:58] Craig. Again, Craig tries to ignore it,
[35:00] even though that is insanely scary.
[35:03] Throwing a golf ball? They're freaking heavy.
[35:06] Surely that could kill you, right?
[35:07] If they hit you in the right place, at the right, at the
[35:10] right speed, that's really scary.
[35:12] Regardless, Craig ignored it, and again, these older kids
[35:15] didn't like that. They wanted a reaction from
[35:19] Craig and they weren't getting 1 so they decided to to approach
[35:23] him. They started taunting Craig
[35:25] asking if he'd stolen the bike that he was riding and like who
[35:28] did he steal it off? And again, Craig is ignoring
[35:32] them. They're not getting the reaction
[35:34] that they want. And so in the end, well, this
[35:36] whole time they've been shouting more slurs at him.
[35:39] I think they threw the golf ball a couple more times.
[35:41] But in the end, they got bored and they walked over to a car,
[35:44] jumped in and drove away. So now Craig and all his friends
[35:47] are relieved, thinking that they'd finally gone and then
[35:50] they could start this bike race. So they all get on their bikes
[35:53] and the race begins. They all set off down the road.
[35:56] They made it all the way to the end, almost at the end of the
[35:59] race, when suddenly that car starts speeding up behind Craig.
[36:05] It was the two older kids. They jumped in that car swung
[36:09] around, and now they were driving after Craig.
[36:12] They were chasing him, getting faster and faster towards him.
[36:14] He was trying to like swerve out of the way.
[36:16] They were swerving after him, and it got to a point where
[36:19] Craig genuinely thought they were going to hit him off his
[36:22] bike if he didn't try and jump off first.
[36:25] So in order to save himself, Craig swerved his bike into the
[36:30] side of the curb and just flew off it.
[36:33] That was his plan to to throw himself off his bike.
[36:36] He did. He fell to the ground.
[36:38] He was in a lot of pain and he just jumped up and ran away, ran
[36:43] off into like someone's garden and just went and hid.
[36:46] Craig hid for a little while until he could no longer hear
[36:49] anyone on the street and then when he finally came out of his
[36:52] hiding place, he found his bike completely mangled.
[36:56] Those two older boys had had destroyed it somehow, ran over
[37:01] it maybe, but it was just so broken.
[37:03] It was beyond repair. And so Craig ran home to his
[37:06] family with what was left of his bike.
[37:08] And he was, he was crying, he was, he was so upset by
[37:12] everything he'd just been through.
[37:13] But instead of being comforted and supported by his family,
[37:17] Craig was just berated for even racing on his bike in the 1st
[37:21] place. They said it was dangerous.
[37:23] The next time Craig would experience racism on this level
[37:27] was about a year after. So that last incident happened
[37:30] when he was just 12 years old. This next one, he was 13.
[37:34] It was on July 27th, 1987. Once again, he was out playing
[37:38] games in the street with all the neighborhood kids.
[37:40] They would play this one particular game called Manhunt,
[37:43] which was kind of a mix between hide and seek.
[37:45] So they would all go out and hide.
[37:47] And then when the seeker found the people hiding, they were
[37:51] then able to like run away. So then it kind of turned into a
[37:54] game of tag where it's like you first got to hide, but then when
[37:57] they find you, you just got to keep running so that you don't
[38:00] get caught. So they were all going to play
[38:01] Manhunt, but first Craig and a couple of the older kids went
[38:04] and smoked joints and then they joined in manhunt afterwards.
[38:08] And this game sounds really fun by the way, because the way that
[38:11] they played it, they had like a no boundaries rule.
[38:13] Well, actually the only boundaries were people's houses.
[38:16] They weren't allowed to go in people's houses, but they played
[38:18] in like neighbors gardens and on the driveways.
[38:21] They were allowed to hide under cars.
[38:23] It was really like no bounds. So they set off playing and
[38:26] they're all, I think it was actually Craig that was that was
[38:29] counting and everyone else was out hiding and all of a sudden
[38:32] he, he is shouting from a white car that was parked outside a
[38:36] neighbor's house. He looked up and saw a man
[38:38] sitting in this car with a window rolled down shouting
[38:42] racist slurs at him, at Craig, a 14 year old boy who was
[38:46] literally playing hide and seek. He had his hands over his eyes
[38:49] counting and this fully grown man is shouting racist slurs at
[38:53] him. Craig did his usual thing of
[38:55] just ignoring this man, even though he really did retaliate.
[38:59] He this made him so angry, so upset, so offended.
[39:03] He wanted to, he wanted to fight back desperately, but he never
[39:07] thought it was worth it. So he just ignored it, kept
[39:11] counting, kept going with the game.
[39:12] And then the car starts up and starts driving directly at Craig
[39:18] Price and he like ran out of the way and it's worth to try and
[39:21] hit him exactly like that car had done a year before.
[39:25] Craig managed to get out of the way and the car eventually drove
[39:28] away, but this had then just put him in a really awful headspace.
[39:33] I can't imagine what that does to a 14 year old kid who's just
[39:36] trying to play a game with his mates and he's some old man in
[39:41] his car is literally trying to kill him.
[39:43] Anyway, he carried on playing the game as if nothing had ever
[39:46] happened. Craig was quite good at just
[39:48] like putting these things behind him and putting on a brave face
[39:50] and just continuing. But inside, the anger wasn't
[39:55] going away this time he could. He could get rid of it on the
[39:58] surface and carry on playing this game.
[40:00] But inside, he couldn't stop thinking about that.
[40:02] And he couldn't stop thinking about how much he wished he
[40:05] could have fought back. All of this anger had just been
[40:08] bubbling up inside him for years, and he had never let it
[40:12] out in any capacity. He just had people being awful
[40:16] to him day in, day out. And this anger was about to come
[40:20] to a head. Later that night, Craig was sat
[40:23] in his room and he was still being eaten alive by these
[40:26] thoughts, like wishing that he'd fought back.
[40:29] He felt so much anger towards this man that he decided he had
[40:32] to get revenge. And Craig had a plan on how he
[40:36] was going to do that. He got dressed head to toe in
[40:39] all black, he grabbed a baseball bat from his bedroom and then he
[40:42] walked out into the street. His plan was to go and find that
[40:46] white car that was parked outside his neighbors earlier in
[40:48] the day and just beat it, vandalise it, smash the windows
[40:53] in, just completely do this guy in.
[40:55] But when Craig got out onto the street, that car wasn't there
[40:59] anymore. And Craig was.
[41:01] He was annoyed. He still had all this anger
[41:04] inside him that he thought he was finally going to be able to
[41:06] release. And yet he's now got there and
[41:09] realized that he can't. But he still wants to.
[41:11] He still wants to do something to let out this Ridge.
[41:15] So he's just like standing there in the street, staring at this
[41:19] house that no longer has the car parked outside it.
[41:21] And all of a sudden, his attention is quickly shifted to
[41:24] a cat running towards the house and in through an open crack in
[41:29] the door. And that's when Craig got the
[41:31] idea to target the house itself instead of the car.
[41:36] He thought that it was probably that guy's house anywhere.
[41:39] And if there was a door there that was literally open, he was
[41:43] going to take advantage of it. The plan was kind of exactly the
[41:46] same as what he was going to do to the car.
[41:47] He was going to break into the house and just smash everything
[41:50] in and smash stuff and just just vandalize, just cause problems
[41:55] for this man that had been awful to him.
[41:57] So before he went and broke into the house, Craig had obviously
[42:00] been watching from outside for a little while and he noticed that
[42:03] the TV was on in the living room.
[42:05] He could see that like flickering blue light.
[42:08] And so he creeped up to the house because he wanted to see
[42:11] who was in that living room. So he peeked in through this
[42:14] window and he saw moving boxes all over the living room.
[42:18] In fact, the only things that weren't in boxes with a TV that
[42:22] was on and a mattress on the floor that had a woman asleep on
[42:26] it. Immediately this confused Craig.
[42:29] There was a woman in this house. He hadn't expected to see a
[42:32] woman. If anyone, he was expecting to
[42:34] see that racist old man. He didn't know who this woman
[42:37] was, but in his head he's thinking she must be related to
[42:40] that man somehow. Maybe it's his wife, or his
[42:42] sister, or, you know, someone. And so Craig thought, well, if
[42:46] the man himself isn't here, then I guess I'll take out my anger
[42:50] on those that he cares about. South Craig snuck into the house
[42:54] through the open doorway. He made his way into the
[42:57] kitchen, and from there he could see through an open door.
[43:01] He could see the woman sleeping on the mattress in the living
[43:03] room. And so he just stood in the
[43:05] kitchen staring at him for a few minutes.
[43:08] He was kind of trying to figure out how he was going to go about
[43:11] this because, like I said, the plan was just to, like, break
[43:14] everything, smash everything, which was clearly going to make
[43:18] a lot of noise. And he didn't really want to
[43:20] wake this sleeping woman up because then she'd call the
[43:23] police and he would get caught. He thought about potentially
[43:25] quieter ways that he could destroy this house.
[43:28] Maybe he could start a fire somewhere and then run away.
[43:30] And then she would be woken by smoke alarms, and part of the
[43:33] house would be burned. You know, maybe that was a way
[43:35] to get back at this man. But then he realized he didn't
[43:38] really have a way to start a fire in the house.
[43:41] So that idea was out. And he was also realizing at
[43:44] this point in time that he'd left his baseball bat outside.
[43:47] So he had come dressed head to toe with a baseball bat, ready
[43:50] to cause some vandalism and then and then left the bat outside,
[43:54] snuck into the house, left the bat outside.
[43:57] So now he had to look for a weapon inside the house.
[44:01] He saw a frying pan sitting on the side.
[44:03] And so he thought, well, maybe, you know, could use that for the
[44:05] same thing as a baseball bat. And he picks it up and he starts
[44:08] like swinging it around, testing it.
[44:10] But it was just way too heavy. He was like, no, that's that's
[44:13] not going to work. So he put it back down on the
[44:14] side, and then he saw a kitchen knife laying on the side next to
[44:18] it. And at first Craig was hesitant
[44:21] about using a knife because I mean that was completely
[44:24] different to the original plan a knife and does a very different
[44:28] job to a baseball bat. At this point, the thoughts that
[44:32] a circle in his head are less about how he can vandalize the
[44:35] property and more about what damage he could do with this
[44:40] knife. He had originally planned to
[44:42] keep the sleeping woman alive and just damage the house around
[44:46] her, but now that this knife was laying there and he was thinking
[44:50] about what he could do with it, his plan changed.
[44:53] He grabbed the knife and walked into the living room.
[44:56] He stood just towering over this this sleeping girl, and he was
[45:01] just watching her. He was just staring at her for a
[45:03] moment, and then she stirred. In that moment, Craig Price
[45:08] panicked and immediately just started frenzied stabbing this
[45:12] woman on the ground over and over and over again until he was
[45:16] completely exhausted. And this woman was clearly dead.
[45:22] When he was done, Craig Price stepped back and looked at the
[45:26] dead body on the floor in front of him.
[45:28] And he realized that he was a murderer at the age of 13 years
[45:33] old. He had just taken someone's
[45:35] life. And that someone was 27 year old
[45:38] Rebecca Spencer, a mother to two children who had big plans for
[45:43] the rest of her life. She was going to go out and get
[45:45] a good job. They were just about to move
[45:47] houses, and Craig had taken all of that.
[45:51] Pretty soon after finishing stabbing Rebecca, Craig realized
[45:55] he needed to get the hell out of there.
[45:57] And so, without touching anything, he snuck out of the
[46:00] front door again and just ran straight home.
[46:03] But actually, it was as he was approaching his own house.
[46:06] He was almost there. He was almost home.
[46:09] He realized that he had made a grave mistake back at the house.
[46:13] He remembered picking up that frying pan and testing it out.
[46:17] You know, waving it around, he had put his fingerprints all
[46:21] over that pan. When police go in there and find
[46:24] that dead body, they're going to check for fingerprints.
[46:26] And immediately they're going to get it.
[46:28] He knew he needed to do something about that frying pan.
[46:30] And so Craig runs back over to the scene of the crime, sneaks
[46:35] in once again, grabs that pan and runs away.
[46:38] At this point, he ditched the knife and the pan in some random
[46:42] bushes. I don't know where, I don't
[46:44] know. I don't know how.
[46:45] And then he runs back home. And now that he was home for
[46:48] real this time, he ran upstairs to the bathroom.
[46:51] He took off all of his blood soaked clothes and just threw
[46:55] them in a bin bag, tied it up. He jumped in the shower and
[46:58] washed all of the blood off off his skin, and then when he was
[47:01] done he took his bag of murder clothes and just threw them in
[47:07] the attic, hoping that his parents wouldn't come across
[47:10] them. Once he was done, he headed back
[47:12] to his bedroom. Now that he was all clean, he
[47:15] rolled a joint and smoked it, and then he crawled into bed
[47:19] with the family cat and just it like, peeled upon his chest and
[47:23] he just fell asleep peacefully, as if he hadn't just murdered
[47:26] someone. The next morning, Rebecca
[47:28] Spencer's brother returns home from his night shift and finds
[47:32] his sister hacked to death on the floor of their living room.
[47:36] She is found in a pool of her own blood.
[47:38] And like I said earlier, this case went cold very, very
[47:42] quickly. Police had no leads.
[47:44] They had no idea that 13 year old Craig Price was getting away
[47:48] with this murder and he wasn't even slightly suspected at the
[47:52] time. He was never even brought up as
[47:55] a possibility in police's minds because after all, he was a 13
[47:59] year old child and police were looking at this murder thinking
[48:03] it has to be a man. It has to be someone big and
[48:05] strong. You know, like they didn't think
[48:08] about this big and strong 13 year old because honestly, Craig
[48:11] Price did seem like a very normal kid.
[48:14] He was into all the normal things, sports, playing with the
[48:17] other kids on the street, going on his bike.
[48:19] Like there was nothing murderous or sinister or even concerning
[48:24] about this boy. There was nothing weird about
[48:26] him at all. He was just big for his age.
[48:29] That was the only thing that could possibly like be a clue
[48:33] that he is the killer, looking back on this point in his life,
[48:37] Craig Price said. I truly feel like getting away
[48:40] with it was my fate and my destiny.
[48:42] I really felt clever and supreme, which tells you a lot
[48:46] about his mindset at this point in time.
[48:48] He loves that he is getting away with with murder.
[48:52] This is a power that he hasn't really felt before in his life.
[48:55] He has always felt inferior to everyone else because of the way
[48:59] that he's been treated by everyone else.
[49:01] But finally now getting away with this murder, outsmarting
[49:05] police, knowing something that no one else knows, it's making
[49:09] him feel strong and powerful. For the first time ever, he
[49:14] enjoys this feeling. In the weeks and months
[49:17] following this savage murder, Craig carried on just as normal.
[49:22] He was doing all the same things with his friends, going out
[49:24] playing, he was still doing drugs and stuff.
[49:27] He was still doing the same crimes with his friends, robbing
[49:29] houses and stuff. But the point is, he was also
[49:32] living a very normal teenager's life.
[49:34] He was going to school on occasion and like his parents,
[49:38] never suspected anything. Two years later, in August of
[49:42] 1989, Craig was out on his bike in the neighborhood when he saw
[49:47] a woman and her two daughters also out on their bikes.
[49:51] These neighbors on their bikes were single mother Joan Heaton
[49:55] and her two young daughters, 10 year old Jennifer and seven-year
[49:58] old Melissa. They rode their bikes past Craig
[50:01] and as they did, Craig heard a sound coming from one of their
[50:04] bikes. He looked up and he noticed that
[50:06] one of the little girls had like a chain that was disconnected on
[50:10] one of her wheels. And so Craig kind of flagged
[50:13] down the family and he was like, oh, I've noticed you've, you've
[50:15] got this issue, I can fix it for you.
[50:17] Completely unprovoked, Craig offers to do a good deed for
[50:21] free for this family, but he felt like he had done something
[50:26] wrong. The way that Joan looked at him
[50:29] and responded to him, he said it was just very tense.
[50:33] He got a feeling that Joan didn't like him before she'd
[50:37] even met him, and he knew he hadn't done anything to deserve
[50:41] such a treatment. He had been polite, kind, nice.
[50:44] He was doing them a favour for free.
[50:48] And yet for some reason he thought Joan had a problem with
[50:51] him. And Craig had felt this kind of
[50:53] unwarranted judgement plenty of times before.
[50:57] He had a feeling that this was down to his race, that Joan was
[51:01] racist and she didn't care what good he was doing for her
[51:05] family. She didn't like him just because
[51:07] of the colour of his skin. This is what Craig thinks at
[51:11] this point in time. But as he always had done, he
[51:13] just kept quiet. He ignored this feeling that he
[51:16] had. He fixed the little girl's bike.
[51:19] They said thank thank you, albeit a bit of a weird thank
[51:23] you, and then they rode their bikes off a few days later.
[51:26] Craig was walking home from school on September 1st, 1989,
[51:30] when he walked past John Heaton's house and he actually
[51:33] saw John in the window. He recognized her as that
[51:36] neighbor that he helped the other day, and he said that she
[51:39] was just glaring down at him, like scowling at him.
[51:43] He could tell that she had a problem even from all the way up
[51:45] there in her window. And in that moment, all of that
[51:49] anger and rage and frustration started to swirl up inside him
[51:53] again. Everything that he had
[51:55] suppressed of the last year, 2 years was about to come out
[51:59] again. That night, Craig went back to
[52:01] his house and alone in his bedroom.
[52:04] He got drunk, he got high. And then to top all of that off,
[52:07] he did LSD as well. So it's tripping on top of all
[52:10] of that. But he was still absolutely
[52:13] raging underneath all of that. Like even though he was
[52:16] medicated on so many different things, self medication on so
[52:19] many different things, he was still so angry that he just
[52:23] couldn't ignore it. He knew he had to do whatever it
[52:27] took to let this feeling out. So he walked up to John Heaton's
[52:31] house and he saw that all of the lights were off inside, but some
[52:35] of the windows were open. And that was when he got the
[52:37] idea to maybe climb in through one of those windows and just
[52:41] vandalize the house. Same plan as the first time, he
[52:44] just wanted to cause issue and he just wanted to cause damage.
[52:48] As as far as we know, this was the original plan.
[52:51] But as we know from the start of this case, that was far from
[52:55] what ended up happening when this ended in the deaths of all
[52:59] three remaining members of the Heaton family.
[53:02] So Craig said he climbed into the house through the kitchen
[53:05] window and something happened as he climbed in.
[53:08] He knocked something over, or he made a noise that woke up John
[53:12] Heaton. It alerted her and she came
[53:14] straight downstairs to the kitchen.
[53:16] So Craig hadn't had chance to do anything.
[53:18] John walks in, turns the light on, and finds this kid has
[53:23] broken into a house. Craig wasted no time.
[53:26] He immediately launched himself at Joan, put his hands around
[53:30] her neck, and just started strangling her, both to try and
[53:33] kill her and also to stifle her screams.
[53:36] Until then, she was going to wake up the kids.
[53:38] She was going to wake up the neighbors.
[53:40] The two of them ended up like wrestling into the hallway
[53:43] almost. And then he eventually had her
[53:45] pin down on the ground, strangling her.
[53:47] And all of this commotion had actually awoken her two
[53:51] daughters. Melissa and Jennifer ran out of
[53:53] their bedrooms and ran down to the hallway where they saw this
[53:57] man killing their mother. Once Craig saw these two little
[54:00] girls run like into the room, he hopped up off their mother and
[54:04] ran back into the kitchen. And Joan is laying on the
[54:08] ground. She can't really get up.
[54:10] She's so weak. This man has just been
[54:12] strangling her. And so she turns to her kids and
[54:14] she tries to tell them to go and call the police, go call 911.
[54:18] But before the girls could do anything, the intruder was back.
[54:22] Craig was standing in the doorway with a big knife in his
[54:26] hand. First he went for John, who was
[54:28] still laying on the ground. He was stabbing her over and
[54:32] over again and she was fighting for her life.
[54:35] She was like trying to punch him and push him off.
[54:37] There she was, biting at his arm, arms, and then he ended up
[54:40] biting her back. Ultimately, Craig was stronger
[54:44] than her. This 15 year old boy was
[54:46] stronger than her. He managed to overpower her,
[54:49] stab her 58 times, and then when he was sure that Joan was dead,
[54:55] his attentions turned to her two young daughters.
[54:59] Like I said in the beginning of this video, he stabbed both of
[55:03] them so savagely, so aggressively, that he broke the
[55:07] handles off of the knives that he was using.
[55:10] He did this multiple times and left the blades just inside the
[55:16] little girls. And this was actually how he'd
[55:18] ended up injuring his hand. It wasn't from punching a car
[55:22] window. It was because he was frenzied
[55:24] stabbing these two kids so much that he was going out of
[55:28] control. He stabbed himself.
[55:31] He was breaking off the handles. Like this was an absolutely
[55:34] insane attack. And once he'd finished killing
[55:37] all three members of the Heaton family, Craig then, for some
[55:42] unknown reason, starts walking around the house, finding
[55:45] different things, things to cover the bodies with.
[55:48] So he grabbed a blanket. He grabbed a big sheet from the
[55:51] bedroom. He grabbed a rug.
[55:52] And then he goes and covers up all three of the bodies.
[55:56] And we still don't know why he did that.
[55:58] We can speculate. Killers tend to do this when
[56:01] they feel guilt or remorse or shame, embarrassment.
[56:06] But I don't know. I don't know why he did it in
[56:08] this instance and not the first time.
[56:10] He then grabbed a trash bag from the kitchen and threw in all of
[56:14] the knives that he'd been using, all of the broken off handles of
[56:18] the broken knives he'd used, and he was able to grab all of the
[56:22] evidence that he possibly could and run away with it.
[56:25] He just ran all the way home. And none of the neighbors had
[56:29] heard any of this, by the way, even though all three of those
[56:32] victims had been screaming, crying, shouting for help, no
[56:36] one had heard anything. So Craig was able to slip away
[56:40] into the night completely undetected.
[56:43] When Craig got back home, he ditched the the trash bag of
[56:47] murder weapons and broken murder weapons in his shed in the
[56:50] garden. And then he ran up to the
[56:52] bathroom and did the exact same process as last time.
[56:55] Had a shower, washed all the blood off of himself, and then
[56:58] put his blood soaked clothing in another trash bag and put that
[57:02] up in the attic where the other lot still were.
[57:05] By the way, his parents still haven't found the clothes from
[57:08] his first ever murder, and now his clothes for his 2nd murders
[57:13] were up there too. He didn't feel the need to do
[57:15] anything differently from the first murder that he committed.
[57:18] Since he'd clearly gotten away with it for so long.
[57:21] He'd clearly done something right.
[57:24] That was until that day when he was spotted by his basketball
[57:28] coach walking down the street with that bandage on his wrist.
[57:33] Ever since police got suspicious about Craig Price, the more they
[57:36] were putting together, he was now the main suspect in both of
[57:41] these murders. He was super tall, he was super
[57:44] big, super strong. He had the injury like
[57:47] everything was lining up. He lived in the neighborhood.
[57:51] He lived literally on that street.
[57:53] So police went and got a search warrant for Craig's home because
[57:56] they wanted to see what evidence might be hiding there.
[57:59] And honestly, this didn't seem to bother Craig all that much,
[58:03] quite surprisingly. So much so that as police were
[58:05] literally searching his house around him, he went and laid on
[58:09] the sofa and had a nap. While Craig was still asleep,
[58:12] the search actually expanded into his backyard, and that
[58:16] included the shed. As soon as police went in there,
[58:19] they found that trash bag of discarded murder weapons knives
[58:23] that he had used to stab the Heaton family to death.
[58:26] As soon as they found it, they ran inside that house, woke
[58:29] Craig up from his slumber, and charged him with all four
[58:35] murders. At this point, his fingerprints
[58:37] had been taken, they had been sent off for testing, and they
[58:40] were now found to be a match to fingerprints at the scenes of
[58:44] both murder scenes. So Craig was taken down to the
[58:47] police station, accompanied by his parents since he was a
[58:50] minor. And they honestly, up until this
[58:53] point, I don't think they had any idea about any of this.
[58:57] They knew that he had robbed houses in the past because he'd
[59:00] been caught for that, but they had no idea about these murders,
[59:04] and they were begging their son to just tell the truth, whatever
[59:07] the truth was. He needed to be honest with
[59:10] police and so he did. Craig Price sat there and
[59:14] confessed to all four of those murders and told police in
[59:19] gruesome detail how he had done each one.
[59:23] He sat there and as he was telling this story, even Craig's
[59:26] own family was so horrified by what their son was saying that
[59:31] his father actually had to get up and leave the room to throw
[59:34] up. Since Craig was only 15 years
[59:36] old at the time, this meant that he would be sentenced and
[59:40] trialled as a juvenile. He was going to be sent to
[59:43] juvenile court, which is very frustrating that a serial
[59:46] killer, even even a child serial killer, will be sent to juvenile
[59:50] court because because The thing is, once he was there, the
[59:53] maximum sentence that they could give him was six years.
[59:58] He pled guilty and he got six years for murdering 4 people,
[1:00:03] for being a serial killer that successfully got away with a
[1:00:06] murder for two years and would have got away with it for the
[1:00:08] rest of his life had he not murdered three more people.
[1:00:12] This guy killed 4 people and got just two years more than that in
[1:00:16] prison. And what's even worse than that
[1:00:19] is that Craig's criminal record would be sealed.
[1:00:22] When he left juvenile prison, like his criminal record was
[1:00:26] going to be wiped, it wasn't going to affect him.
[1:00:28] The fact that he was a serial killer was not going to affect
[1:00:31] his life in the future. All of that sounds really,
[1:00:34] really scary. I know.
[1:00:36] But that being said, it never actually got to that point
[1:00:38] because Craig has never been released from prison.
[1:00:41] But for other things he has been very badly behaved in prison.
[1:00:44] Well, actually he's been quite a mixed bag.
[1:00:47] Generally. He is known to be quite a good
[1:00:50] prisoner. He's quite a model prisoner in
[1:00:51] that way. But every now and again, he'll
[1:00:54] get into like a really big fight and get like a chunk of years
[1:00:57] added to his sentence. They're the things that are
[1:01:00] keeping him in prison is his just general anger and
[1:01:03] aggression. He's made like DIY weapons
[1:01:05] behind bars. He's made his own knives.
[1:01:08] He accidentally stabbed a police officer.
[1:01:10] Well, they say it was accidentally.
[1:01:11] I think it was just in his finger or something.
[1:01:13] He accidentally stabbed a police officer with one of his
[1:01:15] makeshift weapons at one point, which was another good chunk of
[1:01:19] years on his sentence. But then the last, like, major
[1:01:22] incident he's got an enter behind bars was when he was
[1:01:25] like, I think he was trying to murder someone.
[1:01:28] He was like repeatedly stabbing them with one of these makeshift
[1:01:30] knives. But because it was a makeshift
[1:01:32] knife, I don't think it killed the guy.
[1:01:35] He managed to recover. And so Craig Price got an extra
[1:01:38] 25 years on his sentence for that firm.
[1:01:41] I don't know what the exact charge was, but it does sound
[1:01:43] like attempted murder. So he still hasn't been let out
[1:01:46] of prison. He won't for a very long time,
[1:01:49] especially if he carries on this way.
[1:01:51] He's just going to keep getting time added and added and added.
[1:01:57] Thank you so much for listening to Usual Disclaimer.
[1:01:59] At this point, I just want to say that if you've been affected
[1:02:02] by any of the topics we discussed today, please check
[1:02:05] the description where we've left some helpful resources.
[1:02:08] If you want to hear more cases like this one, make sure to
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[1:02:17] And if you really enjoyed, I'd love it if you could leave a
[1:02:19] rating and a review too. Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[1:02:23] Neil is an Audio Boom Studios production.
[1:02:26] See you next time.

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