Murders and Mysteries of New England · Marti Shaw

Serial Killer Craig Price

·23 min·2 clips

At 13, Price stabbed a neighbor 58 times—a woman he'd been stalking.

Mardi Shaw starts by thanking listeners and mentioning the small but meaningful audience the show has gathered. She says the number of Spotify subscribers feels personal because 31 lines up with her August 31 birthday. Then she turns to Craig Price. She explains that she came to the case through a YouTube compilation and was shocked by what it described. The episode centers on the brutal 1989 stabbing spree. Shaw lays out how Price, at 15, is tied to the murders of Joan Heaton, 39, her 10-year-old daughter Jennifer, and 7-year-old Melissa, with the attacks described in grim detail. The violence is extreme. She says Joan was stabbed 57 times, Jennifer 62 times, and Melissa 30 times, and that Melissa's skull was crushed. Shaw also notes that the handles of the knives broke during the attacks, leaving blades inside the victims. She connects those facts to the earlier unsolved killing of Rebecca. Both Rebecca and Joan were single mothers living with two children. That similarity, plus the fact that Price used a weapon already in the house, leads the episode to suggest he may have entered for another purpose, such as burglary, and then killed the witnesses. The overkill is treated as another major clue. Shaw says the stabbing of Rebecca was not solved until a few months after the 1989 spree. The FBI was brought in to profile the serial killer because the crimes looked related. Even so, investigators missed the possibility that the suspect was a 15-year-old Black male. The first real break came on September 5, 1989. That was the day after the bodies were found and about two weeks after the Heaton murders. Detectives Ray Pendergast and Mark Branrith stopped Price in a car and talked to him because they already knew him from frequent police calls to his house. When they saw a bandage on his hand, they pressed him on it and checked his explanation that he had punched through a car window after getting drunk. No police report matched that story. There was no glass on the street either. Shaw uses that mismatch to show how a small detail helped shift suspicion toward Price. She closes on the aftermath. The episode says Price's release was first set for May 2020 and later moved to February 2022, and that his violent behavior in prison has left his release date uncertain.

As heard by us

A blunt, evidence-led look at one of New England's most brutal teenage murder cases.

The episode follows Craig Price through a brutal New England case in a mostly chronological way, opening on an earlier unsolved stabbing before moving into the 1989 Heaton murders and the clues that started to point detectives toward a teenage suspect.

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Why you'd press play

Want a straight-ahead look at how a 15-year-old suspect came under scrutiny in a brutal New England case?

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