Digital Extras

In my 30 years of journalism in Rhode Island few crimes have had the impact of the 1989 murders of Joan Heaton and her daughters, Jennifer and Melissa. The deaths were senseless, seeming to come from the most sinister of human experience. A home invaded in the night. Children killed. And no motive, no reason.

When 15-year-old Craig Price was arrested in the Heaton case and also confessed to murdering Rebecca Spencer when he was only 13, the shock and fear flooded Rhode Island in a wave of outrage.

Fourteen years had passed when reporter Mark Arsenault approached the editors and told them he had written Craig Price and that Price had agreed to talk to him. Price was in prison in Cranston, buried there by the judicial and correctional system that has kept him locked away. He would have been free at 21 under the juvenile-justice laws that prevailed at the time of his crimes had authorities not found ways around the law. Only the civil libertarians cared. The rest of us would be happy never to have him on the streets again.

My reflex was to say, no. To explain to Mark, who was not here 14 years ago, how traumatic the case had been. To forget it. However that is not what newspaper people do. We talk to all kinds of people -- to governors and mobsters, mothers and hookers, bishops and killers. We take you places you cannot go -- the back of a Bradley on the road to Baghdad, behind the doors of the State House, and, in this case, inside the mind of a killer.

So I said OK, and Mark continued with a year of extraordinary interviews with Craig Price. Price told Mark his story and shared his writings.

Mark came to The Journal as an experienced reporter. A graduate of Assumption College, he worked on his hometown newspaper in Gardner, Mass., and at The Lowell Sun before joining us in 1998. When he first began this story, Mark was working in the West Bay office and in Warwick, where Price lived and comitted the murders. Mark has worked on it for more than a year, being transferred to the State House bureau and then to Station fire coverage before completing the story last month.

Mark has contacted members of the Spencer and Heaton families to tell them that he is doing the story and to alert them to its publication.

From the point of view of a journalist, Mark has achieved excellence in his reporting and writing. If you chose to read Mark's work, you will know what happened and you will know what Craig Price says about why it happened. Still no reason can justify those crimes, and knowledge is not solace.