He was born in London and apprenticed at an early age to a dealer in "scraps and rags" until the death of his master two years later.
[1] Price appears to have lived constantly on the edge of the law; on one occasion in 1715, after executing three men at Tyburn, he was arrested for debt.
His earnings, tips, and sales that day helped him to avoid prison, but eventually his financial problems led to his imprisonment in Marshalsea, in Southwark, London.
Shortly afterwards in 1718 he killed a man,[2] and then savagely attacked and beat a woman named Elizabeth White in Bunhill Fields; she died of her injuries four days later.
The Weekly Journal reported an account by the hangman that a few days before Price's execution he had raped a young girl who had taken food to his cell.