Police are combing the Mountains in Arkansas after a prison guard cleared the way for the killer and rapist known as the “Devil in the Ozarks” to walk out of jail while disguised as a law enforcement officer.
Fugitive Grant Hardin, 56, the former police chief of Gateway, has plunged the area into terror after he walked out of the North Central Unit prison, in Calico Rock, on Sunday while inconspicuously pushing a cart full of utility materials.
As the manhunt enters its third day, the Arkansas Department of Corrections is also investigating the “lapse” in security that allowed Hardin to be let out through the gate by a prison officer without any verification.
AP
Prison officials took about 30 minutes to notice that Hardin had escaped. The guard who let Hardin through the gate has yet to be publicly identified.
Hardin was the subject of the TV documentary “Devil in the Ozarks,” which aired on Max in 2023.
Hardin is believed to be prowling somewhere in the Ozark Mountains, a vast forest area littered with hundreds of caves, abandoned cabins and campsites, many of which are familiar to the fugitive, according to those who knew him.
“[He] knows where the caves are,” Darla Nix, a cafe owner in Pea Ridge whose sons grew up around Hardin, told The Associated Press.
She described the disgraced officer as a “very, very smart” man who will do whatever it takes to survive.
The ADC said police are focusing on the area’s cave systems in the search for the fugitive.
“That’s one of the challenges of this area — there are a lot of places to hide and take shelter, a lot of abandoned sheds, and there are a lot of caves in this area, so that’s been a priority for the search team,” said ADC spokesperson Rand Champion.
Authorities have deployed canine units, drones and helicopters as sheriffs of several counties search across the Arkansas Ozarks for the fugitive.
There are nearly 2,000 documented caves in northern Arkansas, state officials say.
Hardin, who is considered extremely dangerous, was serving a 30 year sentence for the 2017 murder of James Appleton, 59, a Gateway water department employee.
Appleton was on the phone with his brother-in-law and Gateway’s then-mayor Andrew Tillman when Hardin shot him in the back of the head with a shotgun.
Appleton’s sister and Gateway’s current mayor, Cheryl Tillman, said she was distraught when she learned that Hardin broke out of prison.
“I was sitting at my house, and my phone’s blowing up, and I finally look at it, and it tells us that Grant Hardin had escaped prison, and it just seemed like my heart just quit beating,” she told 5News.
Tillman described Hardin as a vile man given his criminal actions and checkered history as an officer, which includes multiple firings over allegations of excessive force, poor performance and falsifying police records.
He served as police chief in Gateway, a town of fewer than 450 people, for just four months in 2016.
“He’s just an evil man,” the mayor said, adding that her family was afraid he could return to Gateway to commit more crimes.
While incarcerated for Appleton’s murder, Hardin’s DNA was tested and linked to a 1997 rape case that saw an elementary school teacher sexually assaulted at gunpoint inside a school bathroom while a community church service occured down the hall.
Hardin pleaded guilty to rape and kidnapping in 2018, with a judge sentencing him to an additional 50 years in jail.
With Post wires
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