Police and prison officials are searching for an inmate who escaped from a north Arkansas prison while “wearing a makeshift outfit designed to mimic law enforcement,” the Arkansas Department of Corrections said Sunday.
Grant Hardin, 56, escaped from the North Central Unit in Calico Rock (Izard County) around 3:40 p.m. Sunday. He’s been an inmate at the prison since 2017, where he is serving a 30-year sentence for first-degree murder and a separate sentence for rape.
Hardin has a background in law enforcement. According to a 2018 report by KHBS 40/29 News, he was an officer with police departments in Fayetteville, Huntsville and Eureka Springs from 1990 to 1996. Hardin was elected constable in Benton County in 2008 and 2012, and in 2016 was hired as police chief for Gateway, a small Benton County town on the Missouri state line, though he resigned a few months later.
Hardin worked as a guard at a women’s prison in Fayetteville until February 2017, when he was arrested for shooting and killing a man in Gateway. After he pleaded guilty to that murder, Hardin’s DNA was linked to a cold case from Benton County from 20 years earlier — the rape of a teacher at a Rogers elementary school in November 1997.
The teacher, Amy Harrison, was working alone in her classroom on a Sunday morning. After she used the bathroom in the teachers’ lounge down the hall, she opened the door to find a man wearing a ski hat and sunglasses who forced her back into the bathroom at gunpoint. No suspects were identified at the time, but authorities did collect DNA evidence from semen left at the crime scene; two decades later, it matched with Grant Hardin.
Hardin pleaded guilty to two counts of rape in 2019, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported at the time, and was sentenced to another 50 years in prison.
The case was the subject of a 2023 TV documentary called “Devil in the Ozarks” produced by Investigation Discovery, a subscription TV network dedicated to true crime.
Hardin is about 6 feet tall and weighs around 259 pounds, according to a notice from the Department of Corrections. The Izard County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook he was last seen wearing “a black hat, black pants and black top” and distributed a picture that appears to be a screenshot from prison security footage; it shows Hardin pushing a cart loaded with supplies while wearing his makeshift disguise. (The state prison spokesman said it was not an official Department of Corrections uniform and that “all DOC-issued equipment has been accounted for.”)
