Calico Rock, Arkansas — A former Arkansas police commander spent decades in jail for murder and rape escaped on Sunday, according to state prisons officials.
Grant Hardin, the former police chief of Gateway, a small town near the Arkansas-Missouri border, escaped from the North Central Unit at Calico Rock, where he had been detained since 2017. Corrections officials could not disclose any information about how he escaped.
The Division of Correction and the Division of Community Correction are following the lead of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.
In October 2017, Hardin pled guilty to first-degree murder in connection with the shooting death of James Appleton, aged 59. According to an affidavit submitted in the case, Appleton worked for the Gateway water department and was speaking with his brother-in-law, then-Gateway Mayor Andrew Tillman, when he was shot in the head on February 23, 2017, near Garfield. Police discovered Appleton’s body inside a car.
Hardin, who served as Gateway’s police chief for about four months in early 2016, received a 30-year prison sentence. He is also serving a 50-year prison sentence for the 1997 rape of an elementary school teacher in Rogers, north of Fayetteville.
KFSM-TV reported on his guilty plea in 2019, stating that investigators utilized DNA evidence from the crime scene to petition for a John Doe Warrant in 2003, as the statute of limitations approached. When Hardin was imprisoned for the murder of Appleton, detectives discovered a match between his DNA and old and new profiles.