Authorities eyeing whether a kitchen job had a role in the 'Devil in the Ozarks' prison escape

CALICO ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas authorities are looking at whether a job in the prison kitchen played a role in the weekend escape of a convicted former police chief known as the ''Devil in the Ozarks.''

Grant Hardin, 56, was housed in a maximum-security wing of the medium-security Calico Rock prison, where he also held a job in the kitchen, Arkansas Department of Corrections spokesperson Rand Champion said Thursday. Authorities have said Hardin escaped Sunday by donning an outfit designed to look like a law enforcement uniform.

''His job assignment was in the kitchen, so just looking to see if that played a part in it as well,'' Champion told The Associated Press.

The kitchen is divided into two shifts of about 25 workers each, according to a 2021 accreditation report that involved an extensive review of the prison. In the kitchen, ''tools and utensils were stored on shadow boards with proper controls for sign out/in of all tools,'' the report states. ''A check of the inventory control sheets found them to be accurate and up to date.''

The kitchen is in one of 16 buildings on over 700 acres (280 hectares) of prison land. The sprawling grounds include a garden, two greenhouses, and extensive pasture lands where a herd of more than 100 horses is raised and trained by staff and inmates.

Hardin, the former police chief in the small town of Gateway near the Arkansas-Missouri border, was serving lengthy sentences for murder and rape. He was the subject of the TV documentary ''Devil in the Ozarks.''

A prison expert said corrections officials are likely investigating whether the kitchen job gave Hardin access to other parts of the prison or to tools in the kitchen that could have helped him, including fashioning the makeshift uniform.

Bryce Peterson, a criminal justice expert at security-based research organization CNA, said prison escapes are usually a combination of motivation and opportunity.

''You wouldn't immediately think of a kitchen as a source of a bunch of escape tools,'' Peterson said. ''But these people are really smart and what they're thinking about day in and day out is how they can escape if that's what their motivation is.''

Local, state and federal law enforcement are continuing their search for Hardin, and the FBI announced Thursday it was offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to his arrest. Champion said officials remained confident that Hardin was in the north-central Arkansas area.

Officials have said there are plenty of hideouts in the Ozark Mountains area, from caves to campsites.

Authorities on Thursday continued to stop cars at a checkpoint near Calico Rock, and fliers featuring photos of Hardin could be seen in local store windows.

Elsewhere Thursday, a sheriff's office in southern Missouri said it had received a report of a sighting of someone resembling Hardin's description in the Moody/Bakersfield area, less than an hour's drive north of Calico Rock.

Deputies with the Howell County Sheriff's Office responded but were unable to locate anyone though agents were continuing to canvass the area, the agency said in a Facebook post.

''At this time, we have no information indicating with any degree of certainty this suspicious person was the escapee or that he is even in the state of Missouri,'' the post said.

Champion said Arkansas authorities were aware of the tip and were looking into it.

The department late Wednesday said search teams also responded to Faulkner County in the central Arkansas area after receiving a tip.

Champion did not immediately know how many other inmates were housed in the prison's maximum-security wing.

Hardin's assignment to the prison, formally known as the North Central Unit, has drawn questions from legislators in the area and family members of the former chief's victims.

Hardin received culinary training at some point during his incarceration, said Cheryl Tillman, whose brother James Appleton was shot to death by Hardin in 2017.

Tillman said she was aware that Hardin had been working in the kitchen at the Calico Rock prison and questioned why he would be allowed to do so.

''It sounds like to me that he was given free range down there,'' she said this week during an interview.

Now that he's free, ''it makes it uneasy for all of us, the whole family,'' she said.

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DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Arkansas, Martin from Atlanta, and Riddle from Montgomery, Alabama.