Authorities are hunting for a former police chief who escaped from a prison in Calico Rock, Arkansas, on Sunday. Grant Hardin, 56, is serving a 30-year sentence for first-degree murder and an additional 50-year sentence on rape charges. No details of how Hardin escaped have been released. Hardin was the police chief of Gateway, Arkansas—near the Arkansas-Missouri border—in 2016. In October 2017, Hardin pleaded guilty to the shooting death of James Appleton, who worked for the Gateway water department, who was killed in February of that year. Hardin was sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 2019 he pleaded guilty to the 1997 rape of an elementary school teacher, after police accessed DNA samples from the Appleton crime scene. The case had been cold for nearly two decades. Anyone with information about Hardin’s whereabouts should contact local law enforcement immediately.
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