By Andrew DeMillo, Jeff Martin and Safiyah Riddle | Associated Press

Arkansas authorities are looking at whether a job in the prison kitchen played a role in the 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 Calico Rock prison from which he escaped on Sunday by donning an outfit designed to look like a law enforcement uniform, Arkansas Department of Corrections spokesperson Rand Champion told The Associated Press on Thursday. But Hardin also held a job in the kitchen of the medium-security facility.

“His job assignment was in the kitchen, so just looking to see if that played a part in it as well,” Champion said.

The kitchen is divided into two shifts of workers, with about 25 inmates working each shift, according to a 2021 accreditation report, which 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 of land on the sprawling prison campus. The prison grounds include a garden, two greenhouses, and extensive pastureland 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 whether there were 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’s what their motivation is.”

Local, state and federal law enforcement continued their search for Hardin on Thursday, 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.

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.

Related Articles

Crypto crime spills over from behind the screen to real-life violence

Santa Cruz County resident detained by ICE, advocacy group reports

Author of ‘pH Miracle’ books sentenced to prison in California medical treatments case. ‘A fraud and a charlatan.’

Father caught therapist molesting autistic boy at their California home, prosecutors allege

California man indicted after allegedly stealing more than $4 million in investment scheme

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 in an interview this week.

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