A bloodhound picked up the scent shortly after the “ Devil in the Ozarks ” escaped from a lockup in northern Arkansas. The hound didn’t have to go far to begin the hunt — it lives at the prison as part of a specialized unit that uses man’s best friend to help track fugitives.
Although the scent of convicted killer Grant Hardin was lost because of heavy rain, experts say that even days after Sunday’s escape, the animal’s highly developed sense of small can still pick up a fresh trail.
Bloodhounds are known for being tenacious trackers, said Brian Tierney, president of the National Police Bloodhound Association. They’re playing a key role in the search for Hardin, now in its sixth day.
They also save lives, as one young bloodhound did just two weeks ago in Maine. Millie, a 10-month-old hound tracked a 5-year-old girl with autism who went missing from her home on May 16, Maine State Police said. The dog found the girl waist-deep in water in a cedar swamp, the agency said. Authorities credited Millie’s dedication and “incredible nose” for saving the girl.
Bad weather confounded the hunt for Hardin, who was serving a 30-year sentence for murder when he escaped from the North Central Unit, a medium-security prison in Calico Rock, Arkansas.
The hound found – then lost – Hardin’s scent when heavy rains blew through the area, said state prison spokesman Rand Champion. Hardin was tracked for less than a quarter of a mile when the bloodhound lost the trail. The fugitive could have gone in any direction after that.
“That was one of the most frustrating things, that they were able to track him but then they lost him because of the rain,” Champion said.
A tip that Hardin was sighted in southern Missouri has been ruled out, Champion said Friday. Until authorities find evidence that he’s left the area around the prison, they assume that he’s still in that vicinity, he said.
Hardin took almost nothing with him and left behind plenty of clothes, bedsheets and other items that are used to familiarize the bloodhounds with his scent, Champion said. Those items are shared with the dogs to give them the initial scent of the person they are seeking, Tierney said. It’s a process that’s standard operating procedure for Arkansas’ prison dogs.
Who is Grant Hardin?
A former police chief in the small town of Gateway near the Arkansas-Missouri border, Hardin had been held at the Calico Rock prison since 2017 after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in a fatal shooting for which he was serving a 30-year sentence.
Hardin’s DNA was matched to the 1997 rape of a teacher at an elementary school in Rogers, north of Fayetteville. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison for that crime. Eventually, his notoriety led to a TV documentary, “Devil in the Ozarks.”
Champion said that someone should have checked Hardin’s identity before he was allowed to leave, describing the lack of verification as a “lapse” that is being investigated.
Bloodhounds live at Calico Rock prison
Authorities haven’t disclosed how many dogs are involved in the manhunt, but the Calico Rock prison is known for its bloodhounds that live in a kennel on prison property. The nearly one dozen dogs at the prison have helped many other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to track a variety of people over the years, according to a 2021 state audit report on the prison.
Southern prisons have a long history of keeping bloodhounds around in case of escapes, like the one featured in country artist Blake Shelton’s song “Ol’ Red,” about a hound that hunts escaped inmates with “a nose that could smell a two-day trail.”
Dogs in Arkansas’ prison system have also been used to help other agencies find people who are not dangerous, such as missing children, people with special needs or elderly people, Champion said.
The bloodhounds tend to raise a ruckus when they find their mark. But the prison system uses other types of dogs in searching for children and vulnerable people who go missing, and those dogs tend to lick people and make friends with them when they are found, Champion said.
Fugitives use spices, other means to foil bloodhounds
Fugitives being hunted by bloodhounds have been known to take extreme steps to throw the dogs off their trail, Tierney said.
Two convicted killers who broke out of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York in 2015 collected dozens of containers of black and cayenne pepper before their escape. They had intended to use the pepper “to interfere with tracking dogs they assumed would be part of a manhunt for them after the escape,” a state investigation found. One of the men was shot and killed during the manhunt; another was also shot but survived and was captured.
Tierney said he’s heard of other methods used by fugitives to evade tracking dogs. Among them: Sleeping in trees could allow one’s scent to disperse before reaching the ground, he said.
Hardin has troubled past in law enforcement
In his first job as a police officer 35 years ago in the college town of Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas, Hardin struggled almost immediately, his supervisors said. “Other recruits do not like Grant,” one wrote in a performance review.
After a few months on the job, most shift supervisors concluded that he was “not suited for police work,” Fayetteville’s police chief at the time wrote to the director of the state commission on enforcement standards in the spring of 1991.
But after being dismissed by Fayetteville police, he kept getting hired for other law enforcement jobs in northwest Arkansas. In documents and interviews, other police leaders echoed what Fayetteville’s police chief had said — that Grant should not have become a police officer.
By the time he was the police chief in the small town of Gateway in 2016, “he was out chasing cars for no reason,” Cheryl Tillman, the town’s current mayor, recalled in the documentary “Devil in the Ozarks.”
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Associated Press Writer Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed.
