A former police chief was in prison for murder and rape. His escape has left a small town on edge and reopened old wounds

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The town of Gateway lies on US Highway 62, a two-lane highway in the northwest corner of Arkansas, less than a mile from the Missouri border in the Ozarks.

As of the 2020 census, only 436 people lived there. It’s the kind of town where everybody knows everybody, locals say.

Which might explain how, in 2017, when a detective responded to reports of a man who had been shot and killed sitting in his truck on the side of the road, a witness was able to immediately identify the shooter.

“His name is Grant Hardin,” the witness told the Benton County Sheriff’s Office detective, according to a probable cause affidavit.

The witness told the detective that Hardin used to work for the G