A convicted rapist who escaped an Arkansas prison on a jet ski last year was recaptured in West Virginia.

Samuel Paul Hartman, 39, was arrested Tuesday at a hotel in Lewisburg along with his wife, 39-year-old Misty Hartman; his mother, Linda Annette White, 61; and his mother’s boyfriend, Rodney Trent, 52, the U.S. Marshals Service said.

Hartman was convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison in 2013.

The women are accused of plotting and carrying out Hartman’s escape from an Arkansas prison in August 2022. While on work detail in a field near the East Arkansas Regional Unit detention facility in Brickeys, the women drove up in a pickup truck and started shooting at corrections officers.

Hartman got into the truck and drove to a pair of jet skis that were waiting on the Mississippi River.

The watercraft were found abandoned on the Mississippi side of the river and a witness reported seeing a man and two women riding them.

Investigators later tracked them to West Virginia.

Trent faces charges for harboring a sex offender and for assisting the trio while they were on the lam.

“Today’s capture was the result of deliberate and determined law enforcement work,” Joe Profiri, secretary of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, said in a statement.

“The United States Marshals Service, Arkansas State Police, and the Arkansas Department of Corrections have kept this case on the forefront and followed hundreds of leads over the course of the last year. We appreciate the support and assistance from all agencies involved, the Arkansas Governor’s office, and the State of West Virginia in bringing this case to a successful conclusion.”

The four are expected to be extradited to Arkansas.

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