True Crime Chronicles:Two men are serving long sentences for a home invasion murder in March 2016

Clifton Randy Jackson lived in Havana, a small Yell County town in the Arkansas River Valley.

On March 28, 2016, he was shot and killed at his home during what sheriff’s investigators later described as an attempted burglary. A relative found his body. He was not a public figure. News accounts treated him as a private homeowner killed where he lived, which is how most people in a place that size experience a homicide.

There was no widely published portrait of a high-risk lifestyle, a public feud, or a named personal enemy. The case read as a home-invasion killing of an ordinary resident.

Three men were arrested in early April 2016 and held in Danville. They were Michael Douglas Gargis, then 28, of Danville; Sean Mathis Tyra, then 23, of Havana; and Robert Michael McCowan, then 19, of Russellville.

Chief Deputy John Foster said the expected charges included first-degree murder, aggravated residential burglary, and possession of firearms by certain persons. Bond was set at $1 million each.

Authorities said at least two of the suspects were armed. They also said the suspects stated Jackson was killed during a burglary attempt of his home and that he posed no immediate threat to them at the time.

The motive presented by law enforcement was the burglary itself. No contemporaneous public report laid out a long personal history between Jackson and McCowan. The state’s theory, later reflected in the convictions, was that the group went to the house to break in and that Jackson was killed in the course of that attempt.

McCowan was sentenced on May 18, 2017, to 336 months for first-degree murder and 240 months for residential burglary. The Arkansas Division of Correction received him on May 19, 2017, as ADC number 167163.

Gargis was handled in a companion Yell County file, 2016-22, and was sentenced on March 2, 2017, as a habitual offender to 660 months for first-degree murder and 240 months for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

McCowan’s inmate sheet current as of September 20, 2026, places him at Tucker Unit, custody class C2, good-time class I-C, with a projected parole or transfer eligibility date of November 10, 2035, and listed total time of 28 years. He has one ADC incarceration and no prior prison history on that sheet.