When QAnon Comes to Main Street: Investigating the Millersville Police Department and its ‘conspiracy cop’
MILLERSVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — The official website for the City of Millersville declares this community of about 6,000 residents to be “Tennessee’s best-kept secret.”
In fact, for most travelers heading north on Interstate 65, just outside of Nashville, the only hint of having visited Millersville comes when they glance into their rearview mirrors, spotting the blue lights of the unmarked police SUVs that run radar in the narrow sliver of highway that the town claims as its jurisdiction — and as a steady source of revenue.
But, these days, Millersville is gaining national attention for an approach to governing that democracy advocates fear. Here, conspiracy theorists carry guns and badges, using their police powers to explore notions that are sometimes completely divorced from reality.
“It’s a terrifying story that offers a perfect picture of what we face nationally as more law enforcement and military members fall into the rabbit hole of conspiracy and hate,” said Fred Wellman, host of the popular podcast On Democracy with FBWellman.
“We have relied on people in power being sane and motivated by good. We are through the looking glass, and we keep finding that the systems and laws in place are completely ill-fit to handle this influx of insanity.”
Now, four months after an exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation first began raising questions about what was happening inside the Millersville Police Department, the agency finds itself at the center of a criminal probe by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
The TBI, according to the Millersville police chief, has limited the department’s access to sensitive U.S. Department of Treasury data regarding Americans’ banking records amid concerns about the possible misuse of that information.
And, earlier this month, TBI agents executed simultaneous searches inside the Millersville Police Department, as well as the residence of the department’s conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor.
Watch my story about the TBI raids in video player above.
District attorneys for Robertson and Sumner counties – Millersville straddles the two jurisdictions – confirmed that they authorized the TBI investigations into the embattled police department following questions raised by NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
One prong of the ongoing TBI investigation focuses on the potential misuse of sensitive law enforcement data by Millersville police to investigate their political enemies, while the other focuses on what appears to have been a botched child-predator sting and possible perjury by the lead detective in that case.
Still, those developments have only intensified the concerns of democracy advocates as Millersville police — and Shawn Taylor in particular — have achieved near-martyrdom status among QAnon-aligned voices of the far right.
QAnon represents a conspiracy-driven movement — originally based on the online postings of an anonymous figure identified only as “Q” — that believes Donald Trump was waging a war against a cabal of elitist, Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
Since the raids, Shawn Taylor’s QAnon-associated allies have accused the TBI of being part of the corruption they imagine, along with the judge and one of the district attorneys who authorized the searches. Some have even accused the TBI of “protecting pedophiles” — a claim that overlooks the fact that the state’s top law enforcement agency has the most aggressive human trafficking enforcement team in Tennessee.
In response to the raids, Taylor produced a three-minute video that has been viewed millions of times on social media. In it, he claimed the TBI targeted his investigation into “major corruption that’s transnational” and “a multifaceted attack from a foreign adversary who is paying off our local, municipal, county, state and federal politicians.”
It’s a conspiracy that, he insisted, stretches from tiny Millersville, through the nation’s capital, around the globe to China.
Podcaster Kim Yeater — the bespectacled, Bible-quoting election denier — has declared the Millersville situation “the biggest corruption story in America.”
🚨🚨🚨Mass U.S. Corruption: Assistant Chief Shawn Taylor of Millersville, TN Police Department Tells All!!!🚨🚨🚨 pic.twitter.com/BfKubqYD7f
— Kim Yeater | Take Your Power Back Show (@RealKimYeater) September 9, 2024
Former U.S. Army Gen. Michael Flynn amplified the concerns, posting on social media that “there must be people way up the chain who must be seriously compromised for the TBI and other LE (law enforcement) agencies to have taken this step.”
Likewise, former Navy SEAL Craig “Sawman” Sawyer, a self-appointed pedophile hunter, has launched a verbal war against the TBI and anyone who questions the activities of Millersville police. He has falsely suggested that this reporter may be tied to an organized crime network that he believes must control the Nashville area.
He also theorizes that this reporter may be a pedophile, perhaps a member of a pedophile ring or a satanic cult.
And GOP election denier Mark Finchem, a member of the militia group Oath Keepers, responded with his own “investigation,” insisting his team “has also made a connection between child sex trafficking and highly placed political figures, and media personalities” — including this reporter — “and law enforcement agents.”
Finchem also published a list of the TBI agents involved in the search of Taylor’s residence and challenged them to come forward with information about their bosses.
“Our suggestion to all who are involved in this malicious abuse of law enforcement, prosecutorial, and judicial authority, if you choose to be a witness, contact us, and we will help you document what you know for the criminal prosecution of others,” Finchem wrote. “If you choose to be a suspect, get a good lawyer, because you’ll need one.”
For a podcaster and writer who tracks conspiracy theories, the story — and the response from Taylor’s allies — has been a cautionary tale about “what might happen if far-right conspiracy theorists are given power at a much larger scale.”
“What would people like Shawn Taylor be capable of if there was no Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to keep them in check?” asked Liv Agar, who recently did a deep dive into the controversy for the popular QAA Podcast.
“Would they attempt to arrest their political enemies under the guise that they were fighting sex trafficking? If they believed they were able to successfully pull it off, I have a hard time thinking of why the answer to the latter question would not be ‘yes.'”
Who is Shawn Taylor?
At the center of the controversies surrounding the Millersville Police Department is the assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor. After having been fired from the agency after just a few months on the job in 2016, Taylor returned to the department in February 2024.
That came after his friend, Bryan Morris, became the town’s third police chief in about a year following a series of controversies fueled, in part, through behind-the-scenes efforts by Taylor and his allies.
As NewsChannel 5 first reported back in May, Taylor, 50, is a self-described “gypsy cop” who has bounced from one police department to another over the last 20 years. By his own admissions, Taylor’s tenure in those various jobs has often been shortened by his desire to investigate vast criminal conspiracies that he claims to have uncovered along the way.
“You don’t become a gypsy cop going from agency to agency. You just, you don’t do it. It’s bad. But it was to the point that that’s what was forced on me,” Taylor said in a podcast interview two years ago when he was between police jobs.
“Every time I will go to an agency and start digging, they will always, as soon as I start showing them everything, they will shut me down.”
Prior to returning to Millersville, Taylor expressed support for the discredited Pizzagate conspiracy theory that Democrats kept child sex slaves locked up inside a D.C. pizza parlor.
In various far-right podcasts, he has claimed — without evidence — to have information about “kids that are actively being smuggled, being chained to walls, that are being raped,” and he claimed to have linked many of the nation’s most prominent political and financial figures to drug trafficking, money laundering and child sex trafficking.
In his mind, the late President George H.W. Bush enlisted Bill and Hillary Clinton into his transnational criminal network.
“Old man Bush is the king. He’s the ringleader. He’s the one that got all of this stuff happening,” Taylor said.
That’s why, he claimed, that then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton picked Tennessee’s Al Gore as his running mate.
“That was the reason he became vice president,” Taylor said in one podcast.
The interviewer followed up, “Because he was trafficking drugs and kids back then? No kidding?”
“Because he was involved in it. His family was involved in it. They were steeped in it for generations.”
Taylor also claimed — with zero evidence — that Gore and a prominent Tennessee banker were involved in the disappearance and murder of 20-year-old Holly Bobo in West Tennessee in 2011. In fact, prosecutors secured convictions against two local suspects.
“Yeah, Al Gore, you’re a piece of sh*t — just so you know,” Taylor proclaimed, looking into the camera during a December 2023 podcast.
And Taylor gave voice to what he would do if he was ever given a gun and a badge again.
“If I was still in law enforcement, and I wasn’t retired, I would be seeking search warrants,” he said in one podcast. “I would be seeking arrest warrants and/or indictments, and we would be kicking people’s asses.”
Still, none of those unorthodox claims kept him from being re-hired earlier this year at the Millersville Police Department, where officials say he passed a psychological examination.
After Taylor declined NewsChannel 5’s request for an interview, we tracked him down outside the Millersville Police Department.
“Some of your theories are so bizarre. Are you worried about them affecting your credibility?” NewsChannel 5 asked as Taylor continued to walk away.
“I have no worries about that,” he insisted.
In one podcast, again before he returned to law enforcement, Taylor had also expressed doubts about the March 2023 shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School that left six dead.
He suggested bodycam video of the police response might have been staged, while falsely claiming to have uncovered evidence that one of the victims, headmaster Katherine Koonce, was involved in child trafficking.
Koonce’s friend, Anna Caudill, wept as she watched video from the podcast.
“It’s indecent,” Caudill said.
Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake called Taylor’s claims “patently false.”
NewsChannel 5 legal analyst Nick Leonardo, a veteran lawyer and former judge, said Taylor’s own words will be used to tear apart any case brought by the Millersville Police Department, which could mean that actual criminals will go free.
“He is a defense attorney’s dream,” Leonardo said.
Still, Taylor has the support of Police Chief Bryan Morris, along with three of the five members of the Millersville City Commission, in a community where the far-right Sumner County Constitutional Republicans hold enormous sway.
The SCCR was formed out of the conviction that today’s Republican Party itself remains far too liberal for its members’ tastes.
Mayor Tommy Long insisted he was not concerned about any views Taylor may have expressed on far-right podcasts when he was not working for Millersville police.
“He wasn’t an employee at that time,” Long said.
NewsChannel 5 followed up, “But is that the type of person who should have arrest power in Millersville?”
“I think Shawn Taylor is a very good police officer,” the mayor replied.
‘Operation Clean Sweep’
On April 23, 2024, at a meeting of the Millersville City Commission, Taylor announced the beginning of what he called “Operation Clean Sweep.”
That night, police arrested former Millersville Mayor Tim Lassiter for issuing a building permit for renovations to a town fire hall that, according to the arrest warrant, he knew did not meet the qualifications for the permit.
Lassiter has pleaded not guilty to the criminal simulation charge.
On another far-right podcast, this time with him in his capacity as assistant police chief, Taylor was asked how Lassiter’s arrest was “tied, or connected to, with the greater story that you are investigating with regards to child sex trafficking.”
“Well, basically our department has started doing investigations into numerous things,” Taylor answered, explaining the connections he sees between child sex trafficking and those involved in real estate development.
Eventually, he clarified, “And I’m not saying that the former mayor is involved in sex trafficking, by any means.”
A month after that arrest, Taylor brought a group of self-appointed pedophile hunters to Millersville to help the department run a child-predator sting in which they would pose online as minors and wait for sexually depraved individuals to make advances toward them.
That group, Veterans for Child Rescue (V4CR), was founded by former Navy SEAL Craig “Sawman” Sawyer after several stints in reality television.
Sawyer was linked to a 2018 uproar in Tucson in which he claimed to have discovered “a child rape camp.”
Tucson police said it was nothing more than an abandoned homeless encampment.
While Sawyer rejects the QAnon label, he routinely spouts all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories about a secretive organization, or cabal, engaged in the “torture, rape, organ harvesting and ritual murder” of children.
Decrying the “Satanic pedos” who “run America,” Sawyer sometimes blames “the Rothschilds,” George Soros, “international banking families” and “Luciferian Jews” for the troubles he sees in the country and in the world — although he insists he’s not anti-Semitic.
Along with Veterans for Child Rescue, photos posted by Shawn Taylor showed the team for the child-predator sting also included a number of MAGA activists.
From the beginning, however, there were red flags.
Red flags
Recordings and text messages provided by former V4CR employee Kim Kelley show Taylor had been warned by a prosecutor that under Tennessee law, any cases developed during the sting would stick only if it were members of law enforcement posing as minors.
Despite those admonitions, Kelley said, Taylor and Sawyer decided that members of Veterans for Child Rescue would do the posing — as long as officers were in the room. Recordings provided by Kelley show her and other volunteers doing the chatting in the online apps and debriefing with the detectives about the fruits of their efforts.
Still, our NewsChannel 5 investigation discovered that when the one arrest from the case went to court, lead detective Todd Dorris testified under oath that he and another Millersville detective had done all the work.
“It does not represent the truth of what really happened during that operation,” Kelley told NewsChannel 5 after listening to audio of Dorris’ testimony.
That sting — and the question about whether a sworn police officer may have committed perjury — is one of the issues that the TBI is investigating.
Appearing on yet another far-right podcast, Millersville Police Chief Bryan Morris insisted NewsChannel 5’s report was not true.
Asked about this reporter’s interest in the sting, Morris answered, “You know, the only thing I can think of is: you are a pedophile, or you are covering for somebody that is.”
“That’s the only reason I can come up with.”
Sawyer, likewise, has brushed aside NewsChannel 5’s questions. Instead, he accused us of blocking an additional 70 warrants from being served against child predators who engaged with the online personas during the sting operation.
There has been no official confirmation for the claim of 70 additional warrants.
“Phil is panicking,” Sawyer posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “What he’s trying to hide cannot remain hidden any longer – child trafficking and other organized crime in Nashville.”
‘Millersville Monkey Business’
Two of the five Millersville city commissioners, David Gregory and Cristina Templet, have unsuccessfully pushed for a public airing of questions about how Taylor was hired.
Those efforts have been rebuffed by the majority.
Gregory also unsuccessfully pushed for a public apology for Taylor’s comments about The Covenant School shooting.
“I think Shawn Taylor needs to apologize to the Covenant victims,” Gregory said.
“He needs to apologize to the victims’ family at the Covenant shooting and also Metro Police for what he said about them.”
Again, the police chief and city commission ignored those pleas.
Instead, Taylor claimed on one far-right podcast that he had Gregory and Templet under criminal investigation as part of “Operation Clean Sweep.”
And the dissident duo has repeatedly been mocked and accused of wrongdoing by accounts using fictitious names on a Facebook group — named “Millersville Monkey Business” — that routinely defends current police officials and excoriates their enemies.
As former Mayor Tim Lassiter was being arrested back in April, an anonymous participant posted a meme of a broom to the Facebook group, along with the text “Operation Clean Sweep, Brought to you by The Coup Crew.”
“The time has come,” the caption added.
Another account — using the name “Dewayne Rock Johnson” (since shortened to “Rock Johnson”) — posted video of the TBI search of the Millersville Police Department.
NewsChannel 5’s own cameras had recorded video of Police Chief Bryan Morris capturing that exact moment on camera using his smartphone.
It is not known how the video got from the police chief to the “Dewayne Rock Johnson” account, but that same fictitious Facebook persona later suggested the idea of holding a public meeting outside TBI headquarters in Nashville to protest the raids.
“We would like to ask if any of the ‘campaign contributions’ to the DAs of Robertson and Sumner counties had anything to do with this,” the account posted. “Cristina Templet and David Gregory, you two need to just go. I hope you two leave and never run for politics again. I wouldn’t want to see you two imbeciles running a lemonade stand.”
And yet another anonymous account, known only as “Roy,” has posted videos and memes lambasting this reporter and accusing me of “protecting child predators.”
Such attacks are straight out of the conspiracy theorist playbook, said the podcaster Liv Agar.
“Right-wing conspiracy theorists generally have a small list of cliches they fire off to deflect from valid scrutiny,” Agar continued.
“They believe that anyone who disagrees with them and finds their views abhorrent must secretly be complicit in the evil conspiracy theory they imagine they are fighting.
“They tend to do this because any admission that reasonable people might disagree with them about the existence of these conspiracy theories is unacceptable, as these theories have become a core component of their worldview.”
Our NewsChannel 5 investigation continues.
Here is how this investigation has unfolded:
Part One: Meet Millersville’s conspiracy cop. He believes the completely bogus QAnon conspiracy theory that falsely claimed Democrats had kept child sex slaves locked up in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.
He imagines sinister plots involving some of the country’s most prominent political figures, including his theory — with no evidence whatsoever — that former Vice President Al Gore was involved in the disappearance and murder of 20-year-old Holly Bobo in 2011.
Taylor recently landed in Millersville as assistant police chief, promising to root out the corruption he sees there.
You can continue reading at this hyperlink.
Part Two: The controversy over Millersville’s conspiracy cop, first uncovered by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, has now become the latest scandal rocking the tiny town just north of Nashville.
Now, two city commissioners want a special meeting to figure out how Shawn Taylor landed his job as the city’s assistant police chief.
At the center of the controversy: Do Millersville residents want a high-ranking police official — with a gun, badge and the power to arrest people — who believes in bizarre conspiracy theories with no real evidence to back them up?
You can continue reading Part Two at this link.
Part Three: An attorney for Millersville conspiracy cop Shawn Taylor has told Millersville’s city commission, whom he also represents, that they should not question the assistant police chief’s bizarre theories or psychological fitness because his client Shawn Taylor could sue his other client, the city.
The attorney’s advice, delivered in an email sent Thursday, responded to a request from two city commissioners for a special meeting to review Taylor’s hiring following NewsChannel 5’s investigation of the self-described “gypsy cop.”
“Interrogating Assistant Chief Taylor about his political viewpoints or political speech will violate his First Amendment rights and thereby expose the City to significant legal liability…,” wrote Bryant Kroll.
You can read more of this installment at this link.
Part Four: Anna Caudill agreed to watch the video of Shawn Taylor knowing there might be only so much she could handle.
“So we’ll start this,” I reassured her, “and then, when you’ve had enough, you just stop it.”
In the podcast video uncovered by NewsChannel 5 Investigates, Taylor shared bogus conspiracy theories about Nashville’s Covenant School shooting. Now the assistant police chief in Millersville, Taylor was between police jobs at the time he recorded the podcast with two other conspiracy theorists.
For Anna, the mass shooting was personal.
Among the three children and three adults killed that day was her friend, Katherine Koonce, the school’s beloved headmaster who was gunned down as she tried to stop the shooter.
You can read more of Anna’s story by tapping on this link.
Part Five: First, he went after Millersville’s former mayor.
Now, the town’s assistant police chief says his two critics on the city commission could be next.
Shawn Taylor, who has become known as Millersville’s conspiracy cop, made those comments as he turned to a group of far-right podcasters to defend himself against questions raised by NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
Tap this link to read from those Taylor’s accused.
Part Six: Millersville officials are standing with their assistant police chief and his bizarre conspiracy theories regarding Nashville’s Covenant School shooting.
City Commissioner David Gregory urged his fellow commissioners to demand that Shawn Taylor apologize for a 2023 podcast in which he had questioned the official story. Taylor falsely claimed that video released by police was actually staged.
But the three-member majority ignored Gregory’s plea, just as they have refused a recent request by Gregory and Commissioner Cristina Templet for a special meeting of the city commission to discuss Taylor’s hiring.
Read how this meeting played out at this link.
Part Seven: Bryant Kroll wears a lot of hats.
He’s the attorney representing the embattled City of Millersville. He also represents Mayor Tommy Long, who faces accusations of misconduct in an ouster suit. Plus, he’s the personal attorney for Police Chief Bryan Morris and Assistant Police Chief Shawn Taylor, representing them in a lawsuit against the City of Ridgetop.
To understand the role he plays, you can read that here.
Part Eight: In Shawn Taylor’s world — in the immortal words of Taylor Swift — “I’m the problem, it’s me.”
Not his bizarre conspiracy theories — with no evidence — imagining some of the most prominent people in the country are engaged in child sex trafficking.
I explain how we got here in this piece, which you can click on here.
Part Nine: What happens when you give people with bizarre conspiracy theories a gun and a badge?
Secret recordings from inside the troubled Millersville Police Department provide a sobering answer to that question.
Those recordings — obtained from what was supposed to be a sting operation to nab sexual predators who prey on innocent children — show that, in their zeal to make some big cases, Millersville’s conspiracy-minded cops may have crossed the line of what’s legal.
Read more on this investigation by tapping here.
Part Ten: In an explosive new development that could bring new trouble for the already-troubled Millersville Police Department, a key player in a child-predator sting says the lead detective on that operation lied under oath.
These latest questions follow the revelation of secret recordings obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates from that child-predator sting back in May that, our investigation discovered, do not match the detective’s sworn testimony in the case.
You can read more about that by tapping here.
Part Eleven: District Attorney General Robert Nash has asked the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to look into the Millersville Police Department’s handling of a child predator sting, including possible perjury by the lead detective.
In a telephone interview, Nash said he was also personally reviewing the one case resulting from that sting in May.
You can read more about that by tapping here.
Part Twelve: The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has expanded its probe of the embattled Millersville Police Department, now looking into allegations that officials may have used sensitive law enforcement data to investigate their political enemies.
Sources told NewsChannel 5 Investigates that TBI agents began conducting interviews last week with potential victims, and District Attorney General Ray Whitley of Gallatin confirmed Monday that he authorized the investigation into the possible misuse of data.
Read more about that by tapping here.
Part Thirteen: With the Millersville Police Department now the focus of a TBI investigation, NewsChannel 5 Investigates has uncovered new questions about the stories that conspiracy cop Shawn Taylor tells about himself.
Those new questions include the stories that Taylor tells about the jobs he has held in the past, stories about retaliation he claims to have faced and stories that raise more questions about whether Taylor should have a gun and a badge.
You can catch up on the investigation by tapping here.
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