Pills and lies in Tennessee: How a couple fought back
Informant and police officers’ actions are under scrutiny
TRACY CITY, Tenn. – Tina Prater walked into the police station with a reputation as a drug addict and a con artist. She walked out with a tape recorder, some cash and a mission: help the police chief arrest anyone whose name made it onto their list.
Prater, 47, has admitted in a sworn affidavit that she framed people while she was a confidential informant for the Tracy City Police Department in 2017. She recruited imposters to act as other people, recorded audio of purported drug deals and turned the tapes over to Chief Charlie Wilder, who oversees just four officers in one of Tennessee’s poorest and most drug-addicted counties.
Prater swore Wilder told her who to frame and how to do it. Wilder has vehemently denied it, painting Prater as an informant who went rogue without his knowledge.
Over a five-month span in 2017, Wilder and his assistant chief, A.J. Cunningham, sent Prater out again and again into the community they are tasked with protecting. By their own admission, the two officers did not follow her, listen in on her dealings, independently identify the people she met with, inspect the pills she collected or take steps to verify anything she said.
Instead, all the officers did was testify before a grand jury. On Aug. 8, 2017, law enforcement agencies fanned out across the region and arrested 29 people. The local newspaper splashed their mugshots across the front page, and Grundy County Sheriff Clint Shrum cited the roundup as a notch in his belt during his reelection campaign.
But some of those cases were bogus. Investigators reviewing recordings of supposed pill deals found two defendants sounded like the same person and one defendant sounded like two. Prosecutors eventually dropped charges against at least 18 people accused of selling drugs to Prater – but not before two pleaded guilty.
Jeremiah and Clarissa Myers proclaimed their innocence from the beginning and had their charges dropped, then expunged. The couple didn’t know Prater. Their voices weren’t on the tapes. The drugs they stood accused of dealing weren’t even controlled substances.
The Myerses fought back by filing a federal lawsuit against Wilder, Cunningham and Tracy City itself, accusing the officers of malicious prosecution by orchestrating a frame job that ruined their reputations. They are seeking unspecified damages.
The couple declined to be interviewed by Knox News, citing advice from their attorney. Wilder similarly declined to comment, and Cunningham did not respond. But a review of hundreds of pages of court records in the ongoing lawsuit sheds light on the way the Myerses landed behind bars and highlights long-leveled criticisms surrounding police use of confidential informants.
Future chief, informant meet
Wilder and Prater have known each other for more than two decades.
The future police chief first met his future informant while working as an investigator for the Cannon County Sheriff’s Office in Woodbury, a Middle Tennessee town of about 2,800 that sits about 20 miles east of Murfreesboro. In 1998, Wilder’s agency arrested Prater’s then-husband, Royce, on a charge of first-degree murder.
“I came to know her through an investigation on the guy she was married to at that time, which was a Prater, where he and another individual were in a camper trailer cooking meth,” Wilder testified in a deposition in the Myerses’ lawsuit. “The guy dies from exposure to the chemicals. Royce then drags him out in the yard, ties an extension cord around his leg, hooks him to a riding lawn mower, pulls him behind a – the camper, and sets him on fire.”
Wilder said Tina Prater wasn’t implicated in that case and that she went on to give him tips about other investigations he conducted in Cannon County. But, he said, he never had her buy drugs as a confidential informant there.
Years later, the pair had an opportunity to reconnect when Wilder moved to Tracy City, population 1,400, to work as a patrolman in 2011. Prater had family there and was back in town.
In Wilder’s telling, he first saw Prater again when she came into the police station one night to complain about a boyfriend. On another occasion, she came in “just to chitchat.” Then, one day in December 2016 or January 2017, Wilder testified, “she just walks in ... and, you know, kind of self-confesses to, you know, I’ve had issues, I’ve had car wrecks, I’ve had this, my family’s, you know, going to end up dead. I want to do something about this. I can buy drugs for you all.”
By that point, Prater was a felon and an addict who had racked up half a dozen convictions for writing worthless checks. She had been convicted of stealing from a dental office and trying to pass a forged prescription, and she was still on probation for smuggling morphine into the local jail.
Wilder had a criminal history, too, having pleaded guilty in the early 1990s to misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence and theft in Rutherford County. “I had purchased a horse,” he said in his deposition. “Horse turned out to be stolen.”
Wilder’s past brushes with the law didn’t stop him from taking over as Tracy City’s police chief in 2014. He filled the revolving door of a position after his predecessor, Tony Bean, took a job as chief deputy of the Grundy County Sheriff ’s Office. Bean and his son, a sergeant at the same agency, now are under federal indictment, accused of routinely assaulting handcuffed people and calling it “the Grundy County way.”
At the police station, Wilder, Prater and Cunningham, a novice officer hired by Wilder, came up with a list of names. The officers swore Wilder didn’t come up with the names himself and only wrote them down as Prater rattled off who she could buy drugs from. The meeting, it seems, was not recorded.
On Jan. 11, 2017, Prater signed an agreement to work as a confidential informant for the Tracy City Police Department.
Wilder testified he had no written policies or formal training on the use of confidential informants. When first asked during his deposition about the department’s procedures for using a confidential informant, Wilder said: “Record them. Pay them. Get the dope.”
Wilder and Cunningham did not independently identify the people Prater met. Instead, the officers testified Prater would tell them who she was going to buy drugs from. They would then print off that person’s driver’s license photo, and she would confirm the identity of the target.
“And it was really just that simple and that quick,” Wilder testified.
Prater would hand over the tape recorder along with the pills she claimed to have bought, and the officers would pay her $30 to $40 per transaction. “I remember, you know, 10 minutes work and $40, that’s pretty good money,” Cunningham said.
In an affidavit, Wilder identified 20 people targeted by Prater in 38 transactions from Jan. 11 to June 19, 2017. Some of those people were on the initial list of targets. Some weren’t. Most, if not all, of the pills were sent off to the state crime lab in Nashville to be tested. The results had not yet come back when Wilder and Cunningham filled out indictment applications and testified before a Grundy County grand jury.
There is no definitive record of what the officers said before the grand jury because the proceedings weren’t recorded. But Prater didn’t testify. The tapes she made weren’t played. The grand jury, it seems, heard mainly the words of Wilder and Cunningham. And the prosecutor, 12th Judicial District Assistant District Attorney David McGovern, said in a deposition that he didn’t try to corroborate the officers’ testimony.
On July 11, 2017, the grand jury returned indictments charging at least 20 people, according to court records. The majority were accused of selling the pain pills hydrocodone and oxycodone, others of peddling such drugs as methamphetamine, ecstasy and Xanax.
All faced felonies on their records and years behind bars – including Clarissa and Jeremiah Myers.
10,000 missing pills
Tracy City has two stoplights and one drug store: Mike’s Pharmacy on Main Street.
Clarissa Myers, nicknamed Candy, worked there as a pharmacy technician off and on for about 17 years. Her husband, Jeremiah, owned a local tire shop and drove a truck on the side.
One day before the grand jury returned the indictments, agents with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration descended on Mike’s Pharmacy. The store, with its eight employees, had ranked fifth for oxycodone purchases and 18th for morphine purchases in Tennessee the year before, according to DEA records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The agents conducted an inspection that revealed the pharmacy had lost track of more than 10,000 pain pills at a time when the opioid crisis was ravaging the region. Owner Mike Yarworth couldn’t account for the missing drugs, and no recent thefts had been reported, records show. Yarworth didn’t return a request for comment.
Gossip spread quickly through the small town. Wilder later said in his deposition that he heard “some rumors, you know, just floating around the street” that Candy was suspected of stealing pills from the pharmacy.
On Aug. 8, 2017, about a month after the inspection, Candy, 34, returned to the pharmacy after a break from work to find police cruisers waiting for her.
She had no prior criminal history in Tennessee, and she cried as officers arrested her in the parking lot and took her to jail. Her husband, who was out of state, learned he was wanted, too, and rushed back to Grundy County to turn himself in.
Candy lost her job. It wasn’t until later that she and her husband learned they had been indicted, accused not of stealing pills but of dealing them.
‘That’s not the same person’
Barry Parker wanted to give the police the benefit of the doubt.
That became harder and harder to do, he said, as the questions kept piling up.
“At the very least, the police department was just grossly negligent and ignorant of how to do their job,” said Parker, a former narcotics officer who worked in the area for a dozen years. “At most, they were out to get certain people.”
Parker began looking into the Myerses’ case after one of their lawyers hired him as an investigator. He almost immediately found problems.
Jeremiah Myers, for example, had a solid alibi. He said he was in South Carolina, delivering generators to a military base at the time police claimed he sold pills to Prater in Grundy County.
Police claimed Prater captured Candy Myers dealing drugs on three recordings. “The voices were so different,” Parker said, “that I just kept thinking, ‘If this one voice is Candy, then on this next buy, that’s not the same person.”
At the crime lab in Nashville, pills in the Myerses’ cases were visually identified not as hydrocodone but as drugs that aren’t controlled substances, according to a lab report dated Sept. 11, 2017. Records indicate some of the pills were cyclobenzaprine, a muscle relaxer, and naproxen, an over-the-counter painkiller best known as Aleve.
Still on the job
Parker, the investigator, went searching for the confidential informant and found her 100 miles away.
He ultimately confronted Prater at an apartment in Roane County, where he said she confessed. Prater claimed Wilder told her to have people impersonate the Myerses and several others. She further alleged Wilder gave her extra cash to pay the imposters.
Parker later tracked down three people who admitted to being imposters on the recordings. Some of the people arrested in the roundup were addicts. Others were dealers. One man whom Prater admitted she framed, Parker said, told the investigator he would have gladly sold pills to her if she had asked but insisted that didn’t happen.
The investigator took the information to the public defender’s office and found the attorneys there had their own concerns. Together they called a meeting with McGovern, the prosecutor in charge of the cases. McGovern and his boss, 12th Judicial District Attorney General Mike Taylor, eventually agreed to dismiss all of the pending Tracy City Police Department cases involving Prater.
Two people pleaded guilty before the cases were dismissed. One told Knox News she was innocent and only took a plea deal to get out of jail. Both are now branded felons.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation launched an inquiry into whether Wilder and Cunningham colluded with Prater. Taylor, the district attorney general, declined to charge the two officers with official misconduct or false reporting, saying the investigation didn’t find enough evidence of wrongdoing. He requested the TBI file be closed last year and declined to release it to Knox News, noting it is exempt from state public records law.
A spokesman for the FBI wouldn’t say whether the agency is investigating Wilder, who remains on the job as Tracy City’s police chief, or Cunningham, who left the department after the scandal to work as an officer in the nearby town of Monteagle.
As for Prater, she was originally scheduled to be deposed in the Myerses’ lawsuit in June 2019, but she cashed a $159 check for mileage and never showed up. Then she signed an affidavit for the couple and landed back in jail after violating her probation by failing a drug test.
After some legal back-and-forth, a visiting judge from Detroit who recently took over the case denied a defense motion to strike Prater’s affidavit from the record and ordered she be deposed. She was taken from the Grundy County jail, where she has been since November, to the county attorney’s office in Tullahoma, Tennessee.
U.S. District Judge Judith Levy decided the deposition can wait until Prater has time to find an attorney after getting out of jail in April.
What will she say then?