In a sensational lawsuit, a defendant jailed for nearly five years on a murder charge before he was acquitted says he was framed in part to protect a sheriff who was being paid off by one of the actual perpetrators.

The suit filed Monday on behalf of 37-year-old William “Bill Bill” Anderson also alleges that a Kentucky State Police detective protected that suspect because he was married to one of the detective’s close relatives.

“Anderson lost nearly five years of his life … facing a sentence of death for a crime he did not commit,” his lawyers say in his suit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in London and charges that officers coerced witnesses, fabricated statements, falsified medical records and destroyed evidence.

"This manifest injustice was not the result of flaws in the judicial system,” the suit says. “Rather, the defendants conspired to take his liberty by knowingly initiating false charges based on evidence that they fabricated.”

The 38-page lawsuit accuses former Knox Sheriff John Pickard of protecting a man who should have been charged as an accomplice because he was paying Pickard $1,000 a month to be allowed to commit crimes in the county with impunity.

The suit also names five Kentucky State Police detectives, including one, Sgt. Jason York, who was accused in a lawsuit last month of framing a pair of cousins in another Knox County murder. Pickard also is a defendant in that suit.

Pickard could not be reached for comment. York's lawyers, Scott Miller and Charles Cole, said in a statement that the claims in the suit are "unfair and unfounded" and that they will seek its dismissal. They also noted York did not arrest, charge nor search Anderson.

Lt. Michael Webb, a spokesman for state police, declined to comment on the suit but said it thoroughly reviews any allegations brought against agency personnel. He said KSP doesn't discuss internal personnel investigations.

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Anderson was acquitted in May 2016 in the murder of Bobby Wiggins, whose body had been found five years earlier buried on Red Bird Mountain in Bell County, about 200 miles southeast of Louisville. Co-defendant James Sizemore pleaded guilty to killing Wiggins, whose skull was smashed with a rock and neck slashed 18 times.

Anderson’s lawyers – from a Chicago law firm that has won numerous exonerations across the United States, including in Kentucky – say that Pickard, York and other detectives and deputies knew that two days after the murder, a security video from the Lowe’s Home Improvement store in Corbin showed Sizemore and his uncle buying materials to bury the body.

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A receipt shows Sizemore’s uncle, Jeffrey Gray, paid cash for a shovel, two flashlights, salt and six bags of lime.

The suit says Gray was never charged because York was married to one of his relatives and because Gray for five years had been paying Pickard $1,000 a month to “conduct criminal activity” in a “pay-to-play scheme” that also involved sheriff’s deputies.

The suit also alleges that York “resorted to physical violence” during an interrogation to get an alibi witness to back off his story that Anderson was with him at the time of the murder.

An audiotape of the confrontation obtained by the Courier-Journal suggests that York slapped the witness as he screamed at him: “I’m going to put you in f---ing prison because you god----- lied to me. I’m so f---ing sick of this god--- bull--t. You f---ing lied.” Sheriff’s Deputy Derek Eubanks added, “Let’s put his ass in the f---ing jail.”

The suit says both used a “level of coercion that has no legitimate place in law enforcement.”

The events that led to Anderson’s incarceration began Nov. 23, 2011, when Wiggins was lured to the scene by a woman who said she desperately needed some Oxycontin pills.

Wiggins, in his black Toyota Camry, drove Sizemore to the top of a mountain, where Wiggins expected to sell the pills, according to the lawsuit.

Instead, Sizemore robbed and killed him, striking him so hard with the rock that it left a divot in his head.

Sizemore fled in Wiggins’ car and was later spotted in it at a store by Anderson and other witnesses. Anderson asked him where he got the new car, and he said his “lady took over the car payments from somebody.”

When Sheriff Pickard and Deputy Eubanks interviewed Anderson, he told them he’d seen Sizemore driving the car and had heard Sizemore had burned papers in the glove compartment before torching the vehicle.

Two other witnesses corroborated Anderson’s story, including David Fox, 48, the one who said Anderson was with him at the time of the murder.

According to the lawsuit, Sizemore initially claimed he alone was responsible for the crime. But in a matter of hours, he told Pickard and Eubanks “a dozen different stories” about the events leading to Wiggins' death.

The law enforcement officers knew Sizemore was the killer, the suit alleges, but instead induced him to falsely implicate Anderson as well.

First they urged him to claim that “someone else did it and you were just there,” the suit says. Then they told him he might get as little as 14 months in prison if he dropped in another perpetrator, according to the lawsuit.

“Like a puppet, Mr. Sizemore acquiesced to his master’s commands,” the suit says.

The sheriff’s office then brought in state police, including York, to investigate, and together they put Sizemore through a “marathon” interrogation, during which he gave a false statement implicating Anderson as a result of the lawmen’s “threats and promises of consideration.”

Missing from the statement was any mention of Gray, whom the Lowe’s security video shows was Sizemore’s accomplice, according to the lawsuit.

It says Pickard and his deputies fabricated the case against Anderson to protect Gray because, if he had been charged, he likely would have revealed the pay-to-play scheme. Elliot Slosar, one of Anderson's lawyers, said Gray told him about the scheme in an interview last week.

Pickard lost his bid to retain his office in a 2014 Republican primary.

In the lawsuit, Anderson asks for compensatory and punitive damages, saying that during his incarceration, he was stripped of the “various pleasures of basic human experience,” including the chance to share holidays, births, funerals and other life events with loved ones, including his wife and five children.

Besides York and Pickard, the suit names as defendants Knox County and state police officers Brian Johnson, Mark Mefford, Jackie Joseph and Tyson Lawson.

In a separate lawsuit filed April 4, also by Slosar’s law firm, York, Pickard and other defendants are accused of conspiring to frame cousins Amanda Hoskins and Jonathan Taylor for a 2010 murder.

The pair spent a combined eight years in jail, accused of killing Katherine Mills of Flat Lick, Kentucky, before the charges were dismissed.

The suit alleges that officers from Kentucky State Police, the Knox sheriff’s department and the Barbourville police implicated them to protect an informant they knew was the likely killer. A judge who dismissed the charges against Hoskins and Taylor noted that all five witnesses cited by police either recanted their statements or said they’d never made them.

The defendants in that suit have filed answers denying wrongdoing and an attorney for York said he expects to be vindicated.

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at 502-582-7189 or awolfson@courier-journal.com