Date: 05-23-2017
Framed? Man says he sat in jail for murder because a suspect paid off the sheriff
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.
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.
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. SEE MORE HERE
By Andrew Wolfson
The Courier-Journal
