Paul Skalnik, Pamela Colloff says, is “effervescent.” He’s as well-spoken as he is well-read, with a quick mind and striking blue eyes. But he’s also a master manipulator, a true con artist. Sklanik has been convicted of fraud, grand theft, and even child sexual abuse. He’s married nine women, some of them at the same time. He’s never who he says he is, whether it is a Vietnam veteran, a star UT football player, or a successful lawyer.
For over three decades, Skalnik traveled across the Gulf Coast, uprooting people’s lives and setting deceitful traps. In and out of jails in Florida and Texas, Skalnik found a way to dodge harsh punishment for his never-ending string of thefts, assaults, and frauds. As a jailhouse witness, Skalnik spent years pinning violent crimes on his fellow inmates, propped up by shoddy and fabricated confessions. In return for his testimonies, Skalnik would have sentences shortened and his own convictions overturned.
Colloff tries relentlessly to unravel Paul Skalnik’s web in her new book, Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast (July 14, Knopf). Years of tenacious reporting and unflinching dedication for The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica led the journalist to a gripping revelation about the harsh truths of a criminal justice system that has long been caught up in lies.
Colloff first caught wind of Skalnik back in 2018, when Laura Fernandez, a lecturer at Yale Law, sent her a pleading email, asking Colloff to turn her investigative eye toward a Florida death row case she believed was wrongfully determined.
“This is in the pile of hundreds of emails of stories like this,” Colloff admits.
What caught her eye was not Fernandez’s case but a note at the bottom, where she alluded to Paul Skalnik’s role in the situation. From there, Colloff began investigating Sklanik’s countless testimonies as a jailhouse witness.
In 2019, Colloff published her investigation into Skalnik. After she finished reporting, Colloff realized the story wasn’t done yet.
“I feel like I’m at the beginning of this, not the end. It just felt like there was so much else,” she recalls thinking. The story reminded her of the opening scene of Goodfellas, a three-minute-long trailing shot, rife with detail.
Colloff’s book follows one case in particular: the conviction of James Dailey for the gruesome murder of a teenage girl. Based on shaky witnesses and drunken details, Dailey has spent decades awaiting an execution date on Florida’s notorious death row. The nail in the coffin of Dailey’s trial is a vicious and perjured testimony from Skalnik and other jailhouse witnesses claiming Dailey made a private confession.
The book is awash with contradictions and a decidedly unreliable narrator. The binary of reality and falsity is thrown out, as all of the evidence is alleged or redacted. Sworn affidavits are rejected, polygraph tests are disregarded, and the quiet pleas of innocence from a man whose state is trying to kill him are ignored, all in allegiance to an unjust system. The long, unbelievable story is a Gulf Coast heat flush to your cheeks, as anger mounts and truth falls away.
“The whole book, in a sense, is about storytelling. And, not necessarily what the truth is, but what story you choose to believe,” Colloff says. “If you pick the wrong story, if you get tunnel vision, if you double down on the unreliable narrator, really bad things are going to happen.”
A justice system that decides who is expendable, based on convenience rather than fact, is not just at all, and Colloff does not let you forget it. The story finds a shiny villain in Skalnik, but the less flashy truth is that the network of prosecutors, governors, and attorneys that weaponized his lies is really to blame.
“To think of Skalnik as the villain – not that he didn’t do terrible things – but he’s not the person you need to be mad at,” Colloff says. “He’s a fixture of a much larger system that made him much more powerful.” She brings you back again and again to the victims: the freckled, mousy-haired young girls and the defeated, hopeless, and wrongfully convicted men alike.
Both daunting and enraging, Catch the Devil burns down the illusory details of a “solved” murder case from the 1980s and wipes away the ash to reveal the sinister and self-serving criminal justice system beneath. Colloff is not under any delusion that her story will bring justice to Jim Dailey or fix the corrupt system that locked him up. To the reader, Colloff has just one thing to say: “This is happening, and you need to look at it.”
Pamela Colloff will discuss Catch the Devil with Rachel Moore at BookPeople on July 13.