This career criminal sent innocent men to death…
Paul Skalnik had a unusual present for being in jail when accused murderers all of a sudden felt the urge to spill their secrets and techniques.
Skalnik was a petty con artist with a grimly dependable routine, writes Pamela Colloff in her riveting new guide, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of unlawful killing, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.” “Whenever his luck ran out and he ended up in jail,” Colloff writes, “men confessed their crimes to him.”
In the summer season of 1981, Skalnik was sitting in the Pinellas County Jail on a grand-theft charge, staring down a attainable five-year prison sentence, when he positioned a gather call to the state attorney’s workplace in Clearwater, Florida, and told them he had data on three different men awaiting trial for homicide. All three, he said, had made full or partial confessions to him.
By 1984, he had already testified against or supplied data on at least 27 defendants in the Pinellas County Jail, serving to ship 4 men to death row. Prosecutors didn’t appear troubled that a man with a long report of deception was extracting confessions at a fee that would’ve impressed the most seasoned murder detective.
Paul Skalnik testified in 37 circumstances over the course of his career in crime. Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office
Skalnik was a small-time hustler with big-time stamina. He’d been married 9 occasions, wrote unhealthy checks, stole from ladies and widows, impersonated legal professionals, and reinvented himself in different cities whenever the earlier model grew to become inconvenient. He claimed to be a Southwest Airlines govt, a Stetson law scholar, a Marine, and a Boston attorney named Avery Harrison.
In jail, he discovered the function that paid best. He grew to become a skilled witness.
His first major flip as an informant got here in Houston in 1978, after he landed in the Harris County Jail on bad-check fees. He noticed Thomas Hirschi, one of three activists charged with inciting a riot at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Moody Park, in Houston’s Near Northside, and called an previous pal in the district attorney’s workplace.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Skalnik said. “Something that will interest you.” Soon he was out of jail for the day, sitting in the DA’s workplace, studying from a small spiral pocket book about conversations he claimed to have had with Hirschi.
By the early Eighties, he’d taken the act to Florida. In the Pinellas County Jail, he labored in the law library, where frightened defendants saved their legal paperwork and a assured man with jailhouse jargon might move himself off as helpful. He read the local papers, studied case particulars, and then called prosecutors and reported that inmates had confessed. The reward was recorded in the state attorney’s recordsdata with an exclamation level: “Probation was discussed!”
The Moody Park riots had been among the worst Houston ever skilled. They started after military veteran José Campos Torres was killed by Houston Police Department Officers. Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
That was the basic cut price. Prosecutors acquired a witness who might flip messy circumstances into cleaner tales. Skalnik acquired leniency and repeated possibilities to resume his career as a criminal. Colloff calls him “the state’s closer, the witness whose words moved jurors to choose death.”
On the stand, Skalnik performed the penitent sinner with a badge-shaped coronary heart. “I still do have law enforcement inside of me,” he told jurors. When requested whether or not he had obtained something for testifying, he replied, “No, ma’am. I was probably treated worse than if I hadn’t testified.”
Behind the scenes, prosecutors and investigators lobbied for him, wrote letters for him, and helped keep him in the county jail where he might stay close to defendants awaiting trial.
The case at the middle of “Catch the Devil” is that of James Dailey, a Vietnam veteran from Kansas who served three tours and got here home a man unrecognizable to his own household. His mom would later inform Colloff she’d sent away “two lovely young men to the Air Force and Marines,” and “they came back, and they were different boys.” By 1985, alcoholism had value Dailey his marriage, his youngsters, and any secure foothold in the world. He drifted to Pinellas County with Jack Pearcy, a violent ingesting companion.
James Dailey has spent nearly 40 years on Florida’s death row. ZUMAPRESS.com
On May 5, 1985, a fourteen-year-old lady named Shelly Boggio crossed paths with Pearcy and Dailey at a home in Seminole. By morning, her physique was under a drawbridge at Indian Rocks Beach, stabbed thirty-one occasions, her fingers cut from making an attempt to defend herself, water in her lungs.
During his polygraph session, Pearcy appeared to incriminate himself nearly by accident. He grew so rattled that he said he would possibly need to converse to a priest, then described a recurring nightmare in which the killer turned toward him and the face he noticed was his own. But when it got here time to give investigators a usable story, Pearcy blamed Dailey.
Detective John Halliday went to the Pinellas County Jail and pulled men from Dailey’s cellblock one by one. His notes recorded what each told him: “Nothing.” “Knows nothing.” “Wish I could have helped you but it’s a little outa my league.” Then Skalnik acquired phrase to Halliday that Dailey had confessed to him.
Shelly Boggio was ZUMAPRESS.com
Dailey told his lawyer, “This is a damn setup,” and drew a diagram of the cellblock exhibiting that any dialog between them would’ve required him to shout across the ground in full view of guards and other inmates. The jury never noticed the diagram.
At trial, Skalnik testified that Dailey told him the lady “kept staring at him, screaming, and would not die.” It was the type of line a jury remembers. The protection cross-examination, meanwhile, went nowhere. Colloff writes that it grew to become so tangled and uninteresting that it “left several jurors dozing in their seats.”
The jury deliberated for less than two hours and returned a unanimous verdict of guilty. The penalty-phase suggestion was death, also unanimous. Five days after the verdict, Skalnik walked out of jail.
“Shelly isn’t the only one who died that day,” said the household of Shelly Boggio, explaining that your complete household was damaged by the homicide. ZUMAPRESS.com
Skalnik’s parole officer, reviewing his conduct after a subsequent release, was less impressed than the prosecutors had been. “This man has been, is, and always will be a danger to society,” she wrote in her official report, warning that he had “perfected the role of con man” and left behind victims who’d “never be able to recoup the financial loss or psychological well-being that they have suffered.”
Skalnik saved reinventing himself until the routine finally wore skinny. When Colloff first met him in a federal prison in Texas in 2018, he pulled out a dirty rag stained with dried blood and told her he was dying of cancer, then promised to reveal every part about his years as an informant. The promised confession never got here. “I refused to admit to myself, until it was much too late,” Colloff writes, “that Skalnik had been stringing me along.”
He died in a Texas nursing home on March 10, 2020, sooner or later before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. His ashes went unclaimed.
“Catch the Devil” is obtainable now.
Dailey stays on Florida’s death row after almost 4 a long time. He turned 80 on June 11. He paints landscapes from his cell with commissary artwork provides, small scenes of forests, streams, and a cobalt-blue swimming gap from his Kansas childhood.
A prosecutor once defended the use of such witnesses as Skalnik with the previous line: “You’ve got to make a deal with a sinner to catch the devil.” Colloff’s guide arrives at a more durable conclusion. “What made him so dangerous,” she writes, “was not his intelligence or cunning, but rather how readily the institutions that were supposed to uphold the law and protect the most vulnerable had amplified his lies.”
In Pinellas County, prosecutors thought they’d discovered a sinner who might help them catch devils. What they actually discovered was a con man who understood precisely what they needed to hear.
Stay in the loop with the latest trending topics! Visit our web site daily for the freshest lifestyle news and content, thoughtfully curated to inspire and inform you.
