This profession prison despatched harmless males to dying row

Paul Skalnik had an odd reward for being in jail when accused murderers abruptly 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 e book, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, 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 within the Pinellas County Jail on a grand-theft cost, staring down a attainable five-year jail sentence, when he positioned a acquire name to the state lawyer’s workplace in Clearwater, Florida, and instructed them he had info on three completely different males awaiting trial for homicide. All three, he mentioned, had made full or partial confessions to him.

By 1984, he had already testified in opposition to or supplied info on a minimum of 27 defendants within the Pinellas County Jail, serving to ship 4 males to dying row. Prosecutors didn’t appear troubled {that a} man with a protracted document of deception was extracting confessions at a price that will’ve impressed essentially the most seasoned murder detective.

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 several cities every time the earlier model turned inconvenient. He claimed to be a Southwest Airlines government, a Stetson legislation scholar, a Marine, and a Boston lawyer named Avery Harrison. 

In jail, he discovered the position that paid finest. He turned knowledgeable witness.

His first main flip as an informant got here in Houston in 1978, after he landed within the Harris County Jail on bad-check prices. He noticed Thomas Hirschi, one among three activists charged with inciting a riot at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Moody Park, in Houston’s Near Northside, and known as an outdated buddy within the district lawyer’s workplace. 

“I’ve got something to tell you,” Skalnik mentioned. “Something that will interest you.” Soon he was out of jail for the day, sitting within the DA’s workplace, studying from a small spiral pocket book about conversations he claimed to have had with Hirschi.

By the early Nineteen Eighties, he’d taken the act to Florida. In the Pinellas County Jail, he labored within the legislation library, the place frightened defendants saved their authorized paperwork and a assured man with jailhouse jargon might go himself off as useful. He learn the native papers, studied case particulars, after which known as prosecutors and reported that inmates had confessed. The reward was recorded within the state lawyer’s recordsdata with an exclamation level: “Probation was discussed!”

That was the essential discount. Prosecutors bought a witness who might flip messy circumstances into cleaner tales. Skalnik bought leniency and repeated probabilities to renew his profession as a prison. 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 instructed 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 preserve him within the county jail the place he might stay near defendants awaiting trial.

The case on the heart of “Catch the Devil” is that of James Dailey, a Vietnam veteran from Kansas who served three excursions and got here dwelling a person unrecognizable to his family. His mom would later inform Colloff she’d despatched away “two lovely young men to the Air Force and Marines,” and “they came back, and they were different boys.” By 1985, alcoholism had price Dailey his marriage, his kids, and any steady foothold on the earth. He drifted to Pinellas County with Jack Pearcy, a violent ingesting companion.

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 underneath a drawbridge at Indian Rocks Beach, stabbed thirty-one occasions, her palms lower from attempting to defend herself, water in her lungs. 

During his polygraph session, Pearcy appeared to incriminate himself nearly accidentally. He grew so rattled that he mentioned he may want to talk to a priest, then described a recurring nightmare through which the killer turned towards him and the face he noticed was his personal. But when it got here time to provide investigators a usable story, Pearcy blamed Dailey.

Detective John Halliday went to the Pinellas County Jail and pulled males from Dailey’s cellblock one after the other. His notes recorded what every instructed him: “Nothing.” “Knows nothing.” “Wish I could have helped you but it’s a little outa my league.” Then Skalnik bought phrase to Halliday that Dailey had confessed to him. 

Dailey instructed his lawyer, “This is a damn setup,” and drew a diagram of the cellblock displaying that any dialog between them would’ve required him to shout throughout the ground in full view of guards and different inmates. The jury by no means noticed the diagram.

At trial, Skalnik testified that Dailey instructed 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, in the meantime, went nowhere. Colloff writes that it turned so tangled and uninteresting that it “left several jurors dozing in their seats.”

The jury deliberated for lower than two hours and returned a unanimous verdict of responsible. The penalty-phase advice was dying, additionally unanimous. Five days after the decision, Skalnik walked out of jail.

Skalnik’s parole officer, reviewing his conduct after a subsequent launch, was much 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 till the routine lastly wore skinny. When Colloff first met him in a federal jail in Texas in 2018, he pulled out a dirty rag stained with dried blood and instructed her he was dying of most cancers, then promised to disclose all the things about his years as an informant. The promised confession by no means 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 dwelling on March 10, 2020, in the future earlier than COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. His ashes went unclaimed.

Dailey stays on Florida’s dying row after practically 4 many years. 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 as soon as defended the usage of such witnesses as Skalnik with the outdated line: “You’ve got to make a deal with a sinner to catch the devil.” Colloff’s e book 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 assist them catch devils. What they actually discovered was a con man who understood precisely what they wished to listen to.