Paul Skalnik had an uncanny ability to extract confessions from accused murderers while he was behind bars.
Skalnik, a minor con artist with a knack for deception, is the focus of Pamela Colloff’s compelling new book, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.” Colloff writes that whenever Skalnik found himself in jail, he seemed to inspire other inmates to share their criminal secrets.
In the summer of 1981, Skalnik was detained in the Pinellas County Jail on a grand theft charge, facing a potential five-year prison term. He made a collect call to the state attorney’s office in Clearwater, Florida, claiming to have information on three men awaiting murder trials. He asserted that each had confessed to him, either fully or partially.
By 1984, Skalnik had provided testimony or information on at least 27 defendants at the Pinellas County Jail, contributing to the conviction of four men who were sentenced to death row. Prosecutors appeared unconcerned about Skalnik’s history of deceit despite the high number of confessions he gathered, which would have impressed even the most experienced detectives.
Skalnik was a persistent hustler, having been married nine times, writing bad checks, stealing from women and widows, impersonating lawyers, and reinventing his identity in various cities as needed. He claimed different personas, including a Southwest Airlines executive, a Stetson law student, a Marine, and a Boston attorney named Avery Harrison.
He found a lucrative role while incarcerated: that of a professional witness.
Skalnik’s first significant role as an informant occurred in Houston in 1978 after he was jailed on bad-check charges. He noticed Thomas Hirschi, an activist accused of inciting a riot at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Moody Park, and contacted an acquaintance in the district attorney’s office.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Skalnik informed them. “Something that will interest you.” He was soon out of jail for the day, sitting in the DA’s office, recounting alleged conversations with Hirschi from a spiral notebook.
By the early 1980s, Skalnik had moved his operations to Florida. In the Pinellas County Jail, he worked in the law library, where he could access defendants’ legal documents. He read local news, studied case details, and reported to prosecutors that inmates had confessed. The incentive was noted in the state attorney’s files: “Probation was discussed!”
In this arrangement, prosecutors received a witness who could simplify complex cases, and Skalnik gained leniency and the opportunity to continue his criminal activities. Colloff describes him as “the state’s closer, the witness whose words moved jurors to choose death.”
On the witness stand, Skalnik presented himself as a remorseful sinner with a law enforcement heart. “I still do have law enforcement inside of me,” he assured jurors. When asked if he benefited from testifying, he insisted, “No, ma’am. I was probably treated worse than if I hadn’t testified.”
Behind the scenes, prosecutors and investigators supported him, writing letters and keeping him in the county jail, close to defendants awaiting trial.
The central case in “Catch the Devil” involves James Dailey, a Vietnam veteran from Kansas who struggled to adjust to civilian life. His mother recounted to Colloff how she sent “two lovely young men to the Air Force and Marines,” only for them to return as “different boys.” By 1985, Dailey’s alcoholism had destroyed his marriage and family life, leaving him adrift in Pinellas County with Jack Pearcy, a violent drinking companion.
On May 5, 1985, a fourteen-year-old girl named Shelly Boggio encountered Pearcy and Dailey in Seminole. The next morning, her body was discovered under a drawbridge at Indian Rocks Beach, having been stabbed 31 times, with defensive wounds on her hands and water in her lungs.
During a polygraph, Pearcy unintentionally implicated himself, expressing a need to speak to a priest and describing nightmares where he saw himself as the killer. However, when it came time to provide a coherent story, Pearcy pointed the finger at Dailey.
Detective John Halliday conducted interviews with men from Dailey’s cellblock, noting that most claimed to know nothing. Then Skalnik informed Halliday that Dailey had confessed to him.
Dailey insisted to his lawyer that it was “a damn setup,” illustrating how any conversation between him and Skalnik would require shouting across the cellblock in view of guards and inmates. The jury was not shown this diagram.
At trial, Skalnik testified that Dailey said the girl “kept staring at him, screaming, and would not die.” This statement stuck with the jury. The defense’s cross-examination, however, was ineffective and left some jurors dozing.
The jury deliberated for less than two hours, delivering a unanimous guilty verdict. They also unanimously recommended the death penalty. Five days later, Skalnik was released from jail.
Skalnik’s parole officer was less impressed with his conduct, describing him as “a danger to society” in an official report. The report warned that he had “perfected the role of con man,” leaving victims unable to recover financially or psychologically.
Skalnik continued to reinvent himself until his tactics lost effectiveness. When Colloff met him in a Texas federal prison in 2018, he claimed to be dying of cancer and promised to confess his informant activities. However, the confession never materialized. “I refused to admit to myself, until it was much too late,” Colloff writes, “that Skalnik had been stringing me along.”
He passed away in a Texas nursing home on March 10, 2020, just a day before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. His ashes remained unclaimed.
Dailey remains on Florida’s death row nearly forty years later. He turned 80 on June 11 and spends his time painting landscapes from his cell, inspired by memories of his Kansas childhood.
A prosecutor once justified the use of informants like Skalnik with the phrase: “You’ve got to make a deal with a sinner to catch the devil.” Colloff’s book offers a more critical perspective, arguing that Skalnik’s danger lay in how institutions meant to uphold the law amplified his fabrications. In Pinellas County, officials believed they had enlisted a sinner to catch criminals, but instead found a con man who knew precisely what they wanted to hear.
