This true crime page-turner isn’t really about a con man. It’s about the prosecutors who kept putting him on the stand.
Catch the Devil | Pamela Colloff | Knopf (320 pages)
The Star Witness
Years ago, during a trial in a bland Manhattan criminal courtroom, an alleged mobster sitting in a seat behind press row waited until a police witness stepped down. Then, in a stage whisper to no one in particular, he said, “I can testaly better than that.”
The term of art technically refers to law enforcement officers, but it’s hard to think of anyone it applies to more than Paul Skalnik. He wasn’t just a testalier. He could have offered a masterclass in the art form.
Skalnik was a serial con artist who married nine women (sometimes at once), impersonated fighter pilots and oilmen and lawyers, and, when arrested (which was often), found a reliable second income stream: testifying that his fellow inmates had confessed their crimes to him. He kept his own tally. In a 1984 letter, he claimed to have “placed 34 individuals in prison, including four on death row.” Florida prosecutors didn’t seem terribly interested in the distinction between witness and performer, so long as he kept delivering convictions.
Paid jailhouse informants and convictions built around them are not an anomaly in American capital cases. They’re familiar enough to lawyers who have spent time in this world. Pamela Colloff’s achievement is making that world legible to everyone else.
Catch The Devil is a gripping true crime narrative that really does read like a novel. Colloff has built an indictment of a criminal justice system that kept rewarding the one witness it had every reason to distrust. She first investigated the case for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. The years of reporting show. Every claim rests on documents, interviews, transcripts and public records.
What.The.Hell
The story begins in the late 1970s and stretches across more than four decades, long enough for prosecutors to retire, defense lawyers to come and go, records to disappear into storage, and one jailhouse witness’s lies to harden into courtroom fact. What makes Catch the Devil more than the story of one gifted liar is the paper trail Colloff uncovers behind him.
What happened in Florida is beyond. Just beyond. Cops, prosecutors, supervisors, all of them had reason to know Skalnik was lying, and all of them kept him working anyway, because a closer is a closer and nobody asks too many questions about the bat. Years later, a Texas prosecutor looked at his file and wrote an internal memo describing him, flatly, as “a BIG con artist.”
Texas cut him loose within days. Florida had access to essentially the same man and kept calling him to the witness stand for another decade. That contrast sits at the heart of the book. The question isn’t who Paul Skalnik was. The question is why prosecutors kept saying yes after they already knew who he was.
The state’s own files make that yes almost impossible to comprehend. At one point, Skalnik claimed to have obtained three separate confessions in three separate murder cases in a single summer, a clearance rate that should have triggered disbelief on its own. Instead, prosecutors negotiated. Someone in the state attorney’s office was excited enough about the arrangement to write, “Probation was discussed!”, exclamation point included.
Years later, Margaret Hindman, the Texas prosecutor who finally refused to use him, looked back with something close to disbelief of her own. “This guy clearly was grandiose, delusional, and had narcissistic-personality disorder,” she told Colloff. “It’s hard to believe prosecutors relied on him.” Exactly.
That willingness to rely on him is what Colloff memorably calls “The Closer.” Skalnik wasn’t the witness who solved cases. He was the witness prosecutors reached for when a case wasn’t quite there and a jury needed nudging across the finish line, which is precisely what makes the nickname land: a closer doesn’t build the case, he just shows up at the end and makes sure it doesn’t fall apart. Without his testimony, Colloff argues, juries in several capital cases likely would have chosen life instead of death. With it, at least three men were sentenced to die.
The Closer
The pattern plays out most vividly in the prosecution of Jim Dailey, a Vietnam veteran convicted largely on jailhouse testimony that begins falling apart almost as soon as Colloff starts examining it. There was no forensic evidence linking Dailey to the murder. A co-defendant later admitted Dailey wasn’t even there. A hand-drawn sketch of the jail showed that the confession Skalnik claimed to have overheard could not have happened the way he described it.
Colloff also makes a broader point that reaches well beyond this case: whoever tells the story first tends to become the story. Once investigators settled on Dailey as the killer, every contradictory fact seemed to lose a little weight while every convenient witness gained credibility. Legal scholar Bennett Gershman argues that prosecutors should approach witnesses with “the attitude of a true skeptic.” Not because skepticism is cynical, but because it’s the job. Nobody involved in Dailey’s prosecution appears to have gotten that memo.
Exhibit A
Dailey’s trial lawyers didn’t do much better. Years later, appellate attorneys pointed to a Southwestern Bell phone bill that had been sitting in the case file all along, showing a collect call placed from a St. Petersburg pay phone to Kansas in the early hours of the murder. It corroborated a co-defendant’s account that he, not Dailey, had been the one dropped at that pay phone, undercutting the state’s theory that Dailey was in the car.
Nobody on the defense team had ever introduced it at trial. It’s the closest thing to a law school exam question on Strickland v. Washington you’re likely to encounter outside a classroom: deficient performance by counsel, paired with a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different if they’d done their job.
The Paper Trail
It ultimately took Laura Fernandez, a Yale scholar of prosecutorial ethics, to see what no one in Florida had bothered to assemble, and she came to it already knowing the terrain. Fernandez grew up in Tampa, and years earlier she’d worked on the appeal of Richard Cooper, another man Skalnik’s testimony had helped send to death row, then the youngest man on Florida’s death row.
She recognized Skalnik’s fingerprints because she’d already spent a career tracing them. Drawing on public-records litigation her firm, Holland & Knight, had won in the Cooper case, she kept pulling files from old cases until the documents filled an entire conference room. Fernandez could have stopped there and gone back to her research at Yale. Instead she stayed with it long enough to show that Skalnik wasn’t one bad witness. He was institutional habit.
The Real Defendant
Colloff closes with one statistic that lands harder than any rhetorical flourish. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, jailhouse informants play a role in roughly one-quarter of death row exonerations, wildly out of proportion to their role in ordinary criminal cases. She’s careful, though, not to let Skalnik become the whole story. What made him dangerous, she writes, “was not his intelligence or cunning” but how readily the institutions charged with seeking justice amplified his lies.
If Catch the Devil is a call to action, it’s a specific one: for prosecutors’ offices to track and disclose their use of jailhouse informants the way some jurisdictions already require, rather than treating a closer’s usefulness as reason enough to keep calling him back. The book’s real subject was never Paul Skalnik’s pathology. It was theirs.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast | Pamela Colloff | Knopf, 320 pages
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC.