CATCH THE DEVIL: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff
Though its subtitle suggests true crime, “Catch the Devil” is by no means your typical true-crime book. This devil is not wild-eyed or knife-wielding but, rather, “one of the most prolific, and most effective, jailhouse informants in American history.” Paul Skalnik, a slippery con man, repeatedly testified about what he’d supposedly heard while in lockup in order to reduce his own sentences. In his telling, Skalnik helped place “34 individuals in prison, including four on death row.”
The problem is that much, even most, of his testimony appears to have been invented, and some of those he helped to convict were almost certainly not guilty. “The consequences of snitch testimony can be catastrophic,” writes Pamela Colloff, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and a reporter for ProPublica.
“Catch the Devil” is about Skalnik, his victims and his enablers. It takes place in Florida and Texas, where Skalnik robbed and defrauded many people — including several of the nine women he was married to, sometimes simultaneously.
Skalnik was a convincing liar. He used several aliases, presenting himself variously as an executive at Southwest Airlines, a law student, a lawyer, an undercover F.B.I. informant, a fighter pilot who had been shot down over Vietnam and a terminally ill cancer patient, all in order to take advantage of others.
He got into a groove: After being caught and convicted of crimes, which included grand larceny and the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl, he would reach out to investigators, offering to share incriminating information he had allegedly heard from fellow inmates, and testify under oath in exchange for leniency.
While Skalnik’s history of crime and snitching extends over roughly a decade, from 1978 to 1987, Colloff focuses on one particular case. Shelly Boggio, 14, was hitchhiking with a friend near Seminole, Fla., in 1985 when three men picked the girls up. Boggio’s naked body, stabbed 31 times, was found the next day. Two of the men were charged with killing her; the first to go to trial was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison — only to accuse his roommate, Jim Dailey, a 38-year-old Vietnam veteran, of being the actual killer.
Little evidence tied Dailey to the case, and so an investigator named Halliday visited the jail and started asking other inmates if Dailey might have confessed to them. “The word was out — Jim Dailey’s case needed a snitch,” Colloff writes. Soon after, jailers moved Dailey onto Skalnik’s floor and two days later “Skalnik got word to Halliday: Jim had confessed to him.”
Skalnik, Colloff writes, “was the state’s closer, the witness whose words moved jurors to choose death. Where there was room for doubt, Skalnik erased it.” His success, as Colloff demonstrates, lay partly in his preternatural ability to gin up colorful and damning details. “He said no jury would ever sentence him to the death chair,” Skalnik testified in one case, “because he’s 19 years old and because he’s got that little baby face.”
Skalnik claimed that a handyman named Freddie Gaines, charged with murder after stabbing a man in the heart, bragged that he should have been charged “with open-heart surgery.”
As for Jim Dailey, Skalnik wanted to convey that Shelly Boggio had suffered a slow, painful death. “No matter how many times I stabbed her,” Skalnik testified that Dailey told him, “she just wouldn’t die.” Dailey, now 80, remains on Florida’s death row to this day.
One of the fascinations here is Skalnik’s psychic makeup. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” a landmark treatment of true crime, is remembered for the effort he invested in getting to know the two murderers at the heart of the book. Colloff similarly works to understand Skalnik: The book’s prologue is a scene of her visiting a dying Skolnick in prison, where he evades her questions despite insisting, “This is a story that needs to be told, and I want to help you tell it.”
Lacking actual cooperation, Colloff instead deploys her prodigious investigative reporting skills. Building on the research of a lawyer named Laura Fernandez, then working to keep a defendant out of the electric chair, the author learns more about Skalnik’s trail of destruction in Florida and Texas, where he was born and to which he returned. She interviews his exes and combs through “thousands of pages of police reports, arrest records, jail logs, probation and parole records, and correspondence.”
Her doggedness appears to shock even Skalnik, whom she tracks down at book’s end in a rural Texas nursing home. “How on earth did you find me?” he asks. Colloff offers him one last opportunity to recant some of his false testimony, to possibly save the life of Jim Dailey or free Freddie Gaines, who was sentenced to life on Skalnik’s word.
Even knowing all she does, Colloff still hopes to find a flicker of a conscience in her subject. And for a moment it seems that Skalnik will indeed display some humanity — but then his tone shifts. “Whatever I testified to was fact,” he declares.
“My revulsion at that moment was not reserved for Skalnik, who had known he would be rewarded, all those years ago, for telling just the right story; it was for the entire apparatus that enabled and encouraged him,” Colloff writes, of detectives and prosecutors eager for convictions, the judges who allowed his testimony and, finally, “the appellate judges who rubber-stamped it all.”
Its unusual villain makes “Catch the Devil” an engrossing read; the public policy implications make it important. “Of the 367 DNA exonerations in the United States to date, jailhouse informants played a role in nearly one in five of the underlying wrongful convictions,” Colloff writes. Skalnik may be dead, but vigilance and reform are needed to truly stop this devil.
CATCH THE DEVIL: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast | By Pamela Colloff | Knopf | 310 pp. | $32