Catch the Devil: A Guest Post by Pamela Colloff

Both chilling and enlightening, this true story follows a con man who helped convict innocent men for his own gain, while exposing prosecutors willing to win at any cost. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Pamela Colloff on writing Catch the Devil. 

Eight years ago, I received an email about an old murder case on Florida’s Gulf Coast that I found myself rereading again and again. The lawyer who had written to me described the prosecution’s star witness in the case as “a former police officer turned con artist.”

The email was from Laura Fernandez, a lawyer and scholar at Yale Law School. She had become so troubled by the conviction of a man named James Dailey that she had reactivated her law license to help represent him. Dailey had spent decades on Florida’s death row, she explained, and she believed his conviction deserved another look.

The star witness against him was a man named Paul Skalnik: a “con man extraordinaire,” as one arrest warrant described him. Whenever one of his schemes landed him back in jail, he relied on the same trick. He would claim that other men in the jail had confessed their crimes to him. Then he would recount those “confessions” on the stand for the prosecution, and in return, he often received a reduced sentence or other benefits. It was exactly that kind of testimony that had helped send Dailey to death row, Fernandez told me. In return, Skalnik had walked free.

I soon began digging into Skalnik’s life. The deeper I looked, the more improbable he became. Skalnik had spent more than four decades reinventing himself. He had claimed to be a decorated Vietnam fighter pilot, a wealthy Texas oilman, a real estate developer, a criminal defense lawyer, an airline executive, and an undercover FBI agent. For more than a decade, he had persuaded people that he was dying of cancer. I found evidence that he had married at least nine different women.

I eventually tracked Skalnik down to a federal prison outside of Dallas and went to meet him. He promised he would tell me everything about his colorful life and his years as a jailhouse informant. He encouraged me to come visit him as often as I could, and to send him as many questions as I’d like. Initially, I was elated. But instead, after stringing me along for months, he told me nothing.

So I began reconstructing his life the only way I knew how: through court transcripts, jail records, police files, newspaper archives, and thousands of pages of public records — many of them heavily redacted. I interviewed dozens of people whose lives had intersected with his over half a century. Every document answered one question, only to raise another. Every interview complicated the story I thought I understood. What began as an attempt to unravel the life of an extraordinary con man became something larger: an investigation into the institutions that trusted him, the incentives that shaped their decisions, and the devastating consequences that followed. That journey became Catch the Devil.