A Former Police Officer Avoided Molestation Charges by Becoming a Jail Informant

Over three decades, Paul Skalnik conned women and exploited teenage girls. Once caught, he helped imprison dozens of men as a jailhouse informant, conning a legal system intent on winning convictions instead of uncovering the truth.

Skalnik was a remorseless but charismatic con man who wreaked havoc on the lives of unsuspecting victims in Florida and Texas. Pamela Colloff’s new book, Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, investigates how he passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent and a terminal cancer patient so that he could dupe, swindle and marry nine different women, some at the same time. When Skalnik was eventually apprehended, the first time in Florida’s Pinellas County, he turned his skills to conning the judicial system by earning a reputation as the go-to “trusted” jail informant and frequent witness for the state.

Skalnik liked to boast that prisoners awaiting trial would confess their crimes to him, and then he’d exaggerate or lie in court implicating the innocent to help prosecutors win convictions. Each time, he was rewarded with freedom and returned to his dark and duplicitous ways, eventually adding sexual predator to his list of crimes.

In 1985, Jim Dailey, a 38-year-old transient Vietnam veteran, was suspected of the gruesome murder of 14-year-old Shelley Boggio. While awaiting trial, Dailey was imprisoned in the Pinellas County Jail alongside Skalnik, who at this time was serving 20 years for grand theft. Later in Texas he would face charges of fraud and child sexual abuse.

Already known as a snitch, Skalnik had been helping prosecutors since 1983 and had sent two men to death row, resulting in his confinement to protective custody in a single cell.

However, Skalnik still claimed that Dailey sought him out and confessed to Shelley’s murder even though no forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing. Two other inmates also alleged Dailey confessed to them, and a jury sent Dailey to death row. Skalnik was released for his service.

Skalnik’s testimony ultimately helped send 37 people to prison in Texas, and four to death row in Florida before his 2020 death. In exchange, Skalnik received such benefits as having a molestation charge dismissed and being granted parole halfway into a five-year sentence, even though the Department of Corrections deemed him to be at “high risk of further unlawful behavior.”

Jailhouse informant testimony has played a role in almost 20% of the 367 cases in which the accused was later exonerated by DNA evidence. As of September 2024, jailhouse informants testified against 247 out of 3,591 exonerees, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

Colloff shares with A&E Crime + Investigation how she herself was duped by Skalnik, the problem with the reliance on jail house snitches and how Dailey, now 80, maintains his innocence from death row.

Catch the Devil is based on your New York Times Magazine article, in partnership with ProPublica, from December of 2019. Why did you expand the story into a book?

Research for this project began in 2018, which is when I first went to visit Paul Skalnik. He tricked me into thinking he was going to tell me everything. While I was working on the article, Jim Dailey was given an execution date. It wasn't clear what was going to happen, and I was on the list of witnesses [for his execution]. And so, luckily, I did not have to do that. He got a stay of execution, and he's still on death row.

I published a magazine story in late 2019 and felt like I had barely scratched the surface, even after doing a year of research into who this man was and the damage he caused. In 2020, during the pandemic, I started working on the book and now here we are. It took much longer than I imagined.

What drew you to Paul Skalnik?

I had been looking for a snitch story for a long time, and the reason for that is that whenever I would look at other cases that had a jailhouse informant in it, it was always a bad case. And to me that became a red flag, a hallmark of a case that had problems. I think Paul Skalnik as a character is so interesting. He had once been a police officer in Austin; he'd gotten caught writing some hot checks and then he went on to become this con artist and to do these escalating crimes over a series of decades.

By the time I saw him, he had landed himself in federal prison, he hadn't been able to talk his way out of that. He knew exactly what I wanted from our conversation. I had said to him that I wanted to write the story of how he became a jailhouse snitch, how he worked with prosecutors. He told me in that initial meeting that he would tell me everything, that this was the story that had to be told before he died and I was the person to tell it. And it wasn't until months later of writing him and trying to make time to go see him that I realized that that was his way of hoodwinking me. He knew what I was hungry for, and for him, the gain was attention. I figured that out much later than I should have that he had no intention of telling me anything and was going to be stringing me along forever.

How did you piece together who Paul Skalnik actually was?

It was a matter of going back and finding all of the different people he had testified against, some of whom are still in prison today. Some of it was finding his ex-wives—he’s been married nine times—then going back and finding some of the daughters of those women who were sexually abused by him. Finding those women, getting them to tell their stories and be willing to be written about is the most moving and important part of this for me. One of the things that was so shocking to me, though I guess it shouldn't have been, is the extent to which they were not believed at the time. Karen Parker, when she came forward, she's a 12-year-old. She was hooked up to a polygraph machine at 12 years old. And what was so striking to me was that Skalnik was never asked to take a polygraph. I do not believe that polygraphs are legitimate evidence of whether someone is lying or telling the truth, but in the 1980s, the police officers who were using them believed that's what they could do.

Do you hope your book will be able to exonerate Dailey?

I wouldn't say that I am trying to exonerate him as much as I am trying to put all the information out there so that people can see what wasn't presented in this case. And to look at how it's possible that a serial con artist like Paul Skalnik could give testimony in dozens of cases, a number of them capital cases, and for there to never be a re-examination of those cases. And for all those convictions to be protected and upheld by the prosecutors who obtained them. I'm trying to appeal to people who have never thought about any of these issues before.

Such as issues around the use of jail informants in trials?

Jailhouse informants have no connection to the crime whatsoever, they're just in the same jail cell as someone who's convicted of something else. And there's the unspoken incentive that if they offer a story to investigators or prosecutors that helps them obtain a conviction, then they will likely have their sentence reduced or they can even, like Paul Skalnik, get their freedom. Obviously, they're huge problems. And then there's the incentive to do this for benefits on the back end.

Would you say that all jailhouse informants are problematic? Are they ever reliable?

It's hard to read the book and think that they are something that should be used in any case, much less a capital case. They are what academics call an incentivized witness, meaning there are reasons for them to testify the way they do. And because of that, they're just inherently too problematic. Skalnik is extreme. Obviously, most jailhouse snitches are not testifying in upwards of 40 cases and in various states. But his story does a good job of illustrating the perils that those witnesses come with.

Are changes being made in the criminal justice system to not rely so heavily on these jail informants?

There are a couple states that have put reforms in place. I don't think they work—I think they're dancing around the issue rather than dealing with the issue—but it's good that people are starting to think about this issue and try to make some legislative reforms. It’s a bizarre exception to the hearsay rule. And they're allowed to do it with rewards, rewards that juries often don't hear about. A prosecutor is required to disclose if the informant is receiving any benefits, but they can usually truthfully say, because the deal hasn't happened yet, that's factually accurate.

What was the biggest takeaway after spending years researching Paul Skalnik and jailhouse informants?

The book is about what happens when you have a story that's not grounded in facts. The book is a response to that. What I feel certain that this book will do at the very least, is to make people think more deeply about things that are background noise right now, whether it's the reality of death row where we have more than 200 exonerations in the United States since 1973, whether it's how women were treated in the criminal justice system in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s when they came forward with sexual assault, to the problems that are posed by jailhouse snitches.