Skalnik

Summary

Gone South – "Skalnik"
Audacy Podcasts | Host: Jed Lipinski | Aired: July 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Gone South centers on the chilling story of Paul Skalnik—a former police officer turned prolific jailhouse informant—and his outsized role in shaping the fates of dozens of accused men in the South, particularly on Florida’s death row. Journalist Pam Koloff joins host Jed Lipinski to unravel Skalnik’s con artistry, the criminal justice system’s dependence on informants, and the devastating effects this has had, including the case of Jim Daley, who remains on death row based largely on Skalnik’s unreliable testimony. The episode deeply explores not just an individual’s crimes, but how flaws in Southern legal structures can amplify such deception, raising troubling questions about justice and the price of a conviction.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Pam Koloff’s Journalism and Focus on the South

• Pam Koloff has devoted much of her career to investigating wrongful convictions and systemic problems in the criminal justice system, mostly in Southern states.
• She emphasizes how stories from the South are distinct:

  "There's a larger than life quality to Texas... combined with the friendliest people who will welcome you in and spend a lot of time talking to you while you're doing your reporting, which is key..." (Pam Koloff, 03:27)

2. The Introduction to Paul Skalnik

• Koloff’s interest is piqued by an attorney’s email about a Florida death row case, where the “star witness” is “a former police officer turned con artist turned jailhouse informant.” (04:21)
• Skalnik’s Reach: By the time Koloff is contacted, Skalnik has testified or provided information in 40+ cases; his words have sent four men to death row (04:48).
• Koloff has long sought a story on jailhouse informants, as they are often incentivized to lie for leniency—nearly a quarter of death row exonerations stem from jailhouse informant testimony.

3. Tracking Down Skalnik – The Reluctant Source

• Koloff initially manages to speak to Skalnik in federal prison; he hints at a big reveal—

  "This is a story that needs to be told before I die, and you are the person I'm going to tell it to." (Skalnik via Koloff, 05:38)

• However, Skalnik strings her along with excuses, stalling indefinitely and essentially ghosting her (06:24).

4. Origins of a Con Man – Houston, 1970s

• Background: Skalnik’s downfall begins as a promising cop caught for check fraud. After leaving the force, he repeatedly reinvents himself, marries multiple women (sometimes concurrently), and runs endless scams, living off other people’s money (08:03–09:14).
• His charisma and manipulative ability are central:

  "He's able to just make you feel like you're the center of the world... terrific at telling a story." (Koloff, 09:42)

5. Skalnik’s Jailhouse Informant Career

• While jailed, Skalnik identifies valuable targets for prosecutors and fabricates confessions to trade for his freedom.
  • Example: His testimony against a Chicano activist in a thin case is rewarded with early release (10:54–11:48).
• After relocating to Florida, he continues the cycle, running scams and identifying new victims.

6. Pinellas County and the Culture of Snitching

• The 1980s Pinellas County DA’s office, led by Jimmy Russell, rewards informants and aggressively pursues long sentences (14:31–15:25).
• Prosecutors frequent the jail, offering deals in exchange for information, fostering a toxic symbiosis with men like Skalnik (15:25).
• Skalnik’s “confessions” often use public information to add credible detail, inflating charges from lesser offenses to first-degree murder or life sentences (15:58–17:06).

7. Escalating Criminality and Impunity

• Skalnik’s repeated cooperation with authorities emboldens him; his out-of-jail crimes grow more serious (17:44):
  • Includes a horrific incident of child sexual abuse for which charges are dropped in favor of a theft plea (17:44–18:27).
• He testifies in multiple murder trials, sending men to death row or life imprisonment, while consistently receiving post-verdict deals (18:27–20:19).

8. The Shelley Boggio Case and Jim Daley’s Conviction

• The brutal murder of 14-year-old Shelley Boggio leads to the prosecution of Jack Percy and Jim Daley (20:19–22:25).
• With little evidence against Daley, prosecutors are left with almost nothing—until they dispatch deputies in search of jailhouse confessions (23:29).
• Three jailhouse informants—including Skalnik—suddenly report Daley’s confession to the murder.
  • Daley senses a setup:

    "Get me out of here. This is a damn setup." (Daley, relayed by Lipinski, 25:58)

• Skalnik’s testimony provides the "missing" evidence of premeditation, turning a weak case into a capital conviction (27:43–29:19).
• Daley receives a death sentence, while Percy—the likely real perpetrator—gets life.

9. The System Turns on Skalnik

• When Skalnik’s value diminishes, he drafts a document alleging prosecutors fed him information and coached his testimony in prior trials (31:04).
• Prosecutors panic and scramble to dismiss his claims as fantasy, despite years spent defending his credibility (32:40).
• A new deal is struck for Skalnik, but he serves little time before being released yet again (33:17).

10. Last Years and Enduring Consequences

• Skalnik cycles through more aliases, locations, and scams, including sexual assault and posing as lawyers and law officials (33:17–34:46).
• Koloff tracks him to a Texas nursing home as Daley’s execution date approaches. Despite evidence and pleas, Skalnik refuses to recant his testimony (35:36–36:52).
• Daley receives a last-minute stay of execution, in part because Koloff’s reporting brings widespread attention to the flaws in his case (36:52).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Southern Stories:

  "Everything has been so compelling...There's a larger than life quality to Texas...but stories in the South, and it's combined with the friendliest people..."
  (Pam Koloff, 03:27)

• On Skalnik’s Charisma:

  "He's not classically handsome, but he's attractive. He's able to just make you feel like you're the center of the world. He's very good at love bombing..."
  (Pam Koloff, 09:42)

• On the Mechanics of Informant Testimony:

  "These are people who are total strangers to him...and he's purporting to have heard them confess...usually...using details that have been in the local newspaper or have been in TV coverage and then building out from that."
  (Pam Koloff, 15:58)

• On Systemic Enabling of Skalnik:

  "These institutions indulged his pathologies, granting him power and influence he could never have achieved on his own, effectively giving him license to commit greater crimes."
  (Pam Koloff, reading from her book, 38:56)

• On Daley’s Ordeal:

  "What I do fear is waking up every morning in prison for the rest of my life for a crime I did not commit... called his trial a mockery of justice."
  (Jim Daley at sentencing, 29:33)

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Key Timestamps

• Introduction to Pam Koloff and her interest in Southern justice: 02:58–04:21
• The Skalnik email and context: 04:21–05:38
• Skalnik’s history as a cop and early cons: 08:03–09:14
• The emergence of the jailhouse snitch system in Houston and Florida: 09:42–12:25
• Pinellas County: DA’s “win at all costs” culture: 14:31–15:25
• Skalnik’s repeat snitching, increased crimes, and child molestation unpunished: 17:44–20:19
• The Shelley Boggio murder and Jim Daley’s frame-up: 20:19–29:19
• Skalnik’s ultimate betrayal of the DA’s office, attempt to expose his own lies: 31:04–33:00
• Koloff’s confrontation with Skalnik as Daley faces execution: 35:36–36:52
• Koloff’s closing reflection on institutional complicity: 38:56

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Conclusion & Reflection

Pam Koloff and Jed Lipinski use the story of Paul Skalnik to expose the deeply troubling interplay between criminal informants and a justice system all too eager for convictions, regardless of truth. The episode dissects how charisma and opportunism, when fused with prosecutorial ambition, can alter the course of lives—even sending possibly innocent men to death row. Koloff’s relentless pursuit of the real story, and her attempts to bring justice for men like Jim Daley, highlight how these systemic failures still loom over the South—and why understanding this history remains vitally important.

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Transcript

[Jed Lipinski]

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[Pam Koloff]

My most recent stories have been set in Oklahoma, Florida, Tennessee and Texas and to me, that's the most interesting part of our country.

[Jed Lipinski]

So I tend to agree. As someone who's done a podcast for five seasons about crime in the South, I really do agree. But what do you think it is about stories from the south, maybe crime stories from the south in particular, that you find so fascinating?

[Pam Koloff]

I think as a native New Yorker who's now lived in Texas for more than three decades, to me everything has been so compelling. I feel like I think of story ideas every day. There's a larger than life quality to Texas in particular, but stories in the south, and it's combined with the friendliest people who will welcome you in and spend a lot of time talking to you while you're doing your reporting, which is key and really not true necessarily of other parts of the country.

[Jed Lipinski]

Around the time Pam left Texas Monthly, an attorney emailed her with what sounded like an interesting Southern crime story. The attorney had a client on Florida's death row, and she hoped Pam might write about the case for better or for worse.

[Pam Koloff]

I get dozens and dozens of emails like this a week. But what stood out in that email was the fact that the star witness at this man's Capitol murder trial had been a former police officer turned con artist turned jailhouse informant. And I just heard those collection of words and thought, I really, really want to know more.

[Jed Lipinski]

The cop turned con artist turned jailhouse snitch was a man named Paul Skalnick. By the time the attorney reached out, Skalnick had testified or provided information in upwards of 40 cases. Many of the men he testified against were sent to prison, some for long stretches. Four were sent to death row. Pam had been looking for a story about jailhouse informants for years. She knew that they're often incentivized to lie in exchange for leniency, which can result in wrongful convictions. Studies have found that nearly a quarter of death row exonerations stem from cases in which prosecutors relied on on a jailhouse informant. And so not long after getting the email, Pam tracked Skalnick down at a federal prison outside Dallas.

[Pam Koloff]

And I said that I wanted to learn more about his time as a jailhouse informant over these many decades when he had been so prolific. And he agreed to speak with me and sort of stalled throughout the allotted hour that we had. And he said, don't worry, you know, you can come back and see me anytime. Let's correspond. I'll tell you everything. This is a story that needs to be told before I die, and you are the person I'm going to tell it to.

[Jed Lipinski]

Pam was elated. On the drive back to Austin, she called her editor to say she'd just found the best story ever and that Paul Skalnick was going to tell her everything. But then he didn't.

[Pam Koloff]

And he strung me along for a really, really long time. He would say, there's something wrong in the mail room. I didn't get your questions, or I can't schedule a visit right now because I'm sick. And I realized long after I should have realized that he was never going to tell me anything.

[Jed Lipinski]

Skalnick's lack of cooperation did nothing to diminish Pam's interest in the story. If anything, it fueled her desire to know more, to understand who Skalnick really was and how he'd helped prosecutors secure dozens of convictions. But according to the attorney who emailed Pam, there was an urgency to the story. Her client had been on Florida's death row for more than 30 years. She was convinced he was innocent, but his appeals were running out, and many suspected the governor would soon sign his death warrant. If Pam was going to write about Paul Skalnick, she needed to do it now. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. After realizing Paul Skalnick was never going to tell her anything about his years as a jailhouse informant, Pam Koloff resolved to understand it for herself. She would spend the next year reporting the story as a magazine piece, which would eventually grow into a book about Skalnick called Catch the Devil. But the story of Paul Skalnick began decades earlier in Houston in the late 1970s.

[Pam Koloff]

1970s Houston, which is a really interesting place. It was a boom town. It was flush with oil money and larger than life characters. And Paul Skelnick was definitely one of those people. And at that point, he sort of bottomed out. He had been a police officer in the early 70s in Austin, Texas, where I live, and he'd been caught writing multiple hot checks. And so he had politely been told to leave the force. He wasn't. There were no criminal charges, and that was really the last real job he had. And from that point forward, he was a full on, you know, catch me if you can style con artist, skimming money wherever he could.

[Jed Lipinski]

Skalnick had moved to Houston to reinvent himself, something he would do over and over in the coming decades. He was married to his third wife. He would eventually marry six more, some of them at the same time, and passing himself off as a top executive at Southwest Airlines. In truth, he was living off his wife's credit cards and taking out lines of credit in her name.

[Pam Koloff]

He had all sorts of different scams he was running. He was having romances with many, many different women. And this all caught up to him when he was finally arrested and charged with fraud and various other things and he was put in the Harris county jail.

[Jed Lipinski]

Harris county jail is the big jail in Houston. Paul found himself surrounded by other men awaiting trial like him.

[Pam Koloff]

I should stop here to say Skalnick is an extremely charismatic, sort of a riveting personality. He's not classically handsome, but he's attractive. He's able to just make you feel like you're the center of the world. He's very good at love bombing all the women around him, and he's terrific at telling a story. And so he's sitting there in the county jail and he's thinking, how the hell do I get out of here? I don't want to be here. And so he deploys his storytelling skills as, you know, raconteur. And what that looks like is figuring out who in the county jail is the most sort of high value defendant to the district attorney's office. Who do they most want to get a conviction against? And he identifies a few people and then goes to investigators and says, hey, I got confessions from some of these folks who you'll be trying in a few months. I got all the details that I think you'll need. I'd be glad to testify at trial.

[Jed Lipinski]

One of the men Skalnick claimed he got a confession from was a Chicano activist who'd been charged with inciting a riot in response to the police killing of a young Mexican American laborer. The evidence against him was thin, but Skalnick said the activist admitted to plotting the riot with two other men.

[Pam Koloff]

So even though they know his history is as a fraudster, he becomes the star witness of a high profile 1979 trial in Houston and helps prosecutors win a conviction. And in return he's rewarded with his freedom and that becomes his playbook. Then he realizes he can live the life of crime. He can be a full on con artist and kind of do what he wants if in return he can work with prosecutors and law enforcement in exchange

[Jed Lipinski]

for his testimony in the Chicano activist case. Skalnick left the Harris county jail after serving just two months for bad check charges. He was then transferred to another jail in Florida to serve out a one year sentence for violating an earlier probation. But likely as a reward for his testimony at the Houston trial, a judge moved him to a work release program months later. By early 1980, Skalnick was a free man. He quickly married his fourth wife and relocated to Pinellas County, a white sand peninsula on Florida's Gulf Coast.

[Pam Koloff]

Early 80s, Pinellas county was a fun place to be. Living was easy, it was cheap. There were a lot of, you know, bars along the beach. You could live a very laid back lifestyle, not work too hard, and everybody was from somewhere else. It was sort of, I think of it more like California in the 60s and 70s. People are going there to get away from something or to reinvent themselves. And Skalnick's another one of these guys.

[Jed Lipinski]

In Pinellas, Skalnick convinced his new wife that he was a churchgoing law student. Meanwhile, he had a fiance in the nearby town of Largo who believed he was a Dallas attorney who'd relocated his practice to Florida. As he had before, Skalnick lived off his wife's credit cards and some elaborate scams.

[Pam Koloff]

And he does things like tell people. And he knew this from his days in law enforcement. You know, I have these connections in law enforcement here, and we have these incredible fancy cars through asset forfeiture that I can get you at a reduced price. You just have to give me the money up front. And a surprising number of people went along with this. And he was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is a lot now, but was really a lot back then.

[Jed Lipinski]

Eventually, authorities caught up with Skalnick. Within a year and a half of arriving in Florida, he was back in jail, this time in Pinellas county, awaiting trial on grand theft charges. But as Skalnick would soon realize, Pinellas wasn't just a great place to escape. It was also a great place to be a snitch. Hey there, it's Jill Schlesinger.

[Pam Koloff]

I'm launching a brand new show.

[Jed Lipinski]

It's called Money Moves.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jed Lipinski]

In the early 1980s, the Pinellas County State Attorney's office was run by an aggressively tough on crime DA named Jimmy Russell.

[Pam Koloff]

He liked to make all sorts of outrageous statements about how many people he was responsible for locking up and the mandate from that office. And this was against the backdrop of the tough on crime 80s, was get the longest sentences possible, the harshest punishments, and win, win, win.

[Jed Lipinski]

As Pam would later write in Catch the Devil, the state Attorney's office under Russell's leadership actively fostered a culture in which snitching was rewarded and even encouraged. Prosecutors routinely visited the jail before their cases went to trial, offering tantalizing benefits to the men who were held there. In exchange for information.

[Pam Koloff]

So these prosecutors are under a lot of pressure. And when you sort of have that come into contact with someone like Paul Skalnick, who will say and do anything in return for his freedom, it became a really toxic combination.

[Jed Lipinski]

Skalnick recognized that Pinellas county prosecutors needed informants, and so he did exactly what he'd done in Houston. He figured out who the state attorney most wanted to convict, and then he produced confessions.

[Pam Koloff]

And they're on their face, preposterous. These are people who are total strangers to him, who haven't stood trial yet, who he doesn't have a rapport with, and he's purporting to have heard them confess to him. And usually he's using details that have been in the local newspaper or have been in TV coverage and then building out from that. And to be clear, there are plenty of these men who are guilty. Some are not, but even those who are guilty who might be looking at a 10 or 15 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter, for example. When Paul Skalnick gets on the stand, he says things like, he told me this was premeditated. He had been planning this for months. He bragged to me about what he did. So you go from, you know, a lesser prison sentence to, in one case of a man I interviewed, life in prison. So the prosecutors are getting results with him.

[Jed Lipinski]

Skalnick's cooperation paid off for him, too. Prosecutors cut his sentence and kept him in the county jail instead of state prison so he could keep producing confessions. Within a year, they went to bat for him again. By the summer of 1982, Skalnick was back on the street, on probation. By this point, Skalnick felt he had the state attorney's office wired. He knew that as long as he gave prosecutors what they wanted in the form of jailhouse confessions, he could expect favors in return. According to Pam Koloff, Skalnick had begun to feel invincible.

[Pam Koloff]

He was emboldened. So there was no reason for his out of jail behavior to improve because he was being rewarded, basically. And his crimes became more and more severe. And that included stealing people's life savings. It included, at one point, preying upon and then molesting a 12 year old girl who was very infatuated with him and thought he was a cool guy who was a friend of her family. And he told her, if you tell anybody about this, you'll be in trouble, not me. And that ended up being exactly what happened. He was not punished even for that.

[Jed Lipinski]

In March of 1983, prosecutors dropped the molestation charge in exchange for a plea on some new grand theft charges. Skalnick was sentenced to five years. But once again, he was kept in the Pinellas County Jail, where he could keep doing what he did best. Over the next four years, he testified in four high profile murder trials. Three of the men he testified against were sentenced to death. A fourth got life. In these cases, defense attorneys did what they could. But Skalnick had a routine. He'd admit to his felonies before the prosecutor could ask, then mention that he'd once been a cop. He'd also assert that he'd been promised nothing in exchange for testifying, which was technically true. The deals were always made later, after the verdicts came in. As for the men he helped convict, Pam says the question at trial was rarely whether they were guilty. It was whether they deserved to die. Skalnick's job was to make sure the answer was yes. Skalnick was paroled in 1985, halfway through his five year sentence, over the objections of the Department of Corrections. Then he went back to work. He conned an elderly woman out of tens of thousands of dollars for two Lincoln Town Cars he never delivered. He conned another woman out of thousands on a phony real estate deal. He walked out of a jewelry store with a $6,000 gold Rolex paid for with a check from an account that didn't exist. In November of 1986, he was arrested again. The warrant described him as a, quote, conman extraordinaire. He was now back in Pinellas jail and eager to make another deal. Luckily for Skalnick, the state attorney's office had yet another case they needed help with.

[Pam Koloff]

There's an especially egregious crime that happens in Pinellas county in 1985 in a little beach town called Indian Rocks beach. And a 14 year old girl named Shelley Boggio is found dead in the water one morning with stab wounds all over her. She's naked. It's a horrible, horrible crime scene. And Shelley, like so many people in the area, had come there from somewhere else. Her father and her sisters and Shelley had come there sort of seeking a better life from Michigan. But Shelly had, in the past year, really stopped going to school and was sort of hanging out with some rougher folks. And she ended up falling in with not the greatest of crowds. And that was really all they knew when they found her body.

[Jed Lipinski]

The investigation eventually narrowed in on a man named Jack Percy. Percy was a drifter from Kansas with a history of violence against women. At 29, he was more than Twice Shelly's age. Sources told law enforcement that Percy had been pursuing Shelly romantically in the months before her death. He was also the last person seen with her that night. But during questioning, Percy pointed the finger at his housemate, a man named Jim Daley.

[Pam Koloff]

Jim Daley did not have the criminal past that Jack Piercey had. Jack Piercey had been involved in a murder for hire case in Missouri. He had a long history of violence against women, and Jim did not have anything of the sort. He was sort of a washed up Vietnam vet who had been so promising when he was young. He'd grown up in Manhattan, Kansas, and just been beloved by family and friends. And then he went to Vietnam and was really broken by his experience there and descended into quite serious alcoholism and then drug abuse. And that's how he became friends and then housemates with Jack Piercy.

[Jed Lipinski]

Jack admitted that he was at the crime scene that night, but he denied killing Shelly. He said he'd watched Jim stab her and hold her underwater until she died.

[Pam Koloff]

To be clear, in Jim Daley's case, there's no forensic evidence, there's no motive, there's no nothing. There's just the word of the person who all the evidence is pointing toward and who fled the state, you know, after she was found dead and all these different things. So both men are charged with capital murder, and Jack Piercey is tried and convicted and he gets a life sentence. And when Jim Daley's case is getting closer, there's just not a lot there like how are they going to try this case? And at that point, Piercy has decided he's not going to testify against Daley, which you could read all sorts of reasons into why he decides that. So they're left with nothing.

[Jed Lipinski]

At that point, a Pinellas county detective assigned to the case went in search of a jailhouse informant.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

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[Pam Koloff]

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[Lloyd Lockridge]

And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true.

[Pam Koloff]

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[Jed Lipinski]

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[Lloyd Lockridge]

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[Jed Lipinski]

Jim Daly had been in the Pinellas County Jail for the past 10 months. During that time, no one had reported hearing him talk about the Boggio murder. But in the weeks that followed the detective's visit, Pam discovered three different men came forward, each claiming to have overheard Jim say he was involved in the killing. Two of those informants worked in the jail's law library. One of them said he'd asked Jim, why did you have to kill that girl? And that Jim had responded, man, I just lost it. As Pam writes, both men had a strong incentive to help the prosecution. They were both awaiting sentencing on cocaine trafficking charges and faced serious prison time. But it was Paul Skalnick who provided the most damning testimony. Skalnick was awaiting trial once again on grand theft charges because his reputation as a jailhouse snitch put his life in danger, making him more likely to be jumped or killed by another inmate. He'd been placed in a single man isolation cell. His cell and Jim Daley's were in different wings of the jail. But around the same time, the detective went looking for a jailhouse informant. Skalnick, the county's most prolific informant, was moved to Daley's wing. Daley saw what was happening. By his own account, he told a sergeant, get me out of here. This is a damn setup.

[Pam Koloff]

And lo and behold, within 24 hours, Paul Skalnick informs authorities that he has obtained Jim Daley's confession. And I think it's important to sort of dwell on the just on its face impossibility of that. Like a man who knows his life is literally on the line. This is when Florida had the electric chair. Who doesn't know this man at all. Or as Jim Daley told me, you know, Skalnick was widely known through the jail as a snitch. Why on earth would I be talking to him? Has made up a story about how Jim Daly has confessed to him through the bars of his cell.

[Jed Lipinski]

As Skalnick told the detective, he was passing by Jim's cell one morning when Jim struck up a conversation and then launched into a description of the murder. According to Skalnick, Jim admitted that he'd stabbed Shelly Boggio to death as his housemate, Jack held her underwater again. The idea that Jim would admit such a thing to a known jailhouse snitch was laughable. Equally improbable was the idea that such a meeting could even take place. Prisoners who were held in isolation, as Skalnick was, can't just stroll around the jail talking with whoever they like. But none of this seemed to matter to Pinellas county prosecutors, who presented Skalnick as their lead witness at Jim Daley's trial.

[Pam Koloff]

So he's put on the stand at Jim's trial, and he's their star witness. He delivers this absolutely damning account of how Jim supposedly not just confessed to him, but this horrifying image where he says that Jim told him, I was staring at her. I'm stabbing her, and she would not die. You know, she's screaming, she would not die. So the jury has this horrific image and is being told that he's the one who committed the murder.

[Jed Lipinski]

As Pam would later write, Skalnick's testimony not only implicated Jim in the stabbing, it also conveniently provided the evidence of premeditation that prosecutors needed to win a first degree murder conviction. Seeing that a victim would not die and then deciding to stab her to death was sufficient to prove forethought under Florida law. In their closing statements, the prosecution admitted that they hadn't proved Jim's motive and that they lacked eyewitnesses or physical evidence. What they returned to was the testimony of the three jailhouse witnesses and Skalnick in particular. They also assured the jury that none of them had received favorable treatment in exchange for their cooperation. This was a lie. All three of them had been promised more lenient sentences. In fact, a prosecutor ended her closing statement by quoting Skalnick directly, saying that Shele had stared at him and she would not die, so he killed her.

[Pam Koloff]

So the jury convicts him and he is sentenced to death. Piercy, his co defendant, got life with the possibility of parole. So very different punishments.

[Jed Lipinski]

Jim Daley spoke at the sentencing. I'm not afraid of death, he said. What I do fear is waking up every morning in prison for the rest of my life for a crime I did not commit. He went on to blame Pinellas county for its reliance on jailhouse snitches to secure confessions and called his trial a mockery of justice. Jim left the courtroom and was soon placed on death row. Skalnick, meanwhile, walked out of jail five days later. A Florida parole and probation memo explicitly says that his release was due to his cooperation in the daily trial. Back on the outside, Skalnick returned to his old ways. He moved to Austin and reinvented himself as a high rolling oil man named J. Paul bourne. He bought $27,000 in jewelry with forged checks. He opened bank accounts and told Marks that millions in wire transfers were on the way. When, of course, it wasn't, he married and divorced his sixth wife. Skalik was soon arrested on a forgery charge and tried to snitch again. But the assistant DA in Austin saw through it and didn't bite. In the summer of 1988, he was sent back to Pinellas county, where he demanded to be let out on his own recognizance. But the prosecutors there pushed back too. Enraged by their refusal to cooperate with their most valuable jailhouse snitch, Skalnick decided to play his ace.

[Pam Koloff]

He's frustrated and he's mad, and he feels in his mind, I've done so much for the state attorney's office, and now look, they're treating me like the other guys around here. And he would say this when I spoke with him that to him, the other men in the jail were the riff raff. You know, he was a more sophisticated type of person. So he drafts a legal document in which he says, everything I said in these previous trials was coached by prosecutors. I was fed information and it wasn't reliable. And just basically sort of undoes all the work of the past 10 years. It was this fascinating moment where the prosecutors were understandably panicking. They had all these convictions they had worked so hard to get. And again, many of these men were guilty. I don't want to say that everyone was Jim Daley, but they needed to preserve those convictions. And so in order to do that, they began arguing to the court, don't listen to this. This is all lies. He's crazy. This didn't happen. We didn't feed anyone anything. But at the same time, we want you to know that everything he said before this in court is accurate and should stand. And I thought, wow, the mental gymnastics you have to do when you get in league with a guy like this never ends.

[Jed Lipinski]

As Pam writes in Catch the Devil, the irony was exquisite. The same office that had previously instructed judges and juries to take Skalnick at his word, that had spent years defending his incredible stories as gospel truth, was now asking the court to treat his accusations as fantasy.

[Pam Koloff]

Prosecutors end up offering him a sweeter deal in return. And he rescinds all of those comments and says, I don't know. That was something my attorney drafted that wasn't something that I wrote.

[Jed Lipinski]

The deal Skalnick got was five years on six pending felonies to be served not in Florida, but in Texas, far from the men he'd put on death row. He withdrew his motion, but he wound up serving just seven months before the Texas Department of Corrections released him and, as Pam notes, bought him a one way ticket out of town. Over the next two decades, Skalnick kept going. He posed as a lawyer in Massachusetts. He served time for sexually assaulting a minor. He claimed to be, at various times, an FBI agent, a fighter pilot, a college football star, a home builder, and an aide to the speaker of the Texas House. In 2015, he was arrested again, this time in Texas for failing to register as a sex offender. He had dozens of fake IDs on him. He offered once again to help out law enforcement, but the investigator turned him down, saying he couldn't possibly put a career conman on the stand and call him credible. Even so, Skalnick somehow walked away with minimal prison time. It was a few years later that Pam Koloff began writing her magazine article about Skalnick. By then, Jim Daley had been on death row for more than 30 years. As Pam discovered, Jack Percy, Daley's former housemate, had told inmates for decades that Daley had nothing to do with the murder. In 2017, he even signed a sworn affidavit saying he'd killed Shelley Boggio alone. But when called to testify to the affidavit in court, Percy got cold feet. His parole had just been denied for seven years. His family had warned him not to do anything rash, and prosecutors, by his own account, had paid him a visit. So Percy took the fifth, and the court ruled the affidavit inadmissible and denied Daley a new trial. Then, in September 2019, while Pam was in the midst of reporting, the Florida governor signed Daley's death warrant. He was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in early November. Realizing that an innocent man whom Skalnick had put in prison was about to be killed, Pam tracked the career con man down at a nursing home in

[Pam Koloff]

Corsicana, Texas, and took some finagling to figure out where he was. And then I had to go in the nursing home and pretend I was a relative of his and bring donuts and this whole sort of charade to get in to see him. And he had cut me off at that point. He told me he didn't like all my questions, that I was making him nervous. So we hadn't communicated in about six months. And I walked in with my donuts and said, can I come talk to you? And I told him that Jim Daly had an execution date that had been set and that it was however many days, you know, it was less than a month at that point in the future. And I went over with him all the things I had learned in my reporting that included things like Jack Piercey, the co defendant, had signed multiple affidavits saying that he, Jack Piercey, had committed the murder, not Jim Daley. And so I said to Skalnick, you know, this is the time, if any, to admit that what you've said on the stand was false at Jim Daley's trial. And he would not go there. He would not admit that.

[Jed Lipinski]

In the end, Daley was spared. Just days before his execution date, a federal judge issued a stay, giving Daly's attorneys more time to prepare their case. Shortly after that, Pam published her story in the times magazine and ProPublica detailing Skalnick's decades long career as a jailhouse informant and the role he played in Jim Daley's conviction. The story won a National Magazine Award. In its wake, editorial boards across Florida and the US called on DeSantis to stop Daly's execution, and DeSantis backed off. Then the pandemic happened and Jim's execution did not move forward. But he's still on Florida's death row

[Pam Koloff]

to this day, and executions are being set every couple of weeks, and it's sort of a matter of when his number will come up.

[Jed Lipinski]

Paul Skalnick died on March 10th of 2020. It seemed at first that he died of COVID but the county didn't record its first coronavirus death until April of that year. Pam says she never figured out what killed him. But when she shared the news of his passing with people who'd known Skalnick, many reacted with disbelief. They assumed it was just another con. In closing her book, Pam writes, perhaps it was easier to imagine him as a criminal mastermind who had faked his own death than to confront the truth. What made him so dangerous was not his intelligence or cunning, but rather how readily the institutions that were supposed to uphold the law and protect the most vulnerable had amplified his lies. These institutions indulged his pathologies, granting him power and influence he could never have achieved on his own, effectively giving him license to commit greater crimes. Without them, Skalnick would have been nothing more than a small time con man.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

Foreign.

[Jed Lipinski]

If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email us at gone south podcastmail.com that's gone southpodcastmail.com for bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram at Gone South Podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on substack at Gone south with Jed Lipinski Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leo Rees, Dennis, Mattie, Sprung Keyser, and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone south is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone South.

[Lloyd Lockridge]

The second World War is the largest event in human history. A 20 part series with Tom Hanks. No part of the globe was untouched, no life unchanged. Experience. The only ultimate account of world war ii. Every single person had a story. These are the stories that make us who we are. Listen to World war II with Tom Hanks on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.