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- [00:07]
A
Well, hello, bookcase listeners far and wide. We're glad that you're all gathered around your telephones, your computers, your iPads, your whatever you listen to us with. We're pleased that you're listening.
- [00:19]
B
I thought we decided last week that these people, you can now call them bookcase listeners. They had a title. They're bookcasers. We decided on this. I'd stopped calling the book nerds. And now you don't honor that. I'm Kate, and I'm very disappointed in my partner.
- [00:32]
A
She's always disappointed in me. It's. It's the way she's survived all these years. Anyway, we have, I think, a really, really interesting and important book this week. Catch the Devil is the name of it. Pamela Koloff is the author. She's a part time New York Times reporter, independent journalist. Also, I think, writes for ProPublica, and
- [00:55]
B
she has been New York Magazine and the New York. Yeah, she's. She's just amazing. Yes.
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A
And she's written a book about jailhouse snitches, particularly a man named Paul Skolnick.
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B
He was in trouble with the law and he kept using, quote, unquote, confessions that he'd gotten from his fellow inmates to parse down his sentence or get parole or be transferred to a bread or prison. This man wasn't just a con man. He was a con man who specifically conned law enforcement over and over and over again.
- [01:25]
A
Yes. He wasn't conning for fellow prisoners to get their confessions. He never got the confessions. But he conned the prosecutors and convinced them that what he had in terms of confessions from fellow prisoners were genuine. He was used many, many times in courtrooms to testify against people who were on trial. Indeed, he says, and I think the statistics back him up, he put almost three dozen people in prison having claimed that they confessed to him, including four on death row.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So this book concentrates on Paul Skolnick, and it also focuses on one of the cases in which Skolnick testified and put a man on death row in Florida, where he has been now for more than 40 years.
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, this book was an education for me. One of the things that Pamela Kohloff says in this book is we are a system that rewards prosecutors, that rewards judges, that rewards DAs who can get harsh penalties, the death penalty or a guilty verdict or what have you, we reward those as, quote, unquote, wins. And in a system where we reward those as wins, how do we get around stepping over justice to get what we want?
- [02:36]
A
Yeah. Pamela writes about prosecutors who placed Gonik in prisons specifically to try to get confessions from people. And he claimed he got confessions from fellow prisoners that he never got near.
- [02:49]
B
No, he was a confession Svengali, I think, according to the lawyers that were using him for testimony. And, you know, time and time again, he would walk up to the stand and the person who was on trial would turn to his lawyer and say, I've never talked to that person. I think it's amazing too, when you look at this book, you think to yourself, I, as a reader am extremely skeptical of anybody that would get a confession more than six times. Right. So this guy testifies in dozens of trials. He claims to have gotten dozens of jailhouse confessions. And the prosecutors, instead of describing him as like, wow, this is really strange that this guy's gonna. They say, oh, no, he's very useful. He's proving to be extremely effective. They put him in prisons where they wanna get information because they think Skalnick is just that good. I mean, there are so many ways in which loopholes had trains driven through them in this book. Again, it was a real eye opening education for me.
- [03:42]
A
And as Pamela indicated, one case which she concentrates on in this book, the case of a fellow named Jim Daly, is really sort of the epitome of what Skalnick was doing. Jim Daly, who I mentioned earlier, has been on death row in Florida for over 40 years.
- [03:58]
B
Yeah. He and his family, I think, are fantastic living portraits and examples of the damage that somebody like Paul Skalnick can do if gone unchecked.
- [04:08]
A
So we will talk more about the Daley case and how that's reverberated and also the peculiar way that Florida decides who should be executed and who should not. The book is Catch the Devil. The author is Pamela Kohoff, and here's our conversation. Pamela Kohloff, Catch the Devil. It is great to have you with us. You're not the Devil. It's just the name of your book.
- [04:32]
B
Oh, that was such a dad segment.
- [04:34]
A
Well, this is about a jailhouse snitch. Tell us who Paul Skalnick is and was.
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C
Paul Skalnick began as a police officer in Texas in the early 1970s. He lasted for about 18 months before he was caught writing hot checks. And that was the last honest job he ever had. From there, he went on to a life of crime that began with petty theft and fraud, things like writing $500 hot checks. And it escalated dramatically over the years. But he was an extremely charismatic guy. He wasn't handsome, but he was attractive, if that makes sense. He was Married to nine different women who I was able to find. There may be more out there. Sometimes he was married to them at the same time. He was a bigamist. And his get out of jail free, you know, trick, which he did whenever he was caught, and he was often caught because he did not use pseudonyms, was when he would land in the jail, he would use his skills as a former cop to size up who it was in the jail who was the most valuable to prosecutors. And then he would go to investigators and he'd say, that guy just confessed everything to me. And he would weave a story that prosecutors would use by putting him on the stand and securing conviction.
- [06:04]
A
So what was his scorecard, so to speak, of prisoners from whom he claimed to have gotten jailhouse confessions when he was one of their fellow prisoners.
- [06:14]
C
So of cases he was actually used in. In one Florida county, he was involved in 37 cases alone. I found evidence that he did this from Houston to Florida in upwards of 40 cases. I suspect that he gave information in over 100 cases. He wasn't used in all of those. And some of those are cases in which guilt is really in question. In other cases where men did commit these crimes, what he would do is give testimony that was so incendiary about something they had said that a crime that might have gotten, say, 15 years, just as an example, in one case I looked at got a life sentence. So he. He had an impact in all sorts of different ways. And he was such a fearsome presence that many men, when learning that he was on the witness list for their case, would just take a plea deal.
- [07:18]
B
How did he originally come to your attention? And you get sort of hooked on the line?
- [07:22]
C
Yeah. So in 2018, I had just published a story in the New York Times Magazine and propublica I worked for, both about junk forensic science in a small town murder case in Texas. And I got this avalanche of email afterward. But there was one email that really stood out, and it was from a legal scholar at Yale Law School named Laura Fernandez. And Laura told me the outlines of the case of a man named Jim Daley who she was representing. She said that she had reactivated her law license after many years of not practicing because she had become so concerned that he was innocent and was facing a death sentence and a potential death date. At the end of this email that she wrote me, she said that the star witness and in her client's case was a man named Paul Skalnick.
- [08:19]
A
Well, I would suspect prosecutors were aware of the numbers that you just gave us knew that Skalnick had more confessions than most Catholic priests.
- [08:29]
B
I think prison administrations had to have been aware of this.
- [08:32]
A
Exactly. And so if they knew how many cases you had to smell something fishy and all that. But they didn't. They continued to put him on the stand. And indeed, I think, didn't you write that he's put a number of people, including Jim Daly, on death row, and
- [08:50]
B
I believe it's almost as if he was soliciting prosecutors with tempting information to reduce sentencing.
- [08:58]
C
Yes. I think one of the hardest things to understand is at what point did prosecutors start to realize that there was no way that one person could gather all these confessions? If you think about the way in which this even works, it's. It strains credulity. You know, you're. When you're in jail, you're typically awaiting trial and you're with strangers. So the idea that you are going to turn to a stranger and say, hey, guess what?
- [09:30]
B
I did.
- [09:31]
C
I did it. And here's how I did it, just on its face. And you can see why I've wanted to write about this for a long time. I mean, jailhouse informants are a feature, not a bug, of our criminal justice system. That said, I do make a point at the beginning of the book to talk about how Skalnick also fooled me when I first met him.
- [09:54]
A
Isn't relying on Skalnick's testimony in all of these cases, didn't it basically come down to prosecutorial misconduct?
- [10:02]
C
So I will not weigh in on that. I will just say that I think our blame really should be on the system that allows this. This testimony was allowed in by judges. This testimony was rubber stamped on appeal by more judges. So I think it's easy to say that it's entirely prosecutors fault when really I think what we should be focusing on is the apparatus. Something I try to make clear in this book. As villainous as Skalnick is, and he does many villainous things in this book, he's not the villain of the book. What we need to be focused on is why is it that we allow this kind of testimony into courtrooms? And why do they factor so much into the most consequential cases, like just one quick statistic that blew my mind. The National Registry of Exonerations found that in 25% of the cases that they have on their registry, jailhouse informant testimony played a role in those underlying convictions. That's just a shocking number.
- [11:18]
A
Well, and those are convictions that got overturned.
- [11:20]
C
Exactly.
- [11:25]
B
One of the things that horrified me so much in this book is as I'm reading and I'm thinking, you know, as a reader, I'd be skeptical if I looked in the newspaper and saw that there was a jailhouse snitch testifying in more than six or seven trials. And yet as he starts to rack up, as Skalnick starts to wrap up dozens and dozens of cases where he has helped prosecutors turn convictions, prosecutors start thinking of him as, quote, unquote, very useful, extremely effective. They start putting him in jailhouses where they know they need more information to close a case.
- [11:55]
A
We talked a little bit about it. Pamela alluded to it, the case of Jim Daly. We'll talk to her more about that specific case. Why he still got convicted and his conviction hasn't been reversed, why he's still on death row and the peculiar way that Florida decides who should actually go once they're convicted to be executed because it's very unusual. And the fact that Daley has sat in death row for over 40 years is sort of a tacit admission that they know that they've got the wrong guy or they have a guy who is not guilty sitting there on death row. We'll be back more with Pamela Koloff after this.
- [12:36]
C
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B
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- [13:40]
B
Allow eight weeks. I do want to talk a little bit about your relationship with Skalnick himself. I want to talk about what your impressions of him are and how you found him. The thesis of your book is we hear what we want to hear. You actually say that in one of your sentences in the book. How is he so skilled at shaping who he is based on what we want to hear?
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C
I'm so glad you asked that because he was sort of a shape shifter in that way, he was so good at figuring out what it is that each person he encountered was hungry for. And I'll just tell you about when I first met him, because I think it illustrates it so well. I went to visit him in federal prison. I knew exactly who he was. I'm an investigative reporter. But when I made my pitch to him and I said, your life is. You know, this is such an extraordinary story, and I would like to tell it. I would like you to take me behind the scenes of how this all worked. Because, as I mentioned, he was very proud of his work. He was very proud that he and prosecutors had put all these men away. And he got very excited about this idea, and he said, you know, I think this is the time to do this. I'm at the end of my life. It's the time when I can tell you this story. You're the person to tell it. But I realized so much later than anyone should have that he was stringing me along and he was going to tell me absolutely nothing.
- [15:11]
A
So he wasn't willing to give you what he knew you wanted and could dangle in front of you. But you must have knew. I'm sorry.
- [15:19]
C
He knew what. He knew what I wanted.
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A
Right.
- [15:21]
C
He knew what I was hungry for. He sized me up in. In two seconds. And so I remember his ninth wife told me, paul puts just enough truth in a lie to make you believe it. And that is exactly what he did with me. I knew all the other stuff was bs. He might have known I knew it was bs but that part I bought hook, line and sinker.
- [15:46]
A
Well, he obviously took delight in stringing you along.
- [15:49]
B
Well, stringing everybody. I get the sense that he had delight and pride in the whole con.
- [15:54]
A
Exactly. But I know that you talked to prosecutors who used him, and they must have known as they used him that this was pretty sketchy. But would they acknowledge to you. Did they acknowledge to you, because you write a lot about this, that they were on very tenuous ground using his testimony?
- [16:14]
C
So there was only one prosecutor who used him who went on the record with me, and he felt that the evidence in the case in question, this was Jim Daley, the man who the Yale law scholar reached out to me about, was strong enough on its own without him. I found that hard to believe, given that they put three jailhouse informants on the stand and there was no forensic evidence, there was no physical evidence, there was no motive, and on and on. But he said this very interesting thing to me that became the title of the book, actually he said, you've, you've gotta use a sinner to catch the devil.
- [16:56]
A
Right.
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C
And to me, this quote captured everything about the upside down world that I had entered with this book.
- [17:06]
B
Did you come into this book with preconceived notions about jailhouse snitching or, I mean, tell us a little bit also, too, in, in this answer, if you could, about some of the scarier statistics that you unearthed as you researched this book.
- [17:20]
C
Sure. I definitely have never come across a case that used a jailhouse informant that didn't have really troubling aspects to the case. And in fact, I would challenge prosecutors to find a case that has a jailhouse informant in it that isn't troubled in some way, that doesn't stand on the other evidence on its own. That national Registry of exoneration shows that in 7% of wrongful convictions on that registration, jailhouse informants have played a role. And you can see that it's almost four times as much in capital cases. I think why that is is in cases where the death penalty is in play, the stakes are so high. There's so much pressure on prosecutors to win a conviction and a death sentence. You can feel that in Jim Daley's case, his co defendant, who all evidence points to having committed this crime of a 14 year old girl, got a life sentence. And I think prosecutors were under a lot of pressure to do more. Jim Daly stood trial after him and then they put Skalnick on the stand in his trial.
- [18:37]
B
Okay, so at this point though, prosecutors know Skalnick is a chronic lawbreaker, and yet they're still using him to get confessions out of inmates, sometimes placing him in specific places of incarceration to gather intel for them.
- [18:50]
C
I mean, to me, the thing that, that struck me as just kind of the most heartbreaking aspect of this, aside from Jim Daley's case, is when Skalnick was granted his freedom in exchange for this testimony that he did, he went out and harmed more and more people. And to be clear, his crimes escalated from, you know, I think we can all see past the $50 hot check at the grocery store, that's not great. But when he started stealing women's life savings, widows and divorcees, really leaving people in terrible circumstances. And then he goes on to sexually abuse teenage girls. He was never held responsible for that and went on to hurt other girls. And I think the reporting in this story that was the most important and the most heartbreaking to me was tracking down some of those girls, now women my age, and allowing them to know that I had found all the police reports, I believed what they had said, that he had a pattern and that he should have been held accountable for what he did.
- [20:06]
B
Let's go back to the Jim Daly case for a moment because he's such a great illustration of the damage that Skalnick did during his lifetime of jailhouse snitching. Tell us a little bit about the case and how Skalnick came into contact, contact with Daly.
- [20:18]
C
John Halliday, he was the lead investigator in the Jim Daly case. He was investigating the murder of a 14 year old girl named Shelley Boggio, who'd been found in 1985 in a body of water in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida. She'd been stabbed more than 30 times and drowned. It was a horrific case. And to make a very long story short, the man who all evidence points toward was the housemate of Jim Daly. And he involved Jim Daly once he was questioned in this case and tried to blame it on him. But when that housemate got a life sentence, that was not a satisfying outcome. By 1987, Skalnick is a known snitch in the Pinellas County Jail. And so he's held in protective custody. He's near the other guys, but he's held in his own cell. If he wants to go to the rec yard or the showers, he has to be accompanied by a correctional officer. So this is not exactly, it's not exactly easy to, to talk to him,
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A
but the word, the word was out that he was a snitch and therefore he had to be put in protective custody.
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C
Exactly. So even with all those constraints, he says that he walked past Jim Daley's cell and that Jim Daley, a stranger, began chatting him up and asking him for legal advice, which doesn't make a lot of sense, and that in the course of doing that, he confessed to this crime. And what Skalnick goes on to say on the stand at, at Jim's trial is not only that Jim confessed to killing Shelley Boggio, but he creates, and he did this, in many cases, this horrific visual image for jurors. And what that is, is he says he's, he's speaking in, in supposedly what Jim said to him. She's looking at me, she's staring at me, she's screaming, and she would not die. So he's conjured up this image of Jim stabbing this girl staring up at him at the same time. And I think when you're trying to decide between life and death as a juror, an image like that can be extremely Powerful.
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A
He creates that image, even though we now know or are pretty sure that Daley wasn't anywhere near it when his friend killed this young woman. So Daly gets convicted on the basis of largely of Skalnick's testimony, and he's put on death row in Florida.
- [23:10]
C
So just a little bit of background about Jim, because I think he's such an interesting counterpoint to Skalnick. They're the same age, baby boomers, born in the late 1940s. He was from Manhattan, Kansas, and he was a kind of happy go lucky kid, very beloved by his community, went to college, married, had two kids. But he was sent to Vietnam in 1968 at the height of the Tet Offensive, time of very intense fighting. And he saw some really terrible things that he never recovered from. The way I put it in the book is that it broke something open in him that he couldn't put back
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A
together as evidence accrued that he probably didn't do it. Once Jack, the other fellow, basically confessed to the crime, the state would not take Daly off death row. And that points to the system that is so reluctant to give people second trials, and Daly hasn't been able to get one right.
- [24:16]
C
In Jim's case, I show how. So much depends on when you get the evidence that can help prove your innocence. If you start off having lawyers who are not great lawyers or who are, as is often the case, terribly overworked and under resourced, who can't investigate the case top to bottom themselves, there are things they're going to miss. And so it might only be many years later on appeal, that lawyers or investigators can dig up that evidence that shows someone's innocence. But short of DNA evidence, exculpatory DNA evidence that shows someone's innocence, the courts are very, very reluctant to overturn past convictions. They really believe that, and there are good reasons for this, that a jury verdict is sacrosanct, that it is something that we should revere, and that as appeals go forward, judges go back to that and use that as a touchstone in their decisions. But that's also part of why things were so hard to undo.
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A
So we're now in a situation where Skalnick has died, taking with him anything that he might have said had he been honest with you or with anybody else. Meanwhile, Daly continues to sit on death row. How long has he been there now?
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C
So he's been on Death Row since 1987. He's been in prison since late. No, excuse me, early 1986. And he just turned 80 years old. He has all the health problems you would imagine someone who's had prison health care for decades has. He is an incredibly upbeat and optimistic person. Just to give you an example, when a photographer and I went to death row in 2019 to take his picture for the New York Times magazine cover, we had to ask him if he would stop smiling because it didn't match the mood of the, of the story. And I'm sure, you know, part of the smiling was he was glad people were there to tell his story. But I contrast that so much with Skalnick, who at the end of this book is dying alone and is such a sad and pathetic human being. At one point, when I go to see him in the nursing home he was in, he grabs my hand when I told him it was time for me to go. And he said, when it's time for me to die, will you come sit with me? And I thought for someone who had lived so large, you know, who had driven fancy cars and worn jewelry and been this larger than life character, that to see him that way was a pretty sad end.
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A
Would you come sit with me? Even though I haven't told you squat.
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C
Right.
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A
Even though I've dangled this in front of you and I've given you nothing.
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B
As we mentioned, Catch the Devil really paints a portrait of one particular case. Golnick was involved in many cases in which he was a jailhouse snitch. But one of the great human illustrations of the damage that his confidence scheme can do is Jim Daly. And Jim Daly is still serving on death row in Florida. He had ptsd, probably from Vietnam, and he was a transient. He'd lost his family. He was living with some not so great guys down in Florida. And at some point those guys picked up a 14 year old girl. And then later in the night, Jim, who claims to have been asleep at the time two men left the house with this girl and only one of them came back. And one of the men implicated Jim, even though he was probably asleep in the house. And that was confirmed by some other folks and he's still serving this sentence on death row.
- [28:05]
A
Yeah, it would appear that there is very strong evidence as I read it in the book. Now again, I'm just reading what Pamela writes, but it's pretty clear he's innocent. And yet the state of Florida will not rehear the case. We talked to Pamela specifically about the daily case and also about the way Florida operates in deciding who should actually go to be executed. I want to talk a little bit about how Florida decides whom on Death row to kill. There are a number of people there. You don't go to the death chamber based on how long you've been there. I gather the governor simply decides who they're going to kill. And these prisoners on death row don't know that there's a date for their execution until. Until somebody shows up at their cell door and says, this is the date.
- [28:56]
B
Yeah, that was truly horrifying for me. You said for all officials know, he throws a dart at. At reports put on the wall that that's how little is understood about the process where DeSantis and before him, Jeb Bush and decide who. Who gets the switch pulled and who doesn't. Is Florida the only state that operates that way in terms of gubernatorial discretion?
- [29:19]
C
Thank you for asking that. So Florida is unique in all these different ways, not just in its number of death row exonerees, which is why this is important. Before I answer your question, for anyone listening, thinking, well, why should I feel sorry for these guys who've done these terrible things? It's not to feel sorry for them, but we should be concerned about this because the error rate is so high. And that error rate is combined with a highly unusual situation in Florida. So among active death penalty states right now, Florida is the only one that operates this way. In other states, just to be clear, what happens is a defendant stands trial, he's found guilty, he's given a death sentence, he appeals that conviction. It works its way through the courts. When he's exhausted his appeals, then a judge sets his execution date. And so there's a logic to it. There's a chronology to it. In Florida, once you've exhausted your appeals, you're sitting there with many, many other condemned men. There's one person in the state of Florida who has the discretion to pick who is executed next and when, and that is the governor. So Ron DeSantis is the person who makes that decision. And there's no transparency around that, even though the Sunshine State has terrific open government laws and open records laws around this particular issue, there's zero transparency. So you have men who've been there since the 1970s who don't have dates set. You then have much more recent ones that are set, and there's no warning.
- [31:10]
A
And Pamela, I know you don't want to pass judgment on the system, but I do. The fact that Daly has been sitting there for 40 plus years and that they haven't set another date for his execution, isn't it, in your mind, a tacit admission that they've Got a guy who doesn't belong there.
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C
It's very curious. I think that's all I feel comfortable saying.
- [31:34]
A
Meanwhile, Daly continues to sit on death row. Are you still in touch with him? Do you talk to him or can.
- [31:40]
C
I am. I am. I am still in touch with him. And I know that this book coming out has been meaningful to him to have people sort of finally focus on this. He's really been kept alive by three women. Laura Fernandez, the lawyer I mentioned, who has been with him through thick and thin. He has a pen pal abroad who's been writing to him from since the late 1990s, and Mary Kay, his ex wife, who he's now, you know, the love of his life. Those three women really keep him going.
- [32:19]
A
Well, I would add a fourth, maybe. Pamela Kohla is something of an inspiration to him. It's a wonderful book.
- [32:26]
B
It is a wonderful book, and you personify something. And my apologies to Marieke. I'm about to just decimate her language. Mete mod der oneho with the courage of despair. This book is a great example of that. I love the way it was written, and it was a real. It should not have been as much of an education for me as it was. Thank you for educating me.
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C
Thank you so much for reading it. I'm so thrilled that you responded to it that way.
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A
Yeah,
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B
This is my favorite type of nonfiction, really. It's the one where there's, like a fascinating story that you can't help but follow because you want to know what happens. And it ends up unearthing a much bigger problem in the system. At least it did for me. As I say, that was my educational process to learn about jailhouse snitching through Paul Skalnick and his amazing story and what he got away with.
- [33:17]
A
And Pamela's very judicious in saying what conclusions she draws, but I draw the conclusion, and I think you will as a reader, that there is prosecutorial misconduct in all of this because a lot of these prosecutors know that they're using a very sketchy informant. And there can be real world consequences, as Jim Daly is experiencing as he sits on death row now for over 40 years. So we thank Pamela Koloff. The book is Catch the Devil. We'll catch you up to date on all you know by now who keeps this podcast going. And then a final word from Pamela.
- [33:50]
B
The book Case with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode description.
- [34:19]
C
It's so hard right now in our news cycle and our attention economy to know where to focus. And I would challenge people to not forget about the reform that the criminal justice system requires. Learn who your local DA is. In many states, they're elected. You have a say in who that person is and how they run their office. Office. Become educated. Do jury service. Be somebody who tries to make the criminal justice system better, even if it's just a little bit at a time.