This career criminal traded false confessions for freedom and sent innocent men to death row
Paul Skalnik had a strange gift for being in jail when accused murderers suddenly felt the urge to spill their secrets.Skalnik was a petty con artist with a grimly reliable routine, writes Pamela Colloff in her riveting new book, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.” “Whenever his luck ran out and he ended up in jail,” Colloff writes, “men confessed their crimes to him.”In the summer of 1981, Skalnik was sitting in the Pinellas County Jail on a grand-theft charge, staring down a possible five-year prison sentence, when he placed a collect call to the state attorney’s office in Clearwater, Florida, and told them he had information on three different men awaiting trial for murder.All three, he said, had made full or partial confessions to him.By 1984, he had already testified against or provided information on at least 27 defendants in the Pinellas County Jail, helping send four men to death row.
Prosecutors didn’t seem troubled that a man with a long record of deception was extracting confessions at a rate that would’ve impressed the most seasoned homicide detective.Skalnik was a small-time hustler with big-time stamina.He’d been married nine times, wrote bad checks, stole from women and widows, impersonated lawyers, and reinvented himself in different cities whenever the previous version became inconvenient.
He claimed to be a Southwest Airlines executive, a Stetson law student, a Marine, and a Boston attorney named Avery Harrison. In jail, he found the role that paid best.He became a professional witness.His first major turn as an informant came in Houston in 1978, after he landed in the Harris County Jail on bad-check charges.
He spotted Thomas Hirschi, one of three activists charged with inciting a riot at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Moody Park, in Houston’s Near Northside, and called an old friend in the district attorney’s office. “I’ve got something to tell you,” Skalnik sai...