Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast

By Pamela Colloff NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • The riveting, true story of an audacious con man who helped send another man to death row for a murder he did not commit “Incendiary, emotionally devastating. [This] is a feat of dogged reporting, bravura storytelling, and clear-eyed moral conscience." —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and London Falling “Unfolding in cinematic detail, Catch the Devil offers a riveting and disturbing account of the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice.” —NPR For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he married nine women—some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. Then he peddled those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida, he became a frequent witness for the state, thinking nothing of exaggerating men's wrongdoing or implicating the innocent to help prosecutors win convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, fueling his growing sense of invincibility. Soon he was not just committing fraud; he was preying on girls in their teens or barely into adolescence. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik's account of his "confession" helped put Dailey on death row. Skalnik, meanwhile, walked free. More than three decades later, after another man took responsibility for the killing, Pamela Colloff, reporting for the New

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