The Informant

In 1978, an investigator in the Harris County DA's office in Houston got a call from an old friend. He told the investigator that he was in jail, that he wanted him to come pick him up — and that he had some information about a case that he thought the investigator would be very interested in. Pamela Colloff’s book is Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast We're going on tour - and it's a different kind of show than any we've done before. Upcoming dates in Durham, NC, and Portland, ME, are on sale now. Find ticket links and updates at ⁠thisiscriminal.com/live⁠. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  How far would you go to have a healthy baby?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  This week on Explain It To Me, the ethics of embryo maxing. Listen to new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Penny was working at her parents' funeral home. She was divorced, she had two kids, and her dream of making it big in Hollywood had not happened. And she was working in basically rural Texas at a funeral home. I think she'd given up on finding love again. And a man named Paul Skalnick came into the funeral home one day for a funeral. And he was just this incredibly dashing guy.

• 1:43Phoebe Judge?

  Journalist and author Pamela Koloff.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  He was not classically handsome, but he was attractive. He wore beautiful three-piece suits. He wore jewelry. He was incredibly charismatic and really sort of swept her off her feet.

• 2:04Phoebe Judge?

  In the spring of 1977, when they met, Paul Skalnick was 27, six years younger than Penny Rogers.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  He is sending her flowers and giving her jewelry. He tells her that he is an executive, a very high-up executive at Southwest Airlines. And at the time, Southwest Airlines was like the cool airline. The stewardesses had go-go booths. And, you know, it was a place of young energy, and he sort of embodied that. It wasn't too long, I think we were talking just at most two months, before they went to Las Vegas and got married.

• 2:48Phoebe Judge?

  Paul moved into Penny's condo with her and her two children. Every morning, he would grab his briefcase, kiss Penny, and tell her he was heading out for work at Southwest Airlines headquarters in Dallas.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  He goes and he flies up there every morning, has his important meetings, and flies back. And at the end of the day, he always comes walking down the walkway, sort of loosening his tie, and comes in and makes himself a drink. So he has this life of an executive. And on the weekends, he takes Penny and the kids on these lavish trips. They don't travel far. They're just going to Dallas and Austin. But they're staying at the finest hotels, and he's ordering champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries up to the room. And he just seems to have the promise, I think, of a better and more exciting life.

• 3:47Phoebe Judge?

  But Penny's daughter Lisa, who was about 14 at the time, started noticing little things that she thought were odd. Paul would steal the robes from the fancy hotels where they stayed. And every time he drank Crown Royal, which he often did, he saved the purple velvet bag it came in.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And probably most importantly, he keeps a handgun on him at all times. Now, it's not unusual in Texas, especially in the 70s, to have a gun. But he always has it with him, like even when they're driving, he's stashing it under his seat.

• 4:27Phoebe Judge?

  Paul started leaving town for a few days at a time on business trips. And then, in the spring of 1978, about a year after he and Penny had gotten together, he didn't come home for a month. That May, an investigator in the Harris County DA's office in Houston, a man named Kenny Rogers, got a call.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  And the voice on the other end of the line is Paul Skalnick. And Paul was somebody he had gone to military school with, sort of a junior college in New Mexico about 10 years prior. And Skalnick says to him, Kenny, hey, you know, it's me. I'm in jail, and I'm wondering if you can come get me. This is very surprising news. And Skalnick says to him, I've got some information in a case that I think you'll be really interested in.

• 5:26Phoebe Judge?

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 5:38Phoebe Judge?

  Kenny Rogers hadn't seen Paul Skalnick in years. But the last time they had spoken, Paul was a police officer in Austin.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  I think because he had been a police officer just a few years ago, and because they had gone to school together, there was just this implicit trust that there must be some misunderstanding, and he just had to go to the jail and get this figured out.

• 6:04Phoebe Judge?

  Why was Paul Skalnick in jail?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  So Paul Skalnick was in jail because he had a habit of writing hot checks. He had started off as an Austin police officer in the early 70s. And he started writing hot checks for these small amounts. And he was never prosecuted for this. He was just sort of quietly shown the door. And after that, that's how he made his living in the 70s. And it started off small, be like a $50 check at the grocery store that was bad. And it escalated from there.

• 6:45Phoebe Judge?

  He'd never been an executive at Southwest Airlines. At one point before he met Penny, he spent time in Florida, where he said he was a salesman for a Scandinavian furniture company, and took pre-orders for expensive furniture that didn't exist. He was arrested for that, but only got probation.

• 7:08Phoebe Judge?

  After he met Penny in Texas, he kept passing bad checks. One of them was for a microwave he'd bought Penny for Christmas.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  So these financial crimes had caught up to him, and he was in the Harris County jail for those.

• 7:24Phoebe Judge?

  And that's when he called his old friend Kenny Rogers at the DA's office and told him he needed to come and get him, that he had some information that Kenny would be interested in. It involved a case that had taken place a year earlier.

• 7:41Phoebe Judge?

  On May 5, 1977, Houston police had responded to a call from a bar manager about a man named Jose Campos Torres. He'd been drinking most of the day and had gotten into a fight after refusing to leave. After the officers picked him up, they drove him to an isolated part of the bayou known as the Hole. One rookie officer later reported seeing other officers beat Jose, and then seeing one of them push Jose into the bayou, saying, let's see if this wetback can swim.

• 8:17Phoebe Judge?

  Jose Campos Torres was found dead three days later by a tour boat operator. The case was all over the news.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And there was an incredible uproar, of course, about this. There was even more of an uproar when the officers who did this really weren't punished. Some really got slaps on the wrist. So when Cinco de Mayo arrives the following year, in 1978, there is what turns out to be a riot at what begins as a very peaceful gathering, just to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, where people are chanting Jose Campos Torres's name, and they're asking for justice for him. And in the course of that, there's property damage and some people are hurt.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  There are many people arrested, and this is a big embarrassment to the city. And the city leaders and Houston police end up pinning all of this on three sort of shaggy-haired activists. And instead of acknowledging that this uprising came out of years and years of mistreatment at the hands of Houston police for Houston's Latino population, they blamed it on these three "outside agitators." They became known as the Moody Park Three. And so they were put on trial in 1978.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  There's no evidence that credibly shows that they convinced hundreds to riot and to cause property damage. And the DA's office is under a lot of pressure to get a conviction. And it just so happens that Paul Skalnick was in the county jail at that time.

• 10:17Phoebe Judge?

  Kenny Rogers rushed to the jail, signed Paul out, and took him to the Special Crimes Bureau to talk. Paul told him that he'd managed to get one of the members of the Moody Park Three, a man named Thomas Hershey, to start talking to him.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  And when prosecutors heard what Skalnick had to say, they were very intrigued and wanted to work with him.

• 10:42Phoebe Judge?

  Kenny and Paul developed a routine. Most days Kenny would head to the jail, take Paul out of protective custody, and drive him to the Special Crimes Bureau in an unmarked car.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  And there, Skalnick would sit there, and he had all the wonderful things that you don't get normally when you're being held in jail. He had ice cold air conditioning during the summer. He had fresh coffee. He had some privacy in the bathroom. So he already was getting some perks. Prosecutors spoke to him, and he told them a story that not only had Tom Hershey supposedly confessed to him, this is something that Tom Hershey would later vigorously deny, but that Tom Hershey and his compatriots had thought this out long ahead of time,

• 11:37Speaker 03

  that this was a premeditated act. And that was a really, really important detail because for inciting a riot, at that time at least in Texas statute, you had to have that premeditative element, and he supplied that.

• 11:57Phoebe Judge?

  Did Paul Skalnick get anything from the prosecutors, any type of deal?

• 12:01Speaker 03

  He did. So he was released. There were no conditions to that. And he was just supposed to keep in touch with Kenny Rogers until he had to deliver his testimony at the Moody Park Three trial.

• 12:17Phoebe Judge?

  The trial began in the spring of 1979, and the prosecutor's case wasn't looking good. Some of the details, one officer described in court, weren't included in his written report about the riot. It also came out that at the same time that some witnesses had said they'd seen the Moody Park Three in the park, other witnesses had seen them at a barbecue. And then Paul Skalnick took the stand.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  The testimony was pretty detailed, and it told this whole narrative about how the Moody Park Three had set out to do this, the ways in which they had convinced young people to carry out this riot, how they had brought weapons with them. They brought alcohol with them, according to this story. To be clear, there is zero evidence that corroborates any of this. But he said this on the stand. And I remember when I interviewed Tom Hershey, he described sitting at the defense table, and his life is on the line.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  They're facing 20 years in prison and felony charges. And he said, you know, I knew that cops sometimes lie on the stand. I knew that our court system wasn't perfect. But watching how easy it was for him to lie was something I'll never forget.

• 13:47Phoebe Judge?

  Thomas Hershey was found guilty, along with the other two members of the Moody Park Three. After his testimony, Paul Skalnick was allowed to continue living outside of jail. Kenny Rogers was meant to keep an eye on him.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Kenny Rogers had this very, very simple beach house on the coast. And he wasn't there a lot because he was a workaholic. So Skalnick, this is a very unusual arrangement, obviously. He's sort of the caretaker. He's fixing things around the house and kind of watching after it while Kenny isn't there. And Kenny Rogers thinks, well, this is a pretty good setup. I know where my witness is, and I'm getting something out of it in return. He was paying him as well. And again, very unconventional, but that's what they did. So Kenny Rogers goes to the beach house one weekend. He finally gets away from work.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  And he notices that the house is very lived in, and that things are askew and just things are a mess. He realizes that Skalnick has been doing more than just being a handyman and a caretaker, but has really set up camp in his home and has not been taking good care of it. So he tries to get in touch with Paul Skalnick and finds that he can't figure out where Skalnick is. And this is obviously very upsetting. He leaves an angry note on the refrigerator, and he goes back to Houston.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  When he goes back to Houston, he gets a phone call from a man who lived in Houston who tells Kenny Rogers that Skalnick had made some charges on his credit card when Skalnick stayed with him during the Moody Park Three trial. And at this point, Kenny Rogers realizes that his star witness has committed a crime while he was being a state witness in the Moody Park Three case. And so he calls the sheriff in the area where his beach house is. And he says, you need to go to my house, and you need to see if this man is there.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  And if he's there, you need to arrest him. And when he went to the Matagorda County Jail, this was where his beach house was, to pick up Skalnick, who'd been picked up by the sheriff's department, he was astonished to find that Skalnick was wearing all of Kenny's clothes, and he was holding a paperback of Kenny Rogers's that he was reading. And he sort of looked at Rogers and said, what's the problem, Kenny? You know? And Kenny, at that point, is furious and feels that, gosh, I gave this guy like every chance,

• 16:57Speaker 03

  and he took advantage of this. And my patience is up.

• 17:02Phoebe Judge?

  After a 60-day sentence, Paul Skalnick was extradited to Florida for violating the terms of his probation there after he'd been caught posing as a salesman for Scandinavian furniture. He was released after just a few months and didn't leave a forwarding address. His wife, Penny Rogers, who'd been corresponding with him while he was in jail in Houston, couldn't find him. When she decided to file for divorce, she had to place a notice in the newspaper to let him know. About a year later, Paul was married again and in jail again for scamming a woman he'd been having an affair with.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  And so he's sitting there in the jail. It's really, really hot. It's the summer. There's no air conditioning. And one day, he goes to this bank of phones, and he makes a call to the state attorney's office. And he says, I've got some information on some cases here that I think you'll be interested in. And prosecutors go and meet with him. And he begins feeding them the details of some kind of low-level drug crime cases. These are various men who are in the jail who are awaiting trial. And there's not quite enough to get a conviction. But he fills in the blanks.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  He sort of gives them what they need to get a conviction.

• 18:36Phoebe Judge?

  Did anyone think, well, this is a this timing is a little suspicious?

• 18:41Speaker 03

  You know, it was so much a part of the culture of the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, where this all took place. This was a fairly common occurrence at the time. And detectives had the run of the jail. They could come in as they pleased to interview anyone who is being held in the jail. And these are all people who are being held, for the most part, pre-trial. There's the presumption of innocence. They're awaiting trial. It's different than prison. And they could come in. And they would do this, where they would come in and ask people who were facing very long sentences, hey, you know, what did your cellmate tell you?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And there was the implicit understanding. It wasn't overt most of the time. But there was the implicit understanding that if these men helped prosecutors make their case, that there would be some kind of reward at the end.

• 19:42Phoebe Judge?

  Paul had been facing a five-year sentence for his crimes. But after bringing these confessions to prosecutors, he was only given probation.

• 19:53Phoebe Judge?

  And then, less than five months after he had been released, Paul was arrested again for theft. Less than a week after his arrest, a 12-year-old named Karen Parker went to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office with her parents and made a report that Paul Skalnick had sexually assaulted her.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  When 12-year-old Karen Parker reported her sexual assault, she was given a polygraph exam to see if she was telling the truth. This was when we-- back then, people believed that polygraph exams were indicative of that. We now know they're far more problematic. So Karen Parker, a 12-year-old girl, is given a polygraph exam. Paul Skalnick never is.

• 20:43Phoebe Judge?

  Karen Parker passed the polygraph. There were also two eyewitnesses who said they'd seen glimpses of the assault. Paul Skalnick was charged with lewd and lascivious conduct on a child under 14, a felony with a possible sentence of 15 years in prison.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Well, this comes at a really inconvenient time because he is promised to testify in more cases, and they've seen how effective he is on the stand. And at that point, when he would get on the stand, all he had to say was that, you know, "I was a former police officer. Law enforcement is in my blood, and I got in a little bit of financial trouble, but I'm a good guy." That really changes if he had to say that he had molested a child.

• 21:36Phoebe Judge?

  The state attorney's office dismissed the charges.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  They never prosecute him. And Karen Parker is made to feel that no one believes her. And in fact, the ripple effect this has, even within her own family when this happens, is that she's not believed, she's seen as a troublemaker, and she ends up running away from home and told me she didn't trust anyone for a long, long time.

• 22:08Phoebe Judge?

  Paul pleaded no contest to the theft charges, and prosecutors gave him a deal. Instead of the potential 15 years he could serve for the charges, he would only receive five and credit for time served. Prosecutors requested that he remain in jail rather than go to prison while he served his sentence. They said that if he were sent to prison, he could be in danger because there were men there that he'd helped to convict with his testimonies.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  The prosecutors know that if Skalnick is sent to prison, if he's convicted and sent to prison, as most of the people around him will be, he's not valuable to them anymore. People who are in prison have already been convicted. In the jail, he's with men who are awaiting trial. He's there as someone who can endlessly help police and prosecutors put together these cases.

• 23:15Phoebe Judge?

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• 23:28Speaker 05

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• 24:00Phoebe Judge?

  By the summer of 1983, word had gotten around in the Pinellas County jail that Paul Skalnick was an informant. Because of that, there were concerns for his safety, and he was moved to a cell block that was separated from the general population. It was for defendants with high-profile cases. Not long after he'd been moved there, he let prosecutors know that a man on his cell block, named Freddie Gaines, had confessed to him.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  So Freddie Gaines was a young man, lightweight boxer, who was working as a handyman in the early 1980s. He ends up getting in a bar fight. And there are many, many witnesses to this, what ended up happening in the bar that night. But he gets into this bar brawl with this other man. And at the end of that fight, one man is dead and one man is alive. Freddie is alive, the other man is dead. And there's this sort of Rashomon effect of what all the witnesses who saw this

• 25:13Speaker 03

  remember about who brought the knife, who first used the knife, who did what. And there's no agreement on what happened. We just know that this man was killed. So Freddie goes to stand trial, and he could have faced something like 15 years for a crime. As terrible as it is, of course, someone lost their life, but this was quite obviously a spontaneous event that happened. Paul Skalnick gets on the stand, and he claims that Freddie Gaines planned this whole thing out, which on its face is curious.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  You would think if you're going to have a premeditated murder, you wouldn't do it in front of all these witnesses. But anyway, he says this was a premeditated crime. And then he goes on to give that detail, that kind of detail that's going to really stick with jurors. He said that Freddie boasted about killing this man. And he not only boasted about killing him, he boasted about the way that he did it.

• 26:27Phoebe Judge?

  The victim had been stabbed in the heart. And Paul Skalnick testified that Freddie had said that he should have been charged with, quote, "open-heart surgery."

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Sort of with a laugh, this very cold-blooded kind of thing. And that testimony helped not just to convict Freddie, and he was guilty, of course, of killing this man, but to get this extremely punishing sentence. So Freddie received a life sentence and is in prison to this day. One of the things that makes no sense about how he could have obtained these confessions isn't just how difficult it would have been physically within the jail to get them, but why? I mean, if your life is on the line and you are three weeks out from a trial,

• 27:20Speaker 03

  why would you tell anyone, you know, anyone in your life, much less a perfect stranger, that yes, you did this, and here are the details? And by 1983, everybody knows he's a snitch. This is no secret.

• 27:39Phoebe Judge?

  One man even told a guard he would not be in the same cell as Paul, quote, "Because I knew who he was and what he did."

• 27:48Speaker 03

  You know, a question many people have asked me is, how did he survive all this? You know, there's this saying, "Snitches get stitches," right? And he emerged unscathed. Well, the reason for that is because he was being held in protective custody, meaning that he couldn't just mix with the other guys. If he wanted to go to the prison yard, if he wanted to take a shower, he had to be accompanied by a corrections officer. And so he was asking people to believe that he was walking past the cells of strangers. Or sometimes, he said, they would seek him out because they thought he was so knowledgeable.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  And here they are, about to face trial, and that they would confess everything to him and things that were self-incriminating. I think it can be hard for people to understand why a jury would believe these stories. And something that's important to remember is that when a prosecutor puts someone like Paul Skalnick on the stand, they are appearing in a line of highly credible witnesses. You know, the first witness in a murder trial might be the lead investigator who showed up to the scene of the crime. Second witness might be the paramedic who can describe what happened, or the medical examiner.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Someone like Paul Skalnick appears within that context, and he is sponsored by prosecutors. He is someone who prosecutors are saying that jurors can trust.

• 29:31Phoebe Judge?

  When he was asked on the stand why he had chosen to testify, he would always say the same thing.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  He talks about how proud he was to be a police officer and how he never really left that life behind. He's made some mistakes, but he still has law enforcement in his blood, is how he puts it. And that the least he can do to redeem himself for these minor financial crimes that he committed when he was desperate for money is to be one of the good guys and to help police and prosecutors. And he does a lot to distance himself from the other, sort of what he sees as the riffraff in the jail. He's not like them. He's a former cop. He's different.

• 30:20Phoebe Judge?

  You just want someone to step in here and say, wait, wait, wait. What is happening with this guy? You know, does someone have some sense of... There's something's going on here.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  I think that's the most shocking thing to me here is... No one ever steps in to say, hold on a second. This doesn't make sense. This is something where, you know, really like ethically, we need to think about this. And I think it goes to these incentives that the system puts out there. The prosecutor's incentives, unfortunately, in this office at that time with the culture, the tough-on-crime culture of the era, it was to get convictions. Something that a prosecutor said to me, which I'll paraphrase, was, "You've got

• 31:15Speaker 03

  to work with a sinner to catch the devil." I can't think off the top of my head of a case in which he brought forth evidence that prosecutors or investigators said, "Come on, Paul, that seems a little far-fetched." And, you know, you have to imagine, here's a guy in the jail who's got a better track record than their star detectives in their county. And they, they never question this. They just, they keep sponsoring his testimony.

• 31:49Phoebe Judge?

  By 1984, he had testified against or given information about at least 27 men in Pinellas County Jail, and three of them were on death row. That year, the St. Petersburg Times published an article about the dramatic rise in death sentences in the county. One lawyer was quoted saying, "They're going to have to build a separate wing on death row for Pinellas County." I mean, if you were a defense attorney and you had done your research, you said, "They've got this guy, he does this all the time. I want to talk about that." You know, was anyone saying on the other side, "Wait a second, this doesn't make any sense"?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  So here's where it's so hard with jailhouse informants. There was no easy way. Think about, especially in a time period when court records are not digitized, right? Where you're just going through page by page by page. The complexity of trying to figure out how many other cases this guy has testified in, it was extremely difficult. The state attorney's office knew. They had a running list of every case he'd ever given information in. But for defense attorneys who are, you know, so short on time, short on money, often we're

• 33:14Speaker 03

  talking public defenders who have a few hours to prepare their case, who don't have an investigator working for them, it was an almost impossible task. And when a defense attorney asks someone like Paul Scalneck, "Were you promised anything in return for this testimony?", he can truthfully say no. So that's something that jurors can go on to believe.

• 33:40Phoebe Judge?

  Because nothing's been promised yet.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Nothing's been promised. It's, it's an implicit understanding on the part of the prisoner that if they help out, they'll get something back.

• 33:56Phoebe Judge?

  What was his reward for all of this testimony, this, this next batch of testimony?

• 34:02Speaker 03

  He was released again, incredibly. One of the things I found so shocking was whenever he was released, you know, he would have court dates where he was supposed to check in with the court because he usually had either an upcoming trial of his own or a trial in which he was testifying in. And he would never show up to these hearings. So there was just this bizarre way in which prosecutors endlessly trusted that he would do what they had asked him to do.

• 34:40Phoebe Judge?

  It's like, you know, I can get in trouble because I can figure, I'll just get a couple of confessions and I'll get myself right back out of jail if I get caught again.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Right, right. That's exactly right.

• 34:51Phoebe Judge?

  He was arrested again, less than two years after he was released, for a few different financial crimes. Once he was in jail, Paul Scalneck let an investigator he'd worked with before, John Halliday, know that even though he was in an isolation cell, all alone, three men had found a way to tell him about the murders they'd committed. Prosecutors planned to use Paul's testimony in their trials. But this time, he wasn't released early. He would have to stay in jail to wait for his own trial. Paul did whatever he could to get out. He wrote to the judge in his case.

• 35:32Phoebe Judge?

  He drafted a legal petition, saying he was unlawfully detained. He even wrote to the governor, copying Ted Kennedy. None of it worked. But then, a man named Jim Daly was moved to Paul's floor. We'll be right back.

• 36:09Phoebe Judge?

  Tell me a little bit about Jim Daly. What was he in jail for?

• 36:13Speaker 03

  So Jim Daly grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, and was this really beloved young man. He had a family. He had started college. He, in 1968, went to Vietnam. He goes on to become an alcoholic and lives quite a difficult, somewhat itinerant, life. And he falls in with a guy named Jack Piercy. Jack Piercy, unlike James Daly, had a very long rap sheet and a history of violence against women.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  He had also been involved in a murder-for-hire case in Missouri a few years earlier. So these guys and their friend end up moving to Pinellas County, this place where you can kind of reinvent yourself, the sun is always shining, the living is cheap. Not long after they arrive in Pinellas County, a 14-year-old girl named Shelley Bogio ends up dead in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, in this area. She is found naked in the water. She's been stabbed over 30 times. Her body's been brutalized, the assumption is she's been sexually assaulted.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  And it's a horrific crime. The investigation very quickly narrows in on Jack Piercy, who was the last person to be seen with her alive the night she was killed. He had been pursuing her romantically. He was 29 years old, she was 14. And he had blood on his shoes that night. There were just all sorts of indications that Jack was the prime suspect in this case. Police track him down to Kansas, where he fled after Shelley's murder. They bring him in for questioning.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  He tells a story about how he brought Shelley Bogio down to this lover's lane in Pinellas County this night that she was killed. And he also happened to bring his housemate, Jim, James Daly. And that he, Jack Piercy, stayed back in the car while Jim went off with Shelley and tried to have sex with her. There was a struggle, and Jim stabbed her and killed her. So there's no evidence whatsoever to back this up. This is really, the word of the prime suspect of the case is putting this on Jim.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  But nevertheless, these two men are arrested and charged with capital murder. So what happens is, Jack Piercy goes to trial for this case, and he's convicted, but he's given a life sentence. And it's hard, I think, in 2026 for us to understand how a life sentence in a crime of this horror was something that was really unacceptable, especially in this area of Florida. And it was a political liability for the state attorney's office. So Jim goes to trial six months after this.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  But there's just not a lot of there there. There's Jack Piercy's account and not much else. So shortly after Jack Piercy gets this life sentence, the lead investigator in the case, John Halliday, goes into the Pinellas County Jail, and he starts pulling guys out of their cells. And these are guys who've been housed with Jim Daly. He pulls 15 men out of their cells in all. And he brings each one, one by one, to this little room. And he asks them what Jim has been saying about his case and if they have any information about Jim's role in this case.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  It's important to note that at least four of them remember that there were newspaper articles that were spread out in this room describing this murder that had all the details one might need to give testimony in a case like this. The lead investigator denies that that was the case, and he has denied that under oath. But he ends up leaving the jail that day without getting information. The guys say, "Jim's never said anything to us," or "Jim said he's innocent." But the word is out in the jail that this case needs a snitch.

• 41:11Phoebe Judge?

  When Jim Daly was moved to Paul Scalneck's floor, he said, "This is a damn setup."

• 41:19Phoebe Judge?

  Two days later, Paul had good news for the investigator. Jim had confessed everything to him.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  These men did not know each other.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  At Jim's trial, again, there's just not a lot of information. And it's, there's nothing that is directly tying Jim to the crime. There's no forensic evidence. There's no physical evidence. There's no obvious motive. And even the story that Jack Piercy has doesn't make a lot of sense. So Skalnick is brought in. Skalnick says that Jim confessed this to him. And he has all the basic details of where it occurred and who the victim was, what she looked like. But the icing on the cake of his testimony is he describes what he says

• 42:13Speaker 03

  is how Jim describes the killing. He says that Jim says that he's holding Shelley in his arms. He's stabbing her and she's staring up at him, but she will not die. And it's a horrifying image of this young girl who is looking up pleading at someone while she's being stabbed to death.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  To be clear, there is zero corroborating evidence to back up this story.

• 42:49Phoebe Judge?

  Paul went on to say that when he heard the confession, it was hard to accept it. He said, "I had seen this gentleman walking in the hallways, laughing and kidding with other inmates. And all of a sudden, to see a man's eyes and to describe how he can stab a young girl."

• 43:08Phoebe Judge?

  What did Jim Daly say about Skalnick's testimony?

• 43:12Speaker 03

  What Jim told me was that he was so beyond, I can't remember the words he used, but what Jim said was that he was just so stunned that someone could get up on the stand and tell falsehood after falsehood this just absolutely outrageous story in a case where the electric chair is at play. That was, that was what Jim was facing at that time. And it's very common for defense attorneys to advise their clients when they're sitting at the defense table, listening to testimony,

• 43:54Speaker 03

  to have no reaction to what a witness is saying. And the idea behind that is you don't want to have jurors see a defendant get really angry. Maybe that would make them think they could commit this crime. So Jim is advised, and this is typical, to not have a reaction to what Skalnick is saying. So he has to sit there stone-faced while Skalnick is saying these lies.

• 44:21Phoebe Judge?

  Doesn't that seem like the hardest thing?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  The hardest thing? And then, and then the ways that juries might interpret that, right?

• 44:30Phoebe Judge?

  How much of a role did Paul Skalnick's testimony play in, in the trial and sentencing of Jim Daly?

• 44:38Speaker 03

  I believe it played an enormous role because there are really, no forensic evidence, no physical evidence, no motive. Jack Piercy didn't even end up testifying at the trial. He took the fifth. So the state had nothing. In the end, the state brought in three jailhouse informants. Skalnick's testimony was by far the most extensive and detailed. But just to give a sense of things, I have always viewed any case that had a jailhouse informant in it as a huge red flag, that either this was a possible innocence case or something was terribly wrong with the case.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  I've actually never heard of a case in which there were three jailhouse informants. I'm sure it's happened before, but that just gives you a sense of how weak the evidence was.

• 45:36Phoebe Judge?

  Jim Daly was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death.

• 45:42Phoebe Judge?

  When Pamela Koloff asked one of the prosecutors in Jim Daly's case about Paul Skalnick's testimony, she said she "never willfully and intentionally provided false evidence or testimony to a court or jury on any case." Another prosecutor said, "If we did not believe that his testimony was truthful, we wouldn't have had him testify."

• 46:08Phoebe Judge?

  Jim spoke at the sentencing hearing and said that in Pinellas County, the pursuit of convictions has been turned into a win-at-all-cost game and that truth is allowed to be manipulated and paid liars are allowed to testify.

• 46:26Phoebe Judge?

  Five days later, Paul Skalnick was released. One Florida parole and probation commission memo stated that his release was, quote, "due to his cooperation with the state's attorney's office in the first-degree murder trial."

• 46:42Phoebe Judge?

  Paul promised he would stay in town to testify in three upcoming murder trials and to attend his own trial for grand theft. Instead, he went back to Texas. And once he was there, he managed to scam a jewelry store out of almost $30,000 of merchandise.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  He finally gets caught. He's extradited back to Florida. And he's very angry that he's being asked to stay in jail before these other murder trials happen that he's going to testify in. He's angry that they won't trust him once again to go free and show up for trial. So in retaliation, he writes a sworn affidavit in which he says that everything he said in all his prior testimony in all these cases in Pinellas County had been, all that information had been fed to him by police and prosecutors. And it was false testimony.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  And he, he takes everything back.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  The prosecutors are then in the same exact position that all these defendants have been in for years of, wait, what? We did what? And they have to try to defend themselves. And one of the most incredible legal documents I've seen in my entire career is what they file in response with the court in which they say, "Paul Skalnick is lying about what he's saying about us. No prosecutor and no investigator fed him information. But everything he said prior to this, in these other cases, is true and should remain on the record."

• 48:36Phoebe Judge?

  It's really wild.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  And he, in the end, gets the upper hand. He, at that point, they wanted him to get out of Dodge. They want him to stop talking. They cut him a deal where he's going to serve his time, even for his Florida crimes, in Texas. And he gets this sweetheart deal back in Texas. He's released after not very much time. But Pinellas County prosecutors want him gone. They're done with him by then.

• 49:10Phoebe Judge?

  Just before Paul Skalnick was released, he wrote a letter to a judge saying, "The state attorney's office has always characterized me as an honest, forthright witness. And together, we never lost a case.

• 49:27Phoebe Judge?

  We reached out to the Pinellas County State Attorney's Office for comment on the cases Paul was involved in, but haven't heard back."

• 49:37Phoebe Judge?

  They have said in a past statement that he at no time was an agent of the sheriff's office or the state attorney's office and that the state attorney's office never provided any leniency to Paul Skalnick in exchange for his testimony. It also stated that all the information Paul Skalnick provided was independently verified and the office never received information indicating that his testimony was incorrect.

• 50:08Phoebe Judge?

  In November 1989, Paul went back to his hometown in Texas. He got married again. He told her he was a real estate developer and gave her a used Jaguar.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  God knows how he kept the charade going, but he did. And so she had a 16-year-old daughter, Misty Anderson. And Paul Skalnick zeroes in on her and does to her what he had done before. He molests her. She goes to police and thankfully, they really, really take action. Unfortunately, he was known to them as a first-time sex offender. So he didn't get the kind of punishment he would have gotten had the Karen Parker crime worked its way through the courts.

• 50:59Phoebe Judge?

  He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and served his full term.

• 51:05Phoebe Judge?

  After he was released in 2002, he didn't register as a sex offender, as he was required to do, and left Texas. He went to Boston, where he told people that he was a lawyer named Avery Harrison and had business cards made to prove it. After paying him thousands of dollars, his clients realized he hadn't been doing any work for them at all. And just over a year after he'd been released, he was arrested again. He was charged with larceny and the unauthorized practice of law.

• 51:41Phoebe Judge?

  While he was in prison in Massachusetts, Jim Daly's lawyers subpoenaed him to testify in a hearing about Jim's case. They were hoping that Paul would say that the prosecutors had coached him before he testified in Jim's trial and that they had offered him a deal. But when Paul was questioned, he said that he had never lied. That statement became part of the court record and would come up every time Jim Daly tried to appeal on the basis of an unfair trial.

• 52:16Phoebe Judge?

  After Paul Skalnick was released from prison in Massachusetts, he never reported for probation and claimed he was a retired lawyer named E. Paul Smith. He kept a legal dictionary around with E. Paul Smith Esquire, Attorney at Law, embossed on it. He also claimed he had health problems from serving as a Marine Corps fighter pilot and was in treatment for brain cancer at the VA. Paul shaved his head to make it look like he was in chemotherapy. And he kept taking people's money to help them with legal issues. He was arrested again and sentenced to 50 months in federal prison.

• 53:01Phoebe Judge?

  Pamela Koloff went to visit him there in 2018.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  He spoke about how prosecutors and he, he said, "we" never lost a case. And I thought that was so interesting that he spoke of how he worked with them in that way. He told me a few lies upfront that were such bald-faced lies that I knew they were lies. One was that he had a yacht that he kept in Belize, which he showed me a picture of, a 100-foot yacht. He had these offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. I knew that none of that was true.

• 53:41Phoebe Judge?

  Pamela Koloff says that Paul told her he'd tell her more of his story in the future. But then, when she tried to see him or talk to him, Paul kept saying he was too sick or that he hadn't gotten her letter because something had gone wrong in the mailroom. He ended up never giving her the information she was hoping for.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  And so I finally realized he had conned me. He had given me exactly what I hungered for. This is what he'd done with everyone. He sized me up. He knew what I was hungry for. He fed it to me. And I, an investigative journalist who knew he was a con artist with a long rap sheet, I bought into that. And I think that speaks to, if you're hungry for something, he knew how to read that.

• 54:31Phoebe Judge?

  But Pamela did see him again, one last time, in 2019, a week after Jim Daly's death warrant was signed. He'd been on death row for more than 30 years.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  So I went to the nursing home where Paul Skalnick was living at that time. And I said to him, "I don't know if you remember the case of a man named Jim Daly, but he has received an execution date. And if you're ever going to tell the truth about what really happened in the jail, this is the time to do it." And he refused.

• 55:10Phoebe Judge?

  He stuck to his story.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  He stuck to his story. And it was interesting. You could see he had other regrets. When I brought up the case of Freddie Gaines, there was an expression that came across his face where I think there was some regret. Freddie was very young when this happened, and he was a very fun and lively and charismatic guy at that time. And I'm sure Skalnick remembered that and reflected on the fact that here was someone who was going to die in prison because of him.

• 55:45Phoebe Judge?

  What was it like to be with him in person?

• 55:49Speaker 03

  So the first thing to know is that even in his advanced age and not being in good health, I could see that charm that he had when he was a young man. He was so easy to talk to. He was a terrific listener. He was very, very well spoken. But there was something that happened. When I went to visit him, he showed me a scar that was on his knee. And he said that that scar had come from the time when he was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, and he'd been shot down over Laos, and he'd been taken captive, and he'd

• 56:34Speaker 03

  become a prisoner of war. And that scar, which was very visible, was from that time. And I remembered when he told me that, something that my mother had told me growing up, which is, if you're going to lie, you have to have a really good memory. Because when I had first gone to see him in prison, and he had that scar, and it was very visible that day, he told me that it had come from a terrible car accident that he had been in Austin in, in the 1970s, which I feel certain is what it really was from. I found no evidence, no records, that he was ever in the military whatsoever.

• 57:17Phoebe Judge?

  Not surprising.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:23Phoebe Judge?

  Did he say anything about why people had confessed to him so often?

• 57:28Speaker 03

  He really couldn't provide the answers for that. I really probed that. And he seemed sort of unconcerned about whether I actually believed these confessions were true. He was really, at that point, very focused on how lonely he was at the end of his life. And I remember after this five-hour conversation, telling him that I had to go. And it had been a tough conversation, but he grabbed my hand very forcefully, and

• 58:06Speaker 03

  he said, "When it's time for me to die, will you come back and sit with me?"

• 58:14Phoebe Judge?

  Paul Skalnick died less than six months later, on March 10, 2020. When you reached out to people to tell them that Paul Skalnick had died, how did they react?

• 58:28Speaker 03

  Nobody believed me. Everybody felt that this was another scam, that he had somehow found a way to escape once again.

• 58:44Phoebe Judge?

  According to a 2024 report from the National Registry of Exonerations, 7% of wrongful convictions in the registry involve jailhouse testimony. And jailhouse testimony had been a factor in 25% of death penalty cases. There have been reforms in at least a dozen states. In Illinois, there are hearings to determine whether a jailhouse informant is reliable enough before a case goes to trial. In Texas, there are registries in each county to keep track of jailhouse informants and the cases they've testified in.

• 59:25Phoebe Judge?

  And in California, the jury is instructed to view the testimony of an in-custody informant with caution and close scrutiny. Jim Daly got a stay of execution in 2019 and is still on death row. Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.

• 1:00:07Phoebe Judge?

  Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silhson. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederboer. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. Pamela Koloff's book is Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any

• 1:00:52Phoebe Judge?

  ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.