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About
The gripping true story of a serial con man and the innocent man he sent to death row by award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Pamela Colloff
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-and scammed them out of their money.
When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. In jail, he would claim to have overheard the "confessions" of the men around him and then offer those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida he became a regular on-call witness who thought nothing of implicating innocent men or exaggerating their crimes in order to help win convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, increasingly giving him a sense of invincibility. He not only stole and committed fraud, he coerced young girls into sex.
In 1985, Jim Dailey, a gentle Vietnam veteran struggling with alcoholism, was implicated in the murder of a 14-year-old girl called Shelley Boggio and had the bad luck to be imprisoned with Skalnik in Pinellas County. Though there was no material evidence, Skalnik's account of Dailey's "confession" was enough to put Dailey on death row and to award Skalnik parole. Four decades later, after another man signed an affidavit confessing to the murder, Pam Colloff, reporting the story for the New York Times Magazine, visited Skalnik and asked him if he would recant his testimony. He refused.
By the time Skalnik died in 2020, he had caused untold damage: to the women and girls he abused, to the dozens of men he helped to wrongfully imprison, and to Jim Dailey, who still awaits execution. In this mesmerizing debut, Pamela Colloff spins a dark tale of a remorseless and brilliant liar made lethal by a system more concerned with winning convictions than finding the truth. "One of America's finest journalists, Pamela Colloff, has delivered a wallop of a debut book-loaded with moral clarity and astounding detail-about one of the world's most infernal liars, the scores of lives he destroyed, and the criminal-justice system that still, shockingly, benefits from those lies." –Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road PAMELA COLLOFF is a reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She was the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2020 and for Feature Writing in 2013. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Reporting, and Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Colloff holds a bachelor's degree in English from Brown University. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and their two children.
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-and scammed them out of their money.
When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. In jail, he would claim to have overheard the "confessions" of the men around him and then offer those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida he became a regular on-call witness who thought nothing of implicating innocent men or exaggerating their crimes in order to help win convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, increasingly giving him a sense of invincibility. He not only stole and committed fraud, he coerced young girls into sex.
In 1985, Jim Dailey, a gentle Vietnam veteran struggling with alcoholism, was implicated in the murder of a 14-year-old girl called Shelley Boggio and had the bad luck to be imprisoned with Skalnik in Pinellas County. Though there was no material evidence, Skalnik's account of Dailey's "confession" was enough to put Dailey on death row and to award Skalnik parole. Four decades later, after another man signed an affidavit confessing to the murder, Pam Colloff, reporting the story for the New York Times Magazine, visited Skalnik and asked him if he would recant his testimony. He refused.
By the time Skalnik died in 2020, he had caused untold damage: to the women and girls he abused, to the dozens of men he helped to wrongfully imprison, and to Jim Dailey, who still awaits execution. In this mesmerizing debut, Pamela Colloff spins a dark tale of a remorseless and brilliant liar made lethal by a system more concerned with winning convictions than finding the truth. "One of America's finest journalists, Pamela Colloff, has delivered a wallop of a debut book-loaded with moral clarity and astounding detail-about one of the world's most infernal liars, the scores of lives he destroyed, and the criminal-justice system that still, shockingly, benefits from those lies." –Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road PAMELA COLLOFF is a reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She was the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2020 and for Feature Writing in 2013. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Reporting, and Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Colloff holds a bachelor's degree in English from Brown University. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and their two children.