Catch the Devil is ProPublica and New York Times Magazine journalist Pamela Colloff's measured but disturbing account of the outsized role one man played in the Florida court system to send at least 27 defendants to prison, including four to death row, through a series of fabricated confessions.
Colloff recounts the sordid story of Paul Skalnik, a serial con man, pedophile, and bigamist who displayed a preternatural talent for obtaining confessions from fellow inmates and parlayed his usefulness into bargaining chips to win favorable treatment for himself. Colloff focuses on Skalnik's role in the case of James Dailey. Dailey, who served three tours of duty in Vietnam, returned bearing severe emotional trauma, and turned to alcohol and drugs. He moved to Pinellas County, Fla., and in 1986, along with his friend Jack Pearcy, was charged in the savage stabbing death of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio.
With no physical evidence linking Dailey to Boggio's murder, and only the dubious testimony of his co-defendant to establish his involvement in the crime, prosecutors turned to Skalnik, who already had a strong track record as an informant. Their star witness soon miraculously related a "brief but lurid account" of the crime he claimed came from Dailey's mouth. Five days after the trial ended in a conviction, Skalnik was a free man.
"What made him so dangerous," Coloff argues, "was not his intelligence or cunning, but rather how readily the institutions that were supposed to uphold the law and protect the most vulnerable had amplified his lies." Catch the Devil is a sobering glimpse inside a criminal justice system bent on securing convictions at any cost. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer