An Injustice in the Justice System

In 2010, the family of four in California goes missing, and the clues left behind, send investigators on a years-long search. Is this a family on the run? Or is the truth far more sinister? From ABC Audio in 2020, this is what happens to the mixed days, coming August 11th, wherever you get your podcasts, or subscribe to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts for our AdFree episodes, early access to new episodes, and so much more. Well, hello, bookcase listeners far and wide. We're glad that you're all gathered around your telephones, your computers, your iPads, your whatever you listen to us with, we're pleased that you're listening. I thought we decided last week that these people, you've now called the bookcase listeners, they had a title. The bookcaseers, we decided on this, I'd stop calling the book nerds and now you don't honor that. I'm Kate and I'm very disappointed in my partner. She's always disappointed in me. It's the way she's survived all these years. Anyway, we have, I think, a really, really interesting and important book this week. Catch the Devil, is the name of it. Pamela Kohloff is the author. She's a part-time New York Times reporter, independent journalist also. I think right for a public, and she has— And New York magazine, and then you're—yeah, she's just amazing. Yes, and she's written a book about jailhouse stitches, particularly a man named Paul Skolnik. He was in trouble with the law, and he kept using quote-unquote confessions that he'd gotten from his fellow inmates to parse down his sentence or get parole or be transferred to a bread or prison. This man wasn't just a con man. He was a con man who specifically conned law enforcement over and over and over again. Yes, he wasn't conning fellow prisoners to get their confessions. He never got their confessions, but he conned the prosecutors and convinced them that what he had in terms of confessions from fellow prisoners were genuine. He was used many, many times in courtrooms to testify against people who were on trial. Indeed, he says—and I think the statistics back him up—he put almost three dozen people in prison having claimed that they confessed to him, including four on death row. Yeah. So, this book concentrates on Paul Skolnik, and it also focuses on one of the cases in which Skolnik testified and put a man on death row in Florida where he has been now for more than forty years. Yeah, this book was an education for me. One of the things that Pamela Kholov says in this book is, "We are a system that rewards prosecutors, that rewards judges, that rewards DAs who can get harsh penalties. The death penalty or a guilty verdict or what have you. We reward those as, quote, unquote, "wins," and in a system where we reward those as wins, how do we get around stepping over justice to get what we want? Yeah, Pamela writes about prosecutors who placed Skolnik in prisons specifically to try to get confessions from people and he claimed he got confessions from fellow prosecutors that he never got near. No, he was a confession Sven Galley, I think, according to the lawyers that were using him for testimony. And, you know, time and time again, he would walk up to the stand and the person who was gone trial would turn to his lawyer and say, "I've never talked to that person." I think it's amazing to, when you look at this book, you think to yourself, "I, as a reader, I'm extremely skeptical of anybody that would get a confession more than six times," right? So this guy testifies in dozens of trials, he claims to have gotten dozens of jailhouse confessions. And the prosecutors, instead of describing him as like, "Wow, this is really strange that this guy's got a. " They say, "Oh, no, he's very useful. He's proving to be extremely effective." They put him in prisons where they want to get information because they think Skolnik is just that good. I mean, there are so many ways in which Lupol's had trains driven through them in this book. Again, it was a real eye-opening education for me. And as Pamela indicated, one case which she concentrates on in this book, the case of a fellow named Jim Daly, is really sort of the epitome of what Skolnik was doing. Jim Dalyas, who I mentioned earlier, has been on death row in Florida for over 40 years. Yeah. That family, I think, are fantastic living portraits and examples of the damage that somebody like Skolnik can do. It's gone unchecked. So we will talk more about the daily case and how that's re-verbred it in also the peculiar way that Florida decides who should be executed and who should not. The book is "Catch the Devil." The author is Pamela Kohloff, and here's our conversation. Pamela Kohloff "Catch the Devil." It is great to have you with us. You're not the devil. It's just the name of your book. Oh, that was such a dad-sign. I said before. This is about a jailhouse snitch. Tell us who Paul Skolnik is and was. Paul Skolnik began as a police officer in Texas in the early 1970s. He lasted for about 18 months before he was caught writing hot checks. And that was the last honest job he ever had. From there, he went on to a life of crime that began with petty theft and fraud, things like writing $500 hot checks. And it escalated dramatically over the years. But he was an extremely charismatic guy. He wasn't handsome, but he was attractive, if that makes sense. He was married to nine different women who I was able to find. There may be more out there. Because he was married to them at the same time. He was a big amist. And his get out of jail free, you know, trick, which he did whenever he was caught. And he was often caught because he did not use pseudonyms. Was when he would land in the jail, he would use his skills as a former cop to size up who it was in the jail who was the most valuable to prosecutors. And then he would go to investigators and he'd say, "That guy just confessed everything to me." And he would weave a story that prosecutors would use by putting him on the stand in securing convictions. So what was his scorecard? So to speak of prisoners from whom he claimed to have gotten jailhouse confessions when he was one of their fellow prisoners. So of cases he was actually used in in one Florida county, he was involved in 37 cases alone. I found evidence that he did this from Houston to Florida in upwards of 40 cases. I suspect that he gave information in over 100 cases. He wasn't used in all of those. And some of those are cases in which guilt is really in question. And other cases where men did commit these crimes, what he would do is give testimony that was so incendiary about something they had said that a crime that might have gotten say 15 years, just as an example, in one case I looked at, got a life sentence. So he had an impact in all sorts of different ways and he was such a fearsome presence that many men when learning that he was on the witness list for their case would just take a plea deal. How did he originally come to your attention and you get sort of hooked on the line? Yeah. So in 2018, I had just published a story in the New York Times magazine and pro public eye work for both about junk forensic science in a small town murder case in Texas. And I got this avalanche of email afterward. There was one email that really stood out and it was from a legal scholar at Yale Law School named Laura Fernandez. And Laura told me the outlines of the case of a man named Jim daily who she was representing. She said that she had reactivated her law license after many years of not practicing because she had become so concerned that he was innocent and was facing a death sentence and a potential death date. At the end of this email that she wrote me, she said that the star witness and in her client's case was a man named Paul Scalnick. Well I would suspect prosecutors were aware of the numbers that you just gave us knew that Scalnick had more confessions than most Catholic priests, I think. How does an administration's had to have been aware of it? Exactly. And so if they knew how many cases they they're ahead, you had to smell something fishy and all that, but they didn't. They continued to put him on the stand. And indeed, I think didn't you write that he's put a number of people including Jim daily on death row? And I believe yes. It's almost as if he was soliciting prosecutors with him with tempting information to reduce sentencing. Yes, I think one of the hardest things to understand is at what point did prosecutors start to realize that there was no way that one person could gather all these confessions. If you think about the way in which this even works, it's it strains credulity. You know, you're when you're in jail, you're typically a waiting trial and you're with strangers. So the idea that you are going to turn to a stranger and say, "Hey guess what?" I did it. I did it. And here's how I did it. Just on its face. And you can see why I've wanted to write about this for a long time. I mean, Jill House Informants are a feature, not a bug of our criminal justice system. That said, I do make a point at the beginning of the book to talk about how Scalnick also fooled me when I first met him. Isn't relying on Scalnick's testimony in all of these cases. And didn't it basically come down to prosecutorial misconduct? So I will not wait in on that. I will just say that I think our blame really should be on the system that allows this test, this testimony was allowed in by judges. This testimony was rubber stamped on appeal by more judges. So I think it's easy to say that it's entirely prosecutor's fault when really I think what we should be focusing on is the apparatus. Something I try to make clear in this book as villainous as Scalnick is and he does many villainous things in this book. He's not the villain of the book. What we need to be focused on is why is it that we allow this kind of testimony into courtrooms and why do they factor so much into the most consequential cases? Like just one quick statistic that blew my mind. The National Registry of Exoneration's found that in 25% of the cases that they have on their registry, Jill House's informant testimony played a role in those underlying convictions. That's just a shocking number. And those are convictions they've got overturned. Exactly. One of the things that horrified me so much in this book is as I'm reading and I'm thinking, you know, as a reader, I'd be skeptical if I looked in the newspaper and saw that there was a Jill House snitch testifying in more than six or seven trials. And yet as he starts to rack up, Scalnick starts to wrap up dozens and dozens of cases where he has helped prosecutors turn convictions. Prosecutors start thinking him as quote unquote very useful, extremely effective. They start putting him in jail houses where they know they need more information to close a case. We talked a little bit about it. Pamela alluded to it. This case of Jim Daly will talk to her more about that specific case. Why he still got convicted and his conviction hasn't been reversed. Why he still on death row and the peculiar way that Florida decides who should actually go once they're convicted to be executed because it's very unusual. And the fact that Daly has sat in death row for over 40 years is sort of a tacit admission that they know that they've got the wrong guy or they have a guy who is not guilty sitting there on death row. We'll be back more with Pamela Kohloff after this. I do want to talk a little bit about your relationship with Scalnick himself. I want to talk about what your impressions of him are and how you found him. The thesis of your book is we hear what we want to hear. You actually say that in one of your senses in the book. How is he so skilled at shaping who he is based on what we want to hear? I'm so glad you asked that because he was sort of a shape shifter in that way. He was so good at figuring out what it is that each person he encountered was hungry for. And I'll just tell you about when I first met him because I think it illustrates it so well. I went to visit him in federal prison. I knew exactly who he was. I'm an investigative reporter, but when I made my pitch to him and I said your life is you know this is such an extraordinary story. And I would like to tell it. I would like you to take me behind the scenes of how this all worked because as I mentioned he was very proud of his work. He was very proud that he and prosecutors had put all these men away and he got very excited about this idea and he said you know I think this is the time to do this. I'm at the end of my life. It's the time when I can tell you the story. You're the person to tell it. But I realized so much later than anyone should have that he was stringing me along and he was going to tell me absolutely nothing. So he wasn't willing to give you what he knew you wanted and could dangle in front of you. But you must have. He knew what he knew what I wanted. Right. He knew what I was hungry for. He sized me up in two seconds. And so I remember his ninth wife told me Paul puts just enough truth and a lie to make you believe it. And that is exactly what he did with me. I knew all the other stuff was BS. He might have known I knew it was BS. But that part I bought hookline and synchro. Well, he obviously took delight in stringing you along. Well, stringing everybody. I get the sense that he had delight in pride in the whole con exactly. But I know that you talked to prosecutors who used him and they must have known as they used him that this was pretty sketchy. But would they acknowledge to you? Did they acknowledge to you? Because you write a lot about this that they were on very tenuous ground using his testimony. So there was only one prosecutor who used him who went on the record with me. And he felt that the evidence in the case in questions was Jim daily, the man who the Yale Law scholar reached out to me about was strong enough on its own. Without him, I found that hard to believe given that they put three jailhouse informants on the stand. And there was no forensic evidence. There was no physical evidence. There was no motive and on and on. But he said this very interesting thing to me that became the title of the book actually. He said, you've got to use a sinner to catch the devil. And to me, this quote captured everything about the upside down world that I had entered with this book. Did you come into this book with preconceived notions about jailhouse snitching? Or I mean, tell us a little bit also too. And in this answer, if you could about some of the scarier statistics that you on earth, does you research this book? Sure. I definitely have never come across a case that used a jailhouse informant that didn't have really troubling aspects to the case. And in fact, I would challenge prosecutors to find a case that has a jailhouse informant in it that isn't troubled in some way that doesn't stand on the other evidence on its own. That national registry of exoneration shows that in 7% of wrongful convictions on that registration, jailhouse informants have played a role. And you can see that it's almost four times as much in capital cases. I think why that is is in cases where the death penalty is in play. The stakes are so high. There's so much pressure on prosecutors to win a conviction in a death sentence. You can feel that in Jim Daly's case. His co-defendant who all evidence points to having committed this crime of a 14 year old girl got a life sentence. And I think prosecutors were under a lot of pressure to do more Jim Daly's to trial after him. And then they put Scalnic on the stand and his trial. Okay, so at this point though, prosecutors know Scalnic is a chronic law breaker. And yet they're still using him to get confession out of inmates, sometimes placing him in specific places of incarceration together until for them. I mean, to me, the thing that struck me as just kind of the most heartbreaking aspect of this aside from Jim Daly's case is when Scalnic was granted his freedom in exchange for this testimony that he did. He went out and harmed more and more people. And to be clear, his crimes escalated from, you know, I think we can all see past the $50 hot check at the grocery store. That's not great. But when he started stealing women's life savings, widows and divorcees, really leaving people in terrible circumstances. And then he goes on to sexually abused teenage girls. He was never held responsible for that and went on to hurt other girls. And I think the reporting in this story that was the most important and the most heartbreaking to me was tracking down some of those girls now women my age and allowing them to know that I had found all the police reports. I believed what they had said that he had a pattern and that he should have been held accountable for what he did. Let's go back to the Jim Daly case for a moment, because he's such a great illustration of the damage that Skalnec did during his lifetime of jailhouse snitching. Tell us a little bit about the case and how Skalnec came into contact with Daly. John Holiday, he was the lead investigator in the Jim Daly case. He was investigating the murder of a 14-year-old girl named Shelley Bougio, who'd been found in 1985 in a body of water in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida. She'd been stabbed more than 30 times and drowned. It was a horrific case. And to make a very long story short, the man who all evidence points toward was the housemate of Jim Daly. And he involved Jim Daly once he was questioned in this case and tried to blame it on him. But when that housemate got a life sentence, that was not a satisfying outcome. By 1987, Skalnec is a known snitch in the Pinellas County jail. And so he's held in protective custody. He's near the other guys, but he's held in his own cell if he wants to go to the wreck yard or the showers. He has to be accompanied by a correctional officer. So this is not exactly easy to talk to him. But the word was out that he was a snitch and therefore he had to be fully in protective custody. Exactly. So even with all those constraints, he says that he walked past Jim Daly's cell and that Jim Daly, a stranger, began chatting him up and asking him for legal advice, which doesn't make a lot of sense. And that in the course of doing that, he confessed to this crime. And what Skalnec goes on to say on the stand at Jim's trial is not only that Jim confessed to killing Shelley Bogeyau, but he creates, and he did this in many cases, this horrific visual image for jurors. And what that is, as he says, he's speaking in supposedly what Jim said to him. She's looking at me, she's staring at me, she's screaming, and she would not die. So he's conjured up this image of Jim stabbing this girl, staring up at him at the same time. And I think when you're trying to decide between life and death, as a juror, an image like that can be extremely powerful. He creates that image even though we now know, or are pretty sure that Daly wasn't anywhere near it when his friend killed this young woman. So Daly gets convicted on the basis of largely of Skalnec's testimony, and he's put on death row in Florida. - So just a little bit of background about Jim, 'cause I think he's such an interesting counterpoint to Skalnec. They're the same age baby boomers born in the late 1940s. He was from Manhattan, Kansas, and he was a kind of happy-go-lucky kid, very beloved by his community, went to college, married, had two kids, but he was sent to Vietnam in 1968 at the height of the Tet Offensive, time a very intense fighting. And he saw some really terrible things that he never recovered from. The way I put it in the book is that it broke something open in him that he couldn't put back together as evidence accrued that he probably didn't do it. Once Jack, the other fellow, basically confessed to the crime, the state would not take Daly off death row. And that points to the system that is so reluctant to give people second trials. And Daly hasn't been able to get one, right? - In Jim's case, I show how so much depends on when you get the evidence that can help prove your innocence. If you start off having lawyers who are not great lawyers or who are, as is often the case, terribly overworked and under-resourced who can't investigate the case top to bottom themselves, they're things they're gonna miss. And so it might only be many years later on appeal that lawyers or investigators can dig up that evidence that shows someone's innocence, but short of DNA evidence, exculpatory DNA evidence that shows someone's innocence. The courts are very, very reluctant to overturn past convictions. They really believe that. And then there are good reasons for this that a jury verdict is sacrosanct, that it is something that we should revere and that as appeals go forward, judges go back to that and use that as a touchstone in their decisions. But that's also part of why things are so hard to undo. - So we're now in a situation where Scalnick has died, taking with him anything that he might have said, had he been honest with you or with anybody else. Meanwhile, Daly continues to sit on death row. How long has she been there now? - So he's been on death row since 1987. He's been in prison since late, excuse me, early 1986. And he just turned 80 years old. He has all the health problems. You would imagine someone who's had prison health care for decades has. He is an incredibly upbeat and optimistic person just to give you an example. When a photographer and I went to death row in 2019 to take his picture for the New York Times magazine cover, we had to ask him if he would stop smiling because it didn't match the mood of the story. And I'm sure part of the smiling was he was glad people were there to tell a story. But I can trust that so much was Scalnick who at the end of this book is dying alone and is such a sad and pathetic human being. At one point when I go to see him in the nursing home he was in, he grabs my hand when I told him it was time for me to go and he said, when it's time for me to die, will you come sit with me? And I thought for someone who had lived so large, who had driven fancy cars and worn jewelry and been this larger than life character that to see him that way was a pretty sad end. Would you come sit with me even though I haven't told you squat? Even though I've dangled this in front of you and I've given you nothing. As we mentioned, catch the devil really paints a portrait of one particular case. Scalnick was involved in many cases in which he was a jailhouse nudge. But one of the great human illustrations of the damage that his confident scheme can do is Jim daily and Jim daily is still serving on death row in Florida. He had PTSD probably from Vietnam and he was a transient. He'd lost his family. He was living with some not so great guys down in Florida and at some point those guys picked up a 14 year old girl and then later in the night, Jim, who claims to have been asleep at the time, two men left the house with this girl and only one of them came back. And one of the men implicated Jim even though he was probably asleep in the house and that was confirmed by some other folks. And he's still serving the sentence on death row. Yeah, it would appear that there is very strong evidence as I read it in the book. Now again, I'm just reading what Pamela writes but it's pretty clear he's innocent. And yet the state of Florida will not rehere the case. We talked to Pamela specifically about the daily case and also about the way Florida operates in deciding who should actually go to be executed. (upbeat music) I want to talk a little bit about how Florida decides whom on death row to kill. There are a number of people there. You don't go to the death chamber based on how long you've been there. I gather the governor simply decides who they're gonna kill and these prisoners on death row don't know that there's a date for their execution until somebody shows up at their cell door and says, this is the date. Yeah, that was truly horrifying for me. You said for all officials know he throws a dart at reports put on the wall that that's how little is understood about the process where DeSantis and before him, Jeb Bush decide who gets the switch pulled and who doesn't. Is Florida the only state that operates that way in terms of gubernatorial discretion? Thank you for asking that. So Florida is unique in all these different ways. Not just in its number of death row exonerees, which is why this is important before I answer your question. For anyone listening, thinking, well, why should I feel sorry for these guys who've done these terrible things? It's not to feel sorry for them, but we should be concerned about this because the error rate is so high. And that error rate is combined with a highly unusual situation in Florida. So among active death penalty states right now, Florida is the only one that operates this way. In other states, just to be clear, what happens is a defendant stands trial, found guilty, he's given a death sentence, he appeals that conviction. It works its way through the courts. When he's exhausted his appeals, then a judge sets his execution date. And so there's a logic to it. There's a chronology to it. In Florida, once you've exhaust your appeals, you're sitting there with many, many other condemned men, there's one person in the state of Florida who has the discretion to pick who is executed next and when, and that is the governor. So Rhonda Santis is the person who makes that decision. And there's no transparency around that. Even though the Sunshine State has terrific open government laws and open records laws around this particular issue, there's zero transparency. So you have men who've been there since the 1970s, who don't have dates set. You then have much more recent ones that are set and there's no warning. And family, I know you don't want to pass judgment on the system, but I do. The fact that daily has been sitting there for 40 plus years and that they haven't set another date for his execution isn't it in your mind to tacit admission that they've got a guy who doesn't belong there? It's very curious. I think that's all I feel comfortable saying. Meanwhile, daily continues to sit on death row. Are you still in touch with him? Do you talk to him? I am. I am. I am still in touch with him. And I know that this book coming out has been meaningful to him to have people sort of finally focus on this. He's really been kept alive by three women, Laura Fernandez, the lawyer I mentioned who has been with him through thick and thin. He has a penpal abroad who's been writing to him since the late 1990s and Mary K, his ex-wife who he's now the love of his life. Those three women really keep him going. A lot went out of fourth. Maybe Pamela Kloof is something of an inspiration to him. It's a wonderful book. It is a wonderful book and you personify something in my apologies to Mary K, I'm about to just just decimate her language. Met de Maldére one whole. With the courage of despair, this book is a great example of that. I love the way it was written and it was a real, it should not have been as much of an education for me as it was. Thank you for educating me. Thank you so much for reading it. I'm so thrilled that you responded to it that way. This is my favorite type of nonfiction. Really, it's the one where there's a fascinating story that you can't help but follow because you want to know what happens and it ends up unearthing a much bigger problem in the system. At least it did for me as I say that was my educational process to learn about jailhouse snitching through Paul, Scalnick and his amazing story and what he got away with. Pamela is very judicious in saying what conclusion she draws, but I draw the conclusion and I think you will as a reader that there is prosecutorial misconduct in all of this because a lot of these prosecutors know that they're using a very sketchy informant and there can be real world consequences as Jim daily is experiencing as he sits on death row now for over 40 years. So we thank Pamela Coloff. The book is Catch the Devil. We'll catch you up to date on all you know by now who keeps this podcast going and then a final word from Pamela. The book case with Keaton Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Colver, Ariel Chester at Good Morning America and Josh Kohan from ABC Audio. Oh the book case wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode we have them linked in the episode description. It's so hard right now in our news cycle and our attention economy to know where to focus and I would challenge people to not forget about the reform that the criminal justice system requires. Learn who your local DA is and many states they're elected. You have a say in who that person is and how they run their office. Become educated, do jury service. Be somebody who tries to make the criminal justice system better even if it's just a little bit at a time. Aloita Irmainen kokeilu shopify.com. See you soon.