Author Pamela Colloff brings True Crime to "Between the Lines"

Stay ahead of Florida's political curve with State Affairs Florida, your insider pass to real-time bill tracking, non-partisan reporting, and deep policy intelligence straight from the capital. Visit pro.stateaffairs.com/FL. It's free for all of 2026. Sign up and get our Florida Files newsletter delivered to your inbox daily. Welcome back to Between the Lines with me, Dara Kam, podcast brought to you by State Affairs. This week we have a very special show for you with Pamela Kholoff. She is the author of a brand new book called Catch the Devil. It is climbing up the bestseller charts on the New York Times. And why are we featuring her? Because her book is all about a grifter and a con man who wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast for decades. Where did he wreak some of the most havoc right here in what the Florida in Pinellas County? We will hear all about that on our true crime climb through Florida with Pamela Kholoff in today's Between the Lines. He was extremely charming. He was not handsome but attractive. That makes sense. And he had this magnetism about him. He was delightful to talk to. I spent a lot of time later in the book speaking with him. And he was incredibly well read. He could talk on any subject. And so I think it is sort of chilling to realize that someone like that then was capable of the things he was capable of. Welcome back to the Camelie. I know every week I say I have a special guest but I am really, really excited this week to introduce you to someone very new to me. He is not new to Florida even though she doesn't live in Florida. And we are going to take a little true crime dive this week. Yes, for your summer reading and listening pleasure, not actually not pleasure but for your summer reading and listening activity. We have with us here in person Pamela Kholoff, the author of Hot Off the Presses, Catch the Devil, a true story of murder, deception and injustice on the Gulf Coast. This story, and she is going to introduce herself to you dear listeners in just a moment. But this story, I just read this book and I could not put it down. It was its investigation into one of the most serious complicated kinds of legal adventures, journeys that you can imagine, the death penalty, capital punishment. But it is so much more than that. It is a narrative. Actually it is a page turner and I don't mean that to as an insult or to take away from the intensity and seriousness of the topic. My listeners know that this is an issue that is very important to me. I have written about capital punishment and executions in Florida for quite a minute. And then I have given you quite a long introduction. So let me let you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and then we'll talk about kind of the eeriness of the timing as we're sitting here. At Midtown Reader, thank you to Sally Bradshaw and the folks at Midtown for letting us use her space to record the podcast where you had a reading last night and it was standing room and sitting room only and you sold out. So long, long introduction. Very happy to have you with us today. Pamela Kolaugh. Thank you so much for having me. So much of writing a book is very solitary. So to have you say all those nice things is pretty wonderful. Thank you. Just to let listeners know a little bit more about me. I'm a reporter at ProPublica and I'm a staff writer at the New York Times magazine. I'm based in Texas where I've been reporting on the criminal justice system for upwards of 30 years now and have recently been doing more than recently. Over the past about seven years have been focusing a lot on Florida and what's going on here with capital punishment. Yeah, we are, you know, I don't know if you how far you go back and we won't really get into this today because I've had other podcasts where we talked about her and post her and you know, all of that and the re hearings, the recent and things and then anonymity, not anonymity. And now I mean, we are, it is a hot mess in Florida, really. I mean, I know that the leaders of the state might take offense at that, but for people who cover capital punishment, who not only the reporters, but the litigators, who that is a very specialized area of law. And repeatedly you hear that Florida is an outlier and you can maybe speak to that. Yes, I think the fact that a Texas reporter is focusing on Florida tells you a lot. I came up as a baby reporter in the mid to late 90s in Texas when we held the, you know, the world record basically each year for the number of people being sentenced to death and executed. And I will say that what's going on in Florida, especially over the past 18 months or so, reminds me not quite numbers, but certainly in intensity of that time. And just it sounds like your listeners know a lot already, but I think just one statistic that shocks me every time I think about it is that in this year, Florida has executed more people than all other states combined. And last year, Florida executed 40% of the people who were put to death in the US. So when we think about, and I wrote about this for a public and the Times Magazine, when we think about what that looks like on the ground for the lawyers who are representing these defendants for clergy who are accompanying them through their final days and hours for the prison staff for so many people in these sort of concentric circles of pain that are caused by this. It's, there's a tremendous toll that's being taken on Floridians just as there was when I started off doing this on Texans. Thank you for that context. And as we're, I alluded to in the top of the show, we're recording this and it was very eerie because we have had this on the books for months. And I was thinking about putting it, you know, and saving it and using it later, but I want to use it this week. It'll come out. We're recording this on Thursday and it'll come out on Monday. And we're recording this two days after this date executed two men on the same day, a double execution that is the first time that has taken place in modern history in Florida. That's right. And again, if you just think about everything that involves, let's say just for prison staff, I believe the executions on Tuesday, correct me if I'm wrong, were roughly six hours a part at noon and six p.m. And, you know, there's, there are real human beings that have to carry these things out. And they know these men, these men are often 20, 30 plus years past the crimes that they committed. And they are often, you know, it depends from person to person, but very different than the violent young men that they were. And it's just a tremendous toll. And in the magazine article that I wrote a few weeks ago for the Times Magazine in Pro publicer, I focused a lot on a priest here in Tallahassee who has been ministering to men in their last weeks and days. And I think the voice that he gave to them in that piece about what the human toll is. I just found to be very moving and profound. It was, I did read that piece. It came out after we had booked this show too and I was like, oh my gosh. So again, thank you for doing this. It's not just, it also takes a toll on the correctional workers because they are with these guys day in and day out for years and years. And I don't think we really think about that as, you know. Yes. The interviewed man named Ron McAndrew for my article. He was the former warden. He was the warden of Florida State Prison in the 90s or a few years in the 90s. And he talked to me about the PTSD that he suffered. It took him 12 years of therapy to work through that. And just so people understand, he is a long order guy. He's politically conservative. He's, you know, until his experience with this was pro capital punishment. And when he saw the effect this had both on himself and his staff, that changed for him. And he told me that this doesn't, you know, after his years of therapy, he's worked through this. But in the years following these executions that he oversaw. And this was back when Florida had Old Sparky, the elected chair. Right. And we can talk about how Old Sparky is still at Florida State Prison. But I know it's still an option. It's still an option. I'll address that in a second. Okay. Ron McAndrew said that he would awake in the middle of the night and see the figures of the man whose execution he had overseen. And he told his wife that he was haunted by this. That's very dark. Because just so people understand, because I find this to be such a mind boggling fact, then if someone is on death row and they have an execution date set, they are given a choice as to the option that they elect, that they can elect. And the electric chair is still an option. Florida has not done away with it. Now lethal injection is the primary mode. No one has chosen that since, you know, it was a choice, but astonishing. It is astonishing given that we stopped using it for a reason. And you do describe that in the book. And I have never witnessed an execution by electric chair, only lethal injection. And it takes a toll on you. And I'll just leave it at that for me. And then, you know, making that decision not to do it even though I think not to participate as a witness, but recognizing that we as journalists have an obligation to document this. So it's kind of a bind, you know, and it's good to have people who have witnessed more than one so that you have context. And yet, I just, you know, I've turned that over to younger and different people that responsibility. So I appreciate my colleagues who continue to do that. It's such an important job. It's so important that these executions which are carried out in our name, right, as citizens and voters, that we know what's going on. We know whether there was any problems that happened. I witnessed one in the late 90s in Texas. I am fortunate to have had that perspective, but I feel for the reporters who are there, you know, for each of these. Well, especially because there's so much secrecy involved. And I do want to get to the book and we could talk about the death penalty for days. And you have other places to go. So I appreciate you taking the time to do this. But there is so much secrecy involved and the drug cocktail, cocktail kind of makes it sound like a good thing. But, you know, the drugs where they get the drugs and how, you know, whether they're expired or not, they're making their own and the identities of the people who are doing it. You know, I had James Uthmeyer, Florida's Attorney General on my podcast several months ago. We were talking about the death penalty and the pace of executions. I asked him about that and I asked him if he had ever witnessed an execution and he told me he hadn't. And I am wondering if he has, if that's changed for him. He's also a devout Catholic and I was kind of asking him how he marries us. The bishops also, Florida's bishops also came out with a new, I forget it's like an advisory opinion, but it's not a visor opinion. Pastoral letter. It's a pastoral letter, I think this week, the day before Tuesday, urging the state to reconsider capital punishment. Yeah. And make sure to go back and listen to that conversation because I think Uthmeyer's at the center of this pace and I would be curious to hear what he has to say. I think it is something that's important for elected officials to see and understand. It's important for them to speak to the people who carry these things out and going to the secrecy issue. Something that is so important for Florida is to know and that I didn't know until I began this reporting is, Florida has obviously such incredible sunshine laws, terrific open government laws, open record laws. It is a wonderful place to be a reporter. And then there's this black box that exists with, well, let me back up. There's one person in Florida who has the power to select who from among the men on death row, who have exhausted their appeals, will be put to death next and what that date will be and that person is the governor. And what calculations, what data, what how these decisions are made is in a complete black box. And I think there are so many factors that people are guessing that go into who's being selected and why and all this. It's something that the public should know but can't have access to. And all Governor DeSantis has said on this is that he is providing justice for victims families. But that doesn't address, you know, why is it that in Florida there are men whose crimes were committed in the 1970s who are still on death row versus someone who's committed a more recent crime who's been selected. So what is the criteria and why does that mean these men from the 70s that their cases, like the case of Tommy Zekeler or other folks are so screwed up that they will just be left there, you know, to die natural deaths or what does that mean? We're just sort of left to wonder. Yeah, there is no way of knowing. And so that is so frustrating because I can't imagine it doesn't, in terms of the lawyers we talked about the stress on the system that this pace of executions is causing for the courts and the attorneys and the folks at the prisons and the pastoral advisors. And I guess, you know, probably the men who are on death row themselves. Yeah, I guess we get that. I wrote about that. I, you know, I didn't focus a lot on that because I understand that people may not be very concerned about the stress that they're going through. I do think when we think about what we mean, by the words, cruel and unusual punishment that, you know, in other states, over example in Texas, if someone exhausts their appeals, there, you know, their case has been working its way up through the courts. And at a certain point, you know, there are no more appeals that they can do. And at that point, the court sets an execution date. So there's a natural progression to things. In Florida, you can sit on death row for 10, 20, 30, 40 plus years. And every time that delegation of people come down the hall, the warden and all the officials who are with him to serve a death warrant, it could be you. And so I just. just again, I don't ever want someone to say, oh, you know, these poor men on Dr. Broke, that's not what I'm saying, but I think that when we look at how this is done, we look at the fact that there are attorneys who represent these men who are given 30 days once a death were in the signed to do herculine work. I won't go that is a very complex process, but quickly like getting the public records going through many, many, many files and all the appeals and many of these old cases, you would suddenly be able to do forensic testing that even five years ago would not have illuminated what it can today, but you've got 30 days. I mean, it just, so the whole system is, it's very problematic and the last thing I'll say about that is just, okay, why does this matter? Well, Florida has the highest number of death row exonerees of any state in the nation. So what that means is right now, 30 men who were sentenced to death and sent to death row walk free now because of huge problems because they're, they did not commit these crimes. Anyone who follows this knows how impossible it is even with a legitimate innocence claim to get an exoneration. So we know that if there are 30 exoneration that have gotten through Florida courts, there are many more than 30 people who this has happened to. And your book, Pam really focuses in part on the, we don't call him a jail house snitch. I really like, I was that you're reading last night and so it wasn't a reading that you were appeared into questions and it's not a jail house snitch, it's a, I'm looking in my, well, they're all sort of incentivized witness. But when I brought this up to a friend of mine that I was just telling him about your book and about that we were doing the podcast and he's a former public defender in Tallahassee and I was talking about the jail house snitch, you know, angle in the book and or focus. And, and he didn't correct me, but he said, oh, you know, the use of, of incentivized, I think it was incentivized informants or I think was what he, how he referred to it and maybe I'm wrong. But that was the first I had heard of it. So I'd heard it before last night and, and how frequent and problematic that is. So, yeah, let me explain that. So first let me explain what a jail house informant is and then I'll explain why I don't call him that might. Okay. So, a jail house informant is someone who typically is in a jail, not a present. Right. So, this is pretrial. This is when generally speaking, the, the jail house informant and the people around him are awaiting trial or figuring out whether or not they're going to take a plea. And a jail house informant like Paul Skellneck, the man at the center of my book, it is widely known within jails. It, there, there don't need to be overt promises from prosecutors or police officers. There's an implicit understanding within jails that if you have information in another case that's going to help prosecutors make their case that you're going to get something in return. There's comments on that. I think that's called it. It could pro quo. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, let me back up and introduce this concept through Paul Skellneck himself. The man at the center of my book is a man named Paul Skellneck, who was a police officer in Texas in the early 1970s and then went on to become this career con artist. And whenever. Very briefly. Very briefly as a cop. Yes, he was a cop for about 18 months. Okay, I'm sorry. I don't mean interruptions. But yeah, he was a cop for about 18 months and this is important why he didn't last. He started writing a lot of hot checks. And so he was quietly dismissed from the force. He wasn't actually charged. But he went on to become a career con artist. And he was very brazen about how he committed his crimes. He didn't even use his pseudonym. And so whenever he was caught, he would end up in jail. And he had this sort of get out of jail free trick that he would do, a card that he would play. And that is that he would figure out, and I think from having been a cop, he was really good at doing this. Who was it in the jail? Who was the most high value person there? Who did prosecutors most want to get a conviction against or were most nervous about the case they had? And then he would go to investigators or prosecutors and he would say, "Hey, that guy, he just confessed everything to me." And it wasn't just that he said that these men confessed to him. He would create from whole cloth these quote unquote confessions, these incendiary tales that were designed not only to make them look guilty, but to inflame jurors, to say something that's so. Yeah, they were monsters or that they were like to remove doubt about whether this person had committed this crime or not, right? Exactly, exactly. And he, you know, prosecutors would put him on the stand. And the details. Yeah. I mean, anyway. Yeah, the details were incredible. We can talk about this in a sec. But in return, he would be granted his freedom and he would be free to go damage more people and he, you know, his crimes increased in their severity as he went. And so he's an extreme example. So in Pinellas County where St. Petersburg and Clearwater are. Shout out to my daughter who lives in St.P. Hi, Lila. Lila, you're going to be listening to this one and you're going to love it. In Pinellas County, he was. He gave information and upwards of 40 different cases. So he's an extreme example, but what his case shows us is how this works. And when you have. So going back to the terms that are used. So people who do this are typically called jailhouse informants. I think informant is a misnomer because they don't have information. They aren't informants in the way. And regular informants are problematic in other ways. We don't have to worry about getting into. But at least in theory and informant in the real world was embedded in the world of the crime. They're talking about may have seen things and so on and so forth. And this is usually a stranger to whom this other person is supposedly confessing. And oftentimes not very long that they're locked up together. Right. Right. So like in the death penalty case that I focus on, that skeleton figured in in my book, James Daly's case, these men, James Daly has maintained his innocence throughout consistently over decades to anyone and everyone except of course, supposedly Paul Skellnic who was moved into a cell close to Daly weeks before Daly's trial began because they didn't have anything. All they had was the word of the prime suspect in the case you said he saw Daly do this and has since recanted and then unrecanted and recants amassed. Yes. Yes. Anyway, but Skellnic claims after less than 24 hours while he's being held in protective custody and can't go anywhere on his own that supposedly James Daly has confessed everything to him weeks before his trial and has told this story of how horribly the 14 year old victim in the case at the heart of this book suffered at his hands. It doesn't make sense on its face, but this is what the state went with. Yeah. And your story really details that how it's really the story of two men. It's the story of Paul Skellnic and the story of James Daly and one is a Vietnam veteran who came back very damaged from Vietnam and the other is this serial, con man child [BLANK_AUDIO] I mean, he married all these women. And like, I just keep thinking of him as like a Ted Bundy type sociopathic without labels, whatever they, but he got all these people. He sucked all these people into believing him, not just law enforcement, but women and banks and jewelers and car dealers and even to some extent you. Yes. So I went to see him in prison in 2018. He was in federal prison and I had gotten a tip about him and his activities. And I walked in, I'm an investigative reporter. I know he's a con artist with, you know, 30 plus years of a rap sheet behind him. And he proceeded to tell me all these wild stories that, of course, I knew were not true about his hundred foot yacht in Belize and his offshore bank accounts. And he told me he had stage four colon cancer and he produced this bloody rag. He was supposed to prove to me. You know, the people in my life who've had cancer don't usually like produce bloody rags to tell me they have. To demistry. Yeah. They're just also saying they don't bring props. Right. Yeah. Exactly. There were always props. So, you know, I obviously did not believe any of that. But I had come there to make the pitch to him that, you know, I wanted to write about what he had done and I wanted to write about what he had done specifically in Pinellas County. And that, you know, I had records and I had trial transcripts, but I really needed his guidance and his help to tell the story. And here he is, supposedly at the end of his life. It's the perfect time. And he was very excited about the prospect of this and about being written about and said that he would tell me everything. And we made a plan where I was going to come back repeatedly to see him to talk about the most sensitive stuff in person because you only get an hour for these interviews in federal prison and that I could send him questions and we would correspond. And so I was very excited about that and thought I had this all tied up. And this went on for months. I went home to Austin. He was outside of Dallas and tried to arrange to go back and see him and wrote him letters filled with questions. And we had this lengthy correspondence, but he would never, there was always like a hang-up of some kind. He wasn't feeling well enough to see me or there was a problem in the mail room. And this is what led me to write first an article and then a book was I realized like he had done to me what he did to everybody. What was the thing I wanted the most? I came in there hungry for something. Everybody's hungry for something, right? And what I wanted was this incredible story. And he loved stringing people along. It wouldn't have been fun for him to tell me everything or tell me nothing. He wanted that relationship over months that we developed. And this is what he did to everyone. To investigators who wanted to crack cases, prosecutors who wanted to win cases, women who wanted love or financial security. And he was the master at it. Sign up for State Affairs Florida for free for the rest of 2026. And how do you do that? Go to pro.stateaffairs.com/FL. That's pro.stateaffairs.com/FL. We'll receive the Florida files daily and you will get the between the lines podcast delivered to your inbox every Monday morning. Was there a moment when you realized I've been had? Yes. I mean, this went on, you know, a normal person would have realized. But you don't because when you're into like I correspond with inmates and men who are incarcerated and you know, some of them write articles for prison newspapers and different things. And it's some of them I knew on the outside. And so, you know, these are you're a human being and you're, you know, and to be a reporter, you create a rapport with someone and there has to be a certain amount of trust. Otherwise, you know, you just you close off your heart and what do you become? You're in AI bot or whatever. So I'm not blaming you when I said, but I'm just wondering what that felt like when you were as a reporter, I know, oh my God, I've got this great story. And it's going to be, you know, we're being really open shine the light on this whole prison, the jailhouse snitch and then what happens when he would do this thing where he would sort of make you a little complicit in whatever it was that you wanted. Like, you know, it was he was a very transactional person. So I think I can't say it was one moment. It was sort of this like growing dread. And, and, you know, you know, from your work that it really happens that letters don't arrive through the mail room or that a prisoner who's only gotten prison health care for so many years has real health problems. And, you know, so each thing was like plausible. It just went on for too long. And I noticed he would, he would like talk about anything but Pinellas County. And he that sort of like cat and mouse game, he just, he loved that. There was one quote from the book that I wrote down. There were so many. And then I, I realized I was like three quarters of the way through. And he was like, I should have been, you know, I don't highlight in books, which I should have. But anyway, where he said, just put just enough truth into a lie to make you believe it. Yeah. That was by a woman who believed they were married. They weren't actually me, right? He was still married to the last way. Yeah. And she would have been, I can't remember if she would have been wife number nine or wife number 10. But she said, yeah, Paul put enough truth in a lie to make you believe it. And I just, I remember the moment she said that, like that is exactly what he did. Right. So smart. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things that you said last night that I was thinking about and you see this so often when you're examining reading through the cases on, and I do a lot of that with the death penalty cases is the power that these jailhouse informants have and not inform it. The jailhouse niche. I like the, I like the incentivized incentivized witness. It's such a mouthful. It is. In the book, but the idea is, you know, you are incentivized again, not, you're incentivized to lie to get your sense reduced or get a better deal or get sent to a prison closer to where your family lives or I mean, you're, there's so many things. And it's, you know, we're to walk out free like he did on numerous occasions. Right. And I used to that idea of, you know, let's say a group of people commit a crime together, who's going to cooperate and who's then going to be treated a little bit more nicely by the system. But again, this is so different. These are strangers. Something quickly, I just wanted to explain. I'm sorry to interrupt, but no, no. People may wonder, well, like how did he have these facts or like how did he weave these stories? And it's sometimes when I was working on the book, I would put on one computer screen his testimony in a case and on the other computer screen, whatever the, what the paper was called, then the St. Petersburg Times had written about the case. And you could see exactly where you got everything. And you don't think about it, but just the most basic news article about a crime. Okay, it tells you. the time, the place, the location, the victim, you know, something about the victim, their age. Maybe there's a whole picture of it a little bit about their family, maybe. Yes, something. And I'm just talking like the most basic, like this crime happened on this night here, not even a big thing. And that's all you need. Like you don't need a lot to weave together. You know, once you have the location and those things, you can tell the story. And he got lots of things wrong. But by the time he would get on the stand, he was, he had a very polished story. And then he would put these things in about how the guys not only had confessed to him, but like had boasted. They were so proud of what they had done. And just these things. Did her face under the water? Yeah. So in the James daily case, he says, and to be clear, there is zero evidence that this ever happened. But he claimed that James daily not only confessed to him, but that daily described him stabbing the victim and her looking up at him as he's doing this, sort of with this pleading expression on her face. And then, you know, but she wouldn't die. And so it's this horrific, it's a 14 year old girl who was stabbed over 30 times whose body was found naked, who was likely sexually assaulted, you know, all these things. When you tell a story like that to jurors and jurors don't understand, they've been told someone like Paul Scalnick has presented right along with the lead investigator, the medical examiner, these very trustworthy sources. And they are told that someone like Paul Scalnick has not been promised anything in return for his testimony, which was likely true. But again, there's this implicit understanding. You don't need to have the overt promise when you understand that the 20 times you did this before you got out. So when this testimony is given, it's very, very powerful to jurors. That that seems to me that it, I mean, you use the phrase like this sort of catch me if you can. And it does feel like that in this, this persona that Scalnick created. He is a very charming. I mean, I don't disagree with you that he was a sociopath or however he did. Yeah. But he and in the beginning of the book, sociopaths are very charming, right, right. And intelligent and very intelligent. Yeah. And manipulative. Yeah. And he was very, he was extremely charming. He was not handsome, but he was attractive. That makes sense. And he could, he was incredibly well read. Right. And in the case of Jim Dele, where someone else now, the man who says he committed the crime, his co-defendant, I guess, or I don't know if they were co-defendants, he got a life sentence. And without the possibility of parole, I believe he has the possibility. Does he? Okay. So his family thinks that he's going to get, he stands a chance of getting out on parole, which I can tell you. I know. I know. You know, and I know, like not in the gazillion billion years. Right. And, and so for poor Jim Dele, do you come James or? So I know, I know, I know, I know, I know him as Jim. Right. He's, you know, James Dele in the course. Right. Right. Okay. So for Jimmy D, Jimmy D was how his friends, that's right. His friends during the 80s were friends. Right. Right. So Jim, you know, here he is convicted sentence to death on death row for decades for a crime. He insisted and commit that someone else, I don't want to give away all the book, right? Because we want people to read it and buy it. Please. Yes. And but, you know, that he believes or his family believes in he, he's privately told lawyers and investigators working on Jim's case that I guess there's a part of him that doesn't want him to be executed for a crime he knows he didn't commit. So he's in kind of a dilemma. He doesn't want to, he's admitted it, but he won't, when he won't testify that he has. Yeah. This is it. So Jack. This is Jack Piersy. This is the co-defendant in this terrible murder that happened in 1985 in Indian Rocks Beach, which is in Pinellas County. Yes. So Jack Piersy in recent years has signed numerous affidavits and or, you know, statements in which he has said that that Jim did not have anything to deal with the murder. And then whenever he's called to court to testify to that because, you know, for something to really happen in Jim's case, there would have to be live testimony about this. He pleads the fifth and he goes silent. And so it's just when you read everything this book, you can see that Jim is caught in this sort of impossible catch 22 where the courts have relied upon this incredibly dubious testimony. And the quickest way I can describe this is I went in search of a jailhouse informant case many years ago. Wasn't until I found this that I knew the one that I had to write. And that's because whenever you see a case has jailhouse informant testimony in it, you know something's wrong with the case. It's a huge red flag. It means that they need that to something's wrong. It doesn't necessarily mean the person is innocent. Maybe it means they're overcharged or, you know, there's some problem with not having enough affidavits. But and I think that's actually how this is often justified in the minds of prosecutors. Well, we know this person's guilty. We just need to like get the jury there. So it's a huge red flag in James Staley's case. There were three jailhouse informants used. And to me, that is evidence of how incredibly weak this case was. There was no forensic evidence, no physical evidence, no motive, no, no nothing. And so it's shocking. He remains on death row today. He's 80 years old. And he had a death date in 2019 before getting a statement. We're not going to let people know too much about that. You need to read the book. No, no, I intentionally was going to tease that. So you you'll have to read the book to find out what happened after governor DeSantis signed his death warrant in 2019. And you know, I do think that one of the things that this case illustrates is not only the the danger of or the the problems inherent in relying on on. Jill House snitches. I was not going to spend 10 minutes searching for the word. But particularly in capital cases, but once prosecutors go down that path. How difficult it is for them. They can't just throw up their hands and say, look, you know, at all this evidence is coming in saying no or any evidence is coming in. No, we're going we're sticking with this guy. We're dancing with the one that brought us. Exactly. And you know, when you think about the number of cases he was involved in that relenting or admitting that there was maybe some hijinks going on over in this case could open the door to the floodgate. I mean, it's really, you know, I hope one of the things this book is is a cautionary tale to prosecutors about what happens when you get in bed with a Jill House informant because you are casting your lot with them with their criminal history with a liar typically. And you know there's so many places in this book where you can see that I don't think prosecutors after a certain point let's say are enjoying the fact that they're tied to Paul Scalnick but they are. And what we see in the system and we see in this book is that the system is it's designed once there's a jury verdict it is so hard to undo that even in the face of like staggeringly important new evidence as has happened in this case we instead the system sort of compounds error instead of illuminating it it doesn't know what to do with new evidence that comes to late 20 plus years later in a case like this and you know the stakes are high so the national registry of exonerations when they looked at how many capital cases you know in which somebody had been sentenced to death how many of those cases had involved jail house informant testimony it was 25% of those well a quarter of the exonerations involved jailhouse niches and and we can see why those things go hand in hand this is a typically a witness who is purgering himself on the stand. I could go on for another three hours I think we'll end on the a question and forgive me Seth for stealing all your questions but he had some it was such a great discussion last night but the and I think again I alluded to this kind of early on when I was talking about my own emotional the toll I felt from witnessing executions I mean you get it just from reading the the cases you know the descriptions of the cases and and again I feel like I do need to express of course the families of the victims you have I have I know you do empathy for those folks and I understand and I've spoken with them and many times this the oh we're going to have an execution oh we're not it's dragging on it's this many years it's you know especially now in Florida we don't do this anymore once a warrant has been signed I mean it's kaput that's that's I mean kaput in terms of that's the end of the legal road very very very unlikely that a someone who is under warrant is that that warrant will be that there will be a stay and that will it be indefinite and so Jim's case is a little unusual in that regard very much so and so you know but and I get why the you know the the rationale behind we want these families to have justice justice would be not putting someone on the stand to lie in a case that then means that for years and decades you're going to be back in the court litigating that I mean what's what's so horrible is these victims families of course deserve justice but this is not justice this is the opposite of justice this is sometimes getting the wrong person in prison or cheating to get the right person which then creates this morass of just you know endless court dates it never ends in in the case that Jim daily sitting in prison for I talk about the fact that the the victim in this case Shelley Bogeot both her sisters and both her parents died before you know they could quote unquote see justice done in this case the other thing that I hope people take away from this book is that new victims families are created through the use of Jill House informants because if you look at the case of Paul Paul Skellneck every time he was let go and he was put out into the world to commit his crimes you know they began his financial crimes and some of those were terrible women who had had nothing when he was gone and who were left truly impoverished by him but that escalated into sexual abuse that was also swept under the rug by prosecutors so of children of children and so you have you know if if what you're really committed to is serving victims families this is the opposite of how you get there yeah and I mean I'm going to go a step further and say if you are if your loved one has been murdered and then the state executes the wrong person for that how do you deal with that I mean they're I mean we know in her situation in Shelley situation the family members are gone so I don't know if that's something we they're more allowed to talk about or think about you know there's it's just well and I should be clear there are there are other family members still with us okay beyond that group very very much want to see more happen in this case okay I think it's important to understand that with all victims families they when when a witness like this is introduced at trial and in daily again it was three of them there's so much the victim's family isn't being told about how those how that testimony came about in in the daily case when they're getting ready to take him to trial and there's there's no there there there's very little to work with the lead investigator in the case goes to the Pinellas County jail starts pulling men out of their cells and asking them what they know about this case which is just a signal to everybody who's sitting there trying to figure out how to save themselves hey this is the case this is the case now I know what the case is victims families don't they're not told things like that so they're they're done such a disservice yeah and he worked a lot with one investigator in particular you'll have to read catch the devil by Pamela Kola Kola if you want to find out more about that at Pinellas County good old Pinellas County you know what surprised me the most about this book that it wasn't Polk County I know or do you all maybe those are the next two books if anyone has any tips I can be reached I think the workings get Polk County yeah sorry sorry Polk County is definitely Gilbert's territory so maybe some far flung counties if you have information I'm not all ears and and one last thing before we go um you did you're how you got hooked into true crime but on this kind of reporting and investigative journalism um is is a case that had a very different outcome and so maybe you could just tell our listeners real quickly about that well there are a couple cases yeah sorry let me in this reaction yes but probably the most memorable I would say there was a case in Texas of a man named Anthony Graves who had been incarcerated for 18 years 12 of them on death row when I started looking into his case and I wrote a story for Texas monthly where I used to work an incredible magazine in Texas and I really I didn't do a lot of new investigative reporting for that I really was sort of translating the incredible work of his attorney Nicole Kossera's that she'd been doing over eight years um night and day she poured everything she had into that case I was really taking it out of the legal language it was in the briefs and filings in the court and turning it into a narrative that people could understand which is exactly what you did in this in this book this is a really readable digestible and I mean enjoyable but kind of like oh my I want it to be a page turn it is a page turner it is I could not put it down I really could not thank you so listeners you you really want this book well just to tie up the I'm sorry yeah okay um I please I love everything you're saying um the story was published and to make a very long story short six weeks after after the stories publication, Anthony was released, charges were dropped, he was later exonerated, he received a generous payout from the state of Texas. And so that was back in 2010, and that sort of started this, you know, this idea that if you just explain things well enough and clearly enough, if you can take them out of that legal ease and put the facts before people, a lot of facts often that don't enter a trial, but that are very important for context that you can make things happen in the world. And obviously in the many cases I've written about, since then, none is as dramatic of an ending. Sure. Some have caused change, some haven't. But I hope at the least with this case that it shines light on this practice that really has no place in the courtroom. Well, I think that's a really great place for us to end. And thank you again, Pam Kulof, the author of "Ketch the Devil," a true story of murder, deception, and injustice on the Gulf Coast and what the Florida. I look forward to catching up again and good luck on your book tour. Thank you so much. Between the lines is brought to you by State Affairs. This podcast is for you. We're cutting through the noise. I'd love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts and suggestions with me at [email protected]. Production and music for between the lines with Dara Cam is provided by RTD360 Enterprises.