Catch the Devil: The Murder of Shelly Boggio

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See packages and options at Toyota.com for future availability. Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even earn the label "Crime of the Century." But the stories that made headlines and decades passed aren't necessarily remembered today. I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show, I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened. This is "Crimes of the Centuries." Shelley Bogeo was a bit of a wild child. She didn't like listening to the adults in her life, and because the adults in her life weren't particularly interested in molding her into a responsible adult, they let her get away with it. She had dropped out of school and would stay out late, sometimes all night, sometimes at bars, sometimes with grown men. She was 14 years old. She should have been protected, from the men, yes, but also from herself. There's a reason we don't let kids call the shots. They're not equipped for it. In May of 1985, Shelley didn't come home, but that wasn't unusual, so she wasn't reported missing. Not until a newspaper report circulated about a body discovered near the Walsingham Road Bridge about eight miles south of Clearwater, Florida. A bridge tender had spotted something in the water. He thought at first it was a mannequin. When the police arrived, they found more than a dead body. Blood stained the nearby rocks. Shelley's jeans lay in the tangled mass close by. The figure they pulled to shore was riddled with knife wounds. A medical examiner would count up to 48 of them, including a slash to her right jugular vein, which was fully severed. She had cleared defensive wounds on her hands, too. Deep ones carved into her flesh, showing how desperately she had fought off her attacker. And she had fought impressively hard. Dr. Joan Wood, the Emmy, would say they were some of the most severe defensive stab wounds she had ever seen in her 10-year career. The autopsy report would show that the stab wounds would have killed her. She was still fighting, still breathing, when she was forced into the water. Wood knew this based on water in her lungs and the chloride concentration in her heart. The discovery of the body made the papers, and with it, a description of the as of yet unnamed corpse. Female, teenage or early 20s, about 5 feet 7, 110 pounds, tan skin, green eyes. It was Shelley, Bosio, who first called the police to say, "I think that's my younger sister." She had been missing for a couple days by then. Poor Shelley had to be the one to identify the body. As writer Pam Kohloff describes in her book about the case called Catch the Devil, officials tried to soften the blow, too little effect. "The makeup applied to the girl's face to camouflage her injuries was so heavy that Shelley was only able to identify her sister by the silver ring, eagle-shaped and inset with turquoise, that Shelley wore on her left hand." The Petersburg Times ran a story headlined, "newed body identified as young, troubled girl." The story was written in a way that made Shelley's death sound inevitable. "Shelly Bosio was often in trouble." That's true, but it sort of let the adults surround her off the hook. The story described how her father, Frank, wasn't concerned when his 14-year-old didn't come home Sunday night because hell, she often didn't come home on nights when she was partying with friends. Author Pam Kohloff views Shelley far more generously. "Shelly wanted a life of adventure, wasn't going to school a lot, was hanging out with older kids and some adults and had a home life that was not ideal and was looking for friendship and love in other places." Kohloff got to know this case inside and out thanks to her work on "Catch the Devil," which is a terrific read. You'll hear from her throughout this episode. Anyway, police got to work trying to figure out what precisely happened to this fun-loving, but wayward girl. They quickly learned that, under last night alive, she had been hanging out initially with her twin sister Stacey and some friends near their home in Kenneth City. That's a small town in southern Pinellas County, sandwiched between St. Petersburg and Pinellas Park, part of the Greater Tampa Bay Area. And when I say "small," I mean, it covers less than a square mile and with a population of about 5,000, it's a dense little pocket. Stacey told police that she, Shelley, and another friend went hitchhiking, looking for some fun, when a man they had met before picked them up. They went with them into of his buddies to a house where they smoked a few joints and watched Alfred Hitchcock present. The guy's name was Jack Piercy. And Jack Piercy was a construction worker. He was around 29 years old at the time. Good-looking guy. Now Jack had taken Stacey and Codua's own house, which he shared with his live-in pregnant girlfriend, Gail Bailey. You might think that would curtail Jack's behavior toward Shelley, but that wasn't the case. For part of the evening, with witnesses around, he pulled Shelley away from the group for stretches of time. And remember, this wasn't their first encounter. He had been pursuing her romantically, but her father had told him to stop bothering her and stop coming around. At some point that Sunday night, Jack decided he wanted to go dancing. Gail was game as was Shelley and another man in the house. Stacey and the friend weren't though, so they pealed off. That was the last time Stacey ever saw her twin sister alive. Naturally, upon learning all of this, police were keen to interview Jack Piercy. Trouble was, Jack Piercy had disappeared. Crimes of the centuries is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Summers winding down, but that doesn't mean the deals have. Right! 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Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage varies. See MintMobile.com. Weeks after Shelley Bosio's murder, police were finally able to locate the man who had last been seen alive with her. Jack Pierci. He was located in Olaith, Kansas, where he had lived prior to moving to Florida earlier in 1985. See, Pinellas County in the 80s seemed to attract a certain kind of person, the type who needed a fresh start. The rent was cheap, the days were sunny, dive bars lined the beach. It was a good place for a guy like Jack, who had run into legal problems back in his past. He had spent a lot of his childhood in and out of trouble, was sent to Juvie for a spell, then to the Colorado State Reformatory and Adult Prison. He got out in 1975 at age 20 to give you a visual. Jack Peercy, who is shorter but very like lean muscle bound, and I know this sounds like such a cliche, but he literally had these extremely piercing light blue eyes to such an extent that people testified about his eyes in another case he was involved in, in which he participated in a murder for hire. Obviously, I can't let her say that, and then not explain, so here it is. In Missouri in 1980, Jack and a friend named Detroit Williams agreed to kill a wealthy elderly Missouri physician named Dr. Duncan Danforth, whose new 22-year-old wife stood to inherit his estate. Jack and Detroit said they would kill Danforth in exchange for money and drugs, then they traveled to Climax Springs, Missouri, armed with two guns and a hunting knife, and days later, Danforth was found shot, point blank in the back of the head on a rural gravel road. Investigators traced the plot to the wife's boyfriend, Michael Stith, who admitted he had hired Peercy and Williams to do it, but when police circled back to Peercy and Williams, they said, "Actually, they had gotten cold feet and hadn't killed Danforth, and that Stith was the real killer." Even though Jack's alibi never checked out and the murder weapon matched a caliber he was known to carry, police for some reason believed him and gave him immunity in exchange for testifying against Stith. Stith went to prison for life, Jack went free. So that was in Jack's background. He had also been repeatedly accused of domestic violence against his longtime girlfriend in Kansas. After years of sticking by her man, she was rewarded by being dumped by Jack, who left an early 1985 with Gail. Three months later, Jack called her and asked to see her and their five-year-old son. She obliged. Police were trailing her and made the arrest. At that point, they had been searching for Jack for two weeks to get answers about what had happened to Shelley Bosio. At first, he gave them nothing, but based on the pointed questions he was being asked, first by local authorities, then by the Florida investigators who had traveled to interview him, he seemed to recognize that that approach wouldn't fly. He knows he's in trouble. He knows things are not good. As the questioning goes on, he goes from saying, like, "I don't know what you're talking about," to, "Okay, yeah, you know, I did spend some time with her that evening." But the story continued more until it finally became, "Okay, look, yes. I was there when she was killed, but I'm not the person who did it." The person who did it, he said, was his housemate, a guy named Jim Daly. Daly was older than Jack. While Jack was closing and on 30, Daly was pushing 40. In his younger years, he had been, as Cole off-road, "a cheerful, long-limbed kid with a bright smile and an easy way about him," end quote. Born in 1946 to parents John and Grace Daly, Jim was the second of four children. He had had a stable childhood in Manhattan, Kansas, where he was known as a good-neatured, happy-go-lucky kid. At 16, he met and fell in love with a girl named Mary Kay, who worked with him at the local movie theater. She worked concessions, he tore the tickets. They got pregnant in 1966, just as Jim started a four-year tour with the Air Force. Soon, he was deployed to Vietnam, so was his brother Joe. His mother Grace would later say, "I sent two lovely young men to the Air Force and Marines, and they came back, and they were different boys," end quote. Jim served a total of three tours, and when he came back home for good, he was, indeed, a change man. He struggled with alcohol addiction that, despite Stinson rehab, he couldn't seem to kick. Mary Kay eventually left with her two children. She ended up remarrying one of Jim's best friends. Through all that, though, Jim was never accused of violence at home. He did get in a bar fight in 1979 and pleaded guilty to aggravated battery for punching a man in the eye. He served five months in jail for that, but he wasn't known as a violent guy. He was mostly just sad. His ex-wife, who he later reconciled with and is now back to being very in love with, she told me that at the lowest moment of his addiction, she found herself doing something that she never in a million years would have expected herself to do, which is that she slapped him in an argument. And he did not touch her. She said he sort of smiled and touched the side of his face and said, "I never thought you'd do that." So he was not a quick to anger person. That's his ex-wife's take. That's not Jack Pierce's take. Jack told the police that Jim, whom he called Jimmy D, was a very dangerous man. Despite the attention Jack had paid little Shelley Bogeo, he said Jimmy D edged him out that night and decided he wanted Shelley for himself. This came after the dancing that twin sister Stacy had bailed on, if you're trying to make sense of the timeline. The dancing had been at a place called Jerry's Rock and Roll disco, where Gale had gotten annoyed that Jack was paying so much attention to Shelley. They all returned to the house and then Jack, Shelley, and one of the other men in the house went back out again. Now Jack would say that other man was Jim, but a guy named Duane Shaw actually said, "No, I was with him that night. I remember because they dropped me off at a pay phone to call my girlfriend and we were arguing. So they left me behind and drove off alone just the two of them. More on that in a bit." Regardless of what Duane said, Jack told police that he, Jim, and Shelley all drove together to a lover's lane near the waterfront and Jack dozed off in the back seat while Jim and Shelley fooled around in the front. "I say fooled around, but to be clear, Shelley was 14. This would have been a salt period. Bear with me as I relay Jack's version of things." Anyway, Jack said he basically fell asleep while the two made out, and when he awoke, Jim was looking crazy, his clothes were soaked, and Shelley was dead. He said Jim told him Shelley had rebuffed his advances and he had snapped. He stabbed her repeatedly, and then when she didn't die, he drowned her. It was a horrifying description. But was it true? The investigators could have reflected upon the fact that this was their prime suspect they were speaking to, who, by the way, had blood on his shoes, fled the scene, and had been the person pursuing her and seen alone with her. From that point on, the case centered on two suspects, Jack Piercy and Jim Daily. And prosecutors made it clear they not only wanted both of them convicted, they wanted both of them executed. This was Florida in the 80s, after all. This is the height of the cocaine wars. Miami Drug Violence was so severe, morgue trucks were brought in to deal with the corpse overflow. Against that backdrop, prosecutors were pushing hard for the harshest possible penalties, including death. Jack's trial came first. During the trial, assistant state attorney Beverly Andrews all the called Jack Piercy a liar. She mocked the ever-shifting explanations he had given to police. "Yeah, so I will definitely tell the truth. I haven't told a yet, but I'll tell it this time." But then she didn't push back when detectives entered into evidence his last version of events, which was that he had seen Daily on top of Shelley making what looked to him like stabbing motions. After that, Jack had said he dragged Shelley's body to the water and that he stabbed her one more time in the hand because Jim Daily made him do it. Andrews told the jury that Shelley had been fighting off two men and that those two men carried her to her death in the intercostal. Jack was convicted of first-degree murder, but the jury recommended life behind bars rather than death. Prosecutors were not happy. This was such a horrific crime. She'd been stabbed over 30 times. It appeared it had still been breathing when she was held under the water, just an awful crime that by the standards of the day would typically have gotten a death sentence. As Jim Daily's trial neared, investigators worked to shore up his case so they wouldn't be disappointed again. Crambs of the centuries are sponsored by Wayfair. Amber, what's the update on Hoetepe's living situation? Massive upgrade, actually, I ordered him a huge new cage from Wayfair. He's a Galikaka too, and I decided he needed bigger digs. 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As in hands bound behind their backs with duct tape lying on the living room floor of Ferdella's house, Scalnic's testimony was labeled a lynch pan in Cooper's conviction especially. He said Cooper, then just 18 years old, told him, "I'll never be sent to the chair 'cause I got this little baby face." Now Halliday was investigating Shelley's murder, and the trial against Jack Piercy, an author Pam Colas few, seemed to underscore something pretty important. At this point in the case, there wasn't a lot against Jim. There was the word of the prime suspect in the case, and not a lot else. Sure, Dale, Jack's girlfriend, said Jim had left the house with Jack and Shelley, which kind of sorta corroborated Jack's version of events, but that was complicated by that other friend, Duane Shaw, saying, "Actually, he was the one who had left the house with Jack and Shelley, not Jim." And by the way, phone record show his girlfriend did get a collect call that night just before Shelley would have been murdered. It's also worth noting that after the time Duane said he was left making that phone call, Jack and Shelley were seen alone at a bar trying to get help because they had had car problems. For some reason, none of this swayed prosecutors. Now, if Duane was telling the truth, that either meant that Gail was mistaken or lying, or it meant that Jack had come back again and picked up Jim after he had left with Duane, it was confusing stuff. Anyway, the bottom line was this. The physical evidence pointed to Jack. He had blood on his shoes. He had also vomited at the crime scene. He said he did that after he saw what Jim had done to the poor girl. There was no such evidence tying Jim to the scene, and that posed a problem for people wanting someone sentenced to death for the crime. If the jury hadn't seen fit to execute Jack, how likely were they to execute Jim when the evidence against him was even weaker? According to men held in the jail at the time, Halliday seemed to have a thought on how to tackle the problem. Halliday starts pulling people out of these cells when they were brought into this little room one by one to speak to this detective that he had newspaper clippings laid out about the murder case. We're talking about newspaper clippings that include the date of the murder, the method of the murder, all sorts of details. Cola of this quick to note, by the way, that Halliday has denied doing this. But this is what men housed in the jail told her in interviews years later. He starts asking these different men, "What do you know about Jim daily? What do you know about his involvement in this crime?" 15 men housed near Jim daily, said they didn't know a thing. Two offered up some vague corroboration that got them on the witness list, but it was by no means a slam dunk. Now chances are this isn't the first true crime podcast you've listened to, so you probably know there are issues with jail house informants. Whether they're promised something explicitly or not, there's an implicit agreement when they step forward in a case to provide prosecutors the testimony needed to get a suspect convicted. "Everyone in jail knows if you help a cop with the case that he is having trouble with, you are going to get some kind of benefit in return. It's not articulated to you necessarily, but everyone knows." One guy in Halliday's orbit knew that better than most. Paul Scalnick, the same guy who had testified in another of Halliday's cases already. In fact, Scalnick had already testified in multiple cases, so many that by the time Jim daily happened to be moved to a cell in his vicinity in the Pinellas County jail in 1984, Scalnick's reputation as an informant was so well known that he couldn't be housed with a cellmate, he was kept by himself in protective custody. Yet, wouldn't you know it? Jim had inexplicably been moved to that side of the jail not two days earlier. Scalnick said that as he strolled past Jim's cell, Jim called out to him, asking for legal advice. See, Scalnick had served a whopping 14 months as an Austin cop, so he knew more about the law than your average prisoner. He said that not only did Jim confess the crime to him, but he tells him all the details of the crime, tells him how he did it, how he stabbed her, how he held her under the water. Paul Scalnick takes this information to Detective Halliday. Little more than a month later, he's put on the stand at Jim Daly's first degree murder trial. Call of compared his testimony to what had been printed in newspapers already and it all lined up, as in anyone who had read up on the crime would know as much as Scalnick told the jury. And then he delivers the sort of kudagra and he says he told me that she was staring at him and he was stabbing her and she would not die. So there's this horrific image of this 14 year old girl just at the mercy of this man. On the stand, Paul Scalnick said he wasn't offered anything in exchange for his testimony. He had stepped forward because his conscience compelled him. Never mind that Jim had already heard about Scalnick's jailhouse informant rap before he was moved close to him and when he saw that he was suddenly near Scalnick he had protested this is a damn setup. He told his lawyer the idea that he would talk to someone like Scalnick was ridiculous. It's worth noting too that the layout of the jail made the actual logistics of the conversation as Scalnick had described it implausible. Coleoff includes a sketch of it in her book and it suggests that there was no way for the two men to have a private conversation. They would have been far enough apart that Jim would have had to raise his voice. Other inmates and even correctional officers would have had to have been able to hear them. But Jim's lawyer didn't press this during cross-examination. That clinched it. The jury not only convicted Jim daily of first degree murder but they sentenced him to die in the electric chair. At Jim's sentencing hearing he offered his sympathies to Shelley's grieving family especially to her twin sister who surely must have felt like she had lost a piece of herself with Shelley's death. He said, "I say these things as a caring human being and as a person wrongfully convicted of this heinous crime." He was innocent he said the trial had been a mockery of justice. Of course Paul Scalnick did get something in exchange for his testimony. Five days after he took the stand he walked out of jail on his own reconnaissance with a memo in his file saying his release was "due to his cooperation with the state attorney's office in the first degree murder trial." No ambiguity there. Crimes of the centuries is sponsored by drip drop. I've been drinking drip drop for a long time now. I make sure we keep some on hand in the house and insist we pack it when we travel. It's part of my routine now. Travel days especially. But also just regular days when I know I haven't hit the water bottle enough I just feel better after I drink one. It's proven fast hydration. Built for busy days, long workouts, summer travel, all of it. Because hydration isn't just something you do when you're behind. It's how you stay ahead. It also uses science-based formulas for rapid hydration so you feel results fast while getting three times the electrolytes of leading sports drinks. Not just for athletes either. 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In 1968, when Skailnick was a first year cadet at the New Mexico Military Institute, a junior college in Roswell, he ran a side business muggling beer onto campus and guitar cases and forging driver's licenses on the side, all while playing model cadet for the school's brass, earning himself a spot on the honor board. He told a classmate he'd be running the school in no time. He signed a Marine Corps contract that all but guaranteed active duty after graduation. Then he came back from summer training in Quantico wearing a conspicuous neck brace. An injury one classmate was fairly sure he'd faked to get out of it. He never became a Marine. But he did become a cop. In the early 1970s, he worked as one in Austin for less than a year and a half before he got run off for writing hot checks. That was, by author Coloff's account, the last honest job Paul Skailnick ever had. He was extremely charismatic, not necessarily classically good looking in his day, but very attractive. I think of him as sort of like a Jack Nicholson character, very charming. That away with ladies could talk his way out of any situation. He put that charm to devastating use. In the spring of 1977, he walked into a funeral home in Friendswood, Texas, 27 years old, dress sharp, moving through a room full of mourners with his eyes locked on the receptionist behind the desk. Her name was Penny Rogers and she was twice divorced, raising two kids, working at the funeral home her parents owned. Skailnick told her he had grown up nearby, then quickly climbed the ranks to become a top executive at Southwest Airlines. None of it was true. Weeks later, he had swept Penny off to Las Vegas and Marrieder. He moved into Orlando and played the role completely, reef case in hand every weekday morning, off to headquarters in Dallas, home in time for dinner. Dickens meant the best hotels in Dallas and Austin, room service he never seemed to worry about paying for, a fur coat, jewelry, a new Lincoln Continental, a customized van with velvet curtains. Only Penny's teenage daughter Lisa seemed to notice what was underneath it. Skailnick pocketed hotel robes and towels. He kept a handgun within reach at all times, even stashed under the driver's seat. Once he promised the whole family a lear jet trip to New York, they sat in an empty airport hanger for hours while he paced and shouted into a pay phone, before announcing, unconvincingly, to Lisa at least, that the trip was off, engine trouble, he said. Soon, letters started arriving at the condo. A jewelry store, a sporting goods store, bounce checks, threats of collection, more letters followed in the months after, banks, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a men's clothing store. Long story short, his marriage to Penny faltered, she started having bruises to show for the relationship, but they didn't divorce, not yet. For some reason though, that didn't stop Skailnick from marrying someone else, and someone else after that. He goes on to marry nine different women, some of them at the same time he was a big amest, and at the same time, be romancing all these other women, and he was living off of them. People hear me when I say, don't fall for charisma, he was very larger than life, where a lot of jewelry always had a crazy story to tell was very captivating. So he sort of abled a wiggle his way out of a lot of these different crimes. By 1979, his habit of bad check writing had landed him in jail in Harris County, Texas. Soon he reached out to officials and said he had information to offer about one of the highest profile cases headed to trial at the time. In exchange, he was let out of jail for stints, despite having been put there without bail, because he was already on probation in Orlando, and had failed to report to his probation officer for six months. Retestified and helped get a conviction in that case, he moved to Florida's Pinellas County. His conjobs kept landing him in jail, where, wouldn't you know it, prisoners would just confess their crimes to him left and right. He then began, quote unquote, informing on all these different defendants. He became an incredibly, incredibly valuable witness to the state attorney's office in Clearwater, and he was put on the stand over and over and over again. By the time he testified in Jim Daly's case, he had been a jailhouse informant in more than 35 cases. Sometimes when a defendant learned that he was on the state's witness list, they would agree to a plea because they knew he would say whatever the prosecution wanted him to say to get a conviction anyway. And what's wild about this is that prosecutors knew he was a fraudster and a con man. They knew this because he was arrested for it, time and again, thus landing him in the jail cells near the bigger fish he was helping them fry. He also had at least one crime in his past that couldn't be shrugged off is just a con man doing con things. In 1982, in between jail stints, he was working for a private investigator. At some point, he went to the PI's brother's house where he met a 12-year-old girl named Karen Parker. Karen was a bit smitten with a big, talking, flashy, Paul Scalnick. He used this to pray upon her. He sexually assaulted her. Karen came forward and this must have put police in a tricky spot because at this point, Scalnick had been a key witness in multiple cases. Instead of investigating him like he might be a child molester, they forced 12-year-old Karen to take a lie detector test, even though there were actual eyewitnesses to parts of the assault. The detective found Karen credible and honest. Scalnick was arrested and faced up to 15 years in prison. Yet, before long, the sexual assault case against Scalnick was, as Ko-Off put it, swept under the rug. The case was dismissed. It was part of this plea deal that they made with him in which he had to keep informing on people. Of course, Jim Daly's attorney had no way of knowing about any of this before his client was tried in Shelley Bogeot's murder. Before records were digitized, this was not easy information to come by. Even now, there's no database showing what informant was used in which cases. I know this from experience reporting on jailhouse informants. For one project, I had to create a database from scratch because no one tracks this stuff, but prosecutors knew about it. They signed the plea deals. Over the years, Scalnick accumulated at least 25 convictions for crimes rooted in dishonesty, including grand theft and forgery. Again and again, he got slaps on the wrist because of the testimony he would offer in other cases. His specialty was recounting graphic, supposedly spontaneous confessions he claimed his cellmates had volunteered to him, often within hours of meeting him or through the bars of an isolation cell. Police and prosecutors repeatedly told jurors in these cases that Scalnick was a crook, sure, but he was otherwise a reliable guy. It would bolster his credibility by emphasizing his former police background and portraying him as a man who had made some mistakes, but had such a strong moral compass that he had to come forward when he caught wind of these heinous crimes. On the stand, Scalnick would solemnly assure juries he had been promised nothing in exchange for his testimony. Scalnick's work reveals he was consistently rewarded with reduced sentences, special jail-housing, early release, you name it. Prosecutors knew this, but they kept using Scalnick again and again in trial after trial, even when it meant they were putting someone potentially innocent on death row. Crampsist centuries is sponsored by Takaya Tree. I had my first appointment through Takaya Tree and it went well. Yeah? How'd the whole insurance piece work out because that's usually where things get complicated. It actually worked without a snag. My insurance was accepted, billing went smoothly, no surprises, and I liked the psychiatrist I was matched with. That's kind of the whole idea. Takaya Tree is a 100% online psychiatry practice, comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, ongoing Medication Management for things like ADHD. - Anxiety, depression, and more. - It's psychiatry, not just talk therapy. You're seeing an actual medical provider who can diagnose and prescribe medication when it's the right call. - All 800 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers, so you're using your existing coverage instead of paying out a pocket. - Getting started took a few minutes. Short assessment matched with a clinician who fit what I needed. First visit scheduled in days, not months. - And because you stay with the same provider, you're not re-explaining everything, every visit. - More than 300,000 patients have already found psychiatric care through talk-iatry. - Head to talk-iatry.com/COTC, the complete, the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. - That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y. com/COTC to get matched in minutes. - Talk-iatry.com/COTC. - For years, Jim Daly sat in prison proclaiming his innocence, but no one was really listening. He had a few laid people in his corner, his ex-wife Mary Kaye for one, and her second husband Dick, his mother believed him too. But as far as the system went, he was on his own for years. Then, in the late 1990s, two attorneys named Harold Brody and Jeff Hason picked up Jim Daly's case. They worked for a Florida state agency that funded post-conviction legal work for condemned prisoners, and they had the kind of resources most death row inmates never see. - They start digging into this, and they're like, "This case stinks." - One of them tracked Scale Nick down in Amarillo, where he was serving time again, and told him flatly that his testimony didn't hold up. Scale Nick, as he always did when someone came looking for the truth, offered a deal instead of an answer. Help me, and maybe I'll help you. The attorney left with nothing, aside from a burning desire to get Jim Daly off death row. Then, Florida politics intervened. The agency Brody and Hason worked for was gutted, they were let go, and Daly's case landed with new lawyers who didn't have the same resources or the same fire. For close to 20 years, that's where it stayed. In 2016, a young attorney named Chelsea Shirley picked up the file after Daly had exhausted his appeals. He was, in the language of Florida law, death weren't eligible, meaning the governor could sign an order for his execution at any time. Most cases that land on a CCRC attorney's desk at that stage are about mitigation, about arguing for life instead of death. - She's a young lawyer pretty new to this work. She starts digging into the case, and realizes, "Oh my God, this is an innocence case." Shirley and an investigator started knocking on doors. In 2019, one of those doors belonged to a man who had briefly worked for the state attorney's office back in the 1980s. The former prosecutor not only said he remembered the case, but he said he remembered being told by someone in law enforcement that Jack Piersie had once described the night of the murder far differently than Jim's jury had ever heard. He remembered hearing that, Jack Piersie had been at the sort of lovers' lane area by the water with Shelley Bogeo, and that he could not perform sexually, that she laughed and he lost it. If true, it was the first account that actually made sense of what had happened by the water that night, and it was information Jim Daly's trial attorneys never had. Then in September of 2019, the case stopped being theoretical. Florida signed Daly's death warrant. He had 43 days to live. Call of had been working the story for a year at that point, building toward a magazine piece about Scalnik's decades as an informant. The warrant changed the story. She found Scalnik in a nursing home in East Texas and went to see him. - And I say, I need you to know that a man named Jim Daly just got an execution date do you remember that name? And I sat by his bedside for five hours and basically asked in every which way I could, are you sure that you stand by your testimony of what Jim Daly said to you all those years ago? - He didn't back down saying, quote, whatever I testified to was fact and quote. It's worth noting that those two death row and made side mentioned earlier, the one Scalnik had helped convict in the execution style triple homicide had had their sentences changed on appeal instead of death they got life in prison. Other cases Scalnik had testified in, fell apart as well. It's also worth noting that the lead prosecutor in Jim Daly's case, Beverly Andrews, who had also led Jack's prosecution, later went on the record saying she couldn't in good faith use Scalnik in another case because she didn't find him reliable anymore. Oh, and also Scalnik himself signed a series of explosive legal documents between 1988 and '89 declaring he had been coached and supplied facts in the Richard Cooper death case to ensure his story matched existing evidence. He said he was told how to answer questions and promised he would be taken care of if he played ball. His filings went so far to claim that he had, quote, deceived the jury in over 50 cases, end quote. But then he recanted his recantations in later hearings saying he'd just been mad at the prosecutor's office. And so Jim was still scheduled to die. He was even measured for a state issued burial suit. Kohlhoff was on the witness list for the execution. It was set for early November 2019. But then just days before, a judge issued a stay so that Jim's attorneys would have more time to chase down what they had found. That's when an attorney named Josh Dubin went to see Jack Pearsie. Now, Pearsie on occasion had been telling a different story to other inmates, once even to Chelsea Shirley herself. And that was that Jim had nothing to do with the murder and that he had done it alone. He even signed an affidavit saying, quote, "James Daily had nothing to do with the murder of Shelley Bogeo. I committed the crime alone. James Daily was back at the house when I drove Shelley Bogeo to the place where I ultimately killed her." Dubin told him, "That means you're going to be called to testify about this. So are you willing to do that?" And he agrees to do that. With one caveat, he didn't want his mother to be there when he testified. The hearing was set for March 2020, days before COVID shut down the world. Pearsie was called to the stand. His mother, who had spent years fighting for his freedom, believing he was an innocent man, was sitting in the courtroom. With her looking on, he refused to testify. I was in the courtroom that day, and I watched Jim Daily watch Jack Pearsie step down from the stand and be escorted out of the courtroom, knowing that was it. Two weeks later, the pandemic shut everything down. That probably saved Daily's life in two ways. First, because he was on death watch, the place prisoners were capped as they awaited execution. He was an in-gen pop. So he was protected from the wave of COVID that ravaged all US prisons in 2020. He was finally released back to a normal death row cell after about nine months. Second, the prison delayed all executions during the pandemic. But he's still there right now. His stay has expired. He's lost to every appeal and is awaiting a new date of execution. No one from Shelley Bogeo's immediate family is left to serve as a witness to it. Her father and older sister, both died of cancer. Her twin Stacy died of an overdose in 2006 at age 35. Jack Pearsie is still serving his life sentence in the murder. He's been eligible for parole, but hasn't gotten it. Most of Paul's scale makes victims never saw justice thanks to the deals he made with prosecutors. Eventually though, his stick began to tire. In the early 1990s in Texas, he was living with his eighth wife when he sexually abused her teenage daughter. By this time, he wasn't a valuable informant anymore. So when the girl went to the police, he was charged, convicted, and sent to state prison for it. When he got out 10 years later, he broke the terms of his release and finally ended up in federal prison. He was eventually released from there too. Soon after which, he had a stroke and was placed in an East Texas nursing home. That's where Kolaugh eventually found him. It wasn't the first time she had tracked him down that it'd been while he was still in prison. - He told me, "I will tell you everything you need. You're gonna be able to tell the whole story of how I worked with prosecutors and police. This is a story that needs to be told. It's a story I need to tell before I die and you're the person to tell it." So I drove back to Austin where I live, elated. - So she got to work. She ordered court records and poured through police documents. She sent Scalnick message after message asking questions about his cases and his life. She tried to arrange more in prison interviews. He strung her along for a while and then. he ghosted her. He had conned her just like he had conned everyone else. He was able to size up who I was. He could see I was ambitious. He could see what I wanted. He promised it. He never did recant his testimony. He died just as the pandemic hit in March 2020. Jim Daily supporters are left now with only the faintest hope that he won't take Jim along with him. To research this case, I read Pamela Kooff's excellent book, Catch the Devil, A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast. Huge thanks to Pam for sitting with me for an interview. The book is more about Paul Scalnick than Shelley Bogeot, so trust me when I say that listening to this episode just scratches the surface of her fantastic reporting. I also read the many court filings involved in Jim Daily's appeals and contemporaneous news coverage of Shelley Bogeot's case. Crimes of the centuries is available early and ad-free through Grab Back Club. Head to www.grabbackclub.com for exclusive content related to this show and access to other series on our profit-sharing network. Unless noted in the citations, this case was researched and written by me Amber Hunt and produced by Henry LeVoy. Original music is by Bruce Hunt, Andrew Higgley, and sometimes my child, Hunt Van Ben Scotten. Other music comes from Epidemic Sound. If you like the show, please help us out by reading and reviewing on Apple podcasts. Also tell your friends. For more information or to recommend a case, go to sentriespod.com. 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