Ep. - 1661 - SATURDAY SERIES: AUTHOR PAMELA COLLOFF

They amazing Kate Casey. Welcome back for another episode of Reality Life with Kate Casey. And welcome back for the Saturday series episode. My guest today is Pamela Kohloff, author of Catch the Devil. She has spent more than two decades investigating the ways that the American criminal justice system fails the people that depend on it. She's a reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at the New York Times magazine. Before that, she spent years at Texas Monthly, where her 2012 series The Innocent Man about the wrongful conviction of Michael Morton became one of the most defining works of modern journalism on the subject. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner honored for feature writing in 2013 and for reporting in 2020. Her first job in journalism was ghost writing and advice column for the Texas Highway Patrol Magazine. And she has said that her interest in wrongful convictions began even earlier than that. And she saw the documentary The Thin Blue Line as a teenager. That early fascination became a career defined by patience, precision, and an unwillingness to accept the official version of events at face value. Today, she's here to discuss her first book Catch the Devil, a true story of murder, deception, and injustice on the Gulf Coast, published this month. The book grew out of a 2019 investigation that she published with ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, and it centers on a man named Paul Scalmick. For more than three decades, he moved along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Florida, presenting himself as a fighter pilot, a wealthy attorney, a college football star, an undercover agent and a dying cancer patient. He married nine women in some cases simultaneously, and defrauded them of money, property, and trust. And he also sexually assaulted women and girls. But his most consequential deception took place inside the criminal justice system itself. As a jailhouse informant, he claimed that fellow inmates confessed their crimes to him, and prosecutors in Florida relied on his testimony again and again. By his own account, he helped send 34 people to prison, including Florida death row. At the center of Catch the Devil is James Daley, a Vietnam veteran convicted in the 1985 murder of a 14-year-old girl, largely on the strength of Paul's word. Despite the absence of any physical evidence connecting Daley to the crime. Advanced praise for the book has been extraordinary. I've read it myself. It is a fantastic read. She has spent years pursuing the story, including a lengthy and often maddening effort to get him to speak the truth. And what she found and what it cost her to find it is what we're going to talk about in this episode. Here's my interview with Pamela. Pamela, it's so nice to meet you and I have to tell you how much I enjoyed your book. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here. So I have to ask you how you got into writing in the first place. I find that those of us that are sort of born investigators, it comes from somewhere. So where did this appetite for investigation begin? So I think even as a little kid, I was very nosy. I loved a book called "Harry at the Spy." I don't know if anyone remembers that book later made into a movie, which was about a very nosy girl. And I just always wanted to know people's secrets and the things that, you know, as kids we weren't supposed to know. And so I definitely was like a big eavesdropper when I was younger. I had an overactive imagination. I wrote a lot though I would say I'm sort of like a failed fiction writer. I would try to write short stories and to me, real life was always more. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know? And I feel like so many of the things I've written about that if I made them up, if they were in a work of fiction that my editor would come back to me and be like, this isn't really believable, we need to change this. And so I think ultimately that's why I was drawn to nonfiction because it's crazier than anything you can imagine. I couldn't agree with you more. Absolutely. Well, it's interesting because your first journalism job was ghost writing and advice column for the Texas Highway Patrol magazine. And I wondered what that job taught you about law enforcement culture before you even set out to investigate it. Yes. That was my first paid. There were plenty of unpaid gigs before that, but that was my first paid one. Well, I think I came from a background in which we very much trusted law enforcement and trusted official narratives. And my work at that magazine and definitely in my early days as a reporter had no reason to doubt that. But as I started moving into wrongful convictions more deeply, and then my own journalism career kind of tracks with the advent of the DNA analysis and of the revelations that that brought about when I started off as a real criminal justice reporter in the mid to late 90s, that was when that was all just getting started. And the idea that there might be someone in prison who didn't do the crime that they were convicted of was considered pretty fringe. It really with, you know, I think we now have since the early 1970s, we've had more than 200 death row exonerations in the US, which is really a staggering number when you think about it, people who were convicted of something and sentenced to death who now are walk free because that evidence didn't hold up. So that revelation and how things worked really got me more interested in looking at the other side of how law enforcement can sometimes work. Now this character for this book is in the only word that I could actually think of that could just encapsulate him is just maddening. How do you come across him? So I got a call in 2018 from a lawyer named Laura Fernandez and Laura is a scholar at Yale Law School who reached out to me after I'd published another story about junk forensic science and a small town murder case in which the wrong person had been convicted. And she told me that she had come to represent this man who was on Florida's death row. She had re-activated her law license because she was so troubled by his case and what was going wrong in his case and her view. And I get a lot of emails like this. I'm sorry to say and there wasn't anything sadly unusual about that type of email but at the end of it there was sort of this throwaway line in which she said that the star witness against her client had been a former police officer turned con artist who had become a jail house informant and had testified in this case. And that was my introduction to him and I did not realize at the time that Paul Scalnick, the con artist, had factored into upwards of 40 different cases from Texas to Florida. But that was my introduction to him. Well, let's talk about his personality, his archetype, his origin story because he's certainly one of the most unique figures I've ever read about. I think so too. He was a chameleon, so he was a different person to many different people. But typically you can think of him as your classic love bomber, the guy who comes into your life. And he was very good at praying upon women who in one way or another were lonely or who just did not. There was some element either of financial insecurity or something missing emotionally in their lives. And he swooped in and here was this guy who was bringing flowers and jewelry and flattery. He was an incredible listener. He was a terrific conversationalist. I experienced this myself. You could talk to him for hours about anything. And in that way he would win women over and then he would work his way into their lives. He married, I found evidence of nine different women. I'm sure there were more. He married them sometimes at the same time. He was a big amist. And he would clean them out financially and really emotionally. But then he ran different cons. That was just sort of the most ubiquitous one of them all. The other con he would run is whenever he would get caught committing fraud or theft and he would end up in whatever county jail he ended up. He knew having been a cop himself, how this worked. He would look at who it was in the jail, who was sort of the most high value person to prosecutors or investigators. Who did they most want to get a conviction against in jail, you're typically a waiting trial, right? So he would then go to investigators and he would say that guy in the cell down the hall for me. He told me, like, he confessed to me what he did in the crime, and he would manufacture a confession that then was very valuable to prosecutors. They would put him on the stand. He would testify that this person confessed to what they did, and in return, he often got reduced sentences or even his freedom. If you look back to his early version of his life, are there some sort of signs that there was a person who was void of any integrity or lacking of value system that sort of set him up for life like this? So he was from a family in which they had absolutely nothing. He was from League City, Texas, and their family lived in Squalor, is what I was told by neighbors and even extended members of the family. And he from a very early age wanted to set himself apart from his family and from both the emotional and physical abuse that he sustained at the hands of his father who was an alcoholic. So his very first lie was telling people that he was adopted. And I found his birth records that is not accurate. But he told that story from a very early age, and I think it was too distance himself from his family. And then everything he did really was to further distance him. He was constantly trying to portray himself as fabulously wealthy as someone of means who had traveled the world, who had had all these different experiences, and it was all lies. So as far as the capacity for evil that really develops through the book, that does seem to come about more in his early to mid-20s, he was a very promising kid. I always think of an old maybe Rushmore where there's a kid who was like this total overachiever and he was, you know, like in every club and getting every honor. And that's who Paul Scalnick was when he was younger. It always amazes me when you have someone like this that they could have run a company. They could have run a country. And there's just this fork in the road and they decide to go the wrong way. So I'm so glad you said that because one of the things that comes across in the reporting that I did, he frequently worked as a jail house lawyer. Or he represented himself pro-say before courts. So I have a lot of his legal writing and he was, I don't want to say a great lawyer that would be overstating it, but had he gone to law school, which he always pretended he had. That was probably his most popular guy's, was he pretended that he was an attorney, usually a criminal defense attorney. He would have been a great lawyer and he could have made money and distinguished himself that way, but that wasn't how it worked out for him. The other question I had is if there's any consistent lies throughout life, it sounds like the one thing that you mentioned that he did say was he was adopted. Were there other lies that stayed consistent or was that the only one? So there were a couple. I think the one that came up the most when I interviewed other people about him and it was certainly something that he brought up with me was he claimed to have been in the Marines and to have gone to Vietnam. This is the worst. Two young valor cases. Stolen valor. Stolen valor. He's crazy. I know. And especially because the counterpoint in this story is another man who really was very damaged by Vietnam, which we can get to later. But Scalnik's story was that he had been a fighter pilot. He'd been shot down over Louse in the Vietnam War and had been taken prisoner of war, had been awarded. I think it was two purple hearts. So he would try to get benefits at the VA hospital. He would hang out with veterans all the time. And he, in fact, showed me on my last meeting with him a scar that he had on his knee that he said was from this experience. And he had forgotten that years earlier when I had tracked him down, that he had told me that scar was from a car accident in Austin many years ago. So sometimes he lost track, especially later in all his lives. I often wondered too with these sort of personality archetypes or people. Do they ever have to just keep a record of their lives? Or it's just always in their head because as you just noted, like as you get older, sometimes you slip up a bit. So is it like they're always working on the fly or they have to have some sort of order to it? So my mother used to always tell me sort of in a cautionary way when I was little, if you're going to lie about things, you have to have a great memory. And that's exactly right. So I did find very late in life, I got a copy of, or not a copy, the actual version of a Bible that he had had with him in a county jail in 2016. This was given to me by a woman he was romantically involved with at the time. And it had been taken away from him when he went to federal prison. And in the margins of this Bible and his very, very careful handwriting, were basically notes keeping track of everything. Names, dates, things he had told people. Most of money he told people that he had where he kept his offshore bank accounts and yachts and these wild stories he told people. Also interesting that he would choose a Bible. I mean, there are so many layers to this. I mean, it's like he could study his brain at the Smithsonian. Right. Well, the Bible was so brilliant because in a jail, that's the one thing you're always allowed to have that they're not going to take away from you typically. And so he had the obligatory few lines underlined here and there to show that he was reading it or whatever, but it really was a cheat sheet for himself. Did you ever get a window into just a little part of him that was either acknowledging that he can't stop lying or that he'd wanted to stop lying or do you think he's just the kind of person that doesn't know it? They're so accustomed to it. They just don't know how to stop. One of the questions I always had with him and it remains to this day is whether he at a certain point even realized he was lying about his own life. I know he very well knew that he was lying about other men's lives and even sort of elliptically alluded to that in my last interview with him. But about his own life, I actually really think that he came to believe it on some fundamental level. When I first met him, he gave me a well-worn Xerox of a hundred-foot yacht that he said he kept in the Cayman Islands. And the way in which he described this boat and his life and this home that he hadn't believes where he had custom built all these things, it was so real to him. It wasn't real in real life, but to him was. Having a father that's a con artist myself, I know that there's this interesting sort of dance. They're trying to find the kernels of truth and they're trying to outrun you so that you forget and you don't pay attention to the little lies. So that dance can be exhausting at times. What was the thing that attracted you to the idea of kind of getting to the bottom of this person who is the worst kind of narrator and did you ever, at moments, feel like giving up? I have so many questions for you now that I wish I could ask, but you just explained exactly what that's like. The sort of the drip, drip, drip of lies is so overwhelming that you can very easily lose track of what's real and what's not and what's important to focus on with them. So as far as trying to track this down, this all happened because he conned me when I first began working on what was an article that grew into this book. When I went to see him in federal prison in 2018, after learning about him, I went to sort of make a pitch to him and that was, I've done a lot of research on you. I understand that you've played a role in dozens and dozens of cases in which you help prosecutors send men to prison. I want to understand how you did that. I want to understand how you worked with investigators and prosecutors. I didn't ask about the wives and the personal stuff that hit closer to home, but I knew you. I was very proud of this work and that this was sort of the way in. And he was very proud during that meeting. He said something to the effect of prosecutors and I worked together and we never lost a case, meaning that he sort of saw himself as part of the prosecution team. So in that first meeting with him, I only had an hour. I was limited because of the prison where I was and it's not very much time to try to ingratiate yourself with someone and convince them that they should tell you their life story, but I did my best. And he was a nurse assessed. So this appealed to him and he said to me, you know what, I'm dying of cancer. He pulled out a bloody rag told me that this was the end of his life. And given that, you know, I think that this is the time to tell this story and I think you're the person to tell this story. And so we spent the rest of the time we had together sort of coming up with a plan. And the plan was that I was going to come back as often as I wanted to see him as long as I coordinated with the warden and I could ask him whatever I wanted and in between, I could send him all the burning questions I had and he would tell me everything. And so I remember walking out of the prison, getting in the car, driving back from this was outside a Dallas to Austin where I live, making this elated phone call to my editor. Like I got it. Like I got the story. This is going to be incredible. No one's ever really told not just his story, but this story of how it is that guys like him sometimes work with police and prosecutors. And I was so proud of myself and so excited. You can see where this is going. And I go home and I try to set up various times to come back and speak with him. I write him letters. I'm pouring through court documents. We're talking months of work. And there's always a hitch, right? Like he's not feeling well because of his cancer. So he can't meet with me or there was a problem at the mail room. So he didn't get a letter that had all the questions. And then he would tell me lots of other things in between. So we had this robust correspondence, right? And we're growing closer and learning more about each other. So long after I should have realized this, I come to realize he's just stringing me on. He's not going to tell me anything. And that, the anger that came out of that of all the time invested at that point, because I had done so much, I had spent so much of my time not reporting other stories while doing this was what set me on the journey of what became this book. But I'll just say quickly, I start the book with that story because I don't want anyone to feel superior to anyone in this book who fell for him. And to have that feeling that I think it's easy to have when you read about a con artist, which is like these rubs, I would never fall for these ridiculous cons that those people did, right? And I wanted to show here I am, I'm an investigator reporter, this guy's in federal prison. There's every possible red flag. And I still fell for it because he knew how to read me. He knew what I was hungry for. He knew what I wanted and he knew how to tap into that. I also feel I've been on the other end like you where you start communicating with someone like this. And at some point, I felt like, oh, I'm just as dirty as they are. I convinced myself of that because I have to try to outplay them too. So I'm almost doing the same dance. And then I have to sort of wash myself with that feeling. Yes, absolutely. And why was I sort of, you know, I was trying to ingratiate myself with him. I was playing along with his game. I was doing all the things he was asking of me. And yeah, at the end, it doesn't feel good. It feels like you've not only been taken in by them, but you've participated in their life. That's right. Craziness. Yes. So as you start digging into the story, are there other people that you're learning about or interviewing that begin to make you at any point feel unsettled? Like, now I think I know too much. I felt that way the whole time. I mean, there was so much. And there was so much even for, you know, I now have a 257 page timeline of his path. His path of destruction. And I feel like there's still so much I don't know. I think what was hardest was seeing the damage that he did to other people. I can think of a 12 year old girl's story who all told in a second, but I think the one that hit me hardest early in my reporting was a woman named Donna Mackie. Donna had believed that she was going to marry Scalnick. This was late in life. This was in the past few years. Once he got out of federal prison and that this world of a beautiful life, you know, living in Belize in the home that he had described to her so vividly and a life of financial security with someone she'd really fallen in love with who listened to her and believed in her that that was something that was going to be part of her future. And I was the person unfortunately who had to break the news to her that really everything he had told her was a lie. I mean, I did that because he was on the verge of being released and he was going to be moving into her home. There were a lot of concerns I had not just for her, but for a granddaughter of hers and we can talk about why that is later. But when I realized that he was about to be released and that he was going to go live with her, I asked her if I could come visit her and have an afternoon with her. And I think she sensed that, you know, something was coming, but I brought everything with me. I brought all my documents and everything to try to condense her, you know, that my version of reality was the truth because how do you explain to someone that everything they believe is a lie? But that's what I had to do with her. At the heart of this story is the James daily case. Can you walk us through it? So James daily was someone who started off life with a lot of promise as well. He was from Manhattan, Kansas and was just a really beloved person in his community and had a wonderful group of friends, many of whom I've interviewed, who have nothing but kind things to say about who he was as a young man. He went to Vietnam in 1968 at the height of the Ted Offensive, which was a very intense time in the war. And he was very, very screwed up from his time there and from some very difficult things that he saw when he was there. He eventually descends into what I would call extreme alcoholism and really an itinerant lifestyle. He just can't function in the world. And he falls in with a crowd that is very different than the people he grew up with. And one of those people is a man named Jack Piersie. In 1985 when a 14 year old girl named Shelley Bougio goes missing and then is later found dead. She's naked with multiple stab wounds in a body of water in Indian rocks beach, Florida, on the Gulf Coast. The investigation very quickly focuses on Jack Piersie. He was lasting in her presence. He confesses things like he had blood on his shoes that night. I won't go into all of the details here, but I'll say that in recent years he has given statements and then gone back on those statements saying that he committed this murder. At the time when investigators focus in on him, he says that Jim Daly, who was his roommate at the time is the person who actually committed the crime. He knows the police have enough on him, Jack Piersie, to place him at the scene of the crime. So he says that he took Jim with him down to the lover's lane where he went with Shelley on the last night of her life, which is something that doesn't make a lot of sense. And that he stayed back in the car while the two of them went off while Jim tried to have sex with her and in Jack's words, killed her. Long story short, both men are arrested and charged with this crime. Jack Piersie is convicted first, but he's only convicted. He's only sentenced to life. Prosecutors do not get a death sentence. And Jim Daly comes up next. for trial and that's where Skellnic enters the picture. - What has this case taught you about law enforcement that you need the reader, the listener to understand? - So I think by and large that law enforcement officers have good intentions and have an extremely difficult job. I think we can see in cases like this case, I was just speaking of that they're under tremendous pressure to solve particularly high profile or particularly disturbing crimes. And sometimes when that intersects, when that pressure from the public, from a district attorney or a state attorney comes to bear on prosecutors, bad things can happen. In this case, and I've seen this in a number of wrongful convictions I've written about, what I see is tunnel vision setting in early on in the investigation. I really don't think it's common at all for investigators to think like, we're gonna go lock up the wrong person, right? That just doesn't make sense. But what you see so often is that there's a decision made very, very early on that you kind of can't recover from. And I remember reading in testimony in this case, one of the investigators saying on the stand, I think it was in Jack Pierce's trial, that he had just known through intuition from being at the crime scene, that this was a two person crime. And he was pressed about this by the defense attorney, well, what is it that you saw that suggested that? 'Cause there wasn't forensic evidence in this case. Everything was washed away by the water. And he just, he couldn't say what it was. It wasn't like there were two sets of footsteps walking down or there wasn't anything he can point to. It was just a sense that he had, that this had been a two person crime. So I think when you have intuitions like that, intersect with a story like Jack Pierce's, that's where things can go wrong. - Hmm. How long did it take you to write this book? There's so much information, so many case details that I would have assumed could be at times overwhelming to kind of make your way through. How long did it take? - So it took much longer than it was supposed to, but I started reporting all this in 2018. I published a magazine article in the New York Times magazine, co-published with ProPublica in 2019. I think this was in November or December of 2019. And when I finished that article, even though I had spent more than a year reporting it, usually at that point, I feel just exhausted, like ready to move on to the next thing. And there's nothing more I could possibly have discovered about whatever I've written about. And with this piece, it felt, the opposite, it felt like I was at the beginning. Like I had a blueprint for what had happened and I needed to fill in everything else. So I began in 2020, obviously with the pandemic and other things, I couldn't report in person for a while. But really since 2020, I've been reporting this story and I don't expect to stop. Like my hope is when the book comes out, that more people come forward. There were so. I hope so too. There were some people who were so hurt by what he did, that even though I was able to find them, I couldn't get them to speak with me. One of the things that readers will notice in the book is that the only pictures I have of Skullneck are mug shots. And that's because the people who are close to him, family members, women who loved him, they had all destroyed the photos they had of him. One woman told me she had burned the photos she had of him. So I hope that this sort of like shakes loose the little bits and pieces of this that I still want to understand better myself. Well, what I think you've done so beautifully is you've given all of them power. So I do think that this is an opportunity for them to move, to come forward. I'm so glad to hear you say that because that, reporting this story was very hard, both logistically and emotionally. There were teenage girls who I came to find out in the course of my reporting. He had hurt usually the daughters of women he was with. And there was one girl in particular, she was 12 years old at the time, her name was Karen Parker, who sort of became infatuated with him. She saw in him this like sort of lusche, you know, 1980s charmer with a Cadillac, who had all this money and all these things her family didn't have. And he prayed upon that infatuation and abused her. She finally, after a period of time of wrestling with us about six months goes to police. And by that time, Skalnick was so valuable to police and prosecutors that her story was in convenience, right? If they did charge him at the end of not prosecuting him, if he had been convicted of doing this to her, he could no longer be their star witness in these cases. So very long story short, her cases dismissed, which then makes even the people in her life doubt her. So when I come back into her life, she's in her late 40s, this is something that even people in her life at that time didn't know. And I tell her that I have the police files that I've found her, her name was redacted and it was a whole adventure trying to find her. But that I had not only found this account in police files, but I had found witness statements. There were two people who witnessed what happened to her. They had a prosecutable case. When I told her that I had that and then I believed her, that was extremely meaningful to her and to have her story told in this book was very meaningful to her. - Well, it's extraordinary work and I'm so grateful for your time. Please tell everybody where they can buy the book and to follow you. - Thank you so much. You can buy, catch the devil wherever books are sold. Please support your independent booksellers if you can. You can follow me on Instagram at Pamela_Colof CODoubleLODoubleFF like Frank Frank and also on Facebook and elsewhere. Thank you. - See, amazing Kate Casey. - I want to thank my fantastic guest and remind you to make sure that you click subscribe to this podcast and leave a five star review. Join the Facebook group reality life with Kate Casey and then also check out bonus episodes on Apple podcast and on Patreon. You can get my weekly WhatToWatchlist at kkc.substalk.com and make sure that you follow me on social media. I'm on Instagram at @kkcca TikTok. It's Kate Casey and Twitter Threads and Blue Sky at @kkc. (upbeat music)