Episode 318: Florida's Notorious Jailhouse Snitch

Welcome to Florida. That is the voice of best selling author and award winning environmental reporter Craig Pittman. My name is Chad Charlotte. I am running for State House in District 15, which is NASA County in parts of DuVol. This is welcome to Florida and in Craig's latest Florida Phoenix column. He takes us to the future. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah, I kind of start off by talking about the Jetsons and how George Jetson would always commute to work in his flying car that sounded less noisy than a vacuum cleaner. And then he'd get there and fold it up into a briefcase, go into his office and segue from that into Florida DOT officials. Now, I want to take $198 million they got from the federal government for electric vehicle chargers and instead spend it on flying cars, which one problem, flying cars do not exist. People are working on them. They're working on it, but they're not currently around. So it's just a bizarre thing. Okay, so we've got almost $200 million here. That's real money. The federal government as part of the Biden infrastructure, all of that stuff, is giving it to the state of Florida, but it's earmarked. This is not, hey, Florida here's $198 million. Do it and think what you please. This is specifically earmarked for electric vehicle chargers. You know, electric vehicles do exist. Electric vehicle chargers do exist. Where does the state get off thinking it can essentially waste this money so as to kneecap the electric vehicle industry by spending it on fantasy land here? Yeah. And I think a better question is, why are they not spending it on hunting down unicorns? Because I think that's just its valid, quite frankly. We need to round up all unicorns in Florida and put them in custody. The money is supposed to go to places like Bucky's and Wawa and so forth that would be within a mile of the interstate and that they would then have the money to set up additional electric car chargers there. And so there's been this absolute refusal to turn that money over to those businesses and instead say, oh, we've got, we feel like we've got enough chargers already that were put there by Tesla and were put there by Florida power and light. And we don't want to give any of this out to anybody else. So they've been sitting on this money for at least three years, maybe more. And now suddenly they're saying, oh, we want to spend it setting up these electric power launch pads for these flying cars that will land and take off from there. And that'll be a great reliever for all the congestion on the roads. Well, no, they won't because these things, when they do come into being the way they've been going with the designs, they can't carry more than four people. They're not going to be carrying the amount that an 18 wheeler would. So they're definitely not going to be carrying the 200,000 cars that you see on the I-4. They're basically going to be taxis and they're going to carry three people and a pilot. And that's it. And that's if they ever make it into existence, which so far they have not. And again, this money is not discretionary. No. That's where I come down. It's like this is very specifically earmarked for a singular purpose that the state of Florida and it has done this before with the federal government is just throwing up a middle finger and saying, no, now it has received this money. So again, it's just sitting there and this is so, but how do they think? How does the state argue that this money is discretionary and not earmarked? Well, and the crazy thing is they had a plan approved by the Feds to spend it on electric car chargers. So that's the reason they were given the money is they came up with a plan for spending it properly as a result. They got the money and then they said, screw it, we're not going to spend it the way we said. We're going to do something completely different. It's just it's just crazy. It's sort of like taking money that was intended for emergencies like hurricanes and spending it on immigration and specifically building a concentration camp in the Everglades or money from the opioid settlement and spending it on political advertisements against abortion and recreational marijuana. I mean, this, you know, once is news twice as a coincidence three times as a trend or you know, whatever that saying goes, there is a pattern here of the state getting federal dollars that are very narrowly defined with how they're supposed to be spent and then just going completely rogue with what they actually do with it. Emergency fund money, estate money, not federal money, but it is the same sort of situation where money is committed supposedly for one purpose and then spent in dramatically other ways. FloridaFenix.com. Check that one out. Very enlightening stuff there from Craig. All right. We've got a spectacular story today. It is the story of Paul Scalnick. It is a story told by Pamela Koloff. He is the author of a new book out this summer, Catch the Devil, a true story of murder, deception and injustice on the Gulf Coast. It's a spectacular book. I recommend it to everybody. This book is about a snitch, sort of a super snitch, Paul Scalnick, who is this con man who came into the Nellis County and wound up being used in at least 37 cases to put people away. Four of them were to put people on death row and there's completely making up stories that prosecutors ran with. It's just her reporting on this is painstaking and the result is spectacular. Yeah. Pamela Koloff is our guest. There's a link to get the book down in the show notes and we're going to learn about one of this covers some territory here. When a Florida is all time, great quote unquote, con man. Pamela Sank. Thank you so much for joining us today. I loved your book and I recommend everybody should go get a copy and read it. Let me start off by asking you how you came across this incredible character of Paul Scalnick. I read somewhere I think it was 2018 when you first heard a story. Yes. So I received an email in 2018 from a legal scholar at Yale Law School named Laura Fernandez. And Laura at the time represented a man on Florida's death row named James daily. And she was writing to me to try to see if I would consider writing about his case. And she described the case as I'm sure we all get a number of emails like this. But what really set it aside was this sort of throwaway line at the end where she said that one of the witnesses against her client had been a former police officer turned con artist, turned jailhouse informant. And of course that got. I'm sorry. I've been looking for a jailhouse informant story for a long time and this proved to be the one. Okay. Why? That's an unusual interest to have. So I've written about wrongful convictions now for most of my career and more broadly just issues with the criminal justice system where it sort of fails to deliver justice which can be in all sorts of different ways. And I had noticed as far back as 2009 in some cases that I was looking at that as soon as a case had a jailhouse informant in it, it was a giant red flag. It wasn't necessarily a red flag that the defendant hadn't committed the crime. But it was a red flag that something maybe prosecutors were overreaching. Maybe they had overcharged the case or maybe there wasn't enough evidence even if it was the right person that there was an issue. And so I always wanted to write about that. And this story because Paul Scalnick is such a colorful person, I thought he was the way in. If I say to a reader, I want to tell you about why a jailhouse informants are bad. If it's me, my eyes glaze over. But if I say I want to tell you this relicking story about a con artist who got away with his cons for 40 years and was married nine times. I feel like that's the way into a narrative. And a lot of what he did was in Pinellas County. >> And calling him colorful seems to fall short of adequate. Quite frankly, I mean, this is a guy who claimed he'd been a fighter pilot, an oil man, an attorney, an undercover cop, and a cancer patient at various times, and was not any of those things. >> Who was he really? >> Well, I'll just tell back into the answer to this by telling you that when I went to see him in 2019, he was in a nursing home in rural Texas at that point. And I had been researching him already at that point for about a year. I saw when I was sitting by his bed. because he didn't have a shirt on that he had all these tattoos all over him that were bragging about the time he had spent serving in Vietnam. And I knew he'd never left Texas during that period and he never served. And it was so, I mean, it's one thing to know that somebody's telling lies but another thing to like decorate their body with their lies. It was kind of fascinating. Who he was really was a kid from Texas where I'm based who grew up really wanting to be something bigger and more grandiose than he was. And the very first lie he ever told I found was when he said that he had been adopted and he was not adopted. But he was from very humble origins and I think he always wanted that sort of bigger life. And then he went on to become a police officer but very quickly that was in Austin where I live. But very quickly got caught writing too many hot checks and was asked to leave after 18 months on the force. And as far as I could find he never had an honest job after that it was just scamming people. So how does he get to Florida? Okay, so he. So many great scammers throughout the 20th century into the White House. I mean, it's kind of fascinating, right? The Florida con man prototype. It's it's the thing that he gravitated there. So he after, you know, not making it on the Austin Police Department. He went to Houston and he got in trouble there and he quickly figured out. And this leads him to Florida. So I'll get there. But he quickly figures out a get out of jail free trick, which is as a former cop when he's sitting in jail where people are pre trial generally they're presumed innocent. They're awaiting trial different than prison. He can look around and do a pretty good job assessing who it is who cops and prosecutors are, you know, most interested in getting a. So he he figures out a way when he's in jail how to assess who it is within the jail who police and prosecutors are most interested in getting a conviction out of. And he then goes to them and says that person confessed to me and he uses things from newspaper coverage legal documents, whatever he's able to get to weave together a story that then when he tells that story on the stand not only helps prosecutors get a conviction, but earns him his freedom. And so it's that freedom that he gets in Houston after testifying against a number of defendants that leads him to Florida. He's like, I better get out of Dodge like while I can basically. And he's still married to his third wife when he arrives in Florida in 1980, I believe, and quickly marries his fourth. So one of his crimes was he was a big amest. And and that begins Florida is really where, you know, he's learned his skills in Texas, but Florida is really where his career as a con artist turned snitch takes off. But before we leave Texas behind, though, I want to mention one of them, one of the I guess funniest is the way to put it. A funny stories in the book is about the Texas cop who let him stay at his, his beach house. Can you tell that real quick? Yes, this was is a cop named Kenny Rogers spelled slightly differently than the country star. And Kenny worked for the Harris County District Attorney's office in Houston. And he was sort of the guy who had to make sure that everybody showed up in court, you know, to testify in the cases they were slated to testify in. And so when Scalnick is let out on his own reconnaissance for a few months after scamming people out of some money. And he's slated to appear in this high profile trial. He talks his way into staying at Kenny Rogers Beach House, which makes it sound fancier than it was just a little place by the water. And and the deal is not that he's allowed to stay there, but that he needs to do some work around the house in exchange for sort of some money that Kenny is giving him. And what ends up happening is that Scalnick starts wearing Kenny Rogers's clothes, living unknown to Kenny in his weekend place, and really taking advantage of the large s that has shown him. And Kenny ends up having to ask local, the local sheriff's department to remove him from his own home. So cops were tricked by him to, though I really try to make the point in the book that Scalnick's not the villain of this book. It's the system that incentivizes someone like him. Interesting point. And I'm curious if you think this individual was born or made. And what I mean by that is, you know, are there circumstances in his upbringing that created this sociopathic, compulsive liar, swindler scam, and more than that because he sent a man to death row. So this is not like he's a trickster and he is always a rascal. And this is a bad guy and your book catch the devil, you know, it hints to how evil so many, you know, and all of these people he's snitching against did not confess to him. And he's using their misery to, you know, expedite his freedom, but is this a nature nurture thing? What, what created in this individual such a remarkable willing and accomplished liar? So glad you asked that. That's one of the questions I was thinking about a lot while I was writing. So I think it's a little bit of both. So I think the nature part of it is he was from a very abusive home and had a very dysfunctional upbringing for sure. But many people do and don't go on to do this. I think the nurture part of this and that's really where the book focuses is he really was just a small time con artist. He wasn't even very good at what he did. Like he until very late in the game, he always used his own name. So he'd be going over Pinellas County scamming people under the name Paul Scalnick, which you could do pre-internet. And his crimes were pretty small starting off. And it's really not until he's empowered by police and prosecutors who like what he's doing for them. And that he escalates his crimes. He goes from things like writing $50 hot checks to robbing people of their life savings and eventually to molesting a 12 year old girl and then another girl after her. So I think the invincibility that he began to see as he was used again and again and again by the state attorney's office and clear water. I think that made him like he had the seeds there, right? And obviously we can debate all day whether he was a sociopath or all these other things. But none of that really would have been consequential or mattered. Had he not been empowered to do the things he did and to be released over and over again to hurt more people. And it never occurred or to what extent it had ever occurred to law enforcement prosecutors that now wait a minute. This is the how many of the time we've done this with this guy. There's no chance he's working us. You know, I'm sure you interviewed or are investing in how how did how did the system, you know, defend that obvious oversight. I think that's the million dollar question of the book is if Scalnick had a better record of cracking crimes than like the best detectives in all of Florida. That just doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So you can see early on how, okay, maybe it's possible that he got this admission or that admission. And some of his quote unquote confessions were very elaborate. But I think where it becomes more confusing as time goes on, right? And when we're talking about the 35th or 36th case, he's given information and oh my god. When he's a known jailhouse informant, I mean, I think everyone knows the phrase snitches get stitches. Well, he didn't get stitches because he was kept in protective custody from I want to say from 1983 on. So he always had an officer with him as he's moving through the Pettos County jail. So the story is sort of strange credulity. And I think we can see the way in which the system, you know, you can imagine being a prosecutor or an investigator and your mentors and your colleagues. of all use this guy, right? So like, that's just what you're going to do. You know, there's this sort of institutional inertia that sets in. So I think, and then the name of the book comes from a phrase that one of the prosecutors said, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's something to the effect of, you know, you've got to work with the center to catch the devil. The idea of being, we know this guy wasn't a saint, but look, he, he had a good information and he helped us with these cases. Well, and it turns out, of course, he didn't have good information, and he only helped them sort of defend the bad thesis that they were working off to begin with. So obviously, and, you know, that argument utterly falls down. Yes, there are informants and, you know, mob snitches and all that were very familiar with how all of that works. And there's a record of it. After the 30th time, like, like you said, okay, this guy is either some sort of savant at this where like the, the, the serial killer, we bring into profile, other serial killers. But I mean, that's just a sign that under his own name, you know, he's not, he, oh, I didn't know that John Paul Jones here was, you know, this guy there that you're using the same guy 30 plus times is. I think I think what's interesting, there's a scene I wrote in the book where I talk about how everyone in the courtroom in one case. And then, you know, I think that's what I think is the case. So, this was to me, I think probably the most interesting moment in what happened in this case. But Jack Pearsie, who is the main, I think only suspect in this murder, you know, realizes when he's questioned by a police, that they have too much on him for him to say he knows nothing, right? So, he admits enough that he was at the scene, but says that this girl, who we know he'd been pursuing for months, Shelley Bougieau, that he'd brought his almost 40-year-old housemate and that he had been the one that had pursued her, while Jack Pearsie remained in the car, a story that makes no sense. Pearsie is tried for Shelley's murder, and he's convicted, but he's given a life sentence, not a death sentence. And in 1986, which is when he was tried, a life sentence for a crime of that magnitude was really a failure for prosecutors. And Jim was up next. And so, it was just a few days after Pearsie was convicted that the lead detective in the case went to the Pinellas County jail and started pulling guys out of their cells who had been housed near Jim daily. And he said, "What do you know? What has he told you about this crime? Four of them remember, we haven't been able to reach all of them, but four of them remember that when this detective took them into a room to ask them questions, that newspaper articles were laid out about Shelley's murder that had all the details in it that you would need to tell a story. And 15 men were questioned that day. None of them gave him any information, but the word was out in the jail that the case needed a snitch. And two, actually three jailhouse informants end up coming forward. They use two of them, and it's still not enough, and a couple weeks before the trial, Scalnick and Daily are moved so that they're housed in the same area. And with miraculously within 24 hours, these men don't know each other. And Scalnick's excuse me, Daily's about to be on trial for his life literally. Scalnick says that Daily has given him a full confession and prosecutors run with that. And there are three jailhouse informants put on the stand at Jim Daily's trial, which I think says a lot about the quality of evidence they had. Yes, what are the laws, I guess, Florida or nationally about jailhouse informants and the veracity of these claims and how they can be used and, you know, they're their admissibility in trial, I guess. I mean, I thought this was fascinating because I won't get too legal nerd on you, but, you know, their hearsay is something that is generally prohibited in the courtroom saying, I heard someone else say this. And jailhouse informants are, however, allowed to give that kind of testimony and that blew my mind in and of itself. There are a few states that have tried to come up with protections Illinois has something called reliability hearings that are done pre trial to try to determine whether someone like Scalnick should be allowed into the courtroom when the trial takes place. Texas has a snitch registry, but it's by county. So if someone gives this kind of testimony, they're listed on a registry. But just to give you a sense of, I think how hard these reforms are Texas has 254 counties. So, you know, how hard is it for a defense attorney trying to piece together what someone's history might be to do that? I personally don't think there are reforms that can curb this what we call incentivized testimony that someone who doesn't have their freedom knows. Even though it's often never said by police and prosecutors so that that witness can say on the stand to a jury, I wasn't promised anything for this testimony. We all know if you help police and prosecutors with the case you usually get something in return. And I think that power imbalance. I just don't think there's a good answer there for how we deal with that unless there's corroborating evidence. Maybe there's a recording or, you know, something. But just the word of someone is incarcerated. I think that's really problematic. Or anyone's word, like you said, this is hearsay. So it's not just because of, you know, people are prison are bad people and they're inherently prone to no. They're just people in the same way that if I came into some courtroom and said, oh, yeah, I overheard this guy talking at the bar or the gym or what. whatever and he, no, I mean, that's, that's, it's no more suitable because I'm on the outside, you know, so to speak. Right. And, and we know, I mean, there are all sorts of problems with other kinds of informants, which I won't get into today, but at least with your typical informant, let's say it's a mafia case, right? At least that person was like within the realm of the criminal activity that you're talking about. And there's the idea that maybe they saw some of what happened. But we can see here where it's strangers. It's, it's just a much harder case to make that they actually have information. Well, and especially when everybody knows who Scalnick is in the jail, and oh, I'm going on trial in a couple of days, let me tell him exactly what I did. No, just it, it, it boggles the month. And, and what I found particularly, I'm sure everybody feels this way, particularly frustrating is what happened when Daily's case went up on a peel and over and over again, they would present new evidence. And the courts would say, well, this is all interesting, but you should have presented that at trial. And we can't consider it now. It's like, well, I'm so glad you took that away from the book because I think we all, myself included, have the idea that we have these checks and balances within our criminal justice system that, you know, if something happens at a trial that's the wrong outcome, that we have a way to fix that later through appeals and post-conviction litigation. And I think what this book shows is that they're often, not always, is this sort of institutional, you know, we, we revere a jury verdict, which which is generally good. We revere the fact that jurors have her live testimony and we respect the decision that they have made. But once it's rendered, it's very, very hard to undo. That's, you know, judges look at precedent, they look backward more than they look forward at new developments and things like forensic science or recantations of testimony. And I think we can see in Jim Daily's case why that's dangerous. Well, and they, it wasn't just that, but they said, oh, you should have brought this up before, but in some cases, it was evidence that the prosecutors had suppressed, but they didn't have. So how do you bring it up if you don't know about? Yes, I'm so happy you took that away. Yes, so there's this concept in the law of, if you're trying to introduce evidence at a certain point, late in appeals, things can be called what's called time barred. It's too late to introduce that evidence. When, you know, Jim Daily gets this incredible legal team, very, very late in the game, just these amazing, amazing lawyers who dig up so much stuff that honestly, your average public defender, even a great one just doesn't have time to do. And that evidence is time barred. It's too late for that. And to me, that just, we can see this in other cases as well. It's not just Daily's case, but, you know, the idea that someone might not be guilty of a crime that they're on death, roe, for shouldn't that Trump all procedural rules. I, at the same time, I think it's important to acknowledge for victims' families, these cases go on and on and on. It's very, very challenging. So it's hard to reconcile those things, but of course, no one wants to make a mistake in a case like this. In your looking at Paul Scalnick, you get this email and there's this line about, you know, jailhouse niche. I got that's interesting. So you start looking into this. And what point did you realize this isn't a blog post or a Texas monthly article? This is a book. And I want to share this because you talked about, I think at the beginning of the interview, meeting Scalnick in like 2018, 2019, something like that was 2026. And the book is just coming out. Okay, that seven years ago, people have no idea in general how long it takes to write a book. The process involved the commitment you give over your life to this project. So when did you decide, yes, I'm going to make that commitment. And hopefully, seven, eight years from now, there will be something on a shelf at a bookstore. To be clear, I definitely did not intend to spend this long looking into all this. But what's funny is, and thank you for acknowledging the work that goes into something like this. You know, I tried to write it in such a way that it's a very quick, easy read. But there's a lot of work that goes into making a book read that way. And the source notes at the end tell people where everything came from. But I spent a year, I spent 2019 researching and writing about this and published a story late that year for the New York Times Magazine in ProPublica. I work for both news organizations now. And I published that in a few follow-ups in 2020. And it just, it felt like not just that I wasn't done, but kind of like, I have barely scratched the surface of what this man has done and what has gone on here. And I should say, all of this was building on work that, well, if we go way back, so the St. Petersburg Times, when it was the St. Pete Times, reporter named Pat Meizal, who's the most wonderful person, she started digging into this in 1986, '87 and wrote, I believe, two articles back then that sort of asked some questions like, what's going on with this guy? And those and the so much work of reporters who came before her at the times and other papers who covered each of these men's trials, without knowing all the pieces I knew later, that I was able to go back and refer to their research and talk to them, that there were lawyers who'd been looking into this since the 90s. This built into literally decades of work. And then I added almost another decade of my own. But that's how hard it is for a defense attorney to try to mount a vigorous defense against someone like this. What did any of his wives have to say about all this? So, for people who look at the book, you may notice that the only photos we have of Paul Skellnick are his mug shots. And that is because every woman who had any kind of personal relationship with him, who I found, who talked to me, had destroyed their photos of him. One person had burned them. Yeah, one person had burned all her photos of him. And it was one of these things. It was like that's such a great detail about him that's so frustrating as an author because he's described to me as this, you know, kind of loose late 1970s, early 1980s dresser. And I really wish I had a photo of that. We have to use our imaginations. So they, I mean, there were some people I contacted for this book, you know, for any article you get "nose." These were some of the most pained "nose" I've ever gotten. It was really, really, really difficult for some people to be contacted about this. The women who did speak to me were so incredible. And I think some of the most gratifying reporting that came out of this was I was able to figure out who the underage girls were, who Skellnic went on to sexually abuse. And they are now my age. And I was able to go back to them and say, "I've read the police reports. I've pieced together how this guy operated. I know you didn't get justice back in the 80s, but I believe you. I know this happened. And in one case, this was a prosecutable case in Pinellas County that prosecutors did not move forward with because Skellnic had become too valuable at that point for him to get on the stand and be a good witness for them. You know, he could say, "I'm a former cop. I had some financial troubles. I wrote some checks I shouldn't have written, but I'm a good guy." That's really different than I'm a child in the Lester. So that 12-year-old coming forward and telling her story in 1982 was a major inconvenience to say the least. And taking a polygraph. That was amazing. So this detail, so this girl, I identify her by her married name today, Karen Parker. She at 12 years old is given a polygraph exam. She's neither of her parents are with her. There's a male police officer. I don't believe that polygraph exams measure anything except how nervous a person is to be clear, but she does pass it. And Skellnic, who testifies against all these men, is never given a polygraph exam. I just found that to be so incredible. And I'll just add one other thing. When we talk about the 37 cases in Pinellas County, you know, there We know there's more because when guys were headed to trial and they would hear that Skalnik was on the witness list, at least what he told me, and I believe this to be true, they would often take a pleadial because why go up against him? He had this really good batting average, right? So I think there's so much more that we don't know, and I'm so eager, like if anyone is listening to this who has any information about those cases or about him, I think there's still a lot we don't know. We're sure and you can reach out to any of the three of us and then we're easy to find. If you do have information and we'll send you to the right place, which of course is going to be Pamela. How was your meeting with him? Okay, so my first meeting with him, I tracked him down to federal prison in 2018 and he was finishing up a four-year sentence in this was outside of Dallas. And I went to go see him, this was at the very beginning of my reporting, and you know, he told me all these crazy stories about his 100-foot yacht that he had in Belize and his offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and on and on and on. And he told me that he was dying and he produced this bloody rag to prove to me that he was dying, it's kind of a weird prop. And I didn't believe any of those things, but I had gone there asking him, you know, what I want to write about these things that you've done in your life. It would be a better story if you talked to me and told me some things. And so he agreed to cooperate with me. And I made this elated phone call to my magazine editor at the time driving from Dallas to Austin, like we've got this incredible story. And months went by of me sending him questions and trying to come back to see him at prison. And there was always something, you know, he didn't feel well enough to meet with me or there was something wrong in the mail room and he hadn't gotten my questions. But he strung me along. He was a great letter writer with all these other letters. And there I am, like month three, the investigative reporter, duh, is like, I don't think he's going to tell me anything. I think he did to me what he did to everyone. He saw what I was hungry for and he gave it to me. And it was this very transactional thing. So I go and do my reporting for my initial magazine story that this book grew out of. And I find him at the end of his life at this nursing home. And he was unrepentant there. He was very proud of what he had done. He said of prosecutors in Pinellas County, we, I thought that was a really interesting way to phrase it, we never lost a case. And then at the end of our meeting, he was in time for me to go. I tell him it's time for me to go. And I stand up. I'd been there five hours. And he grabbed my hand and he said, when it's time for me to die, will you come sit with me? And I thought it was a weirdly sort of poignant moment with this man who had lived such a big, extravagant life. And really at the end, he's broke. You know, he's alone. And you know, that's it. And doesn't want to make things better, you know, from all the damage he did. Into the con. That's just amazing. Yeah. Were you there at the end with him? I was not. So he died on March 10th of 2020. As everyone was sort of screying around trying to figure out what it meant that, you know, maybe schools were going to be closed for a day or two. I talk about that. And the book is sort of his great escape that like he always got away. And to die on March 10th 2020, he sort of missed all the like, painting that the rest of us went through. And I remember just frantically calling around. I knew that something had happened. He wasn't at the nursing home anymore. That spring, but I didn't know what. And you know, because of HIPAA, nobody could tell me. Yeah. And so it was like the terrible part of lockdown that spring. And I'm calling all these hospitals that can't tell me anything in nursing homes. And I finally start calling justices of the peace in this rural area of Texas where he'd been. And I then start calling funeral homes and land on a funeral home that said, Oh, yes, we have him. You know, are you next of Ken? We're looking for someone to pick up his ashes. And I was like, no one will be picking up his ashes. I feel like we can't end the story by asking, what are the panelists prosecutors have to say for themselves that they they they wrote on this guy's shotty, completely false stories on all these cases and got convictions, but not just I mean, I think what they have said, you know, no one is pretending that Scalnick was a good guy for sure. People who used him later did not necessarily know about that molestation case that was swept under the rug. You know, there's so many generations of prosecutors coming in and out. It's hard to know what people knew. So I'd like to extend the benefit of the doubt there. I think the most important thing is that the state attorney's office stands by the conviction in the daily case. So much so that in 2020, a prosecutor with that office defended their use of Scalnick in court and even defended not prosecuting him in the Karen Parker case and said that the 12 year old had a, I can't remember the exact phrase, but had a past that would have been difficult in court. And I know from going through those records, there were two witness statements to the assault that happened to her two friends who saw part of what happened. So I believe it was a prosecutable case and the state attorney's office won't budge on any of this and James daily remains on death row. Pamela Kholoff's book is Catch the Devil just out this summer. A true story of murder, deception and injustice on the Gulf Coast. An amazing piece of investigative reporting and a astonishing story told beautifully. Thank you so much for doing this work, for committing yourself to this work and exposing how the criminal punishment, I won't say criminal justice because there's very little justice in the criminal justice system, but our criminal punishment system works. I'm sure you're still doing that work, although not in decade-long chunks at a time. So all the best and thanks for joining us. Thanks so much to you both. I really appreciate it. We've actually got now quite a number of true crime, wrongful conviction episodes in the archives. If this is the sort of thing you're interested in, Hitman recently was out of this world. The Gideon, Ma Barker, Guy Bradley, going way, way, way, way back in the archives. We've got an episode on the another Texas, the Florida, the astronaut lady who drove here in a diaper to murder what was the mistress of a husband? A wife or something like that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I have to mention, I read this book with keen interest because I used to cover the Pinellas County Court system. I used to cover criminal courts for the times. And this was about 20 years before I did that, but I heard some pretty bad horror stories about jailhouse snitches and their use in cases that, you know, basically you see a snitch, that means the prosecution hasn't got a case and they're trying to prop it up with some fancable storage delivery. Just incredible. Welcome to Florida. Welcome to Florida. [BLANK_AUDIO]