Pamela Colloff had spent nearly a decade investigating the case of death row inmate Jim Dailey when she found herself at a Kansas City Public Library branch in early September.
The Watchdog Writers Group fellow at the Missouri School of Journalism sat in a semicircle with members of the library’s pop-up book club, answering questions about her debut book, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.” The book chronicles the deals and deceptions of a notorious jailhouse informant that led to Dailey’s conviction.
A friendly woman with a bob of blonde hair and wire-framed glasses stood up to introduce herself. It was Jan Ballard, a longtime friend of Dailey, whom Colloff had been communicating with for years. Colloff, finally recognizing Ballard, jumped to her feet and the two embraced.
“To see [Colloff] in person and hear about the book has been phenomenal,” Ballard recalled later. “It is an incredible book. The one question I would have liked to have asked is, how can we help Jim to get [his] well-deserved freedom?”
Dailey has been on death row since 1987, convicted of the murder of a 14-year-old girl in Pinellas County, Florida, despite no motive or forensic evidence linking him to the crime. Ballard shared with Colloff the happy memories she made with Dailey in high school and going to prom together as friends. They lost contact after high school but reconnected when his execution date was set. Since then, she’s been campaigning for his freedom.
Ballard gifted Colloff a collage of paintings that Dailey created in prison. The paintings were arranged on a trifold board. Each piece boasted streaks of vibrant color, fiery reds and indigo hues, depicting romantic scenes in startlingly vivid detail: an owl leaping off a branch, a dragon roaring at the edge of a cliff, a fleet of hot air balloons lifting into the sky above a misty mountain range. Dailey’s work captured the beauty of an outside world that he himself had not seen in decades.
The trifold was a poignant reminder that the story Colloff tells in her book was more than a thrilling tale of a con artist. It was Dailey’s reality. He lived in an overcrowded cell block. It lacked heat in the winter. It was a breeding ground for mosquitos during the sweltering subtropical summers. Execution days were unbearable. Dailey and his cellmates switched their radios to the same station and turned the music up so they couldn’t hear the hum of the electric chair.
Even with Colloff’s reporting, there is no further legal path to appeal Dailey’s case. To this day, he remains on death row based on the jailhouse informant testimony of a con man.
“Jailhouse informant testimony is something that happens in all 50 states to this day,” Colloff said during her book talk at the library. “There are a few legislative reforms that have been passed. Unfortunately, I don’t think most of them have teeth…This is something still at play, that prosecutors are using, that judges are allowing, and that appellate courts are rubber stamping.”
Colloff was discussing her book with Christopher Leonard, the executive director of the Watchdog Writers Group (WWG), a nonprofit fellowship program at the School of Journalism. Colloff worked on her book during her fellowship from 2020 to 2022.
“Catch the Devil” landed on the New York Times Bestseller list this summer and has received widespread praise from critics. “A scathing indictment of a country where prosecutors are so often politically incentivized to get a conviction regardless of a defendant’s actual guilt,” wrote Henry Fernandez in The Nation.
Author Robert Kolker described Colloff’s book as “loaded with moral clarity and astounding detail — about one of the world’s most infernal liars, the scores of lives he destroyed, and the criminal justice system that still, shockingly, benefits from those lies.”
The “infernal liar” was Paul Skalnik, a con artist and child predator who, over the course of three decades, testified or supplied information in 37 Pinellas County cases, helping the state of Florida win four death penalty convictions in exchange for his freedom. In 1985, Skalnik found himself in prison with Dailey, who had recently been charged for the murder of 14-year-old Floridian Shelley Boggio.
Skalnik claimed that Dailey had confessed his guilt to him. With the help of Skalnik’s testimony, the court sentenced Dailey to death. In exchange for his testimony, Skalnik walked free. To this day, Dailey maintains his innocence — and his spirits, according to Ballard. She spoke to Dailey’s efforts to build community and create more opportunities for his fellow prisoners to communicate with the outside world. “I can’t believe how truly positive [Dailey] remains,” Ballard said. “There’s been very few times that I’ve ever talked to him that he’s ever been somewhat down. The guys that he is surrounded with adore him.”
Colloff paints a vivid image of Dailey’s life in her reporting. She went through hundreds of court documents and traveled across the country to meet with countless sources, seeking to illustrate the pitfalls of prosecutors using jailhouse informants.
“I can show you that it’s bad, and I can show you that there’s a price,” Colloff told the audience. “But what does it feel like to actually sit on death row since 1987, a place with no air conditioning, a 6-by-9-foot windowless cell, while the person whose testimony put you there is gallivanting around and is free?”
Dailey wasn’t the only person whose real-life experience is chronicled by Colloff. She also documents the devastating costs on the women Skalnik abused and conned. Finding the women was difficult because many of their names had been redacted from court documents.
“What’s my role walking back into their life?” Colloff said. “Do their husbands know this happened? Am I going to traumatize them by asking them about this?”
Karen Parker spoke to Colloff. She was only 12 when Skalnik, a colleague of her neighbor’s uncle, sexually abused her in 1982. She reported Skalnik to the police, but because Skalnik was a valuable jailhouse informant, all charges against him were dropped. After, Parker’s family began to doubt her credibility. Eventually, she ran away from home.
Colloff revealed to Parker the truth about why her case against Skalnik never went to trial.
“It had nothing to do with her believability or her credibility,” Colloff said. “And that became a very healing process for her. It sort of helped me, emboldened me a little bit more. I think I’m sometimes shy in reporting situations like that, about not wanting to intrude on people’s lives. And it made me see that sometimes doing that work can be very important for that person, not just the story.”
According to Colloff, the prosecutorial misconduct of the 1980s hasn’t gone away. The criminal justice system continues to place greater importance on precedent; it protects convictions, and new evidence is not always given full consideration.
As proof, Colloff shared an example from a 2020 hearing in Dailey’s case, which once again denied the inclusion of Parker’s testimony. Prosecutors argued that Parker’s testimony should not be added as evidence due to her lack of credibility. Colloff noted that by this time, the Me Too movement had brought about an “enlightened state” by raising awareness for sexual assault and harassment around the world.
“A prosecutor gets up and gives a full-throated defense of Skalnik and says that the reason that [Parker’s] case didn’t proceed was that prosecutors had a lot of questions about the promiscuity and moral background of this 12-year-old girl,” Colloff said. “And I put that in the book because I think it’s so easy to think that we don’t have these issues in our present-day system when we very much do.”
Colloff said that in the contemporary political climate, investigating corruption in the criminal justice system is more necessary than ever.
“It’s hard to know what to do when it feels like so many of our systems and institutions are broken,” she said. “And if we can try to find better models and better ways for the criminal justice system to work, then we can build towards something.”
