In December 1986, prosecutors in Pinellas County, Fla., had a problem. They had just failed to secure a death sentence against Jack Pearcy in the 1985 killing of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio.
The night before her nude body was found with 31 stab wounds, floating in the Intracoastal Waterway, Shelly had spent time drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana with Pearcy, his girlfriend and his two male roommates. Pearcy, a 31-year-old with an extensive history of violence against women, who had pursued Shelly in the months before her death, eventually gave a convoluted and contradictory confession that laid most of the blame on one of his roommates.
Though jurors found Pearcy guilty of first-degree murder, they recommended a life sentence rather than the death penalty that prosecutors sought — “a monumental blow,” as journalist Pamela Colloff explains in Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, her engrossing and damning book on the case. Securing death sentences in first-degree murder cases was the primary goal of prosecutors at the time in Pinellas County, where the nation’s Reagan-era tough-on-crime ethos found its apotheosis. Florida led the country in death sentences during this period. “But even by Florida’s standards, Pinellas County stood out,” Colloff writes. “Prosecutors sought the death penalty in nearly every first-degree murder case that came before the state attorney’s office.”
But the state had another chance to secure a death penalty — against Pearcy’s roommate, 40-year-old James Dailey. A Vietnam War veteran who struggled with alcoholism, Dailey had no connection to Shelly, and he maintained his innocence. Investigators had no physical evidence to tie him to the case, only Pearcy’s self-serving statements. So lead detective John Halliday turned to a tactic the state had used again and again: finding a jailhouse witness who would testify that Dailey had confessed to them.
Luckily for Halliday, Colloff writes, a snitch he had worked with to help secure death sentences in the past was freshly back in Pinellas County Jail: Paul Skalnik, a con man who “had become one of the most prolific, and most effective, jailhouse witnesses in American history.” Over several years, Skalnik had been in and out of the jail on repeated felony grand theft charges and had testified against or provided information about 27 inmates.
As Colloff compellingly details throughout Catch the Devil, prosecutors in Florida had found Skalnik and the unlikely stories he told about fellow inmates unburdening themselves to him “useful.” “He was the state’s closer, the witness whose words moved jurors to choose death,” she writes. “Where there was room for doubt, Skalnik erased it.” In exchange, though Skalnik and the state always denied it, he received extraordinary leniency at sentencing and parole hearings, allowing him to avoid lengthy prison stays — and to reoffend, Colloff writes. Skalnik once again cooked up a story, the book explains, that would work to the state’s benefit, claiming that as he passed by Dailey’s cell, Dailey confessed in florid terms.
“A prosecutor’s decision to lean on a jailhouse witness is usually a red flag, a tacit admission that the state’s evidence is wobblier than it should be,” Colloff asserts. Yet in Dailey’s case, it was Skalnik’s testimony that secured not only a verdict of guilt for first-degree murder, but the death sentence prosecutors coveted. And as Dailey has spent nearly 40 years on death row, Skalnik’s testimony has continued to serve as an impediment to his appeals. “Once a witness like Skalnik takes the stand and gives his testimony, it is almost impossible to unring the bell,” Colloff explains. That’s thanks to the machinations of our legal system: “in the eyes of the courts, testimony given under oath and challenged through cross-examination is presumed to have been properly scrutinized, so it carries more weight — whether or not the process actually reveals the truth.”
In Catch the Devil, Colloff’s cinematic telling of this appalling case serves to highlight the potentially fatal consequences of a criminal legal system that is more concerned with securing convictions than determining the truth and delivering justice. Dailey is far from the only person claiming to be innocent to have been sent to death row on the basis of a jailhouse witness’ word. Colloff highlights a 2024 report from the National Registry of Exonerations that found that one-quarter of the 142 people exonerated in death penalty cases had been sentenced with the help of an incarcerated informant.
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