Peter Yang
Audio By Carbonatix
There aren’t many combinations more dangerous in life than a person desperately wanting something connecting with someone who somehow just knows what that person wants to hear, regardless of whether they can provide it. Pamela Colloff has spent years reporting on such dramatic scenarios with life-and-death stakes. If anyone could avoid being a mark, it was her, but Paul Skalnik needed only an hour to prove that theory wrong.
An hour was all federal prison rules allowed him with a reporter, and Skalnik used it the way he’d used a thousand opportunities before with so many other marks. As she describes in the prologue of her new book, “Catch the Devil,” Colloff walked past tall fences with razor wire into her meeting with the inmate knowing exactly who he was: a jailhouse informant whose testimony had sent men to prison and, in at least one case, to a life sentence for a crime prosecutors couldn’t otherwise prove.
The investigative journalist who wrote for Texas Monthly before joining ProPublica and The New York Times had spent a year investigating Skalnik and his patterns, but Skalnik took control of the entire situation immediately.
“I know he’s done all this stuff and I still totally buy what he’s selling because he has sized me up in two seconds and he knows what I want and he told me what I wanted to hear,” she says over the phone a few days before her appearance at Interabang Books in Dallas on Wednesday to celebrate the release of “Catch the Devil.”
Colloff has won two National Magazine Awards, one for feature writing in 2013 and the other for reporting in 2020, yet she didn’t know she had been conned until long after that prison conversation. She had been surprised Skalnik agreed to meet with her in the first place, but she had made contact, and they had agreed to continue communicating. As she explains in the prologue, the back-and-forth proved fruitless. As her reporting and investigating kicked into high gear, nothing of value from the jailhouse informant was ever given to her.
Asked point-blank whether it was a con from the moment Skalnik agreed to talk to her, Colloff doesn’t hesitate: “Yes.”
But that is hindsight’s clarity speaking, of course. At the time, the exhaustive, painstaking reporter chased Skalnik’s participation the way she had so many other sources.
“He’s the one I’m writing to like, ‘Hey, how are you? Please, please, please, really please write me back. I’m so far into this, and I told my editor,'” she says.
But Colloff’s curiosity didn’t die when Skalnick did in 2020. This story was different.
Since joining Texas Monthly in 1997, she’s been behind some of the most acclaimed narrative journalism offered on any pages of any kind, including the 26,000-plus-word “The Innocent Man” two-part series from 2012 in which she tells the stunning story of Austin-area man Michael Morton, who was wrongfully convicted in 1987 of murdering his wife, Christine, and spent 25 years in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him. That story netted her first National Magazine Award. In fact, the story that landed Colloff her second National Magazine Award ultimately led her to write her first book.
Given that her stories are often grand, cinematic pieces with life-and-death stakes, or “non-fiction novellas” as she calls them, why did it take her so long to write a book? Because, she says, her 2019 story “He’s a Liar, a Con Artist and a Snitch. His Testimony Could Soon Send a Man to His Death” was the first story where she reached the end of her reporting with more questions than when she’d started. That story centers on James Dailey, a Florida death-row inmate convicted for the 1985 murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio, thanks primarily to Skalnik’s testimony, despite no physical evidence tying Dailey to the crime.
“In a lot of these stories, it felt like there was no way I could contain them to a magazine length,” she says. “But in this case, I had sort of done what I wanted to do with the [2019] piece. I reported and investigated everything that’s now in this book for a year before writing the magazine story. And I’m proud of that magazine story, but when I got to the end of it, it felt like I had just kind of scratched the surface of what had happened.”
For nearly three decades, Colloff has been the one asking the questions — reading sources, sizing up motives and staying just out of view. In recent months, however, while promoting her book, she’s been on the other side of the phone call or video chat, although one of the first lessons a journalist learns is to tell the story, not be a part of one. It’s a strange position for a reporter who spent a year being read and managed by perhaps the biggest liar she’s ever encountered.
“I am so much more comfortable being behind the scenes, holding the notebook, being behind the camera, whatever,” she says. “It’s almost like we know too much as journalists when we do interviews.”
