Paul Skalnik had a strange gift for being in jail when accused murderers suddenly felt the urge to spill their secrets.
Skalnik was a petty con artist with a grimly reliable routine, writes Pamela Colloff in her riveting new book, “Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast.” “Whenever his luck ran out and he ended up in jail,” Colloff writes, “men confessed their crimes to him.”
In the summer of 1981, Skalnik was sitting in the Pinellas County Jail on a grand-theft charge, staring down a possible five-year prison sentence, when he placed a collect call to the state attorney’s office in Clearwater, Florida, and told them he had information on three different men awaiting trial for murder. All three, he said, had made full or partial confessions to him.
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