Some men lie for money. Paul Skalnik lied for freedom, and along the way he helped send at least one innocent man to death row. That’s the rot at the center of “Catch the Devil,” Pamela Colloff’s first full-length book, and it’s the kind of rot that doesn’t wash out no matter how many years pass.
Colloff, an investigative reporter known for her meticulous work on wrongful convictions, first wrote about this case in 2019: the 1987 murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio on Florida’s Gulf Coast, and the jailhouse informant whose testimony helped convict James Dailey and put him on death row. “Catch the Devil” pulls that thread all the way out. Skalnik, we learn, spent decades cycling through Pinellas County’s jails, collecting confessions real and invented from fellow inmates, then trading them to prosecutors eager for an easy win. He conned nine women into marriage along the way, funding a taste for fine suits and gold jewelry with other people’s trust. Colloff tracked him down in person and asked him, point blank, whether he’d recant. The answer, and everything that led to it, forms the spine of the book.
What makes “Catch the Devil” more than a grim procedural is Colloff’s refusal to let either man stay a type. Dailey doesn’t become a symbol of pure innocence, and Skalnik doesn’t become a cartoon villain; both come across as fully, uncomfortably human, which is exactly what makes the story so hard to shake. Colloff’s reporting is exhaustive without being exhausting. Court transcripts, parole records, and years of interviews get woven into scenes that move with the tension of a thriller, even though every detail is documented. She’s especially sharp on the mechanics of how a system built to convict, rather than to find the truth, can turn a known liar into its most valuable witness, again and again, because nobody with the power to stop him has an incentive to look too closely.
Critics have responded to the book as a serious indictment rather than a sensational one. Reviewers have praised Colloff’s prose for its control and her reporting for its depth, with more than one comparing her command of courtroom detail to the genre’s best practitioners. The consensus seems to be that this isn’t just a well-told true crime story but a pointed argument about how American justice actually functions when speed and convenience are rewarded over accuracy, and about how hard it is to undo a conviction once the state has staked its reputation on it.
“Catch the Devil” earns its place among the year’s most talked-about nonfiction not by shocking readers with gore, but by making them sit with a slower, more corrosive kind of horror: a system that knew, or should have known, and looked away anyway. Colloff doesn’t offer tidy resolution, because the real story hasn’t offered her one either. What she offers instead is clarity, and a case that will linger with readers long after the last page. For anyone drawn to true crime that asks harder questions than “who did it,” this is essential reading.
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