The Informant

27:41Paul Skelnick gets on the stand, and he claims that Freddie Gaines planned this whole thing out, which on its face is curious. You would think if you're going to have a premeditated murder, you wouldn't do it in front of all these witnesses. But anyway, he says this was a premeditated crime. And then he goes on to give that detail, that kind of detail that's going to really stick with jurors. he said that Freddie boasted about killing this man. And he not only boasted about killing him, he boasted about the way that he did it.

28:21Phoebe Judge:The victim had been stabbed in the heart. And Paul Skalnik testified that Freddie had said that he should have been charged with, quote, open-heart surgery. Sort of with a laugh. This very cold-blooded kind of thing. And that testimony helped not just to convict Freddie, and he was guilty, of course, of killing this man, but to get this extremely punishing sentence. So Freddie received a life sentence and is in prison to this day. one of the things that makes no sense about how he could have obtained these confessions isn't just how difficult it would have been physically within the jail to get them but why I mean if your life is on the line and you are three weeks out from a trial why would you tell anyone you know anyone in your life much less a perfect stranger that yes you did this and here are the details.

29:25And by 1983, everybody knows he's a snitch. This is no secret.

29:33Phoebe Judge:One man even told a guard he would not be in the same cell as Paul. Quote, because I knew who he was and what he did. You know, a question many people have asked me is, how did he survive all this? You know, there's this saying, snitches get stitches, right? And he emerged unscathed. Well, the reason for that is because he was being held in protective custody, meaning that he couldn't just mix with the other guys. If he wanted to go to the prison yard, if he wanted to take a shower, he had to be accompanied by a corrections officer. And so he was asking people to believe that he was walking past the cells of strangers.

30:21Or sometimes he said they would seek him out because they thought he was so knowledgeable. and here they are about to face trial and that they would confess everything to him and things that were self-incriminating. I think it can be hard for people to understand why a jury would believe these stories and something that's important to remember is that when a prosecutor puts someone like Paul Skalnik on the stand, they are appearing in a line of highly credible witnesses. You know, the first witness in a murder trial might be the lead investigator who showed up to the scene of the crime. Second witness might be the paramedic who can describe what happened or the medical examiner.

31:11Someone like Paul Skelnick appears within that context and he is sponsored by prosecutors. He is someone who prosecutors are saying that jurors can trust.

31:26Phoebe Judge:When he was asked on the stand why he had chosen to testify, he would always say the same thing. He talks about how proud he was to be a police officer and how he never really left that life behind. He's made some mistakes, but he still has law enforcement in his blood, is how he puts it. and that the least he can do to redeem himself for these minor financial crimes that he committed when he was desperate for money is to be one of the good guys and to help police and prosecutors. And he does a lot to distance himself from the other sort of what he sees as the riffraff in the jail. He's not like them.

32:11He's a former cop. He's different.

32:14Phoebe Judge:You just want someone to step in here and say, wait, wait, wait. What is happening with this guy? You know, does someone make some sense that there's something's going on here? I think that's the most shocking thing to me here is no one ever steps in to say, hold on a second. This doesn't make sense. this is something where you know really like ethically we need to think about this and I think it goes to these incentives that the system puts out there the prosecutor's incentives unfortunately in this office at that time with the culture the tough on crime culture of the era it was to get convictions something that a prosecutor said to me which I'll paraphrase, was you've got to work with a sinner to catch the devil.

33:13I can't think off the top of my head of a case in which he brought forth evidence that prosecutors or investigators said, come on, Paul, that seems a little far-fetched. And, you know, you have to imagine here's a guy in the jail who's got a better track record than their star detectives in their county. And they never question this. They just, they keep sponsoring his testimony.

33:43Phoebe Judge:By 1984, he had testified against or given information about at least 27 men in Pinellas County Jail, and three of them were on death row. That year, the St. Petersburg Times published an article about the dramatic rise in death sentences in the county. One lawyer was quoted saying, they're going to have to build a separate wing on death row for Pinellas County. I mean, if you were a defense attorney and you had done your research, they've got this guy, he does this all the time. I want to talk about that. You know, was anyone saying on the other side, wait a second, this doesn't make any sense?

34:29Phoebe Judge:So here's where it's so hard with jailhouse informants. there was no easy way. Think about, especially in a time period when court records are not digitized, right, where you're just going through page by page by page, the complexity of trying to figure out how many other cases this guy has testified in, it was extremely difficult. The state attorney's office knew. They had a running list of every case he'd ever given information in. But for defense attorneys who are, you know, so short on time, short on money, often we're talking public defenders who have a few hours to prepare their case, who don't have an investigator working for them, it was an almost impossible task.

35:20And when a defense attorney asks someone like Paul Skalnik, were you promised anything in return for this testimony? He can truthfully say no. So that's something that jurors can go on to believe. Because nothing's been promised yet. Nothing's been promised. It's an implicit understanding on the part of the prisoner that if they help out, they'll get something back.

35:50Phoebe Judge:What was his reward for all of this testimony, this next batch of testimony. He was released again, incredibly. One of the things I found so shocking was whenever he was released, he would have court dates where he was supposed to check in with the court because he usually had either an upcoming trial of his own or a trial in which he was testifying in, and he would never show up to these hearings. So there was just this bizarre way in which prosecutors endlessly trusted that he would do what they had asked him to do. It's like, you know, I can get in trouble because I can figure it. I'll just get a couple of confessions and I'll get myself right back out of jail if I get caught again.

36:42Phoebe Judge:Right, right. That's exactly right. He was arrested again, less than two years after he was released, for a few different financial crimes. Once he was in jail, Paul Skalnik let an investigator he'd worked with before, John Halliday, know that even though he was in an isolation cell, all alone, three men had found a way to tell him about the murders they'd committed. Prosecutors planned to use Paul's testimony in their trials, But this time, he wasn't released early. He would have to stay in jail to wait for his own trial. Paul did whatever he could to get out. He wrote to the judge in his case.

37:26He drafted a legal petition saying he was unlawfully detained.

37:31Phoebe Judge:He even wrote to the governor, copying Ted Kennedy. None of it worked. But then, a man named Jim Daley was moved to Paul's floor.

37:45Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back.

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40:15Phoebe Judge:Tell me a little bit about Jim Daly. What was he in jail for? So Jim Daly grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, and was this really beloved young man. He had a family. He had started college. He, in 1968, went to Vietnam. He goes on to become an alcoholic and lives quite a difficult, somewhat itinerant life. And he falls in with a guy named Jack Piercy. Jack Piercy, unlike James Daly, had a very long rap sheet and a history of violence against women. He had also been involved in a murder-for-hire case in Missouri a few years earlier. So these guys and their friend end up moving to Pinellas County, this place where you can kind of reinvent yourself.

41:14The sun is always shining. The living is cheap. Not long after they arrive in Pinellas County, a 14-year-old girl named Shelly Boggio ends up dead in Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, in this area. She is found naked in the water. She's been stabbed over 30 times. Her body's been brutalized. The assumption is she's been sexually assaulted. And it's a horrific crime. The investigation very quickly narrows in on Jack Piercy, who was the last person to be seen with her alive the night she was killed. He had been pursuing her romantically. He was 29 years old. She was 14. And he had blood on his shoes that night.

42:07There were just all sorts of indications that Jack was the prime suspect in this case. Police track him down to Kansas, where he fled after Shelly's murder. They bring him in for questioning. He tells a story about how he brought Shelly Boggio down to this lover's lane in Pinellas County this night that she was killed. And he also happened to bring his housemate, Jim, James Daly. and that he, Jack Piercy, stayed back in the car while Jim went off with Shelly and tried to have sex with her. There was a struggle and Jim stabbed her and killed her. So there's no evidence whatsoever to back this up.

43:00This is really the word of the prime suspect of the case is putting this on Jim. But nevertheless, these two men are arrested and charged with capital murder. So what happens is Jack Piercy goes to trial for this case, and he's convicted, but he's given a life sentence. And it's hard, I think, in 2026 for us to understand how a life sentence in a crime of this horror was something that was really unacceptable, especially in this area of Florida. And it was a political liability for the state attorney's office. this. So Jim goes to trial six months after this, but there's just not a lot of there there.

43:53There's Jack Piercy's account and not much else. So shortly after Jack Piercy gets this life sentence, the lead investigator in the case, John Halliday, goes into the Pinellas County Jail, and he starts pulling guys out of their cells. And these are guys who've been housed with Jim Daly. He pulls 15 men out of their cells in all. And he brings each one, one by one, to this little room and he asks them what Jim has been saying about his case and if they have any information about Jim's role in this case. it's important to note that at least four of them remember that there were newspaper articles that were spread out in this room describing this murder that had all the details one might need to give testimony in a case like this.

44:54The lead investigator denies that that was the case and he denied that under oath. But he ends up leaving the jail that day without getting information. The guys say, Jim's never said anything to us, or Jim said he's innocent. But the word is out in the jail that this case needs a snitch.

45:17Phoebe Judge:When Jim Daly was moved to Paul Skalnik's floor, he said, this is a damn setup. Two days later, Paul had good news for the investigator. Jim had confessed everything to him. These men did not know each other. At Jim's trial, again, there's just not a lot of information, and there's nothing that is directly tying Jim to the crime. There's no forensic evidence. There's no physical evidence. There's no obvious motive. And even the story that Jack Piercy has doesn't make a lot of sense. So Skelnick is brought in. Skelnick says that Jim confessed this to him, and he has all the basic details of where it occurred and who the victim was, what she looked like.

46:12but the icing on the cake of his testimony is he describes what he says is how Jim describes the killing. He says that Jim says that he's holding Shelly in his arms. He's stabbing her and she's staring up at him, but she will not die. And it's a horrifying image of this young girl who is looking up, pleading at someone while she's being stabbed to death. To be clear, there is zero corroborating evidence to back up this story.

46:55Phoebe Judge:Paul went on to say that when he heard the confession, it was hard to accept it. He said, I had seen this gentleman walking in the hallways, laughing and kidding with other inmates. and all of a sudden to see a man's eyes and to describe how he can stab a young girl. What did Jim Daly say about Scoundling's testimony? What Jim told me was that he was so beyond, I can't remember the words he used, but what Jim said was that he was just so stunned that someone could get up on the stand and tell falsehood after falsehood this just absolutely outrageous story in a case where the electric chair is at play.

47:46That was what Jim was facing at that time. And it's very common for defense attorneys to advise their clients when they're sitting at the defense table listening to testimony to have no reaction to what a witness is saying. And the idea behind that is you don't want to have jurors see a defendant get really angry. Maybe that would make them think they could commit this crime. So Jim is advised, and this is typical, to not have a reaction to what Skelnick is saying. So he has to sit there stone-faced while Skelnick is saying these lies.

48:27Phoebe Judge:Doesn't that seem like the hardest thing? The hardest thing. And then the ways that juries might interpret that, right? How much of a role did Paul Skelnick's testimony play in the trial and sentencing of Jim Daley? I believe it played an enormous role because there really, no forensic evidence, no physical evidence, no motive. Jack Piercy didn't even end up testifying at the trial. He took the fifth. So the state had nothing. In the end, the state brought in three jailhouse informants. Scalnik's testimony was by far the most extensive and detailed. But just to give a sense of things, I have always viewed any case that had a jailhouse informant in it as a huge red flag, that either this was a possible innocence case or something was terribly wrong with the case.

49:29I've actually never heard of a case in which there were three jailhouse informants. I'm sure it's happened before, but that just gives you a sense of how weak the evidence was.

49:41Phoebe Judge:Jim Daly was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death. When Pamela Koloff asked one of the prosecutors in Jim Daly's case about Paul Skalnik's testimony, she said she never willfully and intentionally provided false evidence or testimony to a court or jury on any case. Another prosecutor said, if we did not believe that his testimony was truthful, we wouldn't have had him testify. Jim spoke at the sentencing hearing and said that in Pinellas County, the pursuit of convictions has been turned into a win-at-all-cost game and that truth is allowed to be manipulated and paid liars are allowed to testify.

50:32Phoebe Judge:Five days later, Paul Skalnik was released. One Florida Parole and Probation Commission memo stated that his release was, quote, due to his cooperation with the state's attorney's office in the first-degree murder trial. Paul promised he would stay in town to testify in three upcoming murder trials and to attend his own trial for grand theft. Instead, he went back to Texas. And once he was there, he managed to scam a jewelry store out of almost$30 ,000 of merchandise. He finally gets caught. He's extradited back to Florida. And he's very angry that he's being asked to stay in jail before these other murder trials happen that he's going to testify in.

51:24He's angry that they won't trust him once again to go free and show up for trial. So in retaliation, he writes a sworn affidavit in which he says that everything he said in all his prior testimony in all these cases in Pinellas County had been, all that information had been fed to him by police and prosecutors. and it was false testimony and he takes everything back. The prosecutors are then in the same exact position that all these defendants have been in for years of, wait, what? We did what? And they have to try to defend themselves. And one of the most incredible legal documents I've seen in my entire career is what they file in response with the court in which they say, Paul Skelnick is lying about what he's saying about us.

52:28No prosecutor and no investigator fed him information. But everything he said prior to this in these other cases is true and should remain on the record. It's really wild. And he in the end gets the upper hand. And he, at that point, they wanted him to get out of Dodge. They wanted him to stop talking. They cut him a deal where he's going to serve his time, even for his Florida crimes, in Texas. And he gets this sweetheart deal back in Texas. He's released after not very much time. But Pinellas County prosecutors want him gone. They're done with him by then.

53:16Phoebe Judge:Just before Paul Skalnik was released, he wrote a letter to a judge, saying, The state attorney's office has always characterized me as an honest, forthright witness, and together we never lost a case. We reached out to the Pinellas County State Attorney's Office for comment on the cases Paul was involved in, but haven't heard back. They have said in a past statement that he at no time was an agent of the sheriff's office or the state attorney's office, and that the state attorney's office never provided any leniency to Paul Skalnik in exchange for his testimony. It also stated that all the information Paul Skalnik provided was independently verified, and the office never received information indicating that his testimony was incorrect.

54:14In November 1989, Paul went back to his hometown in Texas.

54:19Phoebe Judge:He got married again. He told her he was a real estate developer and gave her a used Jaguar. God knows how he kept the charade going, but he did. And so she had a 16-year-old daughter, Misty Anderson, and Paul Skalnik zeros in on her and does to her what he had done before. He molests her. She goes to police, and thankfully, they really, really take action. Unfortunately, he was known to them as a first-time sex offender, so he didn't get the kind of punishment he would have gotten had the Karen Parker crime worked its way through the courts. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and served his full term.

55:11Phoebe Judge:After he was released in 2002, he didn't register as a sex offender, as he was required to do, and left Texas. He went to Boston, where he told people that he was a lawyer named Avery Harrison and had business cards made to prove it. After paying him thousands of dollars, his clients realized he hadn't been doing any work for them at all. And just over a year after he'd been released, he was arrested again. He was charged with larceny and the unauthorized practice of law. While he was in prison in Massachusetts, Jim Daly's lawyers subpoenaed him to testify in a hearing about Jim's case. They were hoping that Paul would say that the prosecutors had coached him before he testified in Jim's trial, and that they had offered him a deal.

56:06Phoebe Judge:But when Paul was questioned, he said that he had never lied. That statement became part of the court record, and would come up every time Jim Daley tried to appeal on the basis of an unfair trial. After Paul Skalnik was released from prison in Massachusetts, he never reported for probation and claimed he was a retired lawyer named E. Paul Smith. He kept a legal dictionary around with E. Paul Smith Esquire, attorney at law, embossed on it. He also claimed he had health problems from serving as a Marine Corps fighter pilot and was in treatment for brain cancer at the VA. Paul shaved his head to make it look like he was in chemotherapy.

56:55Phoebe Judge:And he kept taking people's money to help them with legal issues. He was arrested again and sentenced to 50 months in federal prison. Pamela Koloff went to visit him there in 2018. He spoke about how prosecutors and he, he said, we never lost a case. And I thought that was so interesting that he spoke of how he worked with them in that way. He told me a few lies up front that were such bald-faced lies that I knew they were lies. One was that he had a yacht that he kept in Belize, which he showed me a picture of, a 100-foot yacht. He had these offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. I knew that none of that was true.

57:47Phoebe Judge:Pamela Koloff says that Paul told her he'd tell her more of his story in the future. But then, when she tried to see him or talk to him, Paul kept saying he was too sick, or that he hadn't gotten her letter because something had gone wrong in the mailroom. He ended up never giving her the information she was hoping for. and so I finally realized he had conned me he had given me exactly what I hungered for this is what he'd done with everyone he sized me up he knew what I was hungry for he fed it to me and I an investigative journalist who knew he was a con artist with a long rap sheet I bought into that and I think that speaks to if you're hungry for something he knew how to read that.

58:37But Pamela did see him again, one last time, in 2019, a week after Jim Daly's death

58:45Phoebe Judge:warrant was signed. He'd been on death row for more than 30 years. So I went to the nursing home where Paul Skelnick was living at that time. And I said to him, I don't know if you remember the case of a man named Jim Daley, but he has received an execution date. And if you're ever going to tell the truth about what really happened in the jail, this is the time to do it. And he refused. He stuck to his story. He stuck to his story. And it was interesting. You could see he had other regrets. When I brought up the case of Freddie Gaines, there was an expression that came across his face where I think there was some regret.

59:35Freddie was very young when this happened, and he was a very fun and lively and charismatic guy at that time. And I'm sure Skelnick remembered that and reflected on the fact that here was someone who was going to die in prison because of him. What was it like to be with him in person? So the first thing to know is that even in his advanced age and not being in good health, I could see that charm that he had when he was a young man. He was so easy to talk to. He was a terrific listener. He was very, very well-spoken. but there was something that happened when I went to visit him. He showed me a scar that was on his knee and he said that that scar had come from the time when he was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War and he'd been shot down over Laos and he'd been taken captive and he'd become a prisoner of War.

1:00:42And that scar, which was very visible, was from that time. And I remembered when he told me that something that my mother had told me growing up, which is, if you're going to lie, you have to have a really good memory. Because when I had first gone to see him in prison, and he had that scar, and it was very visible that day, he told me that it had come from a terrible car accident that he had been in Austin in in the 1970s, which I feel certain is what it really was from. I found no evidence, no records that he was ever in the military whatsoever.

1:01:23Phoebe Judge:Not surprising. Yeah. Did he say anything about why people had confessed to him so often? He really couldn't provide the answers for that. I really probed that, and he seemed sort of unconcerned about whether I actually believed these confessions were true. He was really, at that point, very focused on how lonely he was at the end of his life. And I remember after this five-hour conversation telling him that I had to go. And it had been a tough conversation, but he grabbed my hand very forcefully and he said, when it's time for me to die, will you come back and sit with me? Paul Skalnik died less than six months later, on March 10, 2020.

1:02:25Phoebe Judge:When you reached out to people to tell them that Polskalnik had died, how did they react? Nobody believed me. Everybody felt that this was another scam, that he had somehow found a way to escape once again. According to a 2024 report from the National Registry of Exonerations, 7 % of wrongful convictions in the registry involved jailhouse testimony. And jailhouse testimony had been a factor in 25 % of death penalty cases. There have been reforms in at least a dozen states. In Illinois, there are hearings to determine whether a jailhouse informant is reliable enough before a case goes to trial.

1:03:22In Texas, there are registries in each county to keep track of jailhouse informants and the cases they've testified in.

1:03:31Phoebe Judge:And in California, the jury is instructed to view the testimony of an in-custody informant with caution and close scrutiny.

1:03:43Phoebe Judge:Jim Daly got a stay of execution in 2019 and is still on death row.

1:04:05Phoebe Judge:Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Sillison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com. slash newsletter. Pamela Koloff's book is Catch the Devil, a true story of murder, deception, and injustice on the Gulf Coast.

1:04:50Phoebe Judge:We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com slash criminal. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast.

1:05:28Phoebe Judge:Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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