In her new book Catch the Devil, reporter Pamela Colloff traces the life and crimes of a mendacious jailhouse informant and exposes the systems that allowed him to walk free.
Pamela Colloff, author of the book Catch the Devil, on a panel(Pamela Colloff)
The first time I saw Pamela Colloff, she was on stage at an overwhelmingly beige convention hall in a New Orleans Marriott. Colloff, a reporter at Propublica and staff writer at New York Times Magazine, was a headliner in one of the few places journalists are cool enough to headline anything: a professional conference for investigative reporters. In a packed, exquisitely air conditioned room—it was New Orleans in the summer, after all—dozens of media workers sat knee to knee on carpet when the room’s few hundred or so chairs filled just to hear Colloff explain her writing process.Colloff has been a criminal justice journalist for decades. She developed her knack for that brand of reporting as a staffer at Texas Monthly—a job she landed fresh out of college when Austin rent was still $300 a month. In the years since, her work has focused on the wrongly incarcerated and the myriad institutional failings of the US criminal justice system.
Colloff’s first book, Catch The Devil follows her reporting for The New York Times and ProPublica on Paul Skalnik, a jailhouse informant whose false testimony helped prosecutors across the American south secure the convictions of dozens of men, one of whom is still on death row. In exchange for his testimony, detectives and prosecutors awarded Skalnik—whose rap sheet included fraud, grand theft, and an arrest for child sexual abuse—sweetheart deals like sentence reductions, early release, and at one point, an unsanctioned conjugal visit.
Catch The Devil traces Skalnik’s life, as well as those of his victims, who make up a diverse group of scammed ex-wives, molested girls, and incarcerated men. Colloff’s pain-staking, comprehensive reporting is a scathing indictment of a country where prosecutors are so often politically incentivized to get a conviction regardless of a defendant’s actual guilt.Colloff sat down with The Nation to discuss her new book, the state of journalism, and why she’s fascinated with the decisions people make in the worst moments of their lives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—Henry Fernandez
Henry Fernandez: After you won the Hillman Prize in 2020 for your initial investigative piece on Paul Skalnik, you said in a video statement, “I’ve come to the conclusion that jailhouse informants simply should not be in American courtrooms.” In the six and a half years since, has your opinion on jailhouse informants stayed the same? If so, can you explain to our readers how your reporting led you to this conclusion?
Pamela Colloff: No, my opinion has not changed. If you look at how jailhouse informants function in the criminal justice system, the fact that they are what we call “incentivized witnesses” makes their use very problematic. Informants come with all sorts of complications and issues. But, I think people are most used to encountering an informant in an organized crime case, where you’re trying to penetrate a group of people and their activities, and there’s one person who flips and works with prosecutors. Obviously, there are issues with this, but at least that person was in the thick of the activity or a witness to the activity that’s at the center of the case.
A jailhouse informant is someone in jail alongside people in pre-trial detention. They have everything on the line, and they’re about to go to trial or decide whether or not to take a plea. The basic conceit of a jailhouse informant, I think, is very hard to buy. We’re not talking about people who’ve already been convicted and have been living alongside fellow prisoners for years. Jail is not a place where you’re talking openly about your crimes.
But the supposed informant knows that anything helpful they bring forward to the prosecution will be beneficial to them. Jurors don’t know that, on the back end, the understanding is that the informant will be rewarded with a sentence reduction or tried on a lesser charge in exchange for their testimony.
So, when you put all those things together, the idea that this has a place in our system just doesn’t make sense to me. If you have a good case, you don’t need a jailhouse informant. When you see that a case has a jailhouse informant, it’s a red flag that something’s wrong with the case and that the evidence isn’t good enough.
HF: Something I find fascinating about this book is the way it traces the failures of a variety of American systems—whether it be the courts, the American military, the school system or law enforcement. What did writing this book teach you about the systems that govern the US?
PC: Skalnik, on his own, was just a small-time con artist. To cause all the damage he did, he had to be enabled by a larger system. That system was law enforcement, which wanted to close cases. It was prosecutors who wanted to secure convictions and get long sentences. It was judges who wanted to move cases through their docket and not ask the questions they should have asked.
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When you see all those things come together and understand that all those people in power benefited from what someone like Paul Skalnik provided them. So they looked the other way about all sorts of things, including crimes he committed that he was not held accountable for. I think we can see that, in the pursuit of justice, it’s sometimes possible to get lost in what real justice looks like.
In many of these cases, what prosecutors considered justice was getting a conviction, and it didn’t matter what the collateral damage was.
HF: You came up at a time when journalism was a very different industry. Print journalism was read at a higher rate, newsrooms across the country were growing, and a young person getting their start in journalism had a wide variety of avenues to choose from. What is your advice to those going into the field today?
PC: Oh my goodness. I mean, it’s such a completely different landscape than when I started. To be clear, even back in the 90s, everyone felt that this industry was dying. Pay was bad unless you had a Vanity Fair contract. There are a lot of problems that still existed then that are with us today.
Right now, while a lot of legacy organizations have disappeared, and you used to be able to go to newsstands with 100 different magazines on them, it does seem like there are so many different ways to get your voice out there, whether that’s going to work for an organization or whether it’s putting yourself out there on your own through things like Substack.
I think the challenge right now—especially for investigative work, which takes so much time and so many resources—is how to find a way to make enough money that you can spend many months or even a year on an investigation. My hope is that all of these news nonprofits that are popping up all over the country can do that investigative work. I don’t pretend to know the answer. I feel like I’m always holding my breath, but I have been since I started.
I think the thing that worries me the most is the attention economy we’re in today. I don’t know what narrative non-fiction looks like in 5 or 10 years. To me, storytelling is the way out of the problems of this attention economy. Deep, immersive storytelling with character-building and twisty plots. That’s what we’ve wanted since the dawn of time.
HF: You got your start in journalism during your time at Brown University. Can you tell us about your first scoop and the lessons or skills you learned as a college journalist that you used while writing this book?
PC: My first big scoop as a college journalist was a story about a fraternity on campus where there were allegations that women inside that fraternity house were being videotaped in the course of sexual acts. That reporting set a lot of things in motion. There were two lessons that came out of that—one good and one bad. The good one was that writing a story could cause change. Writing a story could make things happen beyond the pages of the newspaper for which I was writing. And that felt really exciting, you know? Things I was writing had the potential to cause change.
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I think the hard lesson was that the administration at that time, one dean in particular, was not supportive of muckraking investigative journalism. I think naively, I was really shocked by that because I went to a college that celebrated the liberal arts and inquiry. To see the institution try to protect itself rather than probing some of the questions I was asking was really disheartening. Discrediting me became a way to protect the institutional priorities.
At the time that that happened, an English professor of mine asked me to stay after class. I thought I was in trouble. But instead, she read me John Milton’s Areopagitica, which is a defense of the free press. She read it to me and said, “I just wanted you to hear that.”
HF: In this book, you write that there is a “Fundamental, irresistible human need to invest ourselves in narratives that we want to be true.” Do you believe prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the US truly believed Skalnik’s testimony, or was the truth second to their goal of convicting a defendant?
PC: I can’t say with certainty what was in their hearts and minds. I do think some people believed or wanted to believe what he was saying—especially early on, before the full scope of who Skalnik was was clear. I start the book by telling a story about how he got me to believe a story that wasn’t true. I did that intentionally because I think whenever you encounter a con man story, it’s easy to believe that you would never be so gullible as the people who fell for whatever the story is about.
I wanted to write about the fact that here I was, an investigative reporter, going to visit someone who I know is a career con artist and fabulist in federal prison. And still, when he promises that he has this incredible story to tell and that I’m the person to tell it before he dies and that he is going to entrust me with it and work with me and tell me all the details that he’s never told anybody else, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I very excitedly told my editor that I had this great story! Of course, he never intended to tell me anything, but he was very good at reading people, and he could see what I wanted and what was important to promise me.
I put that at the front of the book as a way of saying that, while I certainly think that law enforcement and prosecutors and judges should have been far more skeptical of him, I fell for that too.
That was also the impetus for the article and then the book. He’s not going to tell me anything, so I have to go find it all out myself.
HF: Your book touches on the women Paul Skalnik victimized outside of the courtroom. Ex-wives who were physically abused, women who were defrauded, and young girls Skalnik molested. What was your process in finding and gaining the trust of these women, and why did you find it important to include their stories in this book?
PC: To me, the people who are the most interesting were the people who were left in his wake. This is different from a con man story, where the focus is entirely on the con artist himself. To me, what was so fascinating was that these younger girls, teenagers in the 80s, saw through Skalnik when their mothers and others in authority didn’t. They had a radar for him.
The kind of damage that he did by gaining the girls’ trust and then exploiting them is important to recall because they had not necessarily been believed or treated well when they came forward with their own stories. They had not initially been believed. I think the most important and interesting reporting that I did was finding those girls, now grown women.
HF: There’s a cultural obsession and romanticization that Americans have with con men. Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort, Elizabeth Holmes. What is your book’s relationship to this longstanding obsession? And why do you think we gravitate so much to these kinds of characters?
PC: We often like to root for the underdog or the person who’s getting away with things. In so many con artist stories, we’re celebrating the con artist. We’re celebrating what they’re able to get away with. We’re rooting for them!
A lot of those stories can come off as victimless; they’re told more like capers. And I think it’s worth spending some time to think about the people who are left behind in these stories and whose story gets told and whose don’t.
For people who are ripped off of their life savings or people who are manipulated in various ways, the consequences can be so devastating.
So I tried with this book to turn that narrative on its head while also showing that the dark, crazy misadventures this man had are almost like fiction. It’s almost hard to believe what he did and what he got away with.
HF: Your book ends in an unexpected way. Following the epilogue and acknowledgments, you do what a lot of journalists would not: you list in rather great detail your reporting process for each chapter. Why did you decide to do this?
PC: It’s always what I want to know. When I read a great work of narrative non-fiction, I think, ‘wow, how did they get that?’ Whatever the great detail is, whatever the story is.
There are many books that have these exhaustive footnotes at the end of them. If you’re writing an academic work, obviously that’s very important. But when you’re writing something like this where you’re trying to reach a really wide cross-section of people, people who may never have thought about the criminal justice system in a critical way before, who are just interested in a good story, having a list of citations in the back doesn’t really do it justice.
It was so much work to unearth all of this. I’m proud of that work. Also, some of it’s so unbelievable that I want people to know that every sentence of the book is grounded in fact and has been exhaustively researched and fact-checked.
Some of my favorite narratives are those in which the reporter takes me along on their journey, and I do that in the last quarter of the book when I go into the first person. Patrick Radden Keefe does that really beautifully in his new book, London Falling, where he sort of sets everything up and then switches into the first person as he uncovers the answers. So, for anyone who wants to take the time to read the source notes of the book, there are a lot of little Easter eggs in there.
HF: Though you have been a journalist for decades, this is your first book. You’ve covered a number of fascinating topics: survivors of the first modern American school shooting, women on death row for killing their abusive spouses, the unreality of bloodstain analysis in forensic science. What about Paul Skalnik made him the right subject for your first book? And why, in a climate where long-form journalism is getting increasingly sidelined, did you choose to write this book at all?
PC: Paul Skalnik was the way into a world that I want people to think more deeply about. But through him, I could tell a really engaging, immersive and, at times, sort of rollicking story.
If the issues that I’m dealing with in the story didn’t have the benefit of character development and plot and storytelling, then it would just be a lot harder to not only reach readers but to get them to think deeply about these issues and react on an emotional level to them, which I want them to do.
It’s not that I haven’t thought about writing a book before, but this was the first time I could see a story where there was so much to build out. There was a whole world. There were all these characters. It had the sort of epic sweep that I think I was always waiting for for a book.
HF: In a PBS interview with your former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, you said “I’ve always been interested in what people do in the worst moments of their lives.” Why does this interest you, and has this interest evolved or changed as you wrote Catch The Devil?
PC: I typically write about the criminal justice system in one way or another. If you think about each person in that system—whether they’re victims of crimes, perpetrators, witnesses, investigators, or prosecutors— they are undergoing this sort of unimaginable stress test, right? Especially in a murder case, we’re talking about the highest stakes there are. In that stress test, some people make good choices, and some don’t.
That has always fascinated me narratively. One of the main characters of my book is a man named Jim Dailey who’s currently on Florida’s Death Row. And he’s been there since 1987. How do you keep living decade after decade, sitting in a windowless cell, knowing that you’re never going to get out? How do you find meaning? How do you find human connection? That’s always fascinated me.
Henry FernandezHenry Fernandez is a 2026 Puffin student writing fellow for The Nation. He is an Ed Bradley Journalism fellow and English major at Cornell University. His reporting has almost exclusively appeared in outlets located in places with terribly cold winters like VTDigger, The Connecticut Mirror, The New York Times and The Ithaca Voice.