Pamela Colloff

Peter Yang

PAMELA COLLOFF is a reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. She was the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2020 and for Feature Writing in 2013. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Reporting, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Colloff holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Brown University. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and their two children.

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Awards: Kirkus Prize finalist in 2026. The National Magazine Award in 2013 for Feature Writing and in 2020 for Reporting. Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism in 2013.

Book:

Catch the Devil

A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast
Current Issues / Politics / Social Science
Random House
July 2026
ISBN 9780593230862
Hardcover, 321 pages

The riveting, true story of an audacious con man who helped send another man to death row for a murder he did not commit. “Incendiary, emotionally devastating. [This] is a feat of dogged reporting, bravura storytelling, and clear-eyed moral conscience."—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and London Falling. For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises he married nine women—some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, as he invariably did, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. Then he peddled those stories to prosecutors. In Pinellas County, Florida, he became a frequent witness for the state, thinking nothing of exaggerating men’s wrongdoing or implicating the innocent to help prosecutors win convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, fueling his growing sense of invincibility. Soon he was not just committing fraud; he was preying on girls in their teens or barely into adolescence. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik’s account of his "confession" helped put Dailey on death row. Skalnik, meanwhile, walked free. More than three decades later, after another man took responsibility for the killing, Pamela Colloff, reporting for the New York Times Magazine and ProPublica, visited Skalnik and asked him if he would recant his testimony. He refused. By then, Skalnik had caused untold damage: to the women and girls he exploited, to the dozens of men he helped imprison, and to Jim Dailey, who went on to receive an execution date. In this mesmerizing debut, Pamela Colloff spins a dark tale of a remorseless and brilliant liar made lethal by a system more concerned with winning convictions than finding the truth. More/less