by Sid Holt
Skalnik had been let loose on the world again.
* * *
In 1991, Misty Anderson was living with her mother and two younger sisters in Friendswood, Texas—the same town where Skalnik passed himself off as an airline executive in the late 1970s. Her mother, who declined to be interviewed for this article and whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy, wed Skalnik after a short courtship; she did not know that he was already married, much less that she was his eighth wife. (Skalnik married his seventh wife shortly after his release from prison.) Masquerading as a prosperous real estate developer, Skalnik lavished Anderson’s mother with gifts: big bouquets of roses, jewelry, even a used Jaguar. He also began sowing division between her and her eldest daughter.
In his campaign to undermine the fifteen-year-old, who disliked him from the start, Skalnik accused her of stealing the engagement ring he had given her mother—a ring whose glittering gemstone, he said, was a seven-carat diamond. Anderson, whose most fervent wish was for her parents to get back together, saw Skalnik as an interloper, and a calculating and tacky one at that. She was stunned when he accused her of stealing the ring, which she suspected was actually set with a cubic zirconium. “He said I’d taken it,” she told me. “He set me up.”
As punishment, Skalnik grounded Anderson, insisting that she could be reformed only through a punishing regimen that he ordered her to carry out over her summer vacation, when temperatures soared into the nineties. “Every day I had to dig holes in the ground along our fence line, under the hot sun, with no water,” Anderson told me. “I was not allowed to shower, not allowed to brush my teeth. I was only allowed to eat once a day. I would get so faint that I would see stars.” When Skalnik permitted her to come inside, she had to stay in her room, shut off from the rest of the world. Only after a month of isolation, when she was at her most desperate and vulnerable, did Skalnik offer her a way out. “He came in my bedroom and said, ‘I have an idea that’s going to make things better between us,’ ” she said.
Anderson did not speak a word about the sexual abuse that followed—“I didn’t think anyone would believe me,” she explained—until late that summer, when she summoned the courage to confide in a family friend. “She told me that she had to report the abuse, and that’s how it all started,” Anderson said. The spell Skalnik seemed to have cast over her mother was, in an instant, broken. “As soon as my mother heard what he’d been doing, she called the police,” Anderson said. Skalnik was arrested and charged with sexual assault of a child.
In the eyes of the law, Skalnik was a first-time sex offender. “With a prior conviction for sexual assault of a child, he would have been looking at 25 years to life,” said Margaret Hindman, the former assistant district attorney in Galveston County who prosecuted him. Instead, he faced two to twenty years. Still, Hindman pursued him with a vigor that Pinellas County prosecutors had not. She was astonished when I told her of Skalnik’s long run as a state witness. “This guy clearly was grandiose, delusional, and had narcissistic-personality disorder,” she said. “He boasted that he was with the FBI, that he was with the CIA, and none of it checked out. It’s hard to believe prosecutors relied on him.”
Skalnik professed his innocence, but he pleaded no contest in exchange for a ten-year prison sentence—a deal that was not as harsh as Anderson would have liked, though it spared her from having to endure a trial. She was in college when Skalnik first came up for parole, and she wrote to the parole board’s members, urging them not to grant him early release, and they abided by her wishes.
In 2002, he was released after serving a decade in prison. Rather than register as a sex offender, as he was required to do by law, he simply disappeared. He was arrested the following year in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, for larceny and forgery after he stole thousands of dollars from unsuspecting clients who had hired him under the false belief that he was an attorney. He pleaded guilty and served time in state prison, then fled the state around 2009 after repeatedly violating the terms of his probation.
He managed to live under the radar for the next six years in East Texas, where he went by the name E. Paul Smith. Claiming to be an attorney, an undercover Homeland Security agent, an ex-fighter pilot who had been shot down over Vietnam, and a terminally ill cancer patient, he worked a variety of small-time scams. “He was writing up people’s wills, and doing legal work for them, and investing their money, though no one ever saw any returns,” said Shirley Saathoff, a retired U.S. Marshals senior inspector who began investigating Skalnik in the summer of 2015 after the daughter of one of his love interests figured out his real name and looked up his criminal record. “He hurt and used a lot of women,” Saathoff added. Everything, even his wedding to a woman named Judy Smith, who would have been his ninth wife, turned out to be a sham, down to the phony marriage license he had her date and sign. (She is now Judy Beaty.) “Paul put just enough truth into a lie to make you believe it,” she told me.
When law enforcement finally caught up with him that October and arrested him for failing to register as a sex offender, he had over thirty fake IDs in his possession—as well as a framed law-school diploma, a legal dictionary embossed with the words E. PAUL SMITH, ESQ., ATTORNEY AT LAW, and a handgun. After he was arrested, he asked to speak to law enforcement. “He wanted to cut a deal,” James Ferris, an investigator with the Panola County Sheriff’s Department, told me one morning in his tidy office in Carthage, Texas. “He started telling me that he could be useful inside the jail, and I told him I was not interested in speaking with him further.” Ferris was emphatic about why he wouldn’t want to work with Skalnik. “I would never be able to say on the stand that I believed the information he gave me was true and credible.”
* * *
As James Dailey’s appeals slowly advanced through the courts, his attorneys at the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel—a state agency that represents indigent death-row inmates—argued that the state had, by putting Skalnik on the stand, used false testimony to convict him. To prove it, they pointed to the claims Skalnik himself made in 1988, when he accused prosecutors of knowing that the confessions he recounted were highly suspect and of concealing from juries the rewards he was given for his testimony. But the courts were indifferent. In a 2007 opinion, the Florida Supreme Court noted that Skalnik’s claims of prosecutorial misconduct had never been substantiated. “Skalnik disavowed the accusations,” read the opinion, and “unequivocally stated that they were false.” The court also accepted the government’s assurances that prosecutors had not engaged in wrongdoing. “The prosecutor in Dailey’s case also testified that she believed Skalnik’s testimony to be truthful at the time of trial,” its justices wrote in their opinion. And with that, any hope of challenging the veracity of Skalnik’s testimony effectively came to an end.
Eight years later, in 2015, the Florida Commission on Offender Review declined to recommend Dailey’s case for a clemency hearing. By then, Dailey and another man, J. D. Walton, were the only people Skalnik testified against who remained on death row. Dailey’s prospects looked grim; after several rounds of appeals, the inexorable fact of his execution loomed.
The following year, a new attorney at the CCRC, Chelsea Shirley, started digging into his case. Shirley, who was less than three years out of law school, brought fresh eyes and indefatigable energy to the decades-long case file and the effort to win Dailey a new trial. At twenty-seven, she was younger than the case itself.
As Shirley read the numerous accounts that Dailey’s codefendant, Jack Pearcy, had given about the night of the crime, she saw nothing to suggest that her client had actually taken part in the murder. “Through the years, Pearcy suggested—but never explicitly said—that he committed this crime by himself,” Shirley told me. She was particularly struck by a sworn statement he made to Dailey’s attorneys in 1993. In it, Pearcy divulged that he had been alone with Boggio in the early-morning hours of May 6, 1985, making him the last known person to see her ali
ve; he did not say what happened to Boggio, only that he returned home alone. “I went in, got Jim up,” Pearcy said of Dailey. “I told him, ‘Come on, let’s go smoke a couple joints, drink a beer or something.’ ” He and Dailey then drove to a nearby causeway, he said, and began tossing a Frisbee around. “He ended up going out in the water,” Pearcy said, “while we was playing Frisbee. We drank beer, we smoked a couple of joints.” His account provided an explanation for why Dailey’s jeans were wet when the two men returned home. It was the same story Dailey had told his attorneys before his own trial—a story they warned him sounded too far-fetched to repeat to a jury.
On April 20, 2017, Shirley drove to Sumter Correctional Institution in Bushnell, Florida, an hour north of Tampa, to see Pearcy. She was still in the early stages of her investigation; she did not yet know that she would interview two men who had been incarcerated with Pearcy at different times, who would tell her that Pearcy told them Dailey had nothing to do with the murder. Shirley went to see Pearcy only with the hope that he might be ready, after thirty years, to talk.
Pearcy, a compact, muscular man with penetrating blue eyes, did not seem surprised that she had come to visit him, and he agreed to meet with her. She began by reviewing several previous accounts he had given of the hours surrounding Boggio’s murder, in which he suggested that Dailey was at home when he and the teenager headed out into the night. Pearcy listened and nodded along. Finally he asked if he could look at a document she had placed on the table between them; it was an affidavit she had prepared that summarized his previous statements, but it concluded with a declaration that went one step further. “James Dailey was not present when Shelly Boggio was killed,” it read. “I alone am responsible for Shelly Boggio’s death.”
Pearcy read the affidavit line by line, and when he finally spoke, his voice was devoid of emotion. “If you can give me a pen, I’ll sign it,” he told Shirley. He said that he would be willing to testify in court to attest to the accuracy of the affidavit; he just wanted to tell his mother first, he said, to prepare her. It was an astounding admission—and it was enough, Shirley hoped, to win her client a new trial.
Pearcy’s affidavit helped persuade a judge to grant an evidentiary hearing, which was held on January 3, 2018. Shirley brought some additional legal firepower. Laura Fernandez, a clinical lecturer and research scholar at Yale Law School, had recently joined Dailey’s legal team. She—along with her colleague Cyd Oppenheimer, also a Yale-trained lawyer—would become a driving force in the effort to overturn Dailey’s conviction. But when Pearcy was called to the stand, he had a change of heart. He explained that he had spoken to someone with the state—he did not specify whom—and was worried about how his testimony could affect his chances for parole. “I spoke with all my family, and they told me I needed to do what I thought was right, but that I needed to not make a rash decision, since my parole just got denied for seven years,” he said. His family had advised him, he said, to “think about what I was doing.” When questioned about the truthfulness of his affidavit, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The judge denied Dailey’s bid for a new trial.
Dailey’s lawyers appealed the decision to the Florida Supreme Court, citing information they had uncovered that, they argued, warranted a new trial. This included revelations about the other two jailhouse informants, Pablo DeJesus and James Leitner, who testified against Dailey in 1987. Travis Smith, who was incarcerated at the Pinellas County Jail at the same time as the two informants, testified at the evidentiary hearing that he heard them concoct a fictitious story about Dailey, which they planned to take to prosecutors so they could win reduced sentences. (Pablo DeJesus died in 2012; Leitner has never publicly recanted his testimony.) The state attorney’s office’s records reflect that DeJesus and Leitner—who told jurors they would receive no reward for their testimony—haggled with prosecutors for reduced sentences in the months leading up to Dailey’s trial, a benefit they were each granted after his conviction.
But Florida’s highest criminal court was unmoved, finding that Smith’s account, and other evidence Dailey’s lawyers presented, including proof that Skalnik misrepresented his criminal record at Dailey’s trial, had come to light too late. “Dailey neglects to explain why this information could not have been discovered earlier,” the court stated in an opinion on October 3—in essence blaming Dailey’s lawyers for not uncovering facts that prosecutors had spent years obfuscating.
It was the end of the road for Dailey. A week earlier, Gov. Ron DeSantis had signed his death warrant. “This was one of the most gruesome crimes in the history of Pinellas County,” DeSantis, a native of the county who grew up just north of Clearwater, later told reporters. “This has been litigated over and over and over, and so at some point you need to do justice.” The day and time of Dailey’s death was set: His execution was to be carried out on November 7 at six p.m.
* * *
Earlier this fall, I went to see Skalnik in a nursing home in the East Texas town of Corsicana. I found him alone in a drab, cluttered room where the blinds were drawn and a television was on low. He had been released from prison in June, after having romanced the mother of another inmate, persuading her to fill his commissary account each week. He lay in bed, shirtless, his thinning gray hair uncombed. Even flat on his back, he cut a shockingly large, Falstaffian figure. He was bedridden and ill—though with what, he did not say. Every so often, nurses turned him so that he did not develop bedsores, and he sometimes grimaced in pain as he spoke. “I think I’m going to die,” he whispered.
During the afternoon I spent with him, and on a subsequent visit, it became clear that the last person who could provide a deeper understanding of Paul Skalnik was Skalnik himself. He was a master of misdirection, sidestepping hard questions while portraying himself as the unfairly maligned hero of a story that featured a supporting cast of cunning and vindictive women who were after his riches. Of both charges of child molestation, he insisted that he had been wrongly accused, a victim of girls who lied to the authorities.
As we talked, I eyed his tattoos. His right shoulder was emblazoned with United States Marines iconography and his left shoulder bore the words “From Texas to Vietnam.” Skalnik told me that the scar on his right knee was a result of being shot down over Laos when he fought in the Vietnam War. In fact, his available military records show that he was never on combat duty and never served overseas.
He insisted that his testimony in Dailey’s trial, and in the many other cases he played a role in, had been truthful. “I never lied on the stand,” he told me. “At least to the best of my knowledge.” When I told him of Dailey’s impending execution, he was unmoved. But he seemed surprised when I mentioned that Freddie Gaines—the twenty-four-year-old who stabbed his girlfriend’s ex-lover in a bar brawl—was still in prison, thirty-six years later. “I think that was a crime of passion,” Skalnik said. “He doesn’t need life,” he added, of Gaines’s sentence. “I’d give him ten and let him go home.”
When I reminded Skalnik that he was the witness whose testimony established premeditation at Gaines’s trial, he appeared shocked. “This was your testimony, that he had planned this,” I reminded him. “Does that ring true to you? Do you think he told you that?”
“No!” Skalnik cried. “No.” He shook his head resolutely. But when I later tried to return to his apparent recantation, his tone shifted. There is no statute of limitations on perjury in Florida in capital felony cases, and Skalnik was reluctant to reverse himself. “I won’t retract what I said,” he told me. “Whatever I testified to was fact.”
Proudly, he told me more than once, “I never lost a case.”
A week later, I went to Florida State Prison in Raiford, west of Jacksonville, to interview Dailey. He had recently caught an unexpected break. On October 23, a Federal District Court judge granted him a limited stay of execution, to provide his newly appointed federal attorneys more time to research and present their appeals.
Though Dailey had been granted a stay, it was clear that what lay ahead weighed heavily upon him. He had been convicted in the era of Old Sparky, the straight-backed oak chair in which 240 prisoners went to their deaths before 2000, when the Florida Legislature made lethal injection the preferred method of execution. As Dailey passed days and then weeks in the death house, he experienced another, different kind of torment: the anticipation of waiting. His cell was just thirty feet from the execution chamber. At the time of our interview, he had already been measured for his state-issued burial suit.
After more than three decades in prison, Dailey seemed even-tempered, agreeable, even acquiescent. A lieutenant at the prison would later take me aside to tell me that Dailey’s disciplinary record was almost nonexistent—a feat for anyone who has been incarcerated for so long.
I asked Dailey about an observation his mother made when she testified during the penalty phase of his trial, hoping to persuade the jury to show him mercy. “I sent two lovely young men to the air force and marines,” she said of Dailey and one of his brothers, “and they came back, and they were different boys.” Dailey closed his eyes at the memory. “I was messed up,” he said. He explained that he was sent to Bien Hoa, an air base northeast of Saigon, in 1968 during the Tet Offensive; after rocket attacks hit the base, he and other soldiers assisted the injured—men whose limbs had been blown off, their faces ravaged, who drifted between life and death. “I wasn’t built for that,” he told me. “I started drinking real bad.” To sleep, he had to finish as much as a fifth of alcohol. After three tours in Vietnam, he found no relief when he returned home. He sank into addiction and became, he told me, “a vagabond.”