Catch the Devil

Chapter 1: Prologue

Overview

The prologue opens with the author’s first encounter with Paul Skalnik, a convicted con artist serving time in a Texas federal prison. All the author knows at this point comes from court records: Skalnik married nine times, ran small-time scams, and—most strikingly—became a star witness for the prosecution decades earlier, helping convict dozens of men based on their alleged confessions to him. Many of those men still sit in prison, one on death row, all insisting Skalnik fabricated their confessions. The author is drawn to the mystery: Was Skalnik lying, or were the convicts? Over a tense, hour-long visit inside the facility, Skalnik weeps, claims he’s dying of cancer, boasts of his fearsome reputation in Pinellas County, and promises to reveal his secrets—but only in person. The author leaves hopeful, only to eventually realize Skalnik has no intention of telling the truth.

A Prison Interview

The setting is a small visiting room in a redbrick penitentiary southeast of Dallas. The author expects a hardened criminal; instead, he meets a frail, obese man in a wheelchair, his complexion waxy and eyes impossibly sharp. Skalnik wastes no time: he pulls out a blood-stained rag from his waistband, claims it proves his late-stage colon cancer, and tearfully says he’s dying. It’s impossible to verify anything he says. He attributes his current imprisonment to a vendetta by an ex-lover’s daughter and a U.S. marshal. He boasts about offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and Abu Dhabi. Most significantly, he describes his past role as a star witness in Florida: “If I was on the witness list, people would take deals. I never lost a case—never ever.” He thumps the table, tears still fresh on his cheeks.

The Elusive Truth

Whenever the author presses Skalnik for specifics—like how he managed to extract confessions from so many inmates in a single jail—he dodges. He deflects, smiles, and assures the author that the real stories can only be shared during future visits. As time runs out, he tells the author to send questions by mail and promises to cooperate fully. “This is a story that needs to be told,” he says, “and I want to help you tell it.” The author leaves exhilarated.

The Slow Fade

Back home in Austin, the author throws himself into research: jail logs, trial transcripts, case files, writing long letters packed with questions. He reaches out via the prison email system. Skalnik responds frequently, but only about trivial aspects of prison life—the food, the boredom, his fear of dying alone. Never a single word about Pinellas County. Excuses pile up: the mailroom is short-staffed, he’s too sick to write, he’ll answer as soon as he feels better. The author refuses to admit the obvious until months later, when Skalnik finally admits the questions are making him uneasy and then stops communicating altogether. The prologue closes with the cold, quiet realization that Skalnik was never going to share the truth—only string the author along.

Key Takeaways

• The author’s initial impression of Skalnik is carefully curated, full of emotion and vague boasts that can’t be verified.
• Skalnik’s pattern of promising cooperation while evading specifics is a clear red flag, one the author only recognizes in hindsight.
• The central mystery—whether Skalnik’s confessions were real or fabricated—remains unresolved, setting up the investigation that will span the rest of the book.
• The prologue establishes Skalnik as an unreliable, skilled manipulator, making every future claim suspect.

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Chapter 2: Chapter 1: Skalnik

Overview

In the mid-1970s, Friendswood, Texas, was a quiet, dry town that seemed to hold out against the modern world—until Paul Skalnik arrived. This chapter introduces us to fourteen-year-old Lisa Rogers, a girl who preferred horses to people, and her mother Penny, a former teenage star on a Houston dance show who yearned for something more. When Skalnik walked into the funeral home where Penny worked, he brought with him the promise of a bigger life, built on expensive suits, gold chains, and grand stories. But beneath the surface, a different truth was waiting to surface, one that would eventually land Skalnik in a jail cell, dialing an old friend in the District Attorney's office.

Penny and the Stranger in a Three-Piece Suit

Penny Rogers had been through enough heartbreak by 1977—three failed marriages, the death of her twin sister—to know better than to fall for a man with a polished line. But Skalnik was a master of persuasion. At twenty-seven, six years her junior, he spoke with the confidence of someone who had already conquered the world, telling her he was a top executive at Southwest Airlines, the upstart carrier famous for hot pants and go-go boots. Their courtship was whirlwind: a weekend in Las Vegas, and Penny was Mrs. Skalnik.

Lisa, watching from the sidelines, saw something her mother missed. There was a restlessness to Skalnik, a need to fill every silence with stories of his own brilliance. He carried a business-sized checkbook and bought fur coats, microwave ovens, and a customized van with red velvet curtains. But he also filched hotel towels and kept a handgun under the driver's seat. And when he pointed out his parents' small, sun-bleached house in League City, the contrast between his grand tales and that shabby yard gave Lisa her first flicker of doubt.

The Man Who Was Always Performing

Skalnik told magnificent stories. He had helped the University of Texas win a national football championship before a knee injury ended his career—and he flashed his jumbo-sized ring to prove it. He promised a family trip to New York on a Learjet he had commandeered. When the jet failed to appear, Lisa watched him pace an empty hangar, shouting into a phone, waving his arms in what she suddenly recognized as a pantomime of fury. She began to wonder if anyone was on the other end of the line.

At home, Skalnik's mask slipped further. He walked around in nothing but his white Jockey briefs, drinking heavily, flying into rages over small slights. Penny emerged from their bedroom with black eyes. And once, when Lisa was in the shower, she felt his gaze and heard the click of the bathroom door. He tried to buy her loyalty with a gold watch inlaid with diamonds. She asked if it was real. He grinned. "Looks real to me."

Letters from Bill Collectors

By January of 1978, the cracks in Skalnik's empire were papered in typewritten letters. Amco Jewelry Company demanded $1,879 for bounced checks. Oshman's Sporting Goods wrote about an unpaid $1,307 bill. More letters followed—from banks, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a men's clothier. Skalnik kept his suit on and his briefcase in hand, heading out the door each morning as if nothing were wrong, but the pressure was eating him alive. Then one day in spring, he simply didn't come back. Weeks passed, then a month. Penny offered no explanation, and the household slowly exhaled.

A Phone Call to an Old Friend

Kenny Rodgers was an investigator in the Harris County District Attorney's Special Crimes Bureau, a hidden office reached through an unmarked sliding glass door. When the phone rang, he answered with the cover name "Austin Street and Bridge Company." The voice on the other end was familiar, even after a decade: Paul Skalnik, calling from the Harris County Jail.

They had met in 1968 as first-year cadets at the New Mexico Military Institute. Rodgers remembered Skalnik as a model cadet who won favor with the brass—but also as a lazy student who faked a neck injury to get out of his Marine contract. Rodgers had always ribbed him: "You're nothing but a big old pussy." Now Skalnik was asking for help. "I've got something to tell you," he said. "Something that will interest you." A case the DA's office had to win. One of the highest-profile criminal investigations in Houston.

Key Takeaways

• Lisa Rogers emerges as a perceptive, quiet observer who sees through Skalnik's performance from the beginning.
• Skalnik is built as a figure of extravagant deception—grand promises, questionable origins, and a growing pattern of lies and abuse.
• Penny's longing for a brighter life makes her vulnerable to a man who offers only the illusion of it.
• The chapter ends on a cliffhanger: Skalnik in jail, promising information on a major case, setting up the investigation to come.

Chapter 3: Chapter 2: Fool Me Once

Overview

The killing of José Campos Torres on a muggy spring night in 1977 set off a chain of events that would test Houston’s tolerance for police violence and expose the cynical machinery of its justice system. Torres, a twenty-three-year-old Army veteran, was celebrating Cinco de Mayo at a small East End bar when a minor scuffle escalated into a fatal encounter with three officers. Instead of taking him to jail, they drove him to a secluded spot on the bayou known as the Hole, where they beat him for hours and finally pushed him off an embankment with a taunt about his ability to swim. His body surfaced three days later, bruised from head to shin.

The public outrage was immediate, but accountability proved elusive. An all-white jury convicted two officers only of negligent homicide—a misdemeanor that earned them probation. When federal civil rights charges followed, a sympathetic judge sentenced each to just one year. The gap between the crime and the punishment festered, and exactly one year later, at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Moody Park, the grief and anger boiled over. Thousands of people chanted Torres’s name as they looted shops, overturned squad cars, and clashed with riot police. Fifteen people were hospitalized, dozens arrested.

Rather than confront the decades of racism and impunity that had sparked the unrest, city leaders blamed “outside agitators.” Three young activists—Thomas Hirschi, Travis Morales, and Mara Youngdahl—were charged with inciting the riot, facing up to twenty years each. That was nineteen more years than any officer would serve for killing José Campos Torres.

The Unlikely Informant

While the Moody Park Three awaited trial in the Harris County Jail, they shared the sixth floor with a man named Paul Skalnik. A former police officer turned con man, Skalnik had landed behind bars on hot-check charges. The DA’s office had a problem: their case against the three activists was thin on evidence and heavy on ideological posturing. They needed a witness who could supply premeditation and conspiracy. Skalnik, with his quick tongue and jailhouse access, seemed like the answer.

Kenny Rodgers, an investigator for the DA’s office, had known Skalnik from the streets. When Skalnik called to say he’d gotten Hirschi talking, Rodgers saw an opportunity. He began signing Skalnik out of protective custody most mornings, driving him to the Special Crimes office in an unmarked car. There, Skalnik would sit with prosecutors, reading from a small spiral notebook filled with notes about conversations he claimed to have had. In return, he got air conditioning, fresh coffee, and the freedom to move around the city.

The deal was sweet: Skalnik would plead no contest to his theft charge and receive ninety days—time already served. Prosecutors even delayed his extradition to Florida, where he faced probation violation. Rodgers became his handler, a job he approached with the pragmatic tolerance of someone who grew up around bookmakers and small-time hustlers.

The Trial and the Testimony

By the time the trial began in spring 1979, Skalnik had been living in the free world for months. On the stand, he delivered exactly what the state needed. He claimed Hirschi had confessed that the real leader was Morales, who planned to get Mexican American youngsters drunk and supply a truckload of rocks and bricks to throw at police. The testimony was specific, damning, and entirely fabricated.

Hirschi watched in disbelief. He had never spoken to this man. He knew people lied in court—he expected law enforcement to stretch the truth—but to see it happen so effortlessly, with three lives hanging in the balance, left him stunned. The jury convicted all three. Morales and Youngdahl received felony convictions; Hirschi escaped with a misdemeanor. Prosecutors called it a symbolic victory. Rodgers told Skalnik he did a fine job.

The Strings Unravel

Skalnik’s reward was continued freedom. Instead of shipping him to Florida, the DA’s office let him stay in Texas, telling Orlando authorities they might need him for another capital murder case. Rodgers was tasked with keeping him busy and out of trouble. He offered Skalnik odd jobs at his beach house in Matagorda—cutting grass, replacing pipes. It seemed like a manageable arrangement.

But Skalnik couldn’t help himself. Within weeks, Rodgers discovered that Skalnik had moved into the beach house, stolen his deck chairs, and used a credit card he’d lifted from a college fraternity brother to buy a television. The charge slip bore Skalnik’s own signature. When Rodgers called the Matagorda County Sheriff’s Office, deputies found Skalnik at the beach house, wearing Rodgers’s clothes and clutching his paperback. “Why the handcuffs, Kenny?” Skalnik asked, as if the whole affair were a misunderstanding.

The Women Left Behind

Skalnik’s trail of damage extended far beyond the courtroom. During his time in Houston, he had reconnected with his ex-wife, Penny, who had remarried and built a stable life. He drained her checking account, plundered her savings, wrecked her credit, and became violent and controlling. Her daughter, Lisa, spent weeks driving through nearby towns in her grandmother’s Cadillac, desperate for any sign that her mother was still alive.

When Skalnik was arrested at the beach house, Penny was there, holding a small terrier, seemingly dazed. Rodgers asked her a few questions but didn’t probe further. Domestic violence was still seen as a private matter, and marital rape wasn’t a crime in Texas. Penny later told her daughter that Skalnik had told her she could never leave him. It took the help of a psychiatrist to free herself from his grip. Even after the arrest, she wrote a letter to the judge in his probation case, asking for mercy. “He is a good person,” she wrote.

Skalnik served only a few months in Florida before work release and then freedom. He left no forwarding address, and Penny had to publish legal notices in the newspaper to finalize the divorce.

Key Takeaways

• The killing of José Campos Torres and the subsequent Moody Park riot exposed the deep failure of Houston’s justice system to hold police accountable for violence against people of color.
• The DA’s office used a convicted con man and former officer, Paul Skalnik, as a jailhouse informant to secure convictions against activists, prioritizing symbolic victories over evidence.
• Skalnik’s testimony was entirely fabricated, yet it worked—the Moody Park Three were convicted.
• The system’s willingness to reward and protect a repeat offender like Skalnik, while ignoring the domestic abuse and financial ruin he inflicted, reveals how easily justice can be bent to serve power.
• The women in Skalnik’s life—his daughter and ex-wife—were left to pick up the pieces with no institutional support, a stark reminder of how the legal system failed those most vulnerable to its abuses.

Chapter 4: Chapter 3: Sunshine State

Overview

The early Spanish explorers who reached Florida's western coast, what is now Pinellas County, came searching for treasure but found only primeval forest and barrier islands with bone-white sand. It wasn't until a railway line connected the peninsula to the mainland in 1887 that the area finally delivered on its long-imagined riches. Tourism and citrus farming gave rise to St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and by the mid-twentieth century, an influx of retirees and WWII veterans fueled a population boom that swallowed up ancient pine forests and orange groves. This was a land of new beginnings, drawing northerners fleeing winters, southerners out of options, and anyone seeking a better life—including Scientologists and, more importantly, Paul Skalnik.

Skalnik arrived in the spring of 1980 for his fourth wedding, marrying a trusting young evangelical named Suzanne Bourdeau. He presented himself as a devout Christian and claimed to have been accepted into law school, leaving Suzanne to support them while he supposedly studied. But the truth was far different. In May 1981, Suzanne received a call from the city jail: Skalnik had been charged with grand theft. He had been having an affair with a local dietitian, presenting her with a fake diamond ring and defrauding her of thousands under the guise of being a successful out-of-town lawyer. The story made the local paper under the headline "False Promise, Fake Diamond, Phony Practice—Real Trouble." Suzanne, blindsided and devastated, bailed him out, but Skalnik soon violated his bail by leaving the county, landing him back in custody to await trial.

Inside the Pinellas County Jail, Skalnik saw an opportunity. Working in the law library, he positioned himself as a helpful adviser to less savvy inmates, gaining access to their legal documents and news coverage of their cases. Within a summer, he claimed to have extracted confessions from three different men charged with murder. Prosecutors, despite the obvious parallels to published reports, eagerly accepted his information. They offered him a deal: plead guilty to grand theft, and they'd recommend no more than three years—then left open the possibility of even sweeter terms if he cooperated further. Skalnik took the plea and went back to work, soon coming forward with information on a fourth defendant in a high-profile drug trafficking case. His testimony helped secure a guilty verdict and a fifteen-year sentence. He then tried to discredit an insanity defense for a man accused of bludgeoning his grandfather, claiming the defendant was faking mental illness—despite evidence in the state attorney's own files showing a history of psychiatric problems. The defendant's lawyer warned the court that Skalnik was lying, but prosecutors put him on the witness list in yet another drug trafficking trial.

For all this, Skalnik was amply rewarded. At his sentencing hearing in June 1982, the prosecutor who had used his testimony rose to speak on his behalf, claiming the state attorney's office could not have successfully prosecuted at least three defendants without him. The judge, despite Skalnik's history of fleeing probation and racking up seven criminal charges, gave him the lightest possible penalty: probation. Suzanne, heartened by the judge's faith in her husband, tried to rebuild their marriage. Two detectives helped secure Skalnik a job with a private investigator, and he began working leads around town. On a warm evening, sitting outside with his new boss's brother, Skalnik entertained them with wild stories, laughing under a sky streaked with pink and tangerine. Whatever he wanted, it seemed, was his for the taking.

Key Takeaways

• Skalnik's pattern of fraud extended seamlessly into the legal system, where he traded dubious jailhouse confessions for leniency, exposing how easily informants can manipulate prosecutors.
• The state attorney's office appeared willing to overlook Skalnik's documented dishonesty when his testimony served their cases, raising serious questions about the reliability of jailhouse snitches.
• The chapter underscores how Florida's promise of reinvention attracted not only honest dreamers but also predators like Skalnik, who exploited the system's trust and openness for personal gain.