How Pamela Colloff wrote her first book, about a con artist turned jailhouse informant

 I’d been looking for a jailhouse snitch story for a long time. Whenever I would see cases that had a jailhouse snitch, it was a red flag that something was really wrong. If you have the evidence you need in a case, you don’t need a guy from the jail to come over and tell a story.

So that sort of began this journey, and I ended up visiting Paul Skalnik, who was the jailhouse informant, who at the time was in federal prison. He had led this very colorful life. He was a con artist with a long rap sheet, and he’d been married nine times — nine different women, some at the same time.

He told me that he would tell me everything. He conned me. I realized that he was not going to tell me anything, and that was the impetus for both the article and then later the book. 

[Skalnik] liked young teenage girls, and one of the most awful things to come out of all of this is that in exchange for his testimony, prosecutors let him go free. That allowed him to go back out there and commit crimes, and that included the sexual assault of two girls. … a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old. In the 12-year-old case, Karen Parker’s story was sort of the heart of the book. What I found so compelling about Karen is she was expendable at the time to police and prosecutors.

She reported that he had assaulted her, but he was such a valuable witness at the time that the quickest way I can explain it is that the state attorney’s office in Clearwater sort of made that case go away and basically found her to be not a trustworthy witness. And that was back in 1982 and ’83.

So when I tracked her down in 2019, and I, of course, believed her, I had to piece together from different police reports what had happened at the time. Just to give you a sense of things, there was not only her statement, but her polygraph examination — I should note that a 12-year-old girl was given a polygraph examination while Skalnik, a grown man, was not. I think that speaks volumes.

I always imagine that other writers have it all figured out when they do anything, including sitting down to write a book. Of course, I had a lengthy book proposal, I had an outline that my book editor had approved, I had a game plan.

As so often happens, it all looked good on paper, but there were years, really, of changing the structure, recalibrating what the storytelling was. One of the tricky things about this book is it really tells the story of two men, with other people woven in.

But there’s Paul Skalnik, the snitch, and then there’s Jim Dailey, who’s on Florida’s death row, mostly on the word of Paul Skalnik. So how do you balance how much of each person’s story there is? Who do you lead with? When do you come back to them?

One of the things that I realized writing a book is … you’re asking so much more of a reader. You’re asking so much more of their time and their attention. I tried to make this book both very rich and immersive, but also a quick read because I kept thinking of someone like me. I’ve got my job, I’ve got my book, I’ve got my kids, I’ve got a lot going on. 

It’s the same thing with a magazine story, but I’m trying to write every sentence so you can’t turn away. Most stories at the Times Magazine are read on your phone. And when you’re looking at your phone, all this information is constantly coming in, right? The notifications and the texts. And so I’m always trying to write in such a way that you’re swiping those away and that you keep reading. It is a really high-stakes way of writing.

 I come from a tradition, first at Texas Monthly, now at The New York Times Magazine, where you have to annotate every sentence that you write, and I don’t think readers know that, but you cannot get anything into print literally without every sentence leading back to a document or a person or both.

So that’s how I approached the book, and I caught plenty of things, big and small, as always happens. It’s so overwhelming with a book, but you have to because it’s immortalized. You can’t make that change later on the website. I always think of something that my friend Maurice Chammah, who’s at The Marshall Project, talks about.

We always talk about that horrible feeling right before you publish, and he calls it “the error terrors.” And I love that term so much. Publishing a book is just like having the error terrors for years. 

I tried to make it as bulletproof as possible. I also sent what I call “no surprises” letters to some of the key sources. This is something that I learned when I started at ProPublica, and I think that tradition originally came from folks there who had come from The Wall Street Journal.

But essentially the idea is that you write a letter to sources who are in the book who have not spoken to you, or who you tell difficult truths about. And so what that letter does is it lays out everything that’s in the book.