About this Event
BookPeople in partnership with welcomes Pamela Colloff and Rachel Monroe to celebrate Catch the Devil!
This event is free and open to the public.
- Start time: 7:00 P.M.
- Run time: 45-60 minutes, followed by a signing line.
- Location: The second floor of BookPeople.
The author will be signing and personalizing copies of the book after the speaking portion of the event.
- To get a book signed, a copy of the event book or an item of equal value must be purchased from BookPeople.
- For high volume events, post-talk signing lines can become very long. For such events, we recommend arriving and checking in to the event early as that will get you into an earlier signing group.
Guidelines:
- Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis and is not guaranteed.
- If you have any accessibility concerns regarding seating, please contact [email protected]
- If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ. If your question isn't covered in the FAQ, feel free to email us at [email protected].
- All event guidelines are subject to change.
- BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary.
- There will not be a live stream or recording available.
About the book:
The riveting true story of an audacious con man weaponized by the justice system who destroys dozens of lives and puts a man on death row for a M**der he didn’t 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 M**der of a fourteen-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County J*il 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.
About the author:
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 The Best American Magazine Writing, The 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.
About the moderator:
Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and the author of Savage Appetites (Scribner, 2019), which was named a New York Times Editor's Choice and a best book of the year by Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, and Jezebel. Her work has appeared in the Best American Travel Writing, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Texas Monthly, Wired, and many others.
By purchasing a book from BookPeople, you are not only supporting a local, independent business – you’re showing publishers that they should continue sending authors to BookPeople.
Thank you for supporting Pamela Colloff, Rachel Monroe, Texas Book Festival, and your local independent bookstore!
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
BookPeople, 603 North Lamar Boulevard, Austin, United States
USD 0.00
