Catch the Devil - An Evening with Pamela Colloff

The riveting, true story of an audacious con man in Pinellas County who helped send another man to death row for a murder he did not commit Colloff and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gilbert King will be in conversation about a con man's story that takes place right here in Pinellas County! The event will take place at Coastal Creative located across the street from the bookstore at 2201 1st Ave S, St. Petersburg, FL 33712. Coastal Creative will have refreshments for sale. Launch Event Two Guests - $42 ticket includes admission to the event for you and one guest and one copy of Catch the Devil. Launch Event Single Guest - $37 ticket includes one admission to the event and one copy of Catch the Devil. More about Catch the Devil 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. 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. Gilbert King is the writer, producer, and host of Bone Valley, a narrative podcast about murder and injustice in 1980s central Florida, from Lava For Good podcasts. He is the author of three books, including Devil in the Grove, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A New York Times bestseller, the book was also named runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic, and he was a 2019-2020 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3679200-0

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