by Sid Holt
He had worked the case for the past year and a half, ever since the body of a fourteen-year-old girl named Shelly Boggio was found, nude, floating in an inland waterway near the town of Indian Rocks Beach. Her murder was singular in its violence. Her body bore thirty-one stab wounds, many of them to her hands, as if she had tried to shield herself from the ferocity of the attack. She was most likely still alive, the medical examiner determined, when she was dragged into the water and left to drown. Her older sister identified her by the silver ring, eagle-shaped and inset with turquoise, that she wore on her left hand.
The crime scene yielded few clues. No murder weapon was left behind, and no fingerprints or other forensic evidence were recovered. If Boggio was sexually assaulted, the medical examiner found, any trace of sperm may have been washed away during her time in the water. “It was one of Pinellas County’s cruelest murders,” the St. Petersburg Times observed, “and there was little evidence.”
Halliday’s investigation quickly zeroed in on two men, Jack Pearcy and James Dailey, who lived together and were new to Pinellas County. The facts, what few there were, pointed overwhelmingly to Pearcy, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker with a history of arrests for violence against women. Pearcy pursued the teenager before her death, and Pearcy picked her up on the last afternoon of her life, when she was thumbing a ride with her twin sister and a friend. The girls spent the afternoon and evening with Pearcy, Dailey, and other housemates, drinking wine coolers and smoking marijuana. After the other two girls went home, Pearcy took Boggio to a beachfront bar, where she was last seen, barefoot and disheveled, around midnight.
Pearcy acknowledged that he drove her to the lovers’ lane along the Intracoastal Waterway where she was killed. But he tried to shift blame to Dailey, claiming that he picked up his housemate before he and Boggio headed down to the water. And while Pearcy admitted to the police that he stabbed Boggio at least once, and he provided details about the crime that were known only to investigators, he insisted that it was Dailey who was the actual killer.
This was all that connected Dailey, a thirty-eight-year-old itinerant Vietnam veteran, to the crime: the word of its prime suspect. No physical or forensic evidence linked him to the murder, nor did any discernible motive. He would later say he had been asleep in the early-morning hours when Pearcy was out alone with Boggio, only to be awaked by Pearcy, who said he needed to talk; Pearcy drove him to a nearby causeway, where they drank beer and smoked a few joints at the water’s edge. Pearcy’s girlfriend and a longtime friend of Pearcy’s said they saw the two men come home together that morning, hours before Boggio’s body was found, and that Dailey’s jeans were wet.
The state attorney’s office in Clearwater pressed forward with the most serious charge it could bring against the men, ensuring that they would be tried for first-degree murder—a crime punishable by death. Pearcy’s trial came first and ended with a guilty verdict in November 1986. But at the penalty phase, the jury recommended that he be sentenced to life in prison. It was a blow to the state attorney’s office, which would argue, in a forceful sentencing memo to the court, that “no evidence exists that Pearcy was not the main actor in this child’s brutal murder.” Pearcy had dodged the electric chair after participating in and most likely carrying out one of the county’s most monstrous crimes. Prosecutors had only one more chance to secure a death sentence for Boggio’s murder.
Ten days after the conclusion of Pearcy’s trial, Halliday visited the Pinellas County Jail. At his direction, jailers began pulling inmates who were housed near Dailey out of their cells. One by one, the men were taken to a small, windowless room, where Halliday was waiting. He pressed each man for information. Had Dailey ever talked about his case? Ever admitted to anything?
Four men who were questioned that day testified at a 2018 evidentiary hearing to the same unsettling detail in the interview room. Newspaper articles about Boggio’s murder were laid out conspicuously before them. “I got a very uneasy feeling looking at the newspaper articles,” Michael Sorrentino, one of the four, testified at the hearing. “Had I wanted to say something, or fabricate something, all the tools were there to give them whatever they might be looking for.”
Halliday testified at the hearing that there were no newspapers in the interview room. Either way, no one gave Halliday any useful information that day. In a slender, lined notebook, the detective recorded what each inmate told him. “Nothing,” he jotted down after one interview. After others, he wrote:
Said Dailey denies charge
doesn’t know a thing
Nothing
Knows nothing. Didn’t even know Dailey.
stays to himself. Knows nothing.
Refused to come to be interviewed.
“Wish I could have helped you but its a little outa my league.”
Halliday’s visit was a bust. But in the Pinellas County Jail, the word was out: The Boggio case needed a snitch.
* * *
In jail, it is widely understood that helping prosecutors and the police can earn extraordinary benefits, from reduced sentences to dismissed charges. By the time Dailey’s trial began the following summer in Clearwater, in June 1987, no fewer than three inmates had come forward claiming to have heard Dailey confess to the killing. The first two worked in the jail’s law library, where they professed to have heard Dailey say about the murder, “I’m the one that did it.” They also told the jury of ferrying several handwritten notes between Dailey and Pearcy; in the letters shown to the jury, Dailey appeared eager to appease his codefendant, whom prosecutors planned to put on the stand. But the two jailhouse informants were eclipsed by a third inmate, who had contacted Halliday to say that he had some information. He told a much more damning story—one that placed Dailey at the scene of the crime and put the knife in his hand. It was exactly what prosecutors needed.
That witness was Paul Skalnik, a familiar figure around the Pinellas County Courthouse. He had appeared before the court numerous times as a jailhouse informant and was skilled at providing the sort of incendiary details that brought a defendant’s guilt into sudden, terrible focus. Skalnik began working with Halliday in 1983, when the detective was investigating a triple homicide, and Skalnik helped send two men to death row, cementing his status as an invaluable resource. Because he was a known snitch, he was held in protective custody, in a single cell where he was shielded from inmates who might want to do him harm. Despite this considerable impediment, Skalnik claimed—just a few weeks before jury selection in Dailey’s trial began—to have procured Dailey’s confession.
Assistant State Attorney Beverly Andrews called Skalnik to the stand before resting her case on a Friday afternoon, ensuring that Skalnik’s words would be left to linger in jurors’ minds over the weekend. Pearcy—the only person to have offered an account of the murder—had by then refused to testify against Dailey, leaving a gaping hole at the center of the state’s case. Skalnik, who was facing twenty years in prison on charges of grand theft, stepped into the void. Dark-haired and stocky, with olive skin that offset his gray-blue eyes, Skalnik had a wide, expressive face that was malleable like an actor’s, registering emotions with almost vaudevillian embellishment. His words had a stagy yet captivating sincerity.
Andrews began by leading him through a series of questions that were designed to establish his trustworthiness. No, he had not been promised anything in return for his testimony, he assured the jury solemnly. And yes, he conceded, he had been convicted of some felonies—“five or six, if I am not mistaken”—but he was quick to tell the jury that he had not only assisted the state numerous times as a jailhouse informant; he had also once been a police officer. “I still do have law enforcement inside of me,” he said.
The story he told the jury was simple but arresting. He was passing by Dailey’s cell early one morning, he explained, when Dailey sought his counsel. Dailey was under the impression that Skalnik had worked as a private investigator, Skalnik said, and wanted his legal ad
vice.
It was then, Skalnik testified, as they stood at the bars of Dailey’s cell, that Dailey came clean, confiding that he had stabbed the girl and then thrown the knife away. What Dailey said “was so hard to comprehend and to accept,” he told the jury earnestly. “I had seen this gentleman walking in the hallways, laughing and kidding with other inmates. And all of a sudden, to see a man’s eyes, and to describe how he can stab a young girl—and she was screaming and staring at him and would not die.…”
“Were those Mr. Dailey’s words as best you can remember?” Andrews asked.
“As best I can recall,” Skalnik said gravely. “ ‘She is screaming, staring at me, and would not die.’ ”
It didn’t matter that Skalnik had few other details about the murder. Any questions as to his truthfulness were put to rest when Andrews called Halliday as her final witness. The detective vouched for Skalnik, testifying that the inmate had supplied him with reliable information in other cases, yielding “extremely positive results.”
Dailey would not testify on the advice of his attorneys, but Skalnik offered a vivid, first-person account of a confession. In a trial that had been long on conjecture but short on hard evidence, his testimony became the linchpin of the state’s case—so much so that Andrews would cite him more than a dozen times in her closing argument. She assured the jury that Skalnik was “honest” and “reliable.”
It was with that imprimatur of credibility that jurors found Dailey guilty. They also recommended, by a rare unanimous vote, that he be executed. Judge Thomas Penick Jr. of the Circuit Court formally sentenced Dailey to death on August 7, 1987.
Five days later, Skalnik was released from jail. A Florida Parole and Probation Commission memo stated that his release was “due to his cooperation with the State Attorney’s Office in the first-degree murder trial.” It was a remarkable turn of events given that he had been identified as a flight risk just a year earlier, after violating the terms of his parole. “This man has been, is and always will be a danger to society,” his parole officer had warned. Now he was released on his own recognizance and did not have to post bond. Skalnik was a free man.
By then, Skalnik had been in and out of jail half a dozen times. One of his earliest brushes with the law came nearly a decade earlier, in Texas, through an unusual series of events that began with a misbegotten Christmas present for his third wife, Rozelle Rogers. Their whirlwind romance started in 1977, when Rogers, a divorced mother of two, was leading a quiet life near her well-to-do parents in Friendswood, south of Houston. “He just came in out of nowhere and swept her off her feet,” said Rogers’s daughter, Lisa Rogers.
At twenty-eight, Skalnik already had two brief marriages behind him, but Rogers, who knew little about his past, saw the promise of a new future in the magnetic, seemingly worldly man who lavished her with rapturous flattery and told her he was a top executive at Southwest Airlines. He was less conventional than someone in the corporate world—he wore a gold necklace and a diamond-studded watch with his three-piece suit—but he seemed like a catch.
After getting married in Las Vegas, Skalnik moved into Rogers’s condo, where he soon established a routine. On weekday mornings, he bounded out the door, briefcase in hand, telling Rogers he was headed to the airport to fly to Dallas, where Southwest is headquartered, and assuring her that he would be back home in time for dinner. He always carried a business-size checkbook with him, with which he was profligate, treating her to jewelry, stays at posh big-city hotels, and box seats at University of Texas football games, where he boasted of once having been a running back for the team. He tried to outdo himself with each ostentatious flourish, giving Rogers not just one but two brand-new vehicles: a baby-blue Lincoln Continental and a customized Dodge van with red velvet curtains and CB radios. Once he presented Lisa, then fourteen, with a gold-nugget Seiko watch that sparkled with diamonds. When the eighth grader asked him, point blank, if it was real, Skalnik grinned and replied, “Looks real to me.”
Lisa had taken note of Skalnik’s idiosyncrasies: how he filched the robes and towels from their luxury hotel rooms and squirreled away the purple velvet bags that his Crown Royal came in after he had drained the bottles. It didn’t escape her attention, either, that he always kept his handgun within reach, even stashing it under the driver’s seat when he was behind the wheel. In the months that followed, Skalnik’s behavior became more unpredictable, and he began heading out of town “on business,” he said. Eventually, his absences stretched into weeks and then months, until he disappeared altogether.
Unknown to Rogers—who would ultimately have to post notices in the newspaper announcing her intent to divorce him—Skalnik had, by the spring of 1978, landed in the Harris County Jail, in Houston, for passing a dozen bad checks, one of which he had used to buy Rogers a microwave for Christmas. Everything Skalnik had told her was a lie. He had financed their new vehicles, and nearly everything else, on the strength of her good credit, taking out loans he never paid back, opening credit cards in her name, and draining her checking account. Rogers, who died in 2005, was left reeling. “He wrecked my mom’s credit, and he wrecked her life,” Lisa said.
His arrest was the first time he found himself in serious trouble, though he had been grifting since at least the early 1970s, when he worked as a police officer. He had lasted just fourteen months with the Austin Police Department, stepping down in 1973 after he wrote a string of bad checks. After apologizing for any embarrassment he had brought upon the department, he was never charged. He got off easy again when he was arrested for grand larceny in Orange County, Florida, three years later, after he posed as a furniture salesman and pocketed $700 from an unwitting customer. Even though the police found evidence in his car that suggested he was running another scam—he had a stash of checks, IDs, and stationery bearing the seal of the Texas State House of Representatives—he received probation. Only his arrest in Houston in the spring of 1978, which violated the terms of his Florida probation, brought his lucky streak to an end. Suddenly he was behind bars and looking at jail time in another state.
It was here, at the Harris County Jail, that Skalnik’s career as an informant began. As he sat contemplating his future, Thomas Hirschi, a defendant in a case that was all over the news, was booked into the jail and placed in a nearby cell. Hirschi was one of the “Moody Park Three,” a trio of anti-police-brutality activists whom the DA’s office had charged with inciting a riot at Moody Park, in Houston, that left fifteen people hospitalized. The uprising came a year after the death of a twenty-three-year-old laborer named José Campos Torres at the hands of Houston police officers. The officers who beat Torres and pushed him into a bayou to drown—“Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” one famously taunted—received only slaps on the wrist. City leaders blamed “outside agitators” like Hirschi, who had called for Torres’s killers to be brought to justice, for the riot rather than acknowledging that years of police brutality pushed the Mexican American community to its breaking point. To the Moody Park Three’s supporters, it was a frame-up. To prosecutors, it was a case they needed to win.
Skalnik would later place a call to the DA’s office, claiming to have information on the case. Prosecutors put him on the stand when Hirschi and his codefendants, Travis Morales and Mara Youngdahl, were tried together in May 1979.
Skalnik’s first time testifying as a jailhouse informant was less sure-footed than his later turns as a witness for the state, but he hewed closely to a story line that he would use again and again in the years to come. He told the jury that he was standing outside Hirschi’s cell when the young activist decided to unburden himself and confess that Morales’s plan all along had been “to incite the Mexican American youngsters,” Skalnik said. As Skalnik spoke, Hirschi sat at the defense table in disbelief. “I’d never seen the guy before,” Hirschi told me. “Never seen his face, didn’t know his name.”
Hirschi and his codefendants were looking at up to twenty years in prison if convicted. “We
weren’t naïve, but to actually see this unfold in front of us—to watch him lie when our lives were on the line—was pretty shocking,” Hirschi said.
Skalnik’s strategy paid off. Prosecutors prevailed in the end; the Moody Park Three were found guilty, though the jury declined to give them any prison time. After Skalnik spent two months in jail in Houston, he was sentenced that November to a year in the Orange County Jail, in Florida, for violating his probation. But four days before Christmas, a Florida Circuit Court judge abruptly reversed course, stating that he had “received a recommendation” that Skalnik be moved from the jail to a work-release program—a privilege normally forbidden to repeat offenders. The judge did not specify whether Texas prosecutors were behind that recommendation. But the lesson was unmistakable: The best way for a man behind bars to help himself was to help prosecutors.
Just two months later, in February 1980, Skalnik was not only out of jail but also married to a woman who believed that her clean-cut, churchgoing husband was a law student. It was this marriage—his fourth—that brought him to Pinellas County. While living with her in St. Petersburg, he got engaged to another woman in nearby Largo, telling her he was a Dallas attorney who wanted to move his law practice to Florida. He persuaded her to take out $3,500 in loans to help him set up his new law office—money he promised to pay back but never did. His wife learned of his engagement only when he was arrested for grand theft. Skalnik, who faced up to five years in prison, was left in the Pinellas County Jail to await his trial.
Skalnik had another plan. As he had done in Houston, he placed a call to prosecutors. So began a years-long working relationship between Skalnik and the state attorney’s office in Clearwater, which would extend through much of the 1980s and involve at least eleven local prosecutors. “The state attorney’s office has always characterized me as an honest, forthright witness,” he later wrote to a judge, “and together, we never lost a case.”
