The Informant

Criminal

In 1978, a former police officer named Paul Skelnick, imprisoned for writing bad checks, contacted his old friend Kenny Rogers, a prosecutor in Harris County, claiming he had critical information about the controversial

Key takeaways

• Jailhouse informants are frequently unreliable, yet their testimony has influenced numerous wrongful convictions and death penalty cases.
• The 'Moody Park Three' were wrongly blamed for a riot sparked by long-standing police brutality against Houston's Latino community.

Main topics

• Jailhouse informants and their role in wrongful convictions
• Racial injustice and police brutality in 1970s Houston

Notable quotes

"When it's time for me to die, will you come back and sit with me?"

"Let's see if this wetback can swim."

Conclusion

The episode underscores the dangers of relying on unverified jailhouse confessions and highlights

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox. Speaker 3 (0:36) I'm Will Anderson, and this week on the very first episode of my new music history podcast, The Monday Music Club, we're talking about one of the pioneers of rock and roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She is the coolest. She recorded the very first rock and roll song, inspired everybody from Elvis to the Beatles, and absolutely shredded on electric guitar. She also got married in a baseball stadium in front of a giant crowd way before Taylor and Travis did. Her story is incredible. So if you're a music geek like me, or even just a casual music fan, check out this week's episode. of the Monday Music Club, wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:11) Hi, it's Phoebe. This fall, I'm going on the road with a big experiment. It's a brand new live show all about me and my family and secrets. It's totally different from anything we've done before. We're going to announce the full run of Tour Date soon, but first, we've got a couple of special shows coming up in just a few weeks. I'll be in Durham on September 16th. at the first place we ever did a live show, Loderco, and in Portland, Maine, on September 18th. We've never done a show in Maine. You can find out more at thisiscriminal.com slash live. I hope to see you very soon. Speaker 1 (1:55) Penny was working at her parents' funeral home. She was divorced, she had two kids, and her dream of making it big in Hollywood had not happened. And she was working in basically rural Texas at a funeral home. I think she had given up on finding love again. And a man named Paul Skelnick came into the funeral home one day for a funeral. And he was just this incredibly dashing guy. Journalist and author Pamela Koloff. He was not classically handsome, but he was attractive. He wore beautiful three-piece suits. He wore jewelry. He was incredibly charismatic and really sort of swept her off her feet. In the spring of Speaker 4 (2:50) 1977, when they met, Paul Skalnik was 27, six years younger than Penny Rogers. Speaker 1 (2:57) He is sending her flowers and giving her jewelry. He tells her that he is an executive, a very high-up executive at Southwest Airlines. And at the time, Southwest Airlines was like the cool airline. The stewardesses had go-go booths and... You know, it was a place of young energy, and he sort of embodied that. It wasn't too long, I think we were talking just at most two months, before they went to Las Vegas and got married. Paul moved into Penny's Speaker 4 (3:34) condo with her and her two children. Every morning, he would grab his briefcase, kiss Penny, and tell her he was heading out for work at Southwest Airlines headquarters Speaker 1 (3:45) in Dallas. He goes and he flies up there every morning, has his important meetings and flies back. And at the end of the day, he always comes walking down the walkway, sort of loosening his tie and comes in and makes himself a drink. He has this life of an executive. And on the weekends, he takes Penny and the kids on these lavish trips. They don't travel far. They're just going to Dallas and Austin. But they're staying at the finest hotels, and he's ordering champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries up to the room. And he just seems to have the promise, I think, of... a better and more exciting life. Speaker 4 (4:32) But Penny's daughter, Lisa, who was about 14 at the time, started noticing little things that she thought were odd. Paul would steal the robes from the fancy hotels where they stayed. And every time he drank Crown Royal, which he often did, he saved Speaker 1 (4:50) the purple velvet bag it came in. And probably most importantly, he keeps a handgun on him at all times. Now, it's not unusual in Texas, especially in the 70s, to have a gun. But he always has it with him. Like, even when they're driving, he's stashing it under his seat. Speaker 4 (5:11) Paul started leaving town for a few days at a time on business trips. And then, in the spring of 1978, about a year after he and Penny had gotten together, he didn't come home for a month. That May, an investigator in the Harris County DA's office in Houston, a man named Kenny Speaker 1 (5:32) Rogers, got a call. And the voice on the other end of the line is Paul Skelnick. And Paul was somebody he had gone to military school with, sort of a junior college in New Mexico, about 10 years prior. And Skelnick says to him, Kenny, hey, you know, it's me. I'm in jail, and I'm wondering if you can come get me. And this is very surprising news. And Skelnyk says to him, I've got some information in a case that I think you'll be really interested in. Speaker 4 (6:11) I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Speaker 4 (6:22) Kenny Rogers hadn't seen Paul Skalnik in years. But the last time they had spoken, Paul was a police officer in Austin. Speaker 1 (6:32) I think because he had been a police officer just a few years ago, and because they had gone to school together, there was just this implicit trust that there must be some misunderstanding, and he just had to go to the jail and get this figured out. Speaker 4 (6:49) Why was Speaker 1 (6:49) Paul Skelnick in jail? So Paul Skelnick was in jail because he had a habit of writing hot checks. He had started off as an Austin police officer in the early 70s, and he started writing hot checks for these small amounts. And he was never prosecuted for this. He was just sort of quietly shown the door. And after that, that's how he made his living in the 70s. And it started off small, be like a $50 check at the grocery store that was bad. And it escalated from there. He'd never been an executive at Speaker 4 (7:32) Southwest Airlines. Speaker 4 (7:34) At one point before he met Penny, he spent time in Florida, where he said he was a salesman for a Scandinavian furniture company and took pre-orders for expensive furniture that didn't exist. He was arrested for that, but only got probation. After he met Penny in Texas, he kept passing bad checks. One of them was for a microwave Speaker 1 (8:00) he'd bought Penny for Christmas. So these financial crimes had caught up to him, and he was in the Harris County Jail for those. And Speaker 4 (8:09) that's when he called his old friend Kenny Rogers at the DA's office and told him he needed to come and get him, that he had some information that Kenny would be interested in. It involved a case that had taken place a year earlier. Speaker 4 (8:25) On May 5th, 1977, Houston police had responded to a call from a bar manager about a man named Jose Campos Torres. He'd been drinking most of the day and had gotten into a fight after refusing to leave. After the officers picked him up, they drove him to an isolated part of the bayou known as The Hole. One rookie officer later reported seeing other officers beat Jose, and then seeing one of them push Jose into the bayou, saying, let's see if this wetback can swim. Speaker 4 (9:02) Jose Campos Torres was found dead three days later by a tour boat operator. The case was Speaker 1 (9:09) all Speaker 4 (9:10) over the news. Speaker 1 (9:11) And there was an incredible uproar, of course, about this. There was even more of an uproar when the officers who did this really weren't punished. Some really got slaps on the wrist. So when Cinco de Mayo arrives the following year in 1978, There is what turns out to be a riot at what begins as a very peaceful gathering, just to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, where people are chanting Jose Campos Torres' name, and they're asking for justice for him. And in the course of that, there's property damage, and some people are hurt. There are many people arrested, and this is a big embarrassment to the city. And the city leaders and Houston police end up pinning all of this on three sort of shaggy-haired activists. And instead of acknowledging that this uprising came out of years and years of mistreatment at the hands of of Houston police for Houston's Latino population. They blamed it on these three, quote-unquote, outside agitators. They became known as the Moody Park Three. And so they were put on trial in 1978. There's no evidence that credibly shows that they convinced hundreds to riot and to cause property damage. And the DA's office is under a lot of pressure. to get a conviction. And it just so happens that Paul Skelnyk was in the county jail at that time. Kenny Speaker 4 (11:02) Rogers rushed to the jail, signed Paul out, and took him to the Special Crimes Bureau to talk. Paul told him that he'd managed to get one of the members of the Moody Park Three, a man named Thomas Hershey, to start talking to him. Speaker 1 (11:17) And when prosecutors heard what Skelnick had to say, they were very intrigued and wanted to work with him. Speaker 4 (11:26) Kenny and Paul developed a routine. Most days, Kenny would head to the jail, take Paul out of protective custody, and drive him to the Special Crimes Bureau in Speaker 1 (11:37) an unmarked car. And there, Skalnik would sit there, and he had all the wonderful things that you don't get normally when you're being held in jail, he had. ice-cold air conditioning during the summer. He had fresh coffee. He had some privacy in the bathroom. So he already was getting some perks. Prosecutors spoke to him, and he told them a story that not only had Tom Hershey supposedly confessed to him, this is something that Tom Hershey would later vigorously deny, but that Tom Hershey and his compatriots had thought this out long ahead of time, that this was a premeditated act. And that was a really, really important detail because for inciting a riot, at that time at least in Texas statute, you had to have that premeditative element, and he supplied that. Speaker 4 (12:42) Did Paul Skelnick get Speaker 1 (12:43) anything from the Speaker 4 (12:44) prosecutors, any Speaker 1 (12:45) type of deal? He did. So he was released. There were no conditions to that. And he was just supposed to keep in touch with Kenny Rogers until he had to deliver his testimony at the Moody Park 3 trial. Speaker 4 (13:01) The trial began in the spring of 1979, and the prosecutor's case wasn't looking good. Some of the details one officer described in court weren't included in his written report about the riot. It also came out that at the same time that some witnesses had said they'd seen the Moody Park 3 in the park, other witnesses had seen them at a barbecue. And then Paul Skalnik took Speaker 1 (13:30) the Speaker 4 (13:30) stand. Speaker 1 (13:31) The testimony was pretty detailed, and it told this whole narrative about how the Moody Park Three had set out to do this, the ways in which they had convinced young people to carry out this riot, how they had brought weapons with them, they brought alcohol with them, according to this story. To be clear, there is zero evidence that corroborates any of this. But he said this on the stand. And I remember when I interviewed Tom Hershey, he described sitting at the defense table and his life is on the line. They're facing 20 years in prison and felony charges. And he said, you know, I knew that cops sometimes lie on the stand. I knew that our court system wasn't perfect. But watching how easy it was for him to lie. was something I'll never forget. Thomas Speaker 4 (14:32) Hershey was found guilty, along with the other two members of the Moody Park Three. After his testimony, Paul Skalnik was allowed to continue living outside of jail. Speaker 1 (14:45) Kenny Rogers was meant to keep an eye on him. Kenny Rogers had this very, very simple beach house on the coast, and he wasn't there a lot because he was a workaholic. So Skelnick, this is a very unusual arrangement, obviously, he's sort of the caretaker. He's fixing things around the house and kind of watching after it while Kenny isn't there. And Kenny Rogers thinks, well, this is a pretty good setup. I know where my witness is. I'm getting something out of it in return. He was paying him as well. And again, very unconventional, but that's what they did. So, Kenny Rogers goes to the Beach House one weekend. He finally gets away from work, and he notices that the house is very lived in, and that things are askew and just things are a mess. He realizes that Skalnik has been doing more than just being a handyman and a caretaker, but has really... set up camp in his home and has not been taking good care of it. So he tries