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Two stories behind one scar
Visiting in prison
Journalist Pamela Colloff visited Skalnik in federal prison in 2018. He opened with lies she knew at once were lies: a 100-foot yacht kept in Belize, complete with a photo, and offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. He promised to tell more of his story later, then claimed to be too sick whenever she tried to see him and blamed the mail room for her lost letters.
She realized he had sized up what she hungered for and fed it to her. An investigative journalist who knew he was a con artist with a long rap sheet had bought in anyway.
The nursing home
A week after Jim Daly's death warrant was signed in 2019, Colloff found Skalnik in a nursing home and told him this was the time to tell the truth about the jail. He refused and stuck to his story, though a look of regret crossed his face at the mention of Freddie Gaines. At that visit he showed her the scar and told her he had been a fighter pilot shot down over Laos and held as a prisoner of war. She found no record that he was ever in the military. Her mother used to tell her that if you're going to lie, you need a really good memory.
Even old and in poor health, he was easy to talk to, a terrific listener, and very well-spoken. After five hours together, he grabbed her hand and asked her to come back and sit with him when it was time for him to die. He died on March 10, 2020. When she told people, nobody believed her, since everyone assumed it was another scam and that he had found a way to escape once again.
Why are liars so rarely caught by listeners?
Communication researcher Timothy Levine proposed truth-default theory, which holds that people assume others are honest unless something specific triggers doubt. The default makes sense because most of what people say to one another is true. A 2006 meta-analysis by psychologists Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo, covering more than 200 studies, found that people identified lies and truths correctly about 54 percent of the time. A coin flip would give 50 percent.
Why was Laos a secret theater of war?
A 1962 international agreement declared Laos neutral and barred foreign military forces from its territory. The United States and North Vietnam both kept forces there anyway, and American air operations over the country went on for years without public acknowledgment. Because the operations were officially secret, the fates of downed airmen were harder to trace. According to U.S. military records, American aircraft dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos between 1964 and 1973.
How can someone's military service be checked?
Service records for veterans are held by the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, which handles requests for them. Claims of decorations can be checked against official award records. Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act in 2005 to punish false claims of military honors. In United States v. Alvarez in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the law's ban on lying about receiving medals violated the First Amendment.
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