A Texas Mother Married an Airline Executive Who Paid for Everything With Bad Checks

Penny Rogers was working in the funeral home run by her parents in rural Texas when Paul Skalnik walked in for a service. She was divorced with two children, her Hollywood hopes had faded, and, as journalist Pamela Colloff put it, she had "given up on finding love again."

Skalnik was 27, six years younger than Penny. He wore three-piece suits and jewelry, and he was charismatic. He sent flowers, gave gifts, and said he was a high ranking executive at Southwest Airlines, then known for its young energy and flight attendants in go-go boots. Within two months at most, they wed in Las Vegas.

He moved in with Penny and her two children. Each morning he grabbed his briefcase, kissed Penny, and said he was heading to company headquarters in Dallas. Each evening he walked down the walkway loosening his tie and made himself a drink. On weekends he took Penny and the children to the finest hotels in Dallas and Austin and ordered champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries up to the room. He seemed to promise a more exciting life.

That promise lasted about a year. In the spring of 1978, Skalnik did not come home for a month. Then he called Kenny Rogers, an investigator in the Harris County district attorney's office in Houston, and asked him to come get him from jail because he had information about a case.

Skalnik had never been a Southwest executive. He had served on the Austin police force in the early 1970s, and he had started writing bad checks for small amounts, including a 50 dollar check at a grocery store. He was never prosecuted, and he was quietly pushed out of the job. After that, bad checks became how he made his living.

Before he met Penny, he had spent time in Florida posing as a seller of Scandinavian furniture and taking preorders for expensive furniture that did not exist. He was arrested and received probation. After he met Penny, he kept passing bad checks, including one for a microwave he had bought her for Christmas.

The Houston bad-check charges caught up with him, and he landed in the Harris County Jail. After a 60-day sentence, Skalnik was sent to Florida for violating probation, was released after a few months, and left no forwarding address. Penny, who had been writing to him in jail in Houston, could not find him and had to announce the divorce filing with a notice in the local paper. About a year later, he was married again and back in jail for scamming a woman with whom he had been having an affair.