I first saw the Everglades more than 30 years ago, as a kid from Chicago dragged along by my parents. Buggy, hot, and flat, what I laid eyes on then was a sodden grassland, and I wasn鈥檛 much impressed. But there鈥檚 a reason the Glades remained wild well after the continent had been 鈥渃onquered,鈥� why the migrant Seminoles were able to hide so long in its redoubts from the U.S. Army. Even today, this national park is massive. Its 1.5 million mostly inaccessible acres make it the third-largest national park in the lower 48 after Death Valley and Yellowstone. Now, after living on its doorstep for 20 years, I鈥檝e become enthralled with its untamed nature.

A catch-all term for many different ecosystems, the Everglades once stretched more than 200 miles, from the Kissimmee River in Orlando, south past Lake Okeechobee, to the state鈥檚 southernmost tip and the Gulf of Mexico. Today the national park preserves just 20 percent of that, and cities, suburbs, and agricultural land abut its very edges. But the preserved Glades are as wild as it gets. Crocodiles and alligators, the Florida panther, manatees, and a vast number of flora, fauna, and invasive species of all sorts call the place home. Fragile and always changing, this Unesco World Heritage site is under threat of real inundation as sea levels rise, as well as from red tide and blue-green algae blooms (possibly caused by agricultural runoff), which have been devastating in recent years. The Glades are also a premier dark-sky zone, a sanctuary for migratory birds and raptors, and a refuge to get absolutely lost and forget the modern world exists at all. Here鈥檚 our guide to the Everglades on how to do just that.

What You Need to Know Before Visiting Everglades National Park

There are two main seasons in the Everglades:听the wet and the dry. From April to October, it is so hot and humid that even short excursions can be draining, and some park facilities, such as the remote Flamingo Visitor听Center, are staffed only intermittently. I鈥檝e found myself wiping masses of mosquitos off my bloody arms in summer, and the no-see-ums can be even worse, driving the stoutest of hearts bonkers. The upshot is that there are fewer crowds during these months. The dry season, which runs November through March, can be idyllic and mild. But whatever the season, pack bug repellent or netting, and be prepared for drenching rain.

Surrounding the park, especially its western parameters, are small, interesting towns听like Everglades City, which some of the fabled Gladesmen鈥攏on-native people who managed to decipher the mysteries of the swamp and carve out frontier lives for themselves鈥攕till call home. The Everglades City area was so lawless听in the recent past that bales of cocaine and marijuana were alleged to have regularly washed up on the shore. In 2017, Hurricane Irma tore through the area, and the people who live there are still recovering.

Finally, there鈥檚 no better way to prepare for a journey to the park than to pick up a copy of by the late journalist and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. A seminal work on South Florida鈥檚 unique ecology, the book was published in 1947, the same year the Glades were designated a national park. The ecosystem was not seen as something worth saving by the many developers who drained and ditched this region all through the 20th century. That a significant part of the Everglades remains is due in large part to Douglas鈥檚 activism.

How to Get There

The Glades are so expansive that seven airports serve as听access points. Though some require longer drives than others, none are more than four hours away (and most much less). So it鈥檚 best to pair your arrival city with other things you might like to do: Orlando has theme parks; Tampa and Miami, nightlife and museums; Sarasota, Fort Myers, and Naples, fine dining, golf, and charter fishing; and Key West, Hemingway kitsch, history, and endless margaritas.

Once you choose your airport, there are three main entrances and four visitor centers, as well as an information station in the park. The Shark Valley and Ernest F. Cole Visitor听Centers and the Royal Palm Information Station and Bookstore鈥攁ll easily accessed from Miami鈥攁re close to civilization听on the park鈥檚 east side听and offer ranger-led programs. Shark Valley鈥檚 45-foot-tall, 360-degree observation tower is a popular stop. On the park鈥檚 west side, in Everglades City, the Gulf Coast Visitor Center is easily accessed from Naples and is the best entry point for the coastal Ten Thousand听Islands region, a birding, fishing, and kayaking paradise. There鈥檚 also the Flamingo Visitor Center on Florida Bay, on the park鈥檚 far southern tip, accessible听by car from Miami听or by boat from the state鈥檚听east and west coasts.

Road access is straightforward. On the west side, U.S. Route 41 is the only road in from Tampa, Sarasota, Fort听Myers, or听Naples. From Miami, U.S. Route 41 and Florida State Road 9336, which turns into Main Park Road, are听the main points of entry. From Orlando, either side is equally convenient. But no matter where you鈥檙e coming from, if you want to explore the west coast, where the river of grass meets the sea, it鈥檚 easiest to bring your own canoe or kayak or rent one in Everglades City at the . Beware: the waters are shallow, and the underwater environment is fragile. If you get stuck in the mud, you鈥檒l have to get out of your boat and push, which tears up the underwater seagrass habitat. Depth finders should be used, and knowledge of tides and nautical maps and an awareness of vulnerable manatees are also essential.

Where to Stay In or Near the Everglades

Despite the park鈥檚 massive size, traditional front-country camping and RV services are limited to just two sites inside the park. Long Pine Key Campground, near the Royal Palm Information Station, is only open November through May ($30 per night, no electric hookups available), while Flamingo Campground is open all year ($30 per night, $45 for electric hookups) and offers watercraft rentals. Reservations are recommended during the dry season.

There鈥檚 plenty of Gulf of Mexico beach camping on the park鈥檚 west coast, and much of the park is only accessible by canoe, kayak, or flatboat, so backcountry campers will be rewarded with solitude like few other places left in the U.S. But you must take trip planning seriously and pack your canoe or kayak with enough food and water for the length of your excursion. You鈥檒l also need to know how to orient yourself with GPS and nautical maps鈥攊t鈥檚 easy to get lost in this landscape of repetitive landmarks. Backcountry camping permits are only issued on a first-come, first-served basis in person at the Flamingo and Gulf Coast Visitor Centers ($21 fee, plus $2 per day).

If you like a bed and shower, Everglades City is a great base camp. The town has a museum, restaurants, and an eclectic assortment of hardy inhabitants. Places to stay include (from $129) and the cottages at the turn-of-the-century (from $125). Longer-stay self-catering options include the (from $109), great for large groups, and the waterfront one- and two-bedroom cabins at (from $130). You can also rent kayaks and gear at Ivey House, take swamp-buggy tours, and hire park-approved fishing charters and guides to lead you into the Glades.

The Best 国产吃瓜黑料s in Everglades National Park

Most of the park鈥檚 one million annual visitors don鈥檛 penetrate much farther than a visitor-center walking tour, but the Glades offer myriad activities for those willing to brave the maze-like waters, tall grasses, and mangrove isles. Whatever activities you choose, they鈥檒l all have at least one thing in common: you鈥檙e probably going to get wet.

Bird-Watching 听

If you鈥檙e a birder, there is no better place in the country to check off your life list than the Everglades, which boasts more than 360 of the winged species. Just pick a bird on your list鈥攆or me it is always the skittish and pink-hued roseate spoonbill鈥攁nd in the Glades you know you are going to see it. Snowy egrets and wood storks are everywhere, osprey鈥攁nd the bald eagles that steal their fish鈥攃ircle overhead, and if you find a lucky spot in the mangroves, flock after flock of curved-beaked ibis will zip over your head as they head home to roost in the evenings. Keep an eye out for black skimmers, a shorebird that is making a rebound; you鈥檒l know them as the seagull-like birds with an incredible underbite that seem to have no eyes at all because of their black and white coloration. Reserve tickets online for the to see wading birds, like limpkins. Kayakers can turn a corner in the islands and mangroves and happen upon a rookery that鈥檚 filled shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of birds: ibis, herons, egrets, wood storks, anhingas, and cormorants galore, and the spring- and fall-migration periods will offer you dozens of species a day without any struggle. Even if you never leave your car, you鈥檒l see birds. That鈥檚 the charm of the Glades.

Paddling

Launch your canoe or kayak at either the Flamingo or Gulf Coast Visitor Centers for a day trip or a two-week expedition. Between the two points are 100 miles of interconnected, watery wilderness, backcountry campsites, and a few marked canoe trails to help keep you from getting lost. The 5.2-mile loop through the grass marshes and mangrove islands around is a favorite for day-trippers. Still, those听who lose their way keep park rangers busy with regular rescues. If you want an expert to lead you, based in Everglades City, offers excellent, private ecotours.

The water is murky and full of creatures that will splash near your craft. Don鈥檛 worry, the usual cause of听commotion is not alligators听but mullet, a fish that schools here and is an important part of the food chain. For some reason that scientists听still don鈥檛 understand, the foot-long, thick-bodied fish loves to leap out of the water, and it happens all day long. You will see gators, but they鈥檒l leave you alone. That said, I keep my distance from any reptile longer than I am tall. If you camp on the beach, don鈥檛 tread on sea turtle nests, and if you paddle or boat along the coast, you will at some point be accompanied by dolphins.

Fishing Trip

There are nearly 300 species of fish here, and the first step to landing them is to get a license online at the 听(the park itself has some special regulations听). Light tackle is fine for freshwater areas. I use crawlers and land plenty of panfish, catfish, and bass. Unfortunately, you鈥檙e also likely encounter the invasive Southeast Asian walking catfish, a creature that can 鈥渨alk鈥澨齩n its front fins overland to infest ever more bodies of water. If you catch one, you can release it. But if you decide to keep one, by law it must be killed.

In the brackish water of听the mangroves, anything can happen, and you never know what you鈥檒l hook, from the delicious and gorgeous black-lined snook to equally delicious sheepshead and snapper. I use live shrimp for bait both here听as well as out in the saltwater. If you want to land a tarpon, one of the region鈥檚 premier saltwater game fish, heavier tackle and wire leaders are musts, and it鈥檚 better to go out with a guide. They have the local knowledge and all the expensive gear that will improve your听chance of tight lines.

One of the great joys听of my life was learning to throw a ten-foot, lead-skirted net for mullet. It isn鈥檛 easy, but all the local guides can offer lessons for the determined and interested. These fish will not take a hook, but if you have the shoulder and core strength to throw the net, it鈥檚 a true South Florida experience, and you can haul in a biblical bounty of these delicious silver beauties.

Everglades City remains a fishing paradise, as it was not hit by the red tide that ravaged the state in 2018. Fishing guides of note include听 and听, though听as Kathy Brock, publisher of Everglades City鈥檚 newspaper, The Mullet Rapper, notes, 鈥淎ll our guides here are good. They can鈥檛 survive if they鈥檙e not.鈥�

Hiking Trails

Short, interpretive trails are offered at all of the park鈥檚 visitor听centers, but while wonderful and easy, they won鈥檛 satisfy those looking for a demanding, all-day trek. For that, head to the 鈥攁ccessed from Royal Palm鈥攆or a 20-mile round-trip trek in absolute solitude on what was once a paved road听but has long since fallen into wild decay. 鈥攁ccessed from Flamingo鈥攊s a 15-mile round-trip that offers backcountry camping at Clubhouse Beach. The campsite requires a permit obtained at the Flamingo Visitor Center.

Ecotours

If you鈥檙e听pressed for time or want a better understanding of the Glades鈥� ecosystem, sign up for a guided airboat tour. On the park鈥檚 northern edge, just off U.S. 41, three park-approved airboat companies鈥�,听, and听鈥攚ill take you into areas adjacent to the park听(airboats are not allowed in the park itself due to听the risk of damaging听fragile submerged flora), schooling you on the region鈥檚 unique environments as you go.

Where to Eat and Drink Near the Everglades

Shop around in Everglades City, and find a menu that offers smoked mullet. It tastes like a moist, jerky delicacy. Restaurants include the year-round and as well as the seasonal (closed in summer). Also look for any menu that offers wild hog. The first Spanish explorers to Florida brought domesticated Iberian pigs with them as walking meat lockers. Some escaped, and now more than half a million feral hogs call Florida home. In Spain, these animals were raised on acorns and are to this day considered the highest-quality meat in that country. Here on this peninsula, they roam free in the Everglades, tearing up the environment with their bulldozer-like snouts, which means their meat is both delicious and good for the environment.

Stone crab season runs October to May. After taking just one claw from these thick-shelled crustaceans, fishermen throw the living crabs back into the water, where they will regenerate the missing claw over three years. All the local restaurants feature them.

Speaking of crab, I prefer the blue variety, which you can catch in the mangroves. Don鈥檛 bother with a trap (though you can set up to five if you insist). Just cast out any hunk of meat on a hook, and as soon as your line goes tight, reel it in very slowly: the crabs are so greedy that they won鈥檛 let go. All you鈥檒l need is a dip net. Sex them on capture, and release any females. Males have a thin, narrow 鈥渁pron鈥澨齩n their undersides, while females鈥� aprons are wide and triangular. There鈥檚 no special permit required听and no better backcountry meal.听They鈥檙e delicious boiled live in a pot.

If you can, plan your trip for early February when Everglades City hosts its annual Its post-Irma resilience was on full display in 2018 as more than 60,000 people descended听to show their support and eat local seafood of every variety while enjoying the live local music.

If You Have Time for a Detour

If you fly into Orlando, stop by Eatonville, a town founded by African Americans at the turn of the 19th century and now consumed by Orlando鈥檚 sprawl. It鈥檚 the site of the writer Zora Neale Hurston鈥檚 acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God,听which has many scenes set in the Everglades and chronicles the 1928 hurricane, during which the banks of听Lake Okeechobee overflowed听into the Glades,听killing听2,500 Floridians, including many poor African Americans. Like Stoneman鈥檚 The Everglades, Hurston鈥檚 novel should be read in advance of any visit to the Glades. Popular attractions include the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts and, in late January, the popular听, which has been celebrated for more than 30 years.

Those who find themselves in the Keys should be sure to hike the trails of the In ecological terms, a hammock is a type of habitat found in the region鈥檚 higher, drier elevations, and this park is home to one of the largest remaining West Indian tropical-hardwood hammocks in the world. In Key West, hop on the for a听ride over to Garden Key and Dry Tortugas National Park. Explore imposing Fort Jefferson before paddling a rental kayak to Loggerhead Key to camp on the island or dive the Windjammer, a 19th-century shipwreck. And听off the coast of Summerland Key is Looe Key Reef, my favorite place to dive in the Keys. Part of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, this听is a special sanctuary preservation area. Corals are under threat all across the region due to climate change and ocean acidification, but Looe Key teems with corals and fish and reminds us of how things once were.

The Tamiami Trail, a听60-mile stretch of U.S. 41 that cuts right across Florida from east to west along the northern edge of the Everglades, offers campgrounds and RV parks. You鈥檒l also find many federally recognized Miccosukee Indian villages, recognizable by their thatched homes and security gates. At Miccosukee Indian Village and听Airboats, you can watch demonstrations of wood carving, beadwork, basket weaving, and doll making as well as taste unique dishes like fry and pumpkin breads and frog legs or witness alligator demonstrations. During the last week of December, the Miccosukee also host the听Indian Arts and听Crafts Festival.

The trail is also home to听鈥檚 Big Cypress Gallery. Known as the Ansel Adams of the Everglades, the storied photographer鈥攚ho is a friend of mine and many other South Florida environmentalists鈥攕truggled to support his family and make a living most of his life. But following the death of his 17-year-old son, in 1986, Butcher stepped into the Everglades to heal and produced his now iconic black and white photographs of the region鈥檚 wild places. Today听even Queen Elizabeth owns one of his prints. His gallery, located almost halfway between Naples and Miami, offers guest stays and walking tours. If you鈥檙e听lucky, Butcher will be there during your visit. In failing health, he鈥檚 still a library of information about the history of the conservation work that made the preservation of the Everglades possible.

Editor’s Note: We frequently update this National Parks guide, which was originally published on May 13, 2019.

The post The Ultimate Everglades National Park Travel Guide appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

ERIC VOLZ HAS BEEN AN ENIGMA to me ever since I met him in Nicaragua’s Modelo prison in early 2007. He’d been convicted of the rape and murder of his Nicaraguan ex-girlfriend, Doris Jim茅nez, and sentenced to 30 years’ hard time. I’d spent months investigating the case for 国产吃瓜黑料 and was certain of Volz’s innocence. He knew this when we met, and still he was elusive—referring to himself in the third person, lamenting how much money the situation had cost him, reluctant to express empathy for the dead girl, pitching story ideas about staying fit in jail. With the international press descending on the story, this was a bewildering tack to take.

Gringo Nightmare, by Eric Volz

Gringo Nightmare, by Eric Volz

Volz was eventually exonerated and released after 13 long months of confinement, illness, and abuse. Now, he tells his own story in Gringo Nightmare: A Young American Framed for Murder in Nicaragua (St. Martin’s Press, $26), a tough tale of survival against long odds. Volz portrays himself as an altruist who went to Nicaragua to help the people and to connect with his grandparents’ Central American roots. The truth is more complicated: Though he fell in love with Nica颅ragua, he participated in the local gringo real-estate frenzy and turned a gritty community newsletter into a glossy lifestyle magazine. By openly living with Jim茅nez, he interposed himself into the conservative seaside town of San Juan del Sur in ways few outsiders would dare. After her death, Volz played lead investigator, getting in police officials’ faces before they arrested him.

Volz walks us through his ordeal in clear, engaging prose, focusing on the trial and the challenges of daily life in rank Central American prisons. His struggles to carve a niche for himself among actual murderers are tense and awful, and his ultimate release and flight from Nicaragua are nothing short of harrowing. But the memoir is most surprising in what it doesn’t reveal: any real change in the author. Volz spills a surprising amount of ink, for example, launching barbs at NBC’s Dateline, which ran an unflattering segment on him in 2007. (He calls the host, Keith Morrison, “a blow-dried correspondent in designer jeans.”) The vitriol doesn’t end there. In obliquely accusing another man of Jim茅nez’s murder, despite a lack of hard evidence, Volz commits an ironic rush to judgment. After all, it was hasty arrow-slinging on the part of the Nicaraguan authorities that incarcerated him. This is the man I met in prison—innocent beyond any doubt, but blind to his own role in bringing this nightmare on himself.

Books: Shell Games

Required Reading

Shell Games, by Craig Welch

Shell Games, by Craig Welch

The sentences in Craig Welch’s
Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature’s Bounty
(William Morrow, $26) are not particularly elegant. But they don’t need to be: Welch, a crack reporter and chief environmental writer for The Seattle Times, turns out a true-life shellfish caper, centered on the efforts of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife detectives to lock up the West Coast’s largest poacher of geoducks—outsize, phallic-looking clams that fetch top coin on the Asian market. The book is full of characters Raymond Chandler would have conjured, if Chandler had been a shellfish nut: crooks named Slim and Spook, detectives scouring Puget Sound in a vessel called Clamdestine, and an informant turned geoduck kingpin with a whalebone necklace and a talent for carving elaborate totem poles. The prose occasionally delves into the stuff of hackneyed mysteries—”Chasing Tobin [the kingpin] would be like grabbing at smoke,” Welch writes—but, then, the cops-and-robbers nature of the story makes you want to read the whole book in one gulp. That’s a good thing, since page-turning mysteries that make you think are a rarity. It would be impossible to read Shell Games and not come away with a fresh, considered perspective on your next order of clams.

Books: By Our Contributors

Eaarth, by Bill McKibben

Eaarth, by Bill McKibben

Environmental author emeritus Bill McKibben’s
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
(Henry Holt, $24) makes a provocative case for smaller appetites in the climate-changed era, but read it for the first few chapters—the most (depressingly) powerful rebuttal of the global-warming-skeptic argument we’ve seen.

Anonymous blogger Bike Snob NYC busts out of cyberspace in
Bike Snob: Systematically & Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling
(Chronicle Books, $17), less manifesto than highly entertaining guide to finding your way on two wheels.

Mark Sundeen gives Captain Sig Hansen, of Deadliest Catch fame, a literary helping hand in
North by Northwestern: A Seafaring Family on Deadly Alaskan Waters
(Thomas Dunne Books, $26), a chronicle that reads like a collection of your crazy buddy’s bar stories about his crazier old man.

And Donovan Webster, inspired by a DNA test, searches for his identity from warthog-hunting grounds in Tanzania to circus tents in Uzbekistan in
Meeting the Family: One Man’s Journey Through His Human Ancestry
(National Geographic Books, $26).

The post Books: Gringo Nightmare appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

In the June 2007 feature story 聯The Boomtown, the Gringo, the Girl, and Her Murder” Tony D聮Souza reports on the murder trial of American ex-pat Eric Volz in Nicaragua. On March 26, 2007, after months of research and nearly two weeks of attempting to get access to Volz, Supreme Court Magistrate Dr. Marvin Aguilar Garcia granted D聮Souza permission to enter the prison where Volz was incarcerated. D聮Souza spoke to Volz for nearly two hours on the trial, the town of San Juan del Sur, the accusations against him, and what the future holds. Here, read selected excerpts of their talk.

LIFE IN PRISON

TD: Tell me about your treatment in prison. If you could kind of give me a timeline.
EV: I've been held in one jailhouse [Rivas], a police interrogation centerhere in Managua called El Chipote, and I've been held in a safe house when I was on house arrest, then in the Federal Penitentiary System in Granada, and here in Managua in Tipitapa. You have to distinguish between the police jurisdiction and Federal Penitentiary because the treatment has been totally different. They're much more professional here. They know this is their business. Rivas was, it was what it was; barely any food, sleeping on concrete, shit smeared on the walls; bad situation. Then the worst was being in Chipote in Managua聴I was tortured there. And there's been several threats and fights and all kinds of shit that's happened.

TD: So the Penitentiary System you feel has been good to you?
EV: Well, I mean…

TD: It's still prison…
EV: It's relative. It's fucked up. They should have me in some safe house and not even in prison. I shouldn't even have to have personal bodyguards around. That obviously is not cool. You don't get enough food here. You don't get sleep here.

TD: So what kind of threats do you get?
EV: Death threats, man.

TD: Like how? Like they come up to you and say, 'I'm going to kill you' ?
EV: Yeah. People yell through the cells. People say things in the hallway. People that I know will say, 'Hey man you need to be careful, I talked to this guy and this is what he is saying.' There's acquaintances of Doris's family in prison here. The reason why I was moved to this prison from Granada is because they had information that they were organizing a hit on me. It's very simple. These guys kill for a living. That's what they're doing here. They got a 30-year sentence and they don't care. Their life's already done.

TD: Are you making any friends here?
EV: Yeah I've made a couple friends. You know I wouldn't call them friends, they're acquaintances, you need to have a couple allies. But I'm not joining any gangs or anything.

TD: What's your day like?
EV: I have a cellmate. Very small concrete cell, an old rusty bunkbed. They come by at four o'clock in the afternoon and lock us in the cell, and then they come at four in the morning and take the lock off.

TD: So you're allowed liberty on the grounds for 12 hours a day.
EV: Liberty in my gallery. I personally, I can't聴Eric Volz is not allowed to leave the gallery to make phone calls. Everything I do is independent. When I go to the yard, it's by myself. It wasn't like that the first week, but now after they saw how dangerous the situation was, and how big of a problem it would be if something happened to me, they've definitely taken my security a little bit more seriously.

TD: Are you getting any kind of special treatment? Are you having a guard protect you?
EV: No. When they walk me down the hallways, there's at least one person with me. They keep an eye on me. It's still extremely dangerous

THE TRIAL

TD: How did you feel when you were on the witness stand?
EV: It felt great, man. That was symbolic of me breaking silence publicly. I hadn't spoken to any media, or got to say anything to Doris's family or the prosecution or the public. It was great to tell my story, whether people believed it or not. It felt really good.

TD: How did you feel when the shots were fired?
EV: You know, man, by then I had been through weeks of private security, wearing the bullet proof vest. My security had to pull weapons on people several times when I was on house arrest. It wasn't like the first time. I was never worried for my personal safety as much as other people getting hurt, because my security is really dangerous.

TD: Did you think they were going to find you innocent at the trial? When did you know that you were going to be found guilty?
EV: It was obvious to everyone that we annihilated the prosecution with our defense. I mean, there is no doubt about the trial itself, in terms of the judicial process and arguing back and forth. We won the trial. I definitely thought that. I thought I'd be acquitted and I thought that Chamorro would be condemned because he didn't present a very convincing defense at all. I knew that I had been found guilty when my attorneys came in聴before she even started reading the verdict, they told me, 'Hey, Eric, don't worry we are going to appeal.' So they already knew.

TD: How do you think they knew?
EV: Well because everybody knew. They're not professional here in that way.

TD: Did they know before the trial?
EV: No. No. We thought we were going to win.

TD: How did you feel when she started reading the verdict? Because that's when I knew, about ten minutes into that…
EV: Yeah, I don't know if you saw me, but I started taking off my watch. I took the money I had in my pocket and I put it in my jacket.

TD: I didn't see that.
EV: I consolidated all of my valuables, put it in my jacket and gave it to my attorney because I knew the police were going to try to immediately grab me and try [to], you know, rob me of any valuables that I had, which has already happened. Oh man, it was a horrible feeling. It's just a dark, dark place that I've gone to on several different occasions. You just have to聴you close your eyes聴just have faith and you pray. Again, the most dangerous thing is being in police custody when the police know that they're responsible for you being falsely accused. That's dangerous. It's dangerous when the police know that I have a large support group and at the heart of the investigation is their irresponsible police work. It's convenient for them if something would happen to me. Which is why on several occasions I don't think they've done a real good job trying to protect me.

ERIC VOLZ THEN

TD: [How] did you end up in Nicaragua, [and] how [did you learn] to speak Spanish?
EV: My mother, she's Mexican; she was raised in the United States. Both of her parents are from Mexico.

TD: But she doesn't really speak Spanish.
EV: Not anymore. It's kind of funny. As a kid she spoke fluent Spanish. But like most, a lot of immigrants that move to the US, being associated with fluent Spanish often means discrimination. So she kind of very selectively hid her Spanish, she kind of lost [it]. She still speaks it, she still has it in her, she understands it well. But I grew up around my grandmother, and my aunt and those people speaking to me in Spanish, so I learned the accent and the culture as a young kid. I was receptively bilingual. I understood what they said, but I only produced English. And I saw my father and mother speaking English, so I knew I didn't have to speak Spanish. So I didn't actually start speaking Spanish until I was probably 13 or 14. I took it in high school, I started learning grammar, learning how to read and write. Traveling and living abroad I got to learn my skills a little bit better. When I was eleven years old, my parents got divorced. The way I kind of dealt with it, I think emotionally, was I found climbing. Climbing is so much more than just a physical sport. Climbers know that. It's very much about personality, and even exists in the spiritual realms. It really began to mean something about freedom, learning my limits, learning to trust myself. [It] really constructed an internal strength of character. A lot of what I've been able to get through here in prison is from what I learned through climbing.

TD: Could you try and describe what it feels like for you personally when you're on a big wall?
EV: It's pure freedom. You're not really touching society, you're not touching the rat race, the fast world of capitalism. It's a place where you can forget that you're in 2007. You find your breath and you leave. It spoke to me at a certain time in my life. And then I realized I was living a little of too much of a good a life, and I reached a point where I was ready to be a little more responsible socially, as an American citizen. Although I come from a middle-class family, I do feel a responsibilty for the mobility that I have to try to make a difference in the world. So I went to school, I studied international relations, and when I got out into the world I was really interested in trying to make a difference. So I think that's kind of [what]聴if you want to call it a transition聴happened. I learned more about the world and realized that hanging out in the mountains and staying in great shape was great, but I wasn't really doing much.

TD: Would you consider yourself a capitalist? Is that how you saw the real estate stuff you were doing in San Juan?
EV: No. I think that there's a new genre of doing business, and it's more prevalent among our generation聴20s and 30s聴where we are care-capitalists. We have found a way to balance nature and business. You see it all over. There's an incredible fascination with organic everything, with sustainablethis, sustainable-that. There [are] marketing campaigns going on like product RED. Who'd of thought? What I was doing at Century 21 was, ironically, I saw myself more as not a real estate broker聴I hate that word. I was doing transitional consulting.

TD: But you were selling land.
EV: Yeah, but we were selling more than land. We were selling a lifestyle. When people often get off the plane, I'm the first person that they talk to after six months of saving money, organizing their capital, and doing research on the internet. Eric is the first person they actually get to talk to on the ground in Nicaragua. I can present Nicaragua in any way that I choose. Often times we end up consulting them on language, on tax, on how to deal with local people, on where to buy groceries. And on several occasions I got money donated to certain projects that were going on.

TD: Like what projects?
EV: There's all types of stuff: sports things, [the] “clean town” [project], the A. Jean Brugger Foundation, all kinds of stuff. Surf boards, jerseys. Things that were small. But the point is that it wouldn't have happened otherwise. Yes, we were selling land, but we were also able to direct people away from the bad developments and the developers who have one foot in the airplane and one foot in Nicaragua, which is a lot of them. So I really felt I was somebody who was trying to control the development the best that I could.

SEEING DORIS

TD: Give me a timeline of your relationship with Doris.
EV: I met Doris, probably, like, I dunno, April of 2005, and just kind of casual dating on and off for probably eight months. At one point she kind of ran into some hard times financially with her family, and she came and actually stayed and lived with me in my house for about three or four months. After that I moved into a house that was across the street, another house, and she came over and lived with me over there. Doris was great. Really fun to hang out with, charismatic, focused.

TD: Did you guys say like, 'I love you,' to each each other?
EV: Uhhhh, yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah.I definitely had a lot of love for her. I wasn't in love with her to start a family. I wasn't trying to have kids with her, and I've heard rumors…

TD: That she was pregnant.
EV: Well that's not true. I know that she's not pregnant. She wasn't pregnant.

TD: Who was ending the relationship when it ended?
EV: Me, definitely. You have to understand, [it] wasn't like I moved to San Juan del Sur and I was just, 'Oh my God, a Latina, sexy.' I knew what I was doing. I knew I wasn't going to be in Nicaragua forever and I was always very up front and honest with Doris about that. And for that reason, I always kind of kept the relationship realistic.

TD: And you kept a distance from her family?
EV: Let's set the record straight on that. She didn't really have family. She had an aunt that lived and worked in Rivas. Her mother lived in Managua, completely aloof. In the two years that I knew Doris, I met her mom twice.

TD: So what's her mom's investment in this, what's her motivation?
EV: I wish I knew. There's a lot of potential reasons. I think that part of it is is kind of an issue of pride. It's an issue of culture. There's a deeply rooted tradition of retaliation in the Nicaraguan culture. If somebody kills a family member, you can't just let it happen, you have to somehow retaliate and save your family's honor. I think that has a lot to do with why she's kind of stepped up. Surprisingly enough, her father, who I actually did have somewhat of a friendship with, has been very low profile.

HIS REPUTATION

TD: Why do people in San Juan say that you are arrogant, and you were disliked?
EV: A lot of the ex-pats in San Juan, the majority of them, are not the kind of people I'd naturally gravitate toward. There's a lot of people down here who, for whatever reason, weren't able to function in society in the United States. Some of them actually have warrants [out for them]. They can't be in the States. A lot struggle with alcoholism; they spend a lot of time in the bars. Quite frankly, I don't connect with a lot of them. So I could see how they could see me being an arrogant person. I really didn't give a lot of them that much attention. I wasn't your normal ex-pat. I worked a lot, pretty much all the time. Century 21 by day, doing EP by night. I wasn't hanging out. Lastly, I was really good at the investment consulting. I was doing well and there were a lot of people who were really jealous. And not just of me, but of my other associates at Century 21 as well. Lastly聟it's a way for them to devalue, undermine, support for me.

TD: One of the biggest rumors in town聴you organized a hit.
EV: It's a town that is hurt. Collectively they want to fill their heart with somebody who's the culprit. It's almost to the point where there's a psychological function where people convince themselves of what is convenient. It's bullshit. I didn't pay to have Doris killed. I had nothing to do with her death. I'm one of the people that has been most hurt by it. It's just bullshit. It's rumors, and San Juan is a small town, and it's very hearsay, he-said she-said bullshit. And not only people in town, but also people in the real estate industry [who] also have tried to convince themselves, 'Oh Eric must be guilty.' It's an easy way out for them.

THE REAL KILLER

TD: Who do you think murdered Doris?
EV: I have my suspicions, but I'm not going to say who it is right now.

TD: Okay.
EV: We know a lot.

THE APPEAL

TD: How do you feel going into the appeal?
EV: We have a good chance. What you have to understand is that my case really at this point has nothing to do with evidence, it doesn't have to do with the Constitution, it doesn't have to do with my attorney. It has to do with politics. I'm in prison today with the general population. If they wanted me out of here, I would be out. I wouldn't be in jail. One phone call, one paper, boom you're done. That's how things work here. Right now it's just kind of political checkers, the media that's taking an interest in the case; that's really an important part of the effort to free Eric Volz.

TD: Do you think about the possibility that you'd have to do the whole time?
EV: Oh no, there's no way. I don't think about 30 years. I think about what happens if I don't get out on the appeal, and it goes to another, Supreme Court process. It's not over in the appeal. It's a mental state of mind, doing time's a state of mind, and you can't give yourself false expectations, you can't let yourself get excited. I got to be really realistic. And no matter how many people say, 'Oh I know this is almost over Eric,' I mean people were saying that before the trial. People don't know what it's like, what's really going on, the type of meetings that are happening. I've accepted the challenge. I don't think that, nobody ever does their full sentence in Nicaragua, never. And there's ways. We're not going to stop. They [are] not going to be able to resist this for 30 years. There's no way with this many people supporting me and really coming together on a global scale. I've gotten letters from Sweden, Australia, Japan, Germany, Mexico, all over Central America. People are outraged. It's embarrassing for Nicaragua, and I really think that eventually it's going to squeeze and squeeze and I'm just going to get popped out the other end I hope.

ERIC VOLZ NOW

TD: Who was Eric Volz? Who is Eric Volz now?
EV: Eric Volz before, I did my best to be a responsible citizen of the planet. I was working hard to create mobility to be able to influence some change in the world. Unfortunately that meant getting money together. I was very focused on my work and my goals and I didn't spend enough time with my friends. I didn't spend enough time cherishing the friendships that were there and close by. I realize now that's really where the true wealth lies, in family and friends and the love that we share for each other.Who am I today? I'm stripped down, I'm very simple. My day-to-day life in prison is just that, day to day. There's days that I feel confident, I feel good, I get exercise, I get to go out in the yard. And there's days that I don't feel good. There's a lot of negative energy in this place. It takes a toll on you physically and mentally. And even the strongest person, eventually it gets to you. I'm developing regardless, developing spiritually and personally. I'm reading a lot. I'm reading a lot about other people who have been in prison unjustly. The amount of support I'm receiving is incredibly, incredibly encouraging for me. To know that I might on a physical level have nothing and my freedom stripped from me, but I have so many people that care about what's happening that I feel like the richest man in the world. It just takes the pain away. While I'm reading those letters, I just feel free again. We'll see, the story's not over yet. I'm really just kicking back and trying to stay alive and stay healthy and get out of here in one piece.

THE FUTURE

TD: Do you think this is happening for a reason, do you see any good in it, is there a spiritual attitude towards this?
EV: You can't really go through this and not reason with the spiritual side of it. You have to ask聴you know I believe in God, I consider myself a spiritual person, I'm not very religious. If you could have walked this journey through the eyes of Eric and seen, no one has as many details as I do, nobody has dealt with the police and heard what the prisoners have said and heard all the inside things. I mean, I hear all the classified information, I know it all, I have the whole story. When you know that whole story, it's like a modern Biblical tale. You look at some of the stories even in the Bible and they're very similar to what I'm going through. And that's pretty heavy for me.

Why me? The attention, I'm not used to this kind of attention. I feel a tremendous responsibility to the people that are pursuing, to know what happened to Eric, what's going on with Eric, to really presenting the situation in not a bitter way, but a realistic way. There's a reason why this has happened. I got a batch of letters yesterday, and one of the guys told me that he really, that God whispers my name in his ear, and he can't stop thinking about the case. He's stopped to really appreciate the small things and the details that he was taking for granted. Every other letter that I get from people, it's like, 'Wow, your story has really touched my heart,' or, 'You're really an inspiration. You forced me to really kind of reconsider my reality.' People tell me they're in the grocery story looking at which kind of juice to buy and the think about me. They all of the sudden feel very appreciative for what they have.

There is some good that's happening. The story, it's causing people to kind of, it's serving as a reference point for people to kind of consider their own, their own life, and the grid that they see reality through is kind of being polished off, cleaned up. Those are the kind of things that really make me feel this is not all for nothing. At the bottom, base core of it is, yeah, Eric Volz is a man in prison, but Doris is the one who lost her life.

The post Behind Bars: Q&A with Eric Volz appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua, is a fishing-and-tourist town of colorfully painted wooden homes laid out on lazy Pacific-coast streets where bicycles outnumber vehicles, where kids set up goal markers out of rocks for afternoon games of 蹿煤迟产辞濒, where locals pass the evenings exchanging gossip on their stoops or attending mass. Always now, too, half-clad gringa girls stroll past in flip-flops on their way to Marie's Bar, where the party on the weekends spills out the door, or Big Wave Dave's, where expats line the counters trading notes on the day's sailfish catch, on the going price for laborers, on the quality of the local beauties, of which there are many.

Los A帽os Ochentas, as the Sandinista contra war of the 1980s is carefully referred to here, is long over, though the memories of it remain. The men go out in their narrow pangas for tuna, for roosterfish, for bonito, for whatever they can pull in on their handlines. The women hang up their laundry to sun-dry.

I'd come, like others before me, looking to pitch a hammock on a stretch of untrammeled beach. Hearing reports of Nicaragua's beauty and safety from a fellow former Peace Corps volunteer, I'd left Florida in my Ford Ranger in early October with a couple of fishing poles, driven slowly through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and arrived in San Juan del Sur on a dusty Sunday afternoon six weeks, five border crossings, and 4,000 miles later. I'd been disappointed before by tales of paradise that turn out to be tourist traps, but my first view of the bay, hemmed in by two sets of cliffs like the Pillars of Hercules, left me diving into the surf as the sun set, wearing a smile as warm as the water around me. By noon the next day, I had a little house with a view of the Pacific for $250 a month.

San Juan is small. Officially, 20,000 people live here; according to the local barber, Roberto L贸pez Mora, it's really just a few extended families L贸pezes, Chamorros, Calderons, Sanchezes, Danglas tracing their roots to the time “before records.” It doesn't take more than a day to start recognizing faces: the oldest beer-bellied expat with his young Nica girlfriend, the Rastafarian trinket hustler who promises he can get you “any-ting, any-ting.” But also, the carpenter who makes furniture across from the park and the expat and his local wife taking their tawny-haired kid down to the beach for a swim.

Nine days after I arrived, on Tuesday, November 21, I walked down the hill into town in the evening to buy a few cans of beer. In the street outside the Miscellania Calderon, where I'd buy all of my sundries over the next three months, a huge crowd had assembled, everyone hushed and looking at something I couldn't see. Gatherings like this are ubiquitous in Central America; I passed it off as a religious event, a Purisima procession of a statue of the Virgin. Then I saw the cops. They came in and out of the doorway of the Sol Fashion boutique in their neat blue uniforms, taking notes.

In the coming days, the shocking details of what was alleged to have happened were splashed in tawdry headlines in El Nuevo Diario, the left-leaning national paper. Doris听Ivania听Alvarado Jim茅nez, 25, a pretty, popular San Juan native, was reported to have been raped, sodomized, and strangled with a ferocity that spoke of specific hatred. It was an audacious crime. Last seen alive in front of her shop at 11:30 that morning, Jim茅nez was found shortly after 2:00 p.m. when the building's watchman, noticing that the boutique was closed, let himself in with a key. What he found inside has threatened to boil resentments between locals and expats into open hostility: the woman's body, hog-tied with bedsheets, asphyxiated with wadded-up paper and rags.

The first newspaper reports pointed to a robbery gone wrong, that Jim茅nez had happened upon and recognized the criminals, that they'd killed her because of it. That premise quickly fell apart as the police issued warrants for four men. Two of them, local surfers who ran in the same posse, were picked up soon after the murder: Julio Mart铆n Chamorro L贸pez, 30, better known as Rosita, was nabbed after a policeman remembered seeing him wandering near Sol Fashion shirtless, bearing what appeared to be fresh scratches and “acting nervous.” Nelson Antonio L贸pez Dangla, 24, who goes by the nickname Krusty, was arrested shortly after Chamorro. The third man, 20-year-old Armando Llanes, had been casually dating Jim茅nez, her friends said. A student at Ave Maria College of the Americas, near Managua, whose family has ties to both Nicaragua and South Florida, Llanes was never taken into custody. He was dropped from suspicion when he produced a statement from his university registrar accounting for his whereabouts during some of the time of the murder.

But what made this case so dramatic was the fourth suspect: Jim茅nez's ex-boyfriend, a 28-year-old expat from Nashville, Tennessee, named Eric Stanley Volz. Bilingual, with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California at San Diego, Eric had moved to San Juan del Sur in 2005 and become a Nicaraguan resident. Until his bio was removed from the Century 21 Web site several weeks after the murder, he was listed as associate manager of the company's San Juan office, and had also made a name for himself publishing a glossy new bilingual lifestyle magazine called EP (short for El Puente, or “The Bridge“). Eric and Doris had dated for a little over a year, but by the summer of 2006 they'd split: He moved to Managua to devote himself to EP, while she remained in San Juan to run her business. After her death, Volz canceled a Thanksgiving business trip back to the States to attend her funeral. Police arrested him shortly after the ceremony.

Local opinion convicted Eric Volz immediately. YOUNG BUSINESSWOMAN VICTIM OF JEALOUS GRINGO, blazed the Diario. US EMBASSY ADVISES ACCUSED GRINGO TO KEEP QUIET. As reported in the paper and as I later read in court documents, what Rosita Chamorro told police in an unsigned statement one that he and his lawyer would later insist to me had been coerced through torture was that Volz, apparently jealous of Jim茅nez's new relationship with Llanes, had offered Chamorro $5,000 to go with him around noon to Sol Fashion, where the American attacked Jim茅nez, then raped, sodomized, and killed her. Krusty Dangla, who would become the prosecution's main witness, said Volz came out of the shop at 1:00 p.m. and paid him 50 cordobas (about $2.75) to put two garbage bags full of what felt like clothes in a white car.

Volz's family quickly disseminated detailed accounts of his alibi that at least ten witnesses placed him two hours away in Managua the whole time on a Web site for supporters called . But the people of San Juan had made up their minds: At Big Wave Dave's, the long-haired beauties tending bar began casually rebuffing expat advances with the simple and musical refrain “Gringos son asesinos.” Gringos are murderers.

Things have been changing quickly in San Juan over the past five years. Sixty major housing developments are either under construction or soon to break ground, from the Costa Rican border, a half-hour south of town, up to and well beyond the fabulous Popoyo reef break, an hour north. More than $400 million in foreign investment has poured in. Land that was next to worthless as recently as 2002 is now flipped with ease; third-acre oceanview lots go for hundreds of thousands. The franchises have followed: The first Subway opened three weeks after I arrived.

An estimated 78 million Americans will retire in the next 20 years, some of them dreaming of deals down south. On the higher end, this could mean a $500,000, 2,500-square-foot house in a gated community overlooking one of these stunning beaches, with its own restaurants, swimming pools, shops, clubhouses, DirecTV, wireless Internet, and full security. The expats need not speak Spanish or even notice much that they are in Nicaragua. All the while, the real estate ads promise, their investments will increase at rates that would make the stock market look silly.

A quick scan of back issues of Between the Waves, a local quarterly English-language magazine geared toward tourists, reveals three things nearly all these ads tout: investment potential, concern for the environment, and sex. Between the Waves covers feature lovely, light-skinned young Nicaraguan women emerging like Venus from the Pacific foam, some of the shots proving so popular they've been reprinted as local Re/Max ads: a tall girl stepping from the sea in a bikini and hoop earrings, smiling at someone off-camera, no one else on the beach. Other developers take the green approach. One outfit, Nica Dev, promises that they “develop with a conscience,” advertising green communities built around ecological reserves, and Century 21's ads exhort readers to “preserve the beaches.”

It's not hard to see why there's an air of expat guilt about what's going on here. In December, I drove out to one of the bigger new projects, Cantamar at Playa Yankee. While many developments can't be seen from the gatehouses where guards stop prying visitors, this one is too big to hide. Carved into the forested hills overlooking an untouched beach are clear-cut terrace after clear-cut terrace, heavy machines at work, the ground rumbling beneath their weight. When Cantamar is eventually finished, it will be a sprawling community of luxury homes, but when I went back in March, it still looked like what it was: deforested land.

Nicaragua is a World Bank and International Monetary Fund designated “heavily indebted poor country,” with little legal ability to control its economic future: Everything is for sale. And once Nicaraguans decide to cash in and sell their houses or farms, they have to look far inland for anything affordable. Many who sold four and five years ago realized less than 5 percent of what the same properties sell for now. A prominent development appraised by the owner at $26 million was built on land bought for $80,000, according to a son of the family who sold it.

Some of these sales are contested. “The foreigners come here knowing the titles are in disarray,” one San Juan man told me late one night at L'Mche's Bar, where the local restaurant and hotel staff unwind after work. He was home for the holidays from the job he held, legally, in Texas. “They have the money to win any lawsuit. We can't afford to fight them in court. And do you know how we are treated when we go to the U.S.? We can't even jaywalk without being harassed by the police.”

This huge and growing disparity in wealth has begun to reveal itself in ugly ways. Though Eduardo Holmann, San Juan's Sandinista-party mayor, dismissed a Diario report that local fishermen have been shot at when they drop anchor in bays fronting private developments, he admitted that new laws have to be written to protect beach-access rights, which some foreigners have been trying to deny. Petty theft is a persistent annoyance. Crack is a growing problem. One Wednesday night late in January, a block from Big Wave Dave's, a celebrated local hustler and avowed user stabbed a prominent expat twice in the stomach with a pair of barber's scissors, the culmination of a long-running feud. The expat recovered after surgery; the hustler was arrested and released, and a few weeks later he left town.

Meanwhile, the boom continues, despite foreign anxiety surrounding the November 2006 reelection of former Sandinista president Daniel Ortega. Ortega, after all, led the nationalization of private property following the 1979 revolution, which overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Ortega of today is not the Ortega of the past; he has been actively reassuring investors that the favorable business climate here will not change. Still, few deny it comes with a price. “You've seen these developments,” said Mayor Holmann. “Where is that sanitation going to drain? We are trying to support all of this with the same infrastructure that we had 30 years ago. If we don't get help from the national government, we are going to have critical situations with drainage and electricity.”

The mayor is not anti-development. “If the foreign investors behave with social responsibility,” he said, “community relations will turn out OK.” But, he cautioned, “what we don't want to see is a San Juan del Sur of America.”

Into the fray of this fevered market came Eric Volz. Speculation had become so rampant by 2004 that Internet investors who'd previously never left the States were visiting regularly on real estate tours, getting the hard sell while enjoying the delights of the bay, the 70-cent beers, the heady idea of financial windfall, the sight of all the pretty girls. Everywhere, the air was full of the sounds of construction, the money crashing in like the big breakers rolling onto shore. It says a lot about San Juan's unregulated, unlicensed real estate market that it could not only make room for the youthful and inexperienced Volz but also allow him to thrive. By all accounts, he had a knack for closing the deal; he was gathering capital, more than $100,000 of which he'd use to fund EP.

According to friends, Volz is a diversely talented individualist, a traveler and outdoor enthusiast. When he was ten, his family moved from Sacramento to Nashville, where his divorced parents both still live. Volz's father, Jan, is a country-music-tour organizer and founding member of an alternative Christian band called the 77's; his mother, Maggie Anthony, is an interior decorator. He has a younger sister, plus a stepsister from his mother's second marriage. His mother's side of the family is of Mexican descent, and it's from them that Volz became “receptively bilingual,” as he put it when I spoke to him in March. “I understood what they said, but I only produced English.”

Volz took up climbing at a local gym when he was 11, as a way to deal with his parents' divorce. “It really began to mean something about freedom, learning my limits, learning to trust myself,” he told me. After high school, he moved to Meyers, California, near South Lake Tahoe. He worked in carpentry, took classes at Lake Tahoe Community College, DJ'd at a local bar, and built a reputation as an exceptional free climber.

While many of his Tahoe friends remained in the mountains, Volz chose a different path, ultimately pursuing Latin American studies at UCSD. “I reached a point where I was ready to be a little more responsible socially,” he says. “I realized that hanging out in the mountains and staying in shape was great, but I wasn't really doing much.”

Volz's climbing friends would be among the first to come to his defense after his arrest. “He had a view you don't see as much in mountain towns,” Chris McNamara, a Tahoe climber who made bouldering films with Volz, wrote me in an e-mail. “He was concerned with global issues and was looking for the opportunity to address them. He thought Nicaragua was the place to do this. And that's the incredibly tragic irony of this case. Eric was working to get beyond those divisive cultural and political relations. Everything that he now seems to be in the middle of.”

In 2004, Volz joined his father for a ten-day trip to Iraq, photographing country singer Chely Wright's tour as she entertained the troops. He met Iraqis, interviewed soldiers, and flew in Blackhawks. He soon finished his degree. In early 2005, having visited San Juan off and on for six years, he decided to move to Nicaragua. In the waterfront Rocamar Restaurant, where he often ate, Doris Jim茅nez was a waitress. Volz's r茅sum茅 was already filled with travels; she was a local girl of very modest upbringing. “Her dream, from when she was 15 years old,” says her aunt Mar铆a Elena Alvarado, “was to have a shop.” Jim茅nez studied business administration at the UPOLI University in nearby Rivas, taking computer and English classes. While Volz, as one friend puts it, “had the world by a string,” Jim茅nez, according to everyone, was the prettiest girl in town.

Just one year later, Jim茅nez would be running Sol Fashion, while Volz focused on the launch of EP. The magazine, as he wrote in his first publisher's letter, would be devoted to everything from “the explosion of surf culture” to local anxiety over the “oncoming waves of foreigners, construction, and the almighty dollar.” Professional, bilingual, and printed on expensive paper, the premiere edition appeared in July 2006, boasting a 20,000-copy run, a viable presence in five countries, and a look to rival Vogue. That first issue includes a nine-page “fashion-documentary” called “Maria's Journey,” following Nicaraguan model Maria Mercedes in various states of dress and undress in Victoria's Secret, Prada, and Benetton beginning as she wakes with a yawn and a long tumble of black hair in what is clearly a campesino shack and ending with her posed outside a modern office building, a powerful CEO. “Where you come from,” the text reads, “does not determine where you can go.” Doris Jim茅nez appears on page 59, standing in the countryside in a traditional skirt, the wind in her hair. The words beside her read, “We are rising in the ranks of power, breaking new ground. Women of Central America.”

Before EP's glossy incarnation, Volz had produced two issues of a community newsletter called El Puente, in March and October 2005, with Jon Thompson, an Atlanta native who began going back and forth to San Juan in 1999. Earnest and crew-cut, with fluent Nicaraguan-accented Spanish, Thompson, 32, now directs the upscale Pelican Eyes resort's A. Jean Brugger Foundation, which provides educational opportunities to students. The original El Puente was Thompson's idea, his ticket to moving here full-time. “Let's say I come to San Juan and I don't know there's an eco-stove project going on,” he said in December. “That's what El Puente was going to be for to connect resources and interest with local leadership and sustainable projects.”

Thompson and Volz met here in 2001, when they were both still visitors. “He told me about his films, that he'd been a DJ,” Thompson said of his onetime friend. “I told Eric, 'I'll hire you to come down, take pictures.' ” Their close partnership lasted well into 2005. “Then Eric wanted to grow,” said Thompson, who clearly regrets the loss of his project. “San Juan wasn't big enough for him. His Century 21 money poured in, and eventually it grew beyond a local newsletter and became the international EP magazine.”

When they first started El Puente and money was tight, Volz shared a house with Thompson and his local girlfriend, Arelis Castro L贸pez, now his wife. Volz and Jim茅nez began dating; Jim茅nez moved in, too. The arrangement lasted several months, and both Thompson and his wife say they didn't see anything that would make them think Volz is a murderer. Thompson knew Jim茅nez three years longer than he knew Volz; he says what everyone says that she was nice.

Though sentiment in San Juan is unanimously positive concerning Doris Jim茅nez, opinion about Volz is mixed. People close to her family invariably say that his foreign ways led her into behaviors considered shameful here. Her mother, Mercedes Alvarado, who sold her San Juan home in 2006 and moved inland to Rivas with Doris's two younger sisters, says she took exception to what she describes as Volz's lack of communication with the family, to her daughter's willingness to leap out of bed “when he would call in the middle of the night.” Jim茅nez's grandmother Jacinta Lanzas told the Diario, “With these people you have to be very careful, because you don't know anything about them, nothing of their past, and in this case I always sensed something bad. I never felt good about this guy.” Volz, for his part, says Jim茅nez was never close to her mother.

Volz's business associates insist he is “a great guy,” that he couldn't possibly have done this. A few other expats, people who had unsuccessful real estate dealings with him at Century 21, readily vilify him in open anger. Many others simply say that he seemed aloof. “A lot of the expats in San Juan,” Volz explained, “quite frankly, I don't connect with them. So I could see how they could see me being an arrogant person. I wasn't your normal expat. I worked pretty much all the time.”

Volz and Jim茅nez's split, both he and Thompson insisted, was amicable. “I had a lot of love for her,” said Volz, who says that he ended things around June 2006. “It wasn't like I moved to San Juan del Sur and was just, Oh my God, a Latina sexy. I knew I wasn't going to be in Nicaragua forever, and I was always very up front and honest with Doris about that.”

“Doris was Miss San Juan a couple years ago,” Thompson said. “Eric wasn't even her first American boyfriend. Eric is innocent. The town didn't know him; that's why they were so quick to condemn him.”

“Have you heard the expression 'Pueblo peque帽o, infierno grande'?” he asked. ” 'Little town, big hell.' There is a lot of jealousy here. Who knows what's really going on?”

Two days before Volz's December 7 arraignment in Rivas, a car with loudspeakers circled through San Juan exhorting people to “bring justice to the gringo!” A huge crowd jeered as he was escorted into the courthouse; during the hearing, a woman outside could be heard shouting, “Come out, gringo, we are going to murder you!” Expecting the worst, Volz and the U.S. Embassy regional security officer, Michael Poehlitz, exchanged clothes while Volz's father, Jan, who'd flown in from the States, looked on.

As Volz left the arraignment, the mob saw through the ruse and rushed him. “A couple punches flew out of the side,” Volz told me. “I don't know if I dodged them or if they just missed me. I felt a rock fly by my head.” He ducked into a nearby gymnasium and hid in an office. With the mob surrounding the building, Poehlitz ran in behind him, making calls on his cell while Volz frantically stripped off one of the handcuffs and kicked through a wall into a room where they would be more secure. An hour later, police retrieved them.

“It was utter chaos,” Jan Volz told me this spring. “Eric had said to me, 'Dad, do not come over here; there are guys with clubs.' I was not going to leave my son. They were taunting and jeering.” As Jan left with two legal advisers, he recalled, “people were pounding on our car, hitting it with clubs. I'm convinced that if they had caught any one of us, they would have killed us.”

Under Nicaraguan law, the defense may choose between a trial by judge or jury. With sentiment tilted so heavily against Volz and because a jury trial rules out the possibility of appeal, the defense opted for a judge; the trial was set for January 26. Meanwhile, Volz was held in various jails and penitentiaries. According to his parents, he wasn't fed for a five-day stretch; he spent a week in a medical ward; he was repeatedly threatened. Then, at a special hearing on January 16, the pre-trial judge, Rivas district judge Dr. Edward Peter Palma Mora, ordered Volz released to house arrest. If he'd had all the facts at the arraignment, Palma stated, he would have thrown the case out due to lack of evidence. As it was, the trial was postponed until February 14, with a designated trial judge, Dr. Ivette Toru帽o Blanco, officiating. Until then, Volz would remain at a friend's house in an undisclosed location.

Middle-class by U.S. standards, Volz's parents say that they've spent their life savings defending their son. In January, friends brought a host of Nashville musicians together for a benefit concert. Dane Anthony, Volz's stepfather, has left his 18-year career at Nashville's Belmont University, where he was an associate dean of students, to focus full-time on the case. Volz's team would eventually include Jacqueline Becerra, a lawyer with the multinational firm Greenberg Traurig and president-elect of the Federal Bar Association's South Florida chapter; Simon Strong, of Holder International, a company specializing in risk management; Melissa Campbell, a music-industry publicist and family friend; private security from multinational Corporate Security Consultants (CSC); and Ram贸n Rojas, a prominent Nicaraguan lawyer who successfully defended Daniel Ortega in a civil case in 2001.

From the first days, the family seemed out of their element. Early comments they made about the legal system were used by the Nicaraguan media to ill effect, and local coverage was so one-sided with the people of San Juan relying on the Diario and an incensed Mercedes Alvarado for most of their information that Volz's parents would finally pay to run his side of the story as an ad.

Sometime in the second half of December, Volz's defense team called a meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Managua to give San Juan mayor Holmann Volz's account of his whereabouts on the day of the murder, hoping he could intervene with local reporters. What quickly transpired, however, was anything but positive. Holmann expanded the invitation to include Krusty Dangla's lawyer, Cesar Baltodano, and commissioner Yamil Guti茅rrez, of the Rivas police. Agreeing to try to arrange a t锚te-脿-t锚te between Jim茅nez's mother and Volz's defense lawyers, Baltodano invited Mercedes Alvarado to lunch at the Gran Diamante restaurant, near Rivas on Lake Nicaragua. According to Alvarado and her lawyer, Erick Cabezas, who was also present, Baltodano told the woman, “Your daughter is dead. She's not coming back. How much could she have earned in her life? Fifty dollars a day? Over 40 years?”

Cabezas alleges that Baltodano told Alvarado that if she would make a public written statement attesting to Volz's innocence, a cash settlement of $1,000,000 would be placed in her bank account, to which Cabezas, as her lawyer, would be entitled to 20 percent. While Baltodano denies offering a settlement, he admits the subject came up. “You know,” he told me, “this sort of thing exists everywhere in the world. I said to her that her daughter would never live again, maybe we could do something.” Volz's family, his defense team, and Holmann all emphatically deny having suggested a settlement.

Nevertheless, Alvarado went to the press. “I don't need a million dollars,” she would cry in every subsequent radio and print interview. “I need my daughter!” Local sentiment turned darker. “He's rich! His powerful family is trying to buy him out!” became a local mantra.

The Volz family seemed totally confused. “I'm a guy who makes a salary,” Jan Volz said. “I'm broke now. Doris's life was worth a lot more than a million dollars. I'm deeply sorry that she's gone. I want justice, too. If Eric was guilty, I'd tell him, 'You'll pay in here because you made a choice.' Had I a million dollars, I wouldn't have given it to her. Eric is innocent I'm not trying to buy his innocence.”

Meanwhile, they kept up their vigil. “Today is day 23 for Eric in jail,” his mother, Maggie Anthony, wrote from Nicaragua on the Web site on December 16. “That is the way I start each day. I've been waking up at 5:00 each morning wondering how many days has it been, and if Eric is sleeping. I then quietly go downstairs to check my e-mail for any news from our attorneys or a message from someone who is sending us love or support.”

Volz was able to contribute one posting himself, on January 4. “I still don't know exactly why I'm being forced to walk this path,” he wrote. “Some have mentioned 'karma' I say bullshit. This is me being formed through a heavy spiritual and physical journey. The ultimate purpose is not yet clear, but in the meantime I have become a lightning rod for politics, compassion, prayer, and love. A campaign and a movement have emerged.”

Surfing is a good way to escape the complexities of the world, especially on the empty waves of Nicaragua. When a swell rolls in, there are double overheads, left breaks, right breaks, beach breaks, reef breaks. The water is warm and clean, the sand soft. Looking south, you can see the dense mountains of Costa Rica; just offshore, islands rise out of the ocean like the buttes of Monument Valley. Fish leap from the water in schools. Humpback whales breach in the distance.

Playa Madera, four miles north of town, is where they all surfed Volz, Chamorro, Dangla. During the rainy season, the road is an axle-bending, suspension-wrecking gash through the rainforest, but, to be fair, once the rains stop and the government grader comes through, you can get into third gear. Here and there are the signs of development tarmac-long clear-cuts and completed gated communities along with modest truck-shed fincas with chickens and pigs in the yard, the municipal dump crowded with turkey vultures, and long swaths of forest resplendent with parakeets, butterflies, and monkeys.

My truck made me lots of “friends” in Central America, and among my more regular passengers out to Playa Madera were Roque and Rex Calderon, the half-dozen members of their entourage, and everyone's surfboard. Roque, 21, and Rex, 14, are two of Nicaragua's best surfers Roque led the national squad to second place at the Central American Championships in Costa Rica last July so that at any given time, I'd be driving the majority of the Nicaraguan national surf team to the beach. Day after day in the months leading up to Volz's trial, the Calderons, their friend Juan, and I waxed our boards and paddled out to the four-footers. Duck-diving back out through the set, I'd get to watch Roque's surgical dissection of the whole line, Rex's skateboard aerials.

One Saturday night in early December, Roque and I had a drink on the rooftop of the La Dolce Vita Hotel, getting started on what usually wound up at four in the morning in the low-key and hidden L'Mche's Bar. Roque has begun to appear in the surf magazines; his mentor, American board shaper Tom Eberly, believes in him so much that he quietly paid for Roque's initial English lessons, getting him ready to succeed on a larger stage. As we looked down at San Juan's central intersection, where European and American girls in sarongs passed in pairs and threes under the yellow streetlight, Roque told me, “Thanks to surfing, lots of people here are making a living: hotels, restaurants, the beach taxis, the surf boats. It's expat surfers who are building many of the developments here. Twenty percent of tourism in San Juan depends on surfing.” For himself, he'd like to open a surf shop.

About the murder? “Rosita is my cousin. I used to see Eric surfing.”

In other words, Roque didn't want to talk about it. Nobody does: Fear of blood feuds looms large in San Juan, and Chamorro's and Dangla's extended families are enmeshed in everything. One shopkeeper took me into a back room so she could cry and tell me how awful she feels for Volz; she wouldn't let me use her name. “[My store] is a public place,” she said. “I'm afraid.”

“The people in town they're angry,” another echoed. “Eric didn't do it. I am afraid of people here. Of vendetta.”

Meanwhile, the sidewalk in front of the Arena Caliente hostel and board shop is busy night after night with the local surfers and the twenty-something backpacker girls who hook up with them.

” 'Do you think he really loves me?' ” mimicked American ESL teacher Mara Jacobsohn, rolling her eyes at the foreign girls the surfer guys go through like soap. Jacobsohn has taught hundreds in the town; she lived with a local family so long that they still get approval over whom she dates. While Nicaraguan attitudes don't seem to condemn casual encounters between local men and female tourists, the reverse situation, she noted, isn't viewed in the same light. When it came to this case, she said, “It's been very important that it must be someone not from here. What's most important about Eric is that he lacked a community; it seemed to me like he was one of those people here to make money. At the same time, I don't think he did it. Even with Doris, although pleasant and nice, she was rewritten. She was beatified. It's disgusting to see Krusty as a witness. A parasite on the whole community.”

A few men in the surfer crowd, I noticed, had turned to hustling, befriending tourists and intimidating them into paying for the night's drinks or staging phony drug deals in which the tourists got burned. One expat woman, who would not allow her name to be published, told me that she once pursued a restraining order against Chamorro after a violent encounter; when I asked him about it, he said that she'd hit him first. Chamorro's lawyer, Geovanny Ruiz Mena, denies any history of violence on his client's part, aside from a bar altercation four years ago.

Down on the street when Roque and I left the Dolce Vita, four young men in blue shirts, all bouncers from the Otangani disco, at the edge of town, were passing out photocopies of Jim茅nez's picture. “We are friends of her family,” they explained. “We want these tourists to know that this happened.” One shouldered past the others and said in a low voice, “When Eric is convicted and sent to the real prison, he will be killed there for sure.” He drew his finger slowly across his throat. “But I hope they rape him first.”

In early February, after repeatedly and persistently being turned away, I was finally given access to the Doris Jim茅nez murder-case file in the Rivas courthouse by Judge Toru帽o herself. For 40 minutes, she allowed me to sift through the nearly 400 pages of documents while two of her staff looked on. I have to admit that all the rumors, coupled with the Diario articles, the number of people who said they didn't know or like Volz, and the certainty of Jim茅nez's family and friends, had led me to have little doubt of his guilt. But when the clerk called time, I closed the file sure that, whoever he was or wasn't, Eric Volz was innocent.

In the file were the original charges against Volz and Armando Llanes for the rape and sodomy of Jim茅nez, as well as murder charges against Volz, Llanes, Chamorro, and Dangla. These were amended on December 6, and what was read at the December 7 arraignment was that Eric Stanley Volz and Julio Mart铆n “Rosita” Chamorro L贸pez were accused of killing Doris Jim茅nez. Charges against Armando Llanes and Nelson Antonio “Krusty” L贸pez Dangla had been dropped. Dangla was now the prosecution's principal witness.

As I'd already read in the papers, Dangla's police statement alleged that at 10:00 a.m. on the day of the murder, he was standing outside the Costa Azul hotel when Volz stopped in a low, white car with another man in the passenger seat and told him to come to Sol Fashion at 1:00 p.m., where Volz allegedly came out of the shop, handed him two black garbage bags full of what felt like clothes, and told him to put them in the car. Dangla said Volz gave him 50 cordobas and sped off in the direction of Managua.

The police statement attributed to Chamorro was also in the file. Volz, it alleged, had offered Chamorro $5,000 to go to Sol Fashion, where the American hit and kicked his ex-girlfriend, then raped, sodomized, and killed her. It wouldn't be until after the trial that Chamorro's lawyer told me the statement had been coerced.

Then there were the crime-scene photos: Jim茅nez's body, bound at the ankles and wrists; her mouth, forced open so wide from being stuffed that it seemed frozen in a perpetual scream. A first forensic exam by the “supplemental” examiner in Rivas, Dr. Isolde Vanesa Arcia Jim茅nez, described vaginal and anal scratches. A second examination, by Dr. 脫scar Bravo Flores, the official forensic examiner, found none. Toxicology put Jim茅nez's blood alcohol content at 0.3, a bizarrely high level. In the photos, her belt is unbuckled and the first two buttons of her fly are undone, revealing the waistband of her underwear. The official police report states that the perpetrators undressed her to rape and sodomize her, then put her clothes back on because of a “sentimental” attachment, and finally hog-tied her the way she was found. Volz's blood type was entered as O, then as A, which is what he is. (Jim茅nez was also A, while Rosita Chamorro is O.) The Nicaraguan criminal-justice system does not yet test for DNA, and I found no fingerprint evidence against any of the defendants.

In official physical exams recorded in the files, the police say that both Chamorro and Dangla bore “fingernail” scratches on their arms. According to these files, Krusty Dangla was scratched on seven different parts of his body, including the head of his penis. Volz, the reports noted, had a number of thin, straight lines, one more defined than the others, on the unbroken skin of his right shoulder.

And then I read the evidence regarding Volz's alibi: cell-phone records, a time-stamped instant-messaging log, page after page of statements by the ten people most of whom I would later interview myself supporting Volz's account. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., Volz maintained, he walked into the EP offices from his living quarters the building also served as his home and was seen by the security guard, the housekeeper, and various EP staff. From 10:30 to 11:00, model Maria Mercedes and a friend said they met with him. At noon, Ricardo Castillo, a Nicaraguan journalist who has contributed to the BBC and other news outlets, arrived; he and Volz then initiated a teleconference to Virginia with consultant Nick Purdy, a cofounding publisher of the music magazine Paste. As the conference progressed, Purdy and Volz exchanged instant messages on their impressions of Castillo, a potential contributor to EP. The call lasted nearly an hour. Following it, at roughly 1:15 p.m., Volz, Castillo, and Adam Paredes, EP's art director, sat down to a lunch of curried fish served by the housekeeper, Martha Carolina Aguirre Corea. Castillo left at 2:00. At roughly 2:45, Volz received a call informing him of Jim茅nez's death; more calls would quickly come in confirming it. Meanwhile, a local hairstylist, Rossy Elena Estrada L贸pez, had arrived to cut Volz's and another employee's hair; she found him talking on a cell phone, she said, “afflicted and crying.” According to these witnesses, Volz left the office at roughly 4:30.

Volz's cell-phone records precisely match his account of what happened next: that he left Managua and drove to San Juan. At 4:38 p.m. the first call outside Managua appears on the log, the following 11 calls tracing the trajectory of someone driving quickly, arriving in the San Juan cellular area at 6:34. (I've since done this drive twice in the same amount of time. It requires driving fast but not inordinately so.)

Only one document cast suspicion on his alibi: a rental agreement from Hertz. Volz had called Hertz to rent a car to go to San Juan. (His, he said, was unreliable.) The agreement was printed at 3:11 p.m. at the Hertz office. But when the vehicle was delivered, EP assistant Leidy de los Santos, not Volz, signed the agreement. She went inside and returned with a credit-card slip bearing what appeared to be his signature, but the delivery driver never saw Volz himself.

The case for Volz's innocence seemed obvious, irrefutable. The day before the trial, the Volz family asked visitors to their Web site to pray for the “safety of all involved in and surrounding the trial: Eric, witnesses, press, attorneys, bystanders, security, police; Health of one of Eric's key defense team who is sick with the flu; Judge; Doris's mother & family; That the trial is swift and that Eric will be free on Friday!”

At the Rivas exit on the morning of February 14, police searched my truck for weapons. In town, a two-block circumference around the courthouse was sealed off. I was patted again for weapons, given my press pass, and allowed to walk into the deserted heart of the downtown commercial district. Most of the businesses would keep their steel doors shut for the next three days.

The courtroom was small, frigid with air conditioning. The cramped gallery was separated from the prosecution and defense tables by a narrow wooden rail. Black-armored special-operations police blocked the door, while six armed national police were stationed at different points in the room. When L茅sber Quintero, the Diario reporter, arrived, I sidled over to him and asked, “L茅sber, why do you always use the word gringo instead of norteamericano or estadounidense?” Quintero blushed as everyone around us laughed. But he quickly found his footing. “Gringo, chele, norteamericano for us Nicaraguans it's all the same thing.”

Soon enough, Volz and Chamorro arrived, and the cameras began flashing. Volz's lawyer, Ram贸n Rojas, would always be the best-dressed man in the room, save the three U.S. Embassy observers taking notes in the gallery corner. Volz wore a jean jacket, the outlines of a bulletproof vest visible underneath. Chamorro wore his bulletproof vest over a long-sleeved black shirt.

The proceedings opened with efforts by the prosecution, led by Isolda Ibarra Arguello, to establish the time of the crime. A university student who lived next door to Sol Fashion testified that he'd heard someone knocking on Jim茅nez's door at around 11:45 a.m., and two loud sounds like something heavy hitting the floor at around 1:00 p.m. Another neighbor said that Chamorro had been hanging around Jim茅nez recently and that something had happened between them. Five days before the murder, he told the court, he'd overheard an angry Chamorro say, “I don't give a damn about this Doris; she's a gringo chaser. She and her beauty can stay that way.” Jim茅nez's mother and close friends testified that Volz was motivated by his jealousy, which increased, they claimed, when Jim茅nez told him about Armando Llanes. Mercedes Alvarado waved around a receipt from the Gran Diamante, crying out, “I don't need a million dollars. I need my daughter.”

Other witnesses were brought forth to call Volz's alibi into question, including the Hertz delivery driver, Victor Morales, who testified that one of Volz's friends had asked him to say that he saw Volz at the EP office that day when he didn't, at which point the prosecution spoke at length about why Leidy de los Santos would have signed Volz's rental agreement. Chamorro was never called; the statement he would later recant did not factor into the trial in any significant way. Therefore the only witness tying Volz to the crime scene was Krusty Dangla. In testimony that made everyone in the courtroom laugh even the judge the excitable and often confused Dangla again and again couldn't follow simple directions to hold the microphone up to his mouth. The one coherent thing he managed to do was point his finger at Volz and say, “He gave me 50 cordobas.”

“I may be an alcoholic,” Dangla stood up at one point and said to Rojas, “but I'm not a liar!”

After declining to cross-examine nearly everyone but Dangla, to the groans of the U.S. Embassy observers, Rojas questioned the forensic witnesses. They explained that the misrecording of Volz's blood type was a typo and acknowledged that fluid from Jim茅nez's vagina and anus revealed no presence of semen. We also learned that, between the two forensic examinations, Jim茅nez's body had been partially embalmed, at her mother's request.

Court adjourned at 1:00 p.m. Alvarado, dressed in black, rushed outside to lead a mob of a hundred San Juan residents, calling the police “whores of the gringo” for keeping them back. Volz left the court as he arrived, protected by a Nicaraguan detail of Corporate Security Consultants bodyguards, including a Caucasian man carrying an AR-15 machine gun. The Diario would quickly run article after article asking why foreigners were carrying military arms in Nicaragua. That was the last time CSC guards appeared at the trial, though the damage had been done.

Back in San Juan, I found Dangla where I knew he would be: hanging with his friends outside his house. He was jubilant, laughing. On the stand, he had adamantly said that he did not know Jim茅nez at all beyond seeing her now and again. Now, back in town with his role in the trial over for him, he said something different. “Yeah, I knew her at the beach, when I'd pass her shop. I'd see her every day.” Asked how he felt, Dangla said, “Very good. I didn't do anything. I have my version. [Eric] has his version. You'll have to talk to my lawyer.”

The next day, February 15, Rojas presented the defense. Consensus among the embassy staff and the other two foreign reporters present was that the prosecution's case was too weak to have been brought in the first place. But the judge had tossed out all but three of Volz's witnesses as redundant, allowing him only Nick Purdy, the consultant; Ricardo Castillo, the journalist; and Rossy Estrada, the hairstylist. Purdy went first, testifying through a court translator that he'd been in phone and instant-message conversations with Volz throughout the time of the murder, which Castillo confirmed, testifying that he was actually in the EP office with Volz. A frightened Estrada testified that she cut Volz's hair. In the cross-examination, the prosecution hammered away at the point that both Castillo and Purdy had incentive to see Volz free, as they had business dealings with him.

Then Volz took the stand. He was calm and looked directly at the judge. He discussed his relationship with Jim茅nez in fluent Spanish. He talked about the competitiveness of the real estate market. When he described the $3 million an average San Juan real estate office made in annual sales, a ripple went through the gallery and a woman gasped, “In dollars?” Volz looked at the judge and said he was innocent. When Rojas asked him why Dangla was lying, he said he didn't know.

Then Rojas asked how he had gotten the marks on his shoulder. Again looking directly at the judge, Volz gave an answer that was wholly in keeping with the telenovela elements of the case: “I got it carrying Doris's casket at the funeral.”

In the total 15 hours of the trial, less than 40 minutes would be spent on Chamorro. He wasn't called to the stand in his own defense or Volz's prosecution; when his lawyer demanded that his client be called by his legal name, not Rosita, the judge shook her head and smiled, “But that is how we Nicaraguans refer to each other.” Chamorro kept a blank face as he watched his only witness, a bleached-blond surfer named Yamil “Coky” Brook Gonzales, testify that he and his Canadian girlfriend had eaten with Chamorro in the market from 9:00 a.m. to around 11:45 the day of the murder. During recesses, he would come to the rail and exchange hugs with his mother and aunt, who always brought a sweater for him, which he didn't wear. He didn't like his picture being taken, and menaced the photographers the first day. But by the second day, he seemed resigned to it.

Volz spent time during court breaks calmly talking to his lawyers; after the first day, he wore a heavy coat against the cold. No members of his family ever appeared in the courtroom; after what had happened at the arraignment, Maggie Anthony told me in Managua in March, they were afraid. Indeed, a terrified Nick Purdy looked at the door after being dismissed from his testimony and said, “I ain't going out on the street.”

In closing statements, the prosecutors summarized their case. Nelson “Krusty” Dangla had seen Volz at the scene of the crime. The Hertz delivery driver's testimony and the rental agreement signed by Leidy de los Santos had called Volz's alibi into question. Blood typing had found both A and O on the sheets used to hog-tie Jim茅nez; Jim茅nez and Volz were type A, Chamorro type O. The first forensic examiner found evidence of rape and sodomy. Cell-phone records could not prove Volz was the one using the phone, the prosecution claimed, nor could instant messages. And then there were Volz's injuries. “How can one be scratched by a coffin while wearing a shirt?” the prosecutor asked. The judge looked at the picture of Volz's shoulder, case photo number 21, for a long time.

Rojas presented an impassioned closing statement. Point by point, he went through the prosecution's evidence, highlighting the changes in the original charges, the scratches on Dangla, the conflicting findings about sodomy and rape, the shoddy police-lab work, which included Volz's incorrect blood typing as well as the failure to collect testable material from under Jim茅nez's fingernails, though her fingers showed signs of defensive injuries. He talked about the credibility of Purdy and Castillo, about the phone records. His voice rose to a crescendo as he slammed the national-police laboratory. About the marks on Volz's shoulder, he said, “Of course that could happen he has white skin.” (Later, Mercedes Alvarado would play me a DVD of the funeral. The video shows the sharp edge of Jim茅nez's coffin resting on Volz's shoulder.)

Just as Rojas was about to finish, there was a sudden commotion, and the special-operations officers barricaded the door with their bodies. A court clerk shouted, “There is shooting outside!”

“Nobody leaves the room,” the judge said, and everyone flipped open their cell phones. Jim茅nez's mother held out hers for us all to hear the shouts of the mob confronting the riot police, which sounded as chaotic as it should. It was amid this tension that the case concluded. Volz's final statement was “Nicaragua has a lot of heart. I believe in her justice.” Chamorro said, “God knows I was not there.” The judge told the court she'd have a verdict in two hours.

It was hot outside; the street was a shoulder-to-shoulder line of riot police in armor, helmets, and shields. Halfway up the block was another line of blue-uniformed national police, and facing them was an angry crowd of hundreds. I had only two real questions left: Would the judge find a way to convict Chamorro even though she would have to let Volz go? And how violent would the mob get?

Security for the 4 p.m. verdict was tighter than it had ever been. A wooden fence had been placed in the hall upstairs, and the riot police made us wait behind it until the accused had taken their seats. The folding chairs in the gallery had been removed so that now the space seemed like a pen. The judge did not come in until 4:15. Then she sat and began to speak.

What I can say is this: The reading of the verdict was long and theatrical. Judge Toru帽o went through the charges against the two men in a loud and emphatic way, rolling her r's just a touch longer than necessary, letting the names of the accused settle around us in their length. The cameras rolled; it would certainly play out well on local television, which it soon did. The judge threw out Purdy's testimony, because he was in Virginia during the phone call. She threw out the cell-phone records because she said they didn't prove Volz's physical location. She said Ricardo Castillo wasn't credible; she said Dangla was. She admitted that the police lab had done a terrible job and chastised them for it. And then she said two things to Volz. “You were in Managua at 5 p.m. and arrived in San Juan at 6:30. You want me to believe that you can move around very fast.” And as far as the scratches on his shoulder were concerned, she said, “You can't get scratches from a coffin.” Volz hung his head. Chamorro was stoic.

Judge Toru帽o pronounced both defendants guilty. The prosecutor asked for the maximum penalty for both men, 30 years. Alvarado burst into tears and said, “Thank God! Thank God! This is what a mother wanted not a million dollars, but justice,” as the cameras flashed and rolled. I passed Chamorro's mother in the hall as I left. “It's better this way,” she whispered. “It's better that it's both of them.”

国产吃瓜黑料 on the street, the mob was jubilant. Jim茅nez's uncle pointed his finger at the sky and said, “This is justice for our small town, for Nicaragua, and for all of Central America!” As Volz and Chamorro were hustled into waiting police trucks, the crowd hung off the walls of the surrounding buildings, whistling and shouting that one word: “Justice!”

Early on the morning of Tuesday, March 27, I sat in a rental car in the parkinglot of the Modelo National Penitentiary, just outside the town of Tipitapa, 30 minutes east of Managua. A half-dozen dusty boys, their hands and faces pressed to the windows, waited for me to get out so they could “guard” my car for a tip. This was my fourth attempt to get into the prison in two weeks; what was different about today was that I finally had a letter from Judge Toru帽o extending me access to visit Volz, for which I'd had to lobby all the way to the office of a Supreme Court magistrate. Meanwhile, the first international TV crews, from Dateline and the Today show, had arrived in Nicaragua. 国产吃瓜黑料 the warden's office, seven or eight of them were already waiting their turn to see Volz.

I'd been thinking a lot about Doris Jim茅nez, about what dark thing descended on her that November day. On March 16, her family commemorated her birthday at the San Juan cemetery. A mariachi band played a haunting traditional song, “Very Pretty Doris,” as her relatives tearfully decorated her grave with plastic flowers and ribbons. While I still disagreed with Alvarado that Volz killed her daughter, I understood her sorrow, her furious desire to see someone pay for this crime.

Entering the Modelo grounds, I saw industrial penitentiary buildings in need of paint. Barbed-wire-crowned walls surrounded the facility, punctuated here and there with towers manned by armed guards. A line of older women were waiting to enter the grounds, carrying plastic shopping bags of toilet paper, rice, and beans. From somewhere, I could hear the echo of men singing.

I was led into a spartan office; Volz was waiting at the desk. He wore a blue Hurley baseball cap and a black T-shirt with the letters ep embossed in green; he'd placed a small voice recorder on the desktop. We shook hands and sat in folding chairs; a guard observed us from a chair in the corner. Volz was calm and collected. He began our interview with this statement: “I've been misquoted a lot; that's why I'm recording… I have an army of attorneys that are willing to step up in any way that I ask. So it's not a threat, but I just want that to be understood.”

Over the next two hours, Volz and I talked about the case, about his relationship with Jim茅nez, about his hopes for the appeals process and his future. (Ram贸n Rojas filed Volz's appeal shortly after the verdict; by press time, in mid-April, the Rivas court had sent the paperwork up to the appellate court in Granada, where three judges were expected to rule on the case by the end of the month. If Volz's conviction was upheld, the final decision will be decided by the Nicaraguan Supreme Court.) “The best-case scenario for Nicaragua right now is to undo the injustice, release me, absolve me, continue the investigation, and find the real killers,” Volz said. “And ultimately, I should be compensated. I've lost a lot. I've worked for two years really hard, and as soon as I get released, I've got to leave the country.”

When the verdict was read, he recalls, “Oh, man, it was a horrible feeling. It's just a dark, dark place that I've gone to on several different occasions. You just have to… you close your eyes, just have faith, and you pray.” He has a cellmate. Like all of Modelo's 2,000 prisoners, they are locked in their cells from 4:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. The rest of the time, the penitentiary keeps a guard near him; he worries about his safety. While still in police custody, he told me, he'd been tortured, but he refused to elaborate. The federal pen was better; still, he said that he had told his mother, “If I die in here and they say it's suicide, don't believe it.”

Volz rejected the San Juan rumor that if he wasn't the actual killer, then he must have contracted Jim茅nez's murder. “It's a town that is hurt,” he explained. “Collectively they want to fill their heart with somebody who's the culprit. I didn't pay to have Doris killed; I had nothing to do with her death. I'm one of the people that has been most hurt by it.”

The experience had, obviously, changed him. “I'm stripped down,” he said. “Day-to-day life in prison is just that: day to day. There's days that I feel confident, I feel good, I get exercise, I get to go out in the yard. And there's days that I don't feel good … Even the strongest person eventually it gets to you.” He relies, he said, on the letters he receives from friends and strangers alike. “People tell me they're in the grocery store looking at which kind of juice to buy and they think about me,” he said. “They all of a sudden feel very appreciative for what they have… Those are the kind of things that really make me feel this is not all for nothing. Yeah, Eric Volz is a man in prison, but Doris is the one who lost her life. It's been really hard for me that she's been lost in this tailspin of cultural and political this divide.”

Finally, the guard told us to wrap it up a film crew was waiting outside. “I'm a warrior,” Volz told me. “It's prison, man. Survival of the fittest.”

There was one last person I wanted to see: Rosita Chamorro. He was being held in the Granada penitentiary, a facility off the highway that houses 800 prisoners on small grounds. Once the guards approved my papers, I walked past long cement buildings, the barred windows revealing prisoners in hammocks, clothes and towels hanging everywhere. At the far end of the yard, I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by inmates, no guards in sight. I entered a narrow corridor, passing the prison chapel, where 50 men prayed, and came out into an area busy with prisoners. A uniformed guard, the only one there, pointed me down a flight of stairs and into a long, dark room, where I could make out the tall and imposing figure of Chamorro.

Alone in the room, we sat together on a bench. Chamorro seemed much affected by prison life, often to the point of tears. “It's hard to be in here,” he told me. “I have a lot of enemies… They steal my money, my food. Right now I have nothing… Thirty years, they say to me: 30 years, 30 years, 30 years.”

Indeed, prisoners looking down through the barred door at the top of the stairs whistled at us; one of them barked. Chamorro is being held in an overcrowded dormitory cell; the 53 men of his wing, he said, share two toilets. Again with great emotion Chamorro told me, “I don't know who killed [Doris], but I know that it wasn't me. I can never go back to my town. Little town, big hell… It's like San Juan doesn't exist for me anymore.”

As his lawyer had told me, Chamorro recanted the statement that Volz had offered him $5,000 to go to Sol Fashion. “I was tortured by the police,” he said. “They hit me and hit me.” Does he think Volz is guilty? “I can't say,” he replied. “I can't decide justice for another person.” What about his friend Krusty Dangla? “A friend?” Chamorro laughed. “An enemy. We were arrested together, he went free. He's laughing out there. He had scratches. Why didn't they put him in jail?” When I asked if he had any message for Dangla, Chamorro nodded slowly. “Walk carefully,” he said. “One day I'll leave here… Watch yourself.”

When the guards called time, Chamorro and I exchanged a hug. He asked me to say hello to his family, and if I could give him a little money to buy a soft drink, he'd like that. His voice broke again as he told me, “Don't ever in your life let this happen to you.”

As I left, I thought back to Modelo and the last moments I spent with Volz. Our time was drawing to a close, and I would soon walk out into the bright day, while Volz would not.

“Do you think this could happen to anyone?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Yeah. Oh yeah. And it has.”

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