Eric Volz in Nicaragua | Outside Online

Outside Magazine, June 2007

Page:

The Boomtown, the Gringo, the Girl, and Her Murder
When a local beauty turned up dead in Nicaragua's San Juan del Sur, the dream of paradise became a nightmare for one expat American surfer. He got 30 years and, predictably, a media melee ensued. But TONY D'SOUZA was on the scene from day one. This is the story you haven't heard.

By Tony D'Souza


	Mercedes Alvarado, mother of murder victim Doris Jiménez, at home in the town of Rivas, Nicaragua, with her daughters Corayama and Hilda López Alvarado (Jason Florio)

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 fútbol, 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 Años 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.



	Eric Volz in a visiting room in the Modelo National Penitentiary, outside the Nicaraguan town of Tipitapa, March 27, 2007 (Jason Florio)

San Juan is small. Officially, 20,000 people live here; according to the local barber, Roberto López Mora, it's really just a few extended families—Lópezes, 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 Ivania Alvarado Jiménez, 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, Jiménez 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 Jiménez 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 Martín Chamorro López, 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 López 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 Jiménez, 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: Jiménez'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 Jiménez's new relationship with Llanes, had offered Chamorro $5,000 to go with him around noon to Sol Fashion, where the American attacked Jiménez, 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 FriendsofEricVolz.com. 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.

Page: