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 Jiménez was a waitress. Volz's résumé 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 María Elena Alvarado, "was to have a shop." Jiménez 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," Jiménez, according to everyone, was the prettiest girl in town.

Just one year later, Jiménez 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 Jiménez 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 López, now his wife. Volz and Jiménez began dating; Jiménez 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 Jiménez 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 Jiménez, 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." Jiménez'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 Jiménez 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 Jiménez'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 pequeño, infierno grande'?" he asked. " 'Little town, big hell.' There is a lot of jealousy here. Who knows what's really going on?"