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 Jiménez'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."