IN EARLY FEBRUARY, after repeatedly and persistently being turned away, I was finally given access to the Doris Jiménez murder-case file in the Rivas courthouse by Judge Toruño 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 Jiménez'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 Jiménez, 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 Martín "Rosita" Chamorro López were accused of killing Doris Jiménez. Charges against Armando Llanes and Nelson Antonio "Krusty" López 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: Jiménez'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 Jiménez, described vaginal and anal scratches. A second examination, by Dr. Óscar Bravo Flores, the official forensic examiner, found none. Toxicology put Jiménez'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. (Jiménez 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 Jiménez's death; more calls would quickly come in confirming it. Meanwhile, a local hairstylist, Rossy Elena Estrada López, 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!"