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 Lésber Quintero, the Diario reporter, arrived, I sidled over to him and asked, "Lésber, 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, Ramón 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 Jiménez'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 Jiménez 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." Jiménez's mother and close friends testified that Volz was motivated by his jealousy, which increased, they claimed, when Jiménez 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 Jiménez's vagina and anus revealed no presence of semen. We also learned that, between the two forensic examinations, Jiménez'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 Jiménez 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."