EARLY ON THE MORNING of Tuesday, March 27, I sat in a rental car in the parking lot of the Modelo National Penitentiary, just outside the town of Tipitapa, 30 minutes east of Managua. A half-dozen dusty boys, their hands and faces pressed to the windows, waited for me to get out so they could "guard" my car for a tip. This was my fourth attempt to get into the prison in two weeks; what was different about today was that I finally had a letter from Judge Toruño extending me access to visit Volz, for which I'd had to lobby all the way to the office of a Supreme Court magistrate. Meanwhile, the first international TV crews, from Dateline and the Today show, had arrived in Nicaragua. Outside the warden's office, seven or eight of them were already waiting their turn to see Volz.

I'd been thinking a lot about Doris Jiménez, about what dark thing descended on her that November day. On March 16, her family commemorated her birthday at the San Juan cemetery. A mariachi band played a haunting traditional song, "Very Pretty Doris," as her relatives tearfully decorated her grave with plastic flowers and ribbons. While I still disagreed with Alvarado that Volz killed her daughter, I understood her sorrow, her furious desire to see someone pay for this crime.

Entering the Modelo grounds, I saw industrial penitentiary buildings in need of paint. Barbed-wire-crowned walls surrounded the facility, punctuated here and there with towers manned by armed guards. A line of older women were waiting to enter the grounds, carrying plastic shopping bags of toilet paper, rice, and beans. From somewhere, I could hear the echo of men singing.

I was led into a spartan office; Volz was waiting at the desk. He wore a blue Hurley baseball cap and a black T-shirt with the letters ep embossed in green; he'd placed a small voice recorder on the desktop. We shook hands and sat in folding chairs; a guard observed us from a chair in the corner. Volz was calm and collected. He began our interview with this statement: "I've been misquoted a lot; that's why I'm recording... I have an army of attorneys that are willing to step up in any way that I ask. So it's not a threat, but I just want that to be understood."

Over the next two hours, Volz and I talked about the case, about his relationship with Jiménez, about his hopes for the appeals process and his future. (Ramón Rojas filed Volz's appeal shortly after the verdict; by press time, in mid-April, the Rivas court had sent the paperwork up to the appellate court in Granada, where three judges were expected to rule on the case by the end of the month. If Volz's conviction was upheld, the final decision will be decided by the Nicaraguan Supreme Court.) "The best-case scenario for Nicaragua right now is to undo the injustice, release me, absolve me, continue the investigation, and find the real killers," Volz said. "And ultimately, I should be compensated. I've lost a lot. I've worked for two years really hard, and as soon as I get released, I've got to leave the country."

When the verdict was read, he recalls, "Oh, man, it was a horrible feeling. It's just a dark, dark place that I've gone to on several different occasions. You just have to... you close your eyes, just have faith, and you pray." He has a cellmate. Like all of Modelo's 2,000 prisoners, they are locked in their cells from 4:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. The rest of the time, the penitentiary keeps a guard near him; he worries about his safety. While still in police custody, he told me, he'd been tortured, but he refused to elaborate. The federal pen was better; still, he said that he had told his mother, "If I die in here and they say it's suicide, don't believe it."

Volz rejected the San Juan rumor that if he wasn't the actual killer, then he must have contracted Jiménez's murder. "It's a town that is hurt," he explained. "Collectively they want to fill their heart with somebody who's the culprit. I didn't pay to have Doris killed; I had nothing to do with her death. I'm one of the people that has been most hurt by it."

The experience had, obviously, changed him. "I'm stripped down," he said. "Day-to-day life in prison is just that: day to day. There's days that I feel confident, I feel good, I get exercise, I get to go out in the yard. And there's days that I don't feel good ... Even the strongest person—eventually it gets to you." He relies, he said, on the letters he receives from friends and strangers alike. "People tell me they're in the grocery store looking at which kind of juice to buy and they think about me," he said. "They all of a sudden feel very appreciative for what they have... Those are the kind of things that really make me feel this is not all for nothing. Yeah, Eric Volz is a man in prison, but Doris is the one who lost her life. It's been really hard for me that she's been lost in this tailspin of cultural and political—this divide."

Finally, the guard told us to wrap it up—a film crew was waiting outside. "I'm a warrior," Volz told me. "It's prison, man. Survival of the fittest."

There was one last person I wanted to see: Rosita Chamorro. He was being held in the Granada penitentiary, a facility off the highway that houses 800 prisoners on small grounds. Once the guards approved my papers, I walked past long cement buildings, the barred windows revealing prisoners in hammocks, clothes and towels hanging everywhere. At the far end of the yard, I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by inmates, no guards in sight. I entered a narrow corridor, passing the prison chapel, where 50 men prayed, and came out into an area busy with prisoners. A uniformed guard, the only one there, pointed me down a flight of stairs and into a long, dark room, where I could make out the tall and imposing figure of Chamorro.

Alone in the room, we sat together on a bench. Chamorro seemed much affected by prison life, often to the point of tears. "It's hard to be in here," he told me. "I have a lot of enemies... They steal my money, my food. Right now I have nothing... Thirty years, they say to me: 30 years, 30 years, 30 years."

Indeed, prisoners looking down through the barred door at the top of the stairs whistled at us; one of them barked. Chamorro is being held in an overcrowded dormitory cell; the 53 men of his wing, he said, share two toilets. Again with great emotion Chamorro told me, "I don't know who killed [Doris], but I know that it wasn't me. I can never go back to my town. Little town, big hell... It's like San Juan doesn't exist for me anymore."

As his lawyer had told me, Chamorro recanted the statement that Volz had offered him $5,000 to go to Sol Fashion. "I was tortured by the police," he said. "They hit me and hit me." Does he think Volz is guilty? "I can't say," he replied. "I can't decide justice for another person." What about his friend Krusty Dangla? "A friend?" Chamorro laughed. "An enemy. We were arrested together, he went free. He's laughing out there. He had scratches. Why didn't they put him in jail?" When I asked if he had any message for Dangla, Chamorro nodded slowly. "Walk carefully," he said. "One day I'll leave here... Watch yourself."

When the guards called time, Chamorro and I exchanged a hug. He asked me to say hello to his family, and if I could give him a little money to buy a soft drink, he'd like that. His voice broke again as he told me, "Don't ever in your life let this happen to you."

As I left, I thought back to Modelo and the last moments I spent with Volz. Our time was drawing to a close, and I would soon walk out into the bright day, while Volz would not.

"Do you think this could happen to anyone?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Yeah. Oh yeah. And it has."