The case for Volz's innocence seemed obvious, irrefutable. Jimnez's uncle pointed his finger at the sky and said, This is justice for our small town, for Nicaragua, and for all of Central America! As Volz and Chamorro were hustled into waiting police trucks, the crowd hung off the walls of the surrounding buildings, whistling and shouting that one word: Justice!. The proceedings opened with efforts by the prosecution, led by Isolda Ibarra Arguello, to establish the time of the crime. In the waterfront Rocamar Restaurant, where he often ate, Doris Jimnez was a waitress. We were arrested together, he went free. Everything that he now seems to be in the middle of.. It's disgusting to see Krusty as a witness. 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. Eric was working to get beyond those divisive cultural and political relations. Meanwhile, the boom continues, despite foreign anxiety surrounding the November 2006 reelection of former Sandinista president Daniel Ortega. Nicaragua has implemented a few other regulations for travelers: All travelers may be subject to a health screening upon arrival. Nicaragua is a World Bank and International Monetary Fund designated heavily indebted poor country, with little legal ability to control its economic future: Everything is for sale. As Volz left the arraignment, the mob saw through the ruse and rushed him. World Canada Cuba Crime. The family of Carla Stefaniak said they were able to see the body late Tuesday night, one week after they last heard from the 36-year-old woman while she was on vacation. I had a lot of love for her, said Volz, who says that he ended things around June 2006. San Pedro Sula, in the northwest of the country, is at the center of much of this small Central American country's violence. Downward spiral: Nicaragua's worsening crisis. I was patted again for weapons, given my press pass, and allowed to walk into the deserted heart of the downtown commercial district. Twenty percent of tourism in San Juan depends on surfing. For himself, he'd like to open a surf shop. He was jubilant, laughing. 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. I need my daughter! Local sentiment turned darker. YOUNG BUSINESSWOMAN VICTIM OF JEALOUS GRINGO, US EMBASSY ADVISES ACCUSED GRINGO TO KEEP QUIET, Surfers Samir Guillermo Duarte, Enrique Cascante, Mancel Cascante, and Oswaldo Bonilla at Playa Madera, Defense lawyer Ramn Rojas in his Managua office, The Modelo National Penitentiary, where Volz is being held. When he was ten, his family moved from Sacramento to Nashville, where his divorced parents both still live. We also learned that, between the two forensic examinations, Jimnez's body had been partially embalmed, at her mother's request. I told Eric, 'I'll hire you to come down, take pictures.' Published by at May 28, 2022. 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. An 18-year old suspect was charged. I'm afraid., The people in town they're angry, another echoed. I worked pretty much all the time., Volz and Jimnez's split, both he and Thompson insisted, was amicable. After her death, Volz canceled a Thanksgiving business trip back to the States to attend her funeral. (His, he said, was unreliable.) In the coming days, the shocking details of what was alleged to have happened were splashed in tawdry headlines in El Nuevo Diario, the left-leaning national paper. 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. I entered a narrow corridor, passing the prison chapel, where 50 men prayed, and came out into an area busy with prisoners. If he'd had all the facts at the arraignment, Palma stated, he would have thrown the case out due to lack of evidence. He has a younger sister, plus a stepsister from his mother's second marriage. This was a "blind point" - an unpatrolled area of the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. 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. Eric is innocent I'm not trying to buy his innocence., Meanwhile, they kept up their vigil. More than 300 have been killed and 2,000 injured since protests over social security reforms began in April . Victims Identified. In January, friends brought a host of Nashville musicians together for a benefit concert. And do you know how we are treated when we go to the U.S.? Sign up today. Things have been changing quickly in San Juan over the past five years. 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. The travelling party of four was . He met Iraqis, interviewed soldiers, and flew in Blackhawks. On the stand, he had adamantly said that he did not know Jimnez at all beyond seeing her now and again. Krusty Dangla, who would become the prosecution's main witness, said Volz came out of the shop at 1:00 p.m. and paid him 50 cordobas (about $2.75) to put two garbage bags full of what felt like clothes in a white car. [Eric] has his version. In December, I drove out to one of the bigger new projects, Cantamar at Playa Yankee. The ultimate purpose is not yet clear, but in the meantime I have become a lightning rod for politics, compassion, prayer, and love. Volz's team would eventually include Jacqueline Becerra, a lawyer with the multinational firm Greenberg Traurig and president-elect of the Federal Bar Association's South Florida chapter; Simon Strong, of Holder International, a company specializing in risk management; Melissa Campbell, a music-industry publicist and family friend; private security from multinational Corporate Security Consultants (CSC); and Ramn Rojas, a prominent Nicaraguan lawyer who successfully defended Daniel Ortega in a civil case in 2001. How much could she have earned in her life? Black-armored special-operations police blocked the door, while six armed national police were stationed at different points in the room. 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. The police statement attributed to Chamorro was also in the file. 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. It's better this way, she whispered. But what made this case so dramatic was the fourth suspect: Jimnez's ex-boyfriend, a 28-year-old expat from Nashville, Tennessee, named Eric Stanley Volz. I'm stripped down, he said. It's better that it's both of them., Outside on the street, the mob was jubilant. The gunfire erupted after a group of . If Eric was guilty, I'd tell him, 'You'll pay in here because you made a choice.' Some of these sales are contested. He told me about his films, that he'd been a DJ, Thompson said of his onetime friend. Ensure your U.S. passport is valid and available for a quick departure from the country . If that wasn't enough, the assailants left them broke and alone in remote locations. I used to see Eric surfing., In other words, Roque didn't want to talk about it. From somewhere, I could hear the echo of men singing. EPA. In official physical exams recorded in the files, the police say that both Chamorro and Dangla bore fingernail scratches on their arms. 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. 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. 16 July 2018. 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. The franchises have followed: The first Subway opened three weeks after I arrived. 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. Hundreds of people have been killed in Nicaragua since 18 . Travel; Money; Search input. The next day, February 15, Rojas presented the defense. Local opinion convicted Eric Volz immediately. He's laughing out there. So I could see how they could see me being an arrogant person. Until April, Manzanillo beach's unspoiled sands were a "superstar getaway" graced by the likes of Beyonc, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Fassbender and deep-pocketed jet-setters able to pay for the. Do you think this could happen to anyone? I asked him. Broward County. Sometime in the second half of December, Volz's defense team called a meeting at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Managua to give San Juan mayor Holmann Volz's account of his whereabouts on the day of the murder, hoping he could intervene with local reporters. (Ramn 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. It's prison, man. Bilingual, with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California at San Diego, Eric had moved to San Juan del Sur in 2005 and become a Nicaraguan resident. 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. Where you come from, the text reads, does not determine where you can go. Doris Jimnez appears on page 59, standing in the countryside in a traditional skirt, the wind in her hair. tourist murdered in nicaragua. 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. While many of his Tahoe friends remained in the mountains, Volz chose a different path, ultimately pursuing Latin American studies at UCSD. . 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. File Photo courtesy of Underwood & Underwood/Wikimedia. 2022 Hyatt Place Managua 815 Managua, Nicaragua from $144/night Yemaya Reefs Colibri Boutique Hotel 402 Little Corn Island, Nicaragua from $101/night 2022 Verdad Nicaragua 250 San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua from $90/night google-search . He talked about the credibility of Purdy and Castillo, about the phone records. Then Rojas asked how he had gotten the marks on his shoulder. Visitors to Nicaragua are able to enjoy the natural beauty of dozens of volcanoes, rivers, and lakes, as well as two oceans. 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. Gatherings like this are ubiquitous in Central America; I passed it off as a religious event, a Purisima procession of a statue of the Virgin. Vittorio Caruso. [4] She was asphyxiated from manual neck compression, and ligature strangulation due to the necklace she was wearing. Judge Toruo pronounced both defendants guilty. A wooden fence had been placed in the hall upstairs, and the riot police made us wait behind it until the accused had taken their seats. According to friends, Volz is a diversely talented individualist, a traveler and outdoor enthusiast. But that reputation has largely . Gringo, chele, norteamericano for us Nicaraguans it's all the same thing.. Like all of Modelo's 2,000 prisoners, they are locked in their cells from 4:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. I reached a point where I was ready to be a little more responsible socially, he says. Volz wore a jean jacket, the outlines of a bulletproof vest visible underneath. The last tourist to be reported killed was a 39-year-old man from Denver, Colorado, who police say was thrown from an SUV and run over in San Juan in February 2020. As reported in the paper and as I later read in court documents, what Rosita Chamorro told police in an unsigned statement one that he and his lawyer would later insist to me had been coerced through torture was that Volz, apparently jealous of Jimnez's new relationship with Llanes, had offered Chamorro $5,000 to go with him around noon to Sol Fashion, where the American attacked Jimnez, then raped, sodomized, and killed her. 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