The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman Read Free Book Online Page A

Jimenez’s murder, which was poorly handled by police.
    Volz’s case is far more complex than that of an innocent abroad who got caught on the wrong side of a Third World justice system. At the time of his arrest he was anything but a carefree surf bum; he had fully embraced Nicaraguan culture, and his mainpursuit wasn’t leisure but publishing a bilingual magazine called El Puente (The Bridge), which sought to close the gap between Central and North American cultures. Instead, Volz has become a flashpoint for the tensions between Nicaragua’s growing community of relatively wealthy Americans and locals who feel left on the sidelines of prosperity.
    The trial left many questions unanswered—such as why anyone would want to harm Jimenez. How a man could be convicted of a murder that allegedly took place while he was on the phone and having lunch two hours away. Was Eric Volz singled out as part of an anti-American backlash—backed, perhaps, by the newly resurgent leftist Sandinista party? Or is the dream of surfing and living in paradise simply untenable? The only certainty is that no gringo in Nicaragua believed in that dream more than Eric Volz, and few have suffered a ruder awakening. “The more politically charged my case becomes, the more nervous I get,” he says.
    Â 
    T HE ROAD FROM M ANAGUA to San Juan del Sur is like a metaphor for life in Nicaragua: lush and beautiful, but uneven and full of surprises. There are sections of fresh pavement where cars can zoom along, but for the most part it’s a slow, potholed slalom course requiring serious navigation skills.
    Once you reach the end of the road, San Juan del Sur sucks you in. Nestled by a horseshoe-shape bay, with fishing boats on the beach, the friendly and relaxed town of 18,000 is not far from some of the best surfing beaches in southern Nicaragua. There’s a magical quality about the place that you just can’t put your finger on, something that inspires first-time visitors to start dreaming about dropping out of the rat race.
    â€œI’ve never once felt unwelcome by the locals; in fact, just the opposite,” says Bryan McMandon, who quit his San Francisco job and moved here in 2004 after visiting on a surfing trip. “Everyone has bent over backwards to help me, especially when I first got here and didn’t know a lick of Spanish.”
    Real estate offices line San Juan del Sur’s main drag, and you can still find a beachfront lot for $75,000—a bargain compared to Costa Rica, just 20 miles to the south. “The first time we came here we asked Eric about buying property,” says Volz’s stepfather Dane Anthony.
    A little more than 20 years ago, though, San Juan del Sur was a Cold War battlefield. In 1984 U.S. forces planted mines along the coast as part of the Reagan administration’s effort to oust Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega—who was recently reelected president.
    â€œIt’s real touchy, real delicate here,” says Jane Mirandette, who founded and runs a local library program. “There are people who don’t speak to their neighbor because of what happened in 1980. We have Contras, we have Sandinistas, we have everything in this town. Emotions run really deep, and people’s fears run deep too.”
    Eric Volz first rolled into town on a backpacking trip in 1998. Like most young norteamericanos , he’d come for the surfing, but that wasn’t the only reason. Despite the tabloid headlines calling him “the gringo murderer,” Volz is only half gringo; his mother is Mexican. He spent a semester studying Spanish in Guadalajara and majored in Latin American cultural studies at the University of California-San Diego. “I think Eric always wanted to get in touch with that part of his heritage,” says his mother. “And like everything else he does, he poured himself into it.”
    He moved to San Juan del Sur in early 2005 and took a