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

job in the small but bustling local Century 21 office, earning as much as $100,000 a year selling beachfront lots and townhouse condos in developments that were beginning to dot the pristine coast. He began taking photos for El Puente , then a local newsletter, started by an expat named Jon Thompson.
    It wasn’t long before he met Doris Jimenez, a slender 25-year-old beauty who worked at the Roca Mar restaurant, where Volz usually ate lunch. Her parents had split up when she was young; her mother moved to Managua, and Jimenez was raised in San Juan del Sur by her grandmother and aunt. She was beautiful, with milky brown skin and a dazzling smile. “Everyone really liked her,” says Gabriela Sobalvarro, Jimenez’s best friend, who calls her a coqueta , Spanish for flirt. She was smart, too: According to one friend she was studying business administration at a university campus in Rivas, about 30 minutes away.
    There’s no such thing as casual dating in Nicaragua, at least for the locals. Couples are either juntos (together) or they’re not, without much of anything in between. According to Sobalvarro, Volz and Jimenez hit it off, and after a few weeks of being friends the relationship turned romantic. They became juntos. “They got along really well,” says Thompson, who, with his wife, shared a house with Volz and Jimenez in the latter half of 2005. “Doris was really chill, almost docile.”
    Once, when Volz went away for a few days, Jimenez decorated the house with balloons and streamers and baked a cake to welcome him back. “The guy was only gone a week,” says McMandon, who lived with the couple in 2006.
    Volz’s mother first met Jimenez on a visit in November 2005. “She was gorgeous, and very sweet,” she says. At the time, Volz was helping Jimenez open up a clothing store, called Sol Fashion, in San Juan del Sur, and his mother helped Jimenez design and decorate the space. “There was something about Doris where you almost wanted to take care of her,” she says.
    Jimenez’s friends wondered if Volz returned her affections. “I didn’t like him much,” claims Sobalvarro. “He was always busy with his work and never had time for Doris. I also think he felt that he was superior to her.”
    Volz wasn’t the type to go out drinking every night with the boys. He had greater ambitions; he was spending more and moretime on El Puente , which he and Thompson now co-owned. Thompson wanted to keep El Puente local and grassroots, while Volz saw it growing into a glossy travel magazine covering sustainable tourism and development in Central America. In early 2006, he wrested control from Thompson in a messy split. “I would call Eric controlling, not just with Doris but in general,” says Thompson. “He was very self-assured, very confident. I’d call him arrogant, but he probably thought he had reason to be.”
    In July 2006 the new (and so far only) issue of El Puente magazine was published. That same month Volz moved to Managua, and he and Jimenez broke up. They were separated for about a month, according to friends, but then he began to visit and they would be seen hanging out together. But Volz’s main focus was in Managua, where he had an increasingly complex business. On Tuesday afternoon, November 21, 2006, Volz was working in El Puente ’s Managua office with more than a half dozen others when he says he got the call from Jon Thompson’s wife. Doris Jimenez had been murdered.
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    T HE FIRST PERSON to discover the crime was Jimenez’s cousin Oscar Blandón, who told the court he went to Sol Fashion around two in the afternoon and found her body in the back room. She had been gagged and strangled, her wrists and ankles tied. Blandón ran to get Gabriela Sobalvarro, who worked down the street. “When I entered the store, it was a mess,” she says. “Doris was wrapped up in sheets