Men's Journal

Sentenced to 30 years in a Nicaraguan prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit, Eric Volz’s Latin American surfing dream has turned into a nightmare, complete with machete-wielding lynch mobs, a trial in the media (and on YouTube), and a stopover in a notorious Sandinista torture chamber. How did it come to this?

by Dean LaTourrette

Eric Volz was trapped. A large crowd had gathered outside the small-town courthouse, screaming, “Ojo por ojo!” — an eye for an eye. Volz had just finished a preliminary hearing for the alleged rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend Doris Jimenez, and despite considerable evidence pointing to his innocence, the judge ruled to allow his case to go to trial. But the people in the town of Rivas, Nicaragua, wanted more than justice. They wanted revenge.

“We’re not going to let you get away with it,” they chanted in Spanish. “We’re going to kill you.” Looking out the window, Volz could see that the angry mob numbered well over 200, some of them waving sticks and machetes, their faces both enraged and excited at the prospect of violence against the gringo. His only protection was several local police officers, along with a U.S. embassy security officer named Mike Poehlitz. The plan was to escape via the back door, a scheme that evaporated moments later when a friend of Volz’s called on his cell phone and said there was a man with a gun waiting outside.

The only option was to exit via the front, where a police pickup truck waited for them, right in the heart of the unruly crowd. As they hit the street and darted for the truck the driver sped away, and the horde closed in, throwing fists and stones. All but one of the cops also fled; the lone officer yanked at Volz’s shirt and yelled, “Corre!” Run.

Though he was handcuffed and without shoelaces, Volz sprinted down the street with the officer and Poehlitz. Miraculously, they made it a block, then ducked into the doorway of a nearby gymnasium, where they barricaded the door and crept from room to room as protesters hunted for them outside. When an unmarked police truck finally arrived an hour later to escort them to the station, they dashed back outside. The crowd moved in, and people jumped on the car. The driver gunned it, hitting some protesters before speeding off toward the police station.

But Volz, a 28-year-old American who had come to Nicaragua with all of the best intentions, was far from free.

Four months later, in late March, Eric Volz sits inside a sweltering 6-by-10-foot cell at La Modelo prison, in Tipitapa, Nicaragua. He cannot feel the gentle breezes that groom and feather the incoming swells that first attracted him to Nicaraguan shores. If he serves his full 30-year sentence he’ll catch his next wave when he’s 57 years old.

The story of how Volz wound up here is every expatriate’s worst nightmare. He was a well-known resident of the Pacific coast town of San Juan del Sur, a surfer’s paradise that he’d helped promote. His ex-girlfriend Doris Jimenez, one of the prettiest girls in town, was found brutally strangled on the floor of her clothing boutique. Volz cooperated with the authorities, only to have them turn on him, he says, after he offended a local police officer. Despite numerous eyewitnesses who said that Volz was two hours away at the time of Jimenez’s murder, and the fact that no physical evidence tied him to the scene, he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The trial, many believe, was a travesty of justice that tests the bounds of the absurd.

“I’d say this was a case of guilty until proven innocent,” says Ricardo Castillo, a well-known Nicaraguan journalist who was meeting with Volz at the time the murder allegedly took place.

“I was really angry that the judge would bend to public pressure so easily,” Volz told Men’s Journal, recalling the judicial farce that brought him here. “I did not kill Doris, absolutely not. And I had no connection to it.”

Volz is handsome, with intense, dark brown eyes. He’s six feet tall, and his muscular frame might make an assailant think twice, but he’s already had to defend himself with his fists in prison. As an American convicted of raping and murdering a Nicaraguan woman, he got into scuffles with a former cellmate, and other inmates have menaced him daily.

“The threat is very real,” he says. “It’s very simple for Doris’s family to pay $500 or $1,000 to send a message to one of these gangs to try and kill me.”

Volz’s imprisonment has sparked an unofficial diplomatic war. His parents and supporters have mounted a media campaign for his release that has resulted in segments on the Today show (among others), so far to no avail. Online, a handful of American and Nicaraguan blogs and websites offer their versions of the truth to the browsing masses. A seven-minute pro-Volz video on YouTube shows him being hustled off to the courthouse over a moody Radiohead soundtrack, while a competing version, by “Nicaraguan Films,” also on YouTube, lingers on him blinking — guiltily, we’re to assume — as the judge delivers her verdict. And Men’s Journal has learned that Volz’s family has hired private investigators to reexamine 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 main pursuit 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.

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