The Bridge: The Eric Volz Story: Murder, Intrigue, and a Struggle for Justice in Nicaragua

By Michael Glasgow

Her Murder was Brutal and Savage, and the Nicaraguan People want Someone to Pay! In 2005, Eric Volz moved to Nicaragua to pursue his dreams. By 2006, he was living the worst nightmare of his life. Twenty-five year old Eric Volz moved to Nicaragua in 2005 in pursuit of paradise. Drawn by its pristine beaches, scenic mountains, lush rainforests, and economic potential, he quickly fell in love with the country. And when his start-up publication, EP Magazine, found success on an international level, Eric's life was taking off like a dream. Then, on November 21, 2006, Eric's ex-girlfriend, beautiful Nicaraguan Doris Ivania Jimenez, was found brutally murdered inside her clothing boutique in the Pacific coastal town of San Juan del Sur. The day he helped lay Doris to rest, Eric was arrested for her murder. His paradise quickly became his prison. Haunting and powerful, this is The Eric Volz Story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781614483939

Book preview

Prologue

Pueblo Pequeño, Infierno Grande

THE BODY OF A YOUNG WOMAN LAY ON THE FLOOR IN the back room of a small clothing store, her lifeless wrists and ankles tightly bound by twisted multicolored sheets. Paper and rags had been forced so deeply into her mouth that they almost ripped apart her facial muscles.

It would later be reported that she had been raped, sodomized, and strangled.

Even the constant ocean breeze from the nearby Pacific that made its way through the coastal village of brightly painted wooden houses with metal roofs was unable to remove the growing smell of death. Her killer or killers had seemingly been spurred on by a powerful personal hatred.

Nothing in the investigation of this horrific crime, which occurred on November 21, 2006, nor the prosecution that quickly followed, would unfold with any clarity.

There was an abundance of physical evidence found at the crime scene—more than one hundred forensic samples of hair belonging to someone other than the victim, multiple shoe prints, and blood of a type not matching the victim’s. In any major city in America, the crime scene investigators would have spent countless days simply cataloging all the evidence.

But this murder took place in San Juan del Sur, a small town on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, a country whose endless miles of stunning ocean views and inexpensive cost of living have been rediscovered by the citizens of the world as the next great paradise. Within days of the murder of Doris Jiménez, the beautiful and well-liked owner of the clothing store Sol Fashion, her former boyfriend, Eric Stanley Volz, an American, would be at the center of this quickly evolving and volatile case.

It would not be the first time an American had been at the very core of an emotionally driven national story in Nicaragua. More than 150 years earlier, the actions of William Walker, who had left his footprints in the soft sands of San Juan del Sur, had unleashed a vitriolic volley of resentment toward their powerful neighbor to the north, the United States. The national fires of distrust for America would again be flamed decades later by a lengthy occupation by the American Marines beginning in 1912, and once again as a result of economic sanctions and a trade embargo along with the clandestine Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Although their lives were separated by almost a century and a half, Eric Volz and William Walker shared a lot in common. Both had spent a portion of their youth in the southern American city of Nashville, Tennessee. Both were highly confident, adventurous individuals who saw the world as a place full of opportunity. Each arrived in Central America as a young man, Eric Volz only twenty-five and William Walker only thirty-one, determined to leave their marks on Nicaragua, a land they viewed as ripe with promise and potential.

Both would end up getting much more than they bargained for.

The murder of Doris Jiménez in this small coastal town would act as a catalyst to reignite a festering undercurrent of hatred toward America that would end up gripping the life of Eric Volz like a dangerous Pacific undertow. A president, an ambassador, a senator, and a mayor would all become part of this story of youthful promise, romance, stolen lives, murder, and national sovereignty.

In a convergence of cultural, political, and judicial forces that would later be termed a perfect storm, was Nicaragua finally flexing its sovereign muscle in the international community in support of one of its own murdered citizens, or was it determined to extract what it deemed as long overdue and just revenge?

There is a saying in Nicaragua, "Pueblo pequeño, infierno grande—Little town, big hell."

ONE

A Siren Song

THE FACT THAT ERIC VOLZ ENDED UP LIVING IN A LATIN American country should not have come as a great surprise to him or his family. His mother, now Maggie Anthony, was born Maria Margerita Lineiro in Nogales, Arizona, to Mexican parents who shortly after World War II had crossed into the United States as immigrants looking for a better life. Nogales lies on the Arizona border with Mexico at the southern terminus of Interstate 19, just across from its sister city, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. A small city with fewer than twenty-five thousand people, Nogales, Arizona, is located in a large agribusiness district, with more than 60 percent of its sales tax revenue coming from citizens who cross over daily from Nogales, Mexico, with its population of more than five hundred thousand.

Latin America and its culture remained just on the other side of the street.

What for Eric Volz started out as a childhood curiosity regarding this part of his heritage, along with a natural ability at being receptively bilingual when around his maternal grandparents, grew into a fascination when he attended college at the University of California–San Diego and majored in Latin American cultural studies, and spent one summer in Guadalajara, Mexico, studying Spanish.

By the time Eric reached his twenties, the lure of Latin America grew stronger and stronger, calling him as the seductive power of the siren songs of Aglaopheme and Thelxiepeia called to Homer’s Odysseus.

Eric Stanley Volz was born on May 19, 1979, two years after his parents married. His first name, Eric, was taken from the middle name of his father, Jan Eric Volz, and his middle name, Stanley, from the first name of his paternal grandfather. There were problems with his birth, and specialists had to be called in immediately. But from the very first moments of life, Eric turned out to be a survivor.

It is a quality that would be put to the ultimate test in 2006.

By the time he was seven, he was living in Citrus Heights, just outside Sacramento, California, with his mother, Maggie, his father, Jan, who had grown up in nearby Placerville, and his younger sister by several years, Megan Joy Volz. In the 1980s, Citrus Heights was a small but growing suburb of the capital city. Sacramento County was one of California’s original twenty-seven counties when it petitioned to become the thirty-first state of the union in 1850, following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War just two years earlier.

During most of the three hundred years of Spanish-American growth in what would become California, most of the settlements were limited to a coastal strip of land near El Camino Real. One notable exception was the vast estate of John Augustus Sutter, a German-Swiss immigrant who was awarded a land grant comprising eleven square leagues or more than 250 square miles in the Sacramento Valley. One of the Mexican land subgrants that was established within the Sutter property was the Ranch Del San Juan, consisting of almost twenty thousand acres of fertile farmland. It is from within this subgrant that the town of Citrus Heights would emerge.

Although Eric did not spend his youth on a border town like Nogales, his young childhood, like his mother’s, was spent within a large agricultural district with a strong Latin American connection. The name San Juan, which translates as Saint John, is a name found throughout Latin America. It traces its roots to the 1493 discovery by explorer Christopher Columbus of the island that would later be named Puerto Rico for rich port, with its principal city retaining the name San Juan. The island’s original name was selected by Columbus in honor of John the Baptist. The connection between the names of San Juan and Eric Volz would reemerge in 2006, and from that date forward the two would be forever linked.

For an active youngster, life in Citrus Heights was like that of most middle-class kids, except for the music. A high level of musical creativity was a major component of the Volz household, as was their strong connection to their faith. Eric’s father, Jan, was a founding member of the alternative Christian rock band, The 77s, with its roots in the Sacramento area in the late 1970s. Originally called the Scratch Band, they were a ministry-based quartet formed before Eric’s birth, with Mike Roe as lead singer, Mark Tootle as keyboardist/guitarist, Jan Volz as bassist and background vocalist, and Mark Proctor as drummer.

By 1982, the band, with its new name, The 77s, had released their first album on Exit/AM Records, for which they received multiple favorable reviews from music critics. This debut album, Ping Pong Over the Abyss, would have an eerily prophetic title in the context of the events of Eric’s life twenty-four years later. In 1984, they released their second album, All Fall Down, and became a road band with the beginning trappings of rock-and-roll stardom. After much success on Exit/AM Records, the band found themselves signed to Island Records as a result of the constant corporate mergers and buy outs in the record industry.

The 77s released a self-titled album in 1987 on their new label, which received favorable reviews in the influential Rolling Stone magazine. After more than a decade of hard work and constant creativity, Jan Volz had become a rock star. In the spring of the following year, the band was asked to be part of a major concert event at the famed Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. In the audience were some of the biggest names in music at the time, including Neil Young. The musical future for Jan Volz and his bandmates seemed unlimited.

Unfortunately for The 77s, Island Records also released in 1987 an album by another alternative Christian rock band, a band from Ireland named U2. Titled The Joshua Tree, the album went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States alone and 25 million worldwide. It would be named Rock Album of the Year at the 1988 Grammy Awards, and in 1989 would be rated as the number three album on Rolling Stone magazine’s top one hundred albums of the 1980s, followed in 2001 with a selection as the number six album on Contemporary Christian Music Magazine’s list of the greatest contemporary Christian music albums of all time. One of the songs from The Joshua Tree was titled Bullet in the Blue Sky, and was written by lead singer Bono about American foreign policy in Central America. He penned the song after traveling to several countries in that part of the world in 1986.

Nicaragua was one of the countries Bono had visited.

Although The 77s were riding a growing wave of critical appreciation for their music after their self-titled album, the phenomenal success by their labelmates, U2, diverted Island Records from adequately promoting the Sacramento-based group, and by 1989 Jan Volz and Mark Tootle decided to leave the band. The 77s, with different members coming and going over the years, would release seven more studio albums and three live ones, and the group remained a favorite of the critics, often being referred to as maybe the best rock and roll band in the world. Words like cutting-edge and relentlessly intense would be found among the growing list of adulatory adjectives, yet many in the American mainstream audience had never heard of the band. They suffered from what one of the forefathers of contemporary Christian music, singer-songwriter Larry Norman, characterized as a common obstacle encountered by many alternative rock groups, being too Christian for the radio, and too radio for the church.

Jan and Maggie Volz decided it was time for a new direction. They set their sites on Music City—Nashville, Tennessee—and the young family moved to a new life almost all the way across the country.

Even though in the late 1980s most people identified Nashville with country music and the hayseed image projected by the musical-comedy television variety show Hee Haw, Music City was much more than Roy Clark, Buck Owens, and Barbara Mandrell. Its musical base was expanding beyond the traditional country sound and had earlier embraced the outlaw movement within country music represented by such artists as Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson. Nashville had set its sights on discovering a broader range of artists and was gradually becoming a melting pot for a much more diverse musical product.

Music City was also the home of the Gospel Music Association and its annual Dove Awards, honoring achievements in contemporary Christian and gospel music, and many of inspirational music’s biggest stars, names like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, resided in Nashville. Every major record label in America had offices in the city, and it was the center of contemporary Christian music publishing and recording, with powerhouses like Sparrow Records and Word Records. It would be on Word that the reconfigured band The 77s, without Jan Volz, would release two albums in the 1990s, including the critically acclaimed Drowning with Land in Sight.

With its world-famous Music Row, the music business in Nashville had evolved into an eclectic, billion-dollar industry made up of cowboy hats, pickup trucks, tour buses, award shows, Porsches, designer jeans, and Bibles, where crossover hits were both frowned upon and encouraged at the same time.

For Jan Volz, who had been a band member of one of the originators of the alternative rock band scene, Nashville was the place to be. If his days as a performer were over, there would still be endless opportunities in other phases of the ever-expanding music business.

The Volzes located in the Bellevue section of west Nashville, a once-rural area made up of mini-farms that had been converted into one subdivision after another, which wrapped in a series of concentric circles around an endless array of apartment complexes that in turn bordered countless commercial establishments with their dizzying array of soliciting signage. Their home was located on Claytie Circle in Sheffield on the Harpeth, a majestically worded reference to the Harpeth River that ran through this portion of Davidson County, but was really not much more than a large meandering creek that flooded its banks with every large rain.

The new Volz residence was a two-story brick home with a narrow front porch, in one of the repeating brown brick patterns that made up the neighborhood mosaic. The lot backed up to a common area with paved walking trails and a very small lake, just large enough to attract the occasional flock of geese traveling south in the winter. All the homes in Sheffield on the Harpeth were on small lots of one-fourth or one-third of an acre, in varying combinations of brick and siding, as each developer in Bellevue competed to present just the right look to project an upper- middle-class mobility that was still affordable. Collectively the houses represented just another frame in the repeatable image of American suburbia.

Nashville was a completely new world for Eric and his sister, Megan; a different pace of living, a new school, new friends, and the virtual absence of any Latin American culture and influence. The family’s relocation from California to Music City USA had brought on major changes for everyone. Maggie would go to work for Manulife Financial, an insurance and financial services company. Jan would gradually make connections inside the Nashville music industry, bouncing around from project to position in a world where you were only paid when the gig was on. They were in many ways what by the early 1990s had become the typical middle-class American family, needing two incomes to support two children.

By 1992, things had become severely strained within the Volz household, and by the first of January 1993, Eric’s parents had separated. The next month Maggie filed her divorce complaint in Nashville’s Circuit Court. Jan would answer with a counter-complaint of his own.

In the same month, in the same court in Nashville, another divorce complaint was filed. This one would be by Sandra Johnson Anthony, a thirty-six-year-old Nashvillian originally from Indiana, against Dane Christopher Anthony, a thirty-three-year-old Nashvillian originally from Texas. The couple had one child, five-year-old Caitlin. Within three months, a Certificate of Divorce was entered in the official records, formally dissolving the Anthonys’ ten-year marriage.

By April of 1994, the marriage of Jan Eric Volz and Maria Margarita Volz would also be officially dissolved. Seven months after her divorce from Jan Volz, Maggie Volz would become Mrs. Dane Anthony.

Dane Anthony was the associate dean of students at Belmont University in Nashville, a Baptist-affiliated college offering degrees in seventy-five areas of study, twelve master’s programs, and three doctoral degrees to more than 4,500 students. The university dates back to the 1800s, when it was started in the Belle Monte mansion of Adelicia Acklen, which remains a part of the campus today. Begun as a school for young ladies from elementary to the junior college level, in 1913 the school merged with the Ward Seminary to become the Ward-Belmont School for Women (a finishing school for young women, that attracted students from around the country, including Mary Martin, who would go on to become one of Broadway’s greatest stars), and then in 1951 evolved into the coeducational Belmont College, before becoming Belmont University in 1991.

Anthony, with a bachelor of science degree from Missouri State University and a master’s of divinity from Midwestern Seminary, joined the Belmont faculty in 1988. His job description included student counseling, orientation, and parent programming. In 1994, his experience in these areas took on a more personal meaning with two young pupils in his new home, Eric and Megan.

Maggie and Dane were willing to follow the most difficult of paths—the blending of two families. In November 1994, in their moment of marital bliss, they could never have imagined the magnitude of what their love would be asked to conquer in 2006.

The drastic changes in his family’s structure were having a real impact on Eric’s life. At age fourteen, in what he would later describe in an interview with writer Tony D’Souza for an article titled The Boomtown, the Gringo, the Girl, and Her Murder appearing in the June 2007 issue of Outside magazine, as a way to deal with his parents’ divorce, Eric took up climbing at a local gym. It really began to mean something about freedom, learning my limits, learning to trust myself, he told D’Souza.

This love for climbing grew into a necessary mental therapy for a confused child who, with his younger sister, Megan, over the next five years would be witness to more judicial conflict between his parents, which would include missed visitations, increasingly large child-support arrearages, unpaid medical bills, orders of contempt, garnished wages, and threats of jail. And all of this on top of the adjustments to a new stepfather and a new stepsister.

Years later, indoor climbing challenges grew into mountain climbing, and an overall approach toward life for Eric Volz. This almost obsessive need of testing his own physical and mental abilities would be a major component in his decision to travel to Nicaragua for the first of what would become six trips, attracted by the surfing potential of its Pacific coastline and the climbing challenges of its numerous volcanic mountains.

During the difficult years immediately following his parents’ divorce, Eric attended Hillwood High School, located in the western portion of Nashville on the periphery of the city’s most affluent section, Belle Meade. In 1995, while a sophomore at the school of about 1,200 students, his yearbook photo depicted someone with a brooding seriousness, his long, curly hair hanging down to his chin. His picture would not be found within the annual’s many pages of participants in any of the numerous athletic teams or school clubs. Eric had already started to chart a course as an individualist, content to be stimulated by his own challenges.

The theme of the annual that year was When All the World Was Young, which was attributed by the yearbook staff to The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterful 1937 work, in which he first introduced to the world characters he would later expand in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Was it somehow a mysterious foreshadowing of what Eric was to face in the future—a quest through Middle Earth (Central America), where the central character explores an antique world (Nicaragua), attempting to prevail in the face of danger and adversity, and drawing on reserves of inner strength?

After graduation from high school, Eric returned to the California roots of his early childhood. He moved to the Lake Tahoe region, where he divided his time between working as a carpenter and a club deejay, attending classes at Lake Tahoe Community College, and perfecting his mountain climbing skills as a free climber. While still in love with the thrill of mountain climbing, after many months in the Lake Tahoe area, Eric sensed it was time for new challenges. He would move to Southern California, where he would earn a degree in Latin American cultural studies from the University of California at San Diego, graduating in 2004. He explained his shift in direction when interviewed by D’Souza for his piece in Outside magazine: "I reached