The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The sign over its beige stucco facade calls the Kozy Korner a “Cut-Rate & Lounge.” Two doors separate the bar from the street. The first opens onto a grungy vestibule where a cashier sells beer and liquor from behind a bulletproof window. The second is locked; customers must be buzzed through. Once inside, they are greeted by a dark, narrow room. A Baltimore Ravens poster is affixed to one wall. A rendering of the Last Supper, with a black Jesus and black disciples, decorates the other. Three video gambling machines flash and hum.

  When Dowery arrived, a dozen other patrons were packed into the space. He recognized one of them: a former girlfriend called Toot. They chatted inside the doorway while he smoked and sipped a beer. Just after 10 o’clock, the door opened, and two men entered. This time Dowery’s sixth sense—the feeling that had told him to turn around on his porch that morning a year earlier—failed him. One of the men drew a gun, pointed it at Dowery’s head, and fired. Then the other did the same. This time, the doctors couldn’t save him.

  And although the bar was crowded, no one has come forward to say they saw a thing. It’s just another homicide in inner-city America, with no suspects, and no witnesses.

  JEREMY KAHN is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, Fortune, The New Republic, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy, and Slate. Previously, he served as managing editor of The New Republic and was a staff writer at Fortune. He recently moved from Washington, D.C. to New Delhi, India.

  Coda

  As a writer, you want all your stories to matter—you want them to be read, to have an impact. But in this case, that desire was particularly strong. I desperately wanted to wake people up, to make them think about the way in which witness intimidation reinforced the inequality of the American justice system—the way it put whole inner-city neighborhoods essentially beyond the reach of the law. I hoped that out of the tragedy of John Dowery’s death, some good might come. But I have enough experience to know that merely exposing a wrong rarely rights it—that places like East Baltimore would not be the way they are if it were so easy to bring about change.

  Since this story was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, the “stop snitching” ethos—some even call it a “movement”—has received increasing attention from the national media. African American columnists, commentators, and community activists have expressed outrage and dismay at the acceptance of this code of silence in America’s inner cities, as well as anger at the hip-hop stars and professional athletes who condone and legitimize it. (Unfortunately, few white commentators or politicians have seemed as exercised.) But the marketing juggernaut that romanticizes “gangsta” culture shows no sign of changing course. So the rapper Cam’ron, without any hint of shame or guilt, freely admits to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that talking to the police would “hurt my business.” Never mind who else gets hurt—that’s none of Cam’ron’s business. Meanwhile, local police and prosecutors—whose business it is to see that justice is served—remain confounded by the epidemic of witness intimidation. In some cities, like Newark, prosecutors have stopped bringing cases in which there is just one witness because of the likelihood that intimidation will derail the prosecution. This policy keeps lone witnesses safe—sometimes—and it conserves the DA’s precious budget, but it hardly makes neighborhoods safer or provides justice to victims’ families.

  When I wrote this story, I assumed John Dowery’s murder would never be solved. Police and prosecutors were furious over his killing—determined to show that no one could execute a federal witness with impunity—but they had crashed into that familiar brick wall of silence. I wasn’t optimistic they could break through. Still, Baltimore’s entire law enforcement community—lead by the local FBI field office—was helping to work the case. And as U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein points out in this story, the feds can be pretty persuasive. Eventually, the wall cracked.

  On November 20, 2007, almost a year to the day after Dowery was killed, federal prosecutors charged two men, Melvin Gilbert, age thirty-three, and Darron Goods, a twenty-one-year-old known on the street as “Moo-man,” with his murder. Prosecutors allege that Gilbert ran an East Baltimore heroin, cocaine, and marijuana distribution ring that called itself “Special.” Tracy Love, aka “Boo-Boo,” and Tamall Parker, aka “Moo-Moo,” were ranking members of Special, according to prosecutors, and Dowery was killed to prevent him from testifying against the gang. In addition to Dowery, prosecutors allege that members of Special killed at least four others, including at least one other witness. In January 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s office announced that it would seek the death penalty against Gilbert. As of this writing, the case had yet to come to trial.

  Dean LaTourrette

  A SEASON IN HELL

  FROM Men’s Journal

  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.

  THE ROAD FROM MANAGUA 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.

  “I’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.

  “It’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 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 more time 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, Novembe
r 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.

  THE 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 like a mummy.”

  Sobalvarro called Volz. “He told me not to let anyone go into the crime scene, including the police, until he got there,” she says. It was too late. A crowd had gathered, and at least 20 people traipsed in and out of the store, touching the body and possibly even moving it, before the police arrived about 20 minutes later and finally roped off the scene.

  Although Jimenez was found fully clothed, the police removed her jeans and her shirt and took pictures of her. Marks on her body led them to conclude that she’d been raped, vaginally and anally, an explosive claim that soon found its way into print but was never substantiated. Jimenez wasn’t known as a drinker, but she had a blood alcohol level of 0.30 percent—three times the DUI limit in most U.S. states. The coroner estimated the time of death between 11 AM and 1:45 PM, right during lunchtime, while people were eating at sidewalk restaurants.

  “We didn’t see or hear a thing,” says Bob Merrill, whose pizza shop is directly across the street. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”