Cover Story
Megan Joy Volz
On Dec. 17, an appellate court in Nicaragua declared Eric Volz innocent. Volz—convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend despite considerable evidence to the contrary—would not actually be free for a few more days, but to his family the news must have been some solace. For over a year, the 28-year-old Nashville native languished in a Nicaraguan prison. According to his online diary, he received extra harsh treatment from prison officials. That day in December must have been a good one for almost everyone in the Volz family. Everyone, perhaps, but Eric’s younger sister Megan.
That’s because on the same day a court was vindicating her brother, 24-year-old Megan went to Nashville police to report that she’d been assaulted by her then-boyfriend Guillermo Diemarch and his brother Juan Carlos Diemarch.
The affidavit, filed the next day, alleges that Juan Carlos kicked Volz and that Guillermo (pronounced Gee-sher-mo,) began to choke her while attempting to break up the fight. Reading the charges, the case seems cut and dried: Two men attack one woman, and she presses charges. But according to Guillermo and Volz’s own testimony during a Metro court preliminary hearing, the situation is much more complex.
Friends of the couple say that it was Volz who regularly abused Guillermo physically, hitting and scratching the young man, leaving bruises and nail marks. On at least two occasions, Juan Carlos called 911 because Volz was hitting his brother, according to recordings of the calls. When police arrived on these occasions, the brothers declined to file official reports. Why?
“Because Megan said that if I did, she would have me and my brother deported,” Guillermo says from behind a plate glass window in the visiting room of the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office’s Hill Detention Center. The brothers came to the U.S. legally five years ago on a 90-day visa from their native Uruguay. They never left and never reconciled their immigration status.
For that reason, Guillermo says that he stayed with and never reported a woman he describes as abusive, vindictive, prone to destroying property and lashing out in fits of anger.
“The very first time when he called the police on me,” Volz said during the preliminary hearing, “I told him to call the police on me, go ahead, because they’ll deport you.”
When Guillermo broke up with Volz, she made good on her threat. On Dec. 18, three days after a shouting match—which Volz claims ended in her being physically attacked—she swore out assault charges against the Diemarch brothers. Volz testified that she waited as long as she did to press charges because it took her mother that long to convince her to “take action and protect myself.”
As her own brother Eric’s nightmarish incarceration was coming to an end, Guillermo and Juan Carlos Diemarch’s imprisonment was just beginning.
Better Days Megan Volz with Guillermo, brother Juan Carlos and their grandmother
The two were arrested and charged with one count of domestic assault each for the Dec. 15 incident, both misdemeanors. Guillermo was additionally charged with felony aggravated assault for a fight he’d had with Volz on Dec. 7. In that fight, Volz claims that she received a separated shoulder. While being processed at the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office, an immigration background check—now routine under the sheriff’s department’s 287g program—revealed that they were in the country illegally. Now, regardless of the outcome of their criminal trial, both men probably will be deported with little chance of ever returning to the lives that they have built here in the U.S.
Further complicating matters is a bureaucratic error on the part of the sheriff’s department that caused Juan Carlos to be prematurely placed in removal proceedings. Now, though he still has criminal charges pending in Nashville, he is hundreds of miles away in a federal immigration facility awaiting deportation. He may miss his court date in Tennessee, meaning that he will never, under any circumstances, be allowed to return to the U.S.
Juan Carlos’ girlfriend Kate Kalil notes a bitter irony in the situation. “I saw Mrs. Volz [Eric and Megan’s mother] on CNN one evening and she was going on and on about how it’s just not fair that her son is being held in jail without any rights,” Kalil says. “He did nothing wrong, and they won’t let him go. To know that she advised her daughter to do the same to somebody else, it’s very disheartening. [Guillermo and Juan] are both in jail without any rights because they’re illegal. They did nothing wrong. They didn’t hurt her. They didn’t harm her.”
The Scene made exhaustive attempts to get Volz’s side of the story. Calls and text messages sent to Megan’s two out-of-state phone numbers found on police documents yielded no response. Megan and Eric’s parents—Maggie and Jan—are separated. Calls to Jan Volz’s home were not returned. After the Scene contacted a friend of the Volz family, Maggie’s husband Dane Anthony agreed to an interview.
At the last minute, Anthony backed out of the interview, citing privacy concerns. The next morning, his wife and stepson appeared live in the Today show studio in Manhattan. The following day, Eric and his mother were interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Two days before this story went to press, Dane Anthony once again agreed to an interview. At the outset, Anthony made it clear that the events of the past year had taken a toll on his family. He also expressed a deep concern about the ongoing legal process in Nicaragua, where a new trial against his son soon may begin, and about the safety of his stepchildren.
He declined to answer questions about his daughter’s education, personal and work history, or her relationship with the Diemarch brothers. When asked whether Megan regrets turning in the brothers, Anthony says, “I’m sure she probably does, but we never talked about that.”
“This is a very unfortunate coincidence,” Anthony says. “Two tragic events that have nothing at all to do with each other.”
As the Diemarch brothers survey the wreckage of the lives they built in the U.S., they aren’t much interested in coincidence, unfortunate or otherwise.
“You’ve got to realize that all that I had is gone,” says Guillermo. “All the people that I worked with over the last five years? Gone. All the people I know? Gone. I’ll never see them again.”
Volz and Guillermo met in 2006 while both were working at one of Nashville’s best restaurants, the tony Park Café in Sylvan Park. Volz worked in the dining room, Guillermo in the kitchen. Park Cafe was not his only employer.
“I’ll work two or three jobs at once,” Guillermo says. “I like to work hard.” He and his brother had much to work for. Their parents died when they were very young, and they were raised by their grandparents, who Juan Carlos and Guillermo were supporting until their arrest. “Those boys had a very hard life, but their grandparents made sure they were educated, says their uncle, Eddie Perez, who lives in Florida. “They could be anything they wanted to be.” In the five years that the brothers lived in Nashville, they worked at some of Nashville’s best culinary establishments—Watermark, PM, Bound’ry, Batter’d & Fried, Park Café and the now defunct Chu, to name a few.
“Guillermo was the most amazing artist with sushi,” says Theresa Everette, chef at Union Station Hotel’s Prime 108. She met the brothers when she was cooking at Bound’ry, working closely with them for more than three years.
“I could always rely on both of them to work any shift even at the last minute.”
She describes them as “extremely sensitive, artist types” who “character-wise were good kids…. They’d give you the shirt off their backs.”
Volz had also worked in the restaurant industry for some time, though in terms of taking shirts off of backs her position was somewhat reversed.
In February 2006, Volz was arrested after trying to steal about $48 worth of merchandise from a TJ Maxx store on Thompson Lane. The store did not pursue the case, though Volz still owes Metro $290 in court fees.
When asked about the arrest, Anderson says he has no knowledge of the incident.
A few weeks after she and Guillermo began dating, Megan Volz’s brother Eric, a Hillwood High graduate, was arrested in Nicaragua for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Doris Ivania Jiménez. Eric Volz had been in the country for two years, jump-starting a new magazine whose English translation is The Bridge. Having majored in Latin American cultural studies at the University of California San Diego, he would soon become its publisher. At the time, Nicaragua was experiencing a wave of new investment. U.S. tourist dollars were flooding in and with them came real estate development and cultural change. The aim of the magazine was to keep a critical eye on this evolution so that native Nicaraguans could harness its benefits without ceding cultural and economic sovereignty to the powerful Yankee dollar.
In Detention “You’ve got to realize that all I had is gone,” says Guillermo.
But when Jiménez was found raped, hogtied and strangled to death in November 2006, suspicion fell on Volz. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime and 10 witnesses signed sworn statements claiming that Volz was two hours away from the crime scene holding a meeting at the time of the murder. Solid evidence such as phone records and logs from cell phone towers also point to Volz’s innocence.
This was not enough for Nicaraguan police, who arrested Volz and two other men. One of them, Nelson Lopez-Danglas, would later be granted immunity by the prosecutor in return for testifying against the American. A media frenzy of O.J. Simpson-trial proportions soon engulfed the small Central American country, with Nicaragua’s major papers and broadcast outlets calling for Volz’s blood. Jiménez’s mother Mercedes Alvarado also turned on Volz, telling anyone who would listen that he was insanely, violently jealous and would stop at nothing to keep her daughter out of the arms of another. She even testified against him, claiming that he offered her $1 million to drop the charges.
At Volz’s trial, as crowds outside demanded mob justice and chanted “Kill the gringo,” Alvarado would whip them to a further frenzy by raising her fists and yelling at the police, “You’re whores of the gringo! [The] process is corrupt.”
Those inside the courtroom report that the chanting could be heard clearly. The presiding judge threw out all of the testimony from Volz’s alibi witnesses as well as the phone record evidence. He never had a chance. The judge sentenced him to 30 years in a Nicaraguan prison, and his sentence began immediately.
Back in Nashville, Eric Volz’s sister Megan was becoming closer to the charming Uruguayan man she’d met at work. “We never spent any time apart,” Guillermo Diemarch recalls. “We worked together, we slept together every night.” Guillermo had Thanksgiving dinner with the Volzes and says that he got along well with her mother Maggie and stepdad Dane Anthony. “Everything was normal,” Guillermo says.
Three months into the relationship, however, Volz got pregnant, Guillermo says. She had an abortion, and Guillermo says that it was extremely hard on both of them. “It was after that,” he says, “that we started fighting…. She was upset by that, and so was I. I understand that.”
When asked about his stepdaughter’s pregnancy, Anthony says he wasn’t “aware of that.” He also says that he was unaware of the violent relationship his stepdaughter had with her boyfriend.
“We would fight, and she would hit me,” Guillermo says. “I had bruises and scratches all over.” He points to the crook of his right arm and says, “She bit me right there! Hard!”
When his brother Juan Carlos found out that Guillermo’s girlfriend was roughing him up, he told the other guys in the kitchen. They found the abuse hysterical. “They would make fun of me because a woman was hitting me all the time,” Guillermo says.
Guillermo was not the only target of Volz’s anger. In the year that they were together, he says that Volz destroyed four cell phones in fits of anger. One phone met its end after Volz threw it at her car windshield. The phone was destroyed and the windshield was badly cracked.
She also destroyed Juan Carlos’ laptop using the ingenious method of water and liquid soap, says Kalil, Juan Carlos’ girlfriend. “She took the laptop, doused it in water…took liquid soap and put it all over the keyboard and then doused it in water again. She knew that if you put liquid soap in there you can’t replace it because there’s a film on the parts. If you just douse it in water, you can save some things.”
Guillermo also says that Volz punched out two windows in the apartment they shared. Volz confirmed one of these incidents in court, saying that she broke the window in a fit of jealous rage. “I was angry…because there was a voice mail on Guillermo’s phone from a man saying he loved him.”
Dane Anthony says he doesn’t recall his step-daughter behaving this way and had no knowledge of her interactions with Guillermo.
Late on the night of April 26, 2007, Megan’s behavior became too much for Juan Carlos, so he called 911, summoning the police to the house on Fatherland Street where the brothers lived and Volz regularly stayed.
“My brother and his girlfriend, they’re fighting,” he told a Metro 911 operator, according to recordings obtained by the Scene. The police soon arrived and, according to the next call that Juan Carlos placed, “told her to leave.” Volz left but quickly returned. Thirty minutes later, Juan Carlos was back on the phone with Metro dispatch. “The cops came,” he told the operator just after midnight. “We all talked about it…. The police told her she has to leave, but she came back.”
...“Is she causing problems again?” the operator asked.
“She is hitting my brother,” Juan Carlos answered.
Guillermo says he knew then that the relationship was doomed but was conflicted because he had strong feelings for Volz. He was also afraid of running afoul of immigration authorities.
“All the time she was like, ‘If you break up with me, I’ll have you deported,’ ” he says from jail, wearing an oversized, bright-orange jump suit.
On April 27, 2007, the day after Juan Carlos Diemarch called the Metro cops on Megan Volz, her brother Eric’s story was featured on Anderson Cooper 360 for the second time in a week. Since his imprisonment, the story had also been featured on the Today show and National Public Radio, and in People magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and The Tennessean.
A movement was building around Eric to bring attention and justice to the young man’s plight. Letter-writing campaigns, blogs and benefit concerts all attempted to spread the word about the case. The website friendsofericvolz.com was started to collect donations and disseminate up-to-date information about Volz’s situation.
Volz would need all the help he could get. In a letter dated April 17, which appeared on the website, he wrote, “At times there is despair so overwhelming there are no words, there is pain so deep it does not have a name, and the fear is so powerful we cannot paint his face.”
The young man was in the belly of a hellish beast. El Modelo prison, where Volz was incarcerated, is an awful place under the best of circumstances, and being a national pariah only made it worse. According to his letters published on the website, other prisoners would taunt him, referring to his cell as “the U.S. Embassy,” and shout “Hey Bush!” as they passed.
His visits were restricted and often he would be handcuffed for long periods of time while other prisoners were not.
Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan media continued to blast him, calling him a “privileged gringo” who offered bribes to Nicaraguan officials to have the charges against him dropped—a ridiculous claim.
But his attorneys were working hard on his behalf. As soon as he was arrested, Volz had hired Ramon Rojas—who had once represented Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega—one of the sharpest and most well-known legal minds in Nicaragua.
He filed an appeal on Volz’s behalf, and the case was scheduled for a hearing before a three-judge appeals tribunal. The case file was over 500 pages long and would take months for the court to review thoroughly. Meanwhile, Volz languished in a Central American dungeon.
Guillermo Diemarch
As Eric Volz’s day in appeals court drew nearer, his sister’s relationship with Guillermo Diemarch was grinding to a bitter end. In early December 2007, Guillermo decided to call it quits. He says that Megan Volz, who was still living with him, initially took the news reasonably well but that within a few days they were fighting again.
Volz says in her sworn affidavit that on Dec. 7 Guillermo became enraged during an argument and threw her on the ground, separating her shoulder and causing “alot (sic) of pain.”
On the day after Christmas, Volz took the stand in a preliminary hearing on the charges and told her story. Though she denied most of the accusations of property destruction, her narrative of the relationship wasn’t much different than Guillermo’s.
“We’ve hit each other for months,” she told the court that day.
When Juan Carlos’ court-appointed defense attorney Bill Bruce asked who started the fight on Dec. 7, Volz replied, “We both started it. It’s ongoing. It wasn’t started by anything in particular.”
While Guillermo claims that he never laid a hand on Volz, she says that on that night he hit her “as hard as he could, with an open hand. He was hitting me in the ear, he was slapping me in the face, he was pushing me.”
“Can you describe how you were hitting him?” asked Laura Getz, Guillermo’s public defender.
“The same way,” she replied. “Just hitting him back.”
Amazingly, Volz thought that even after this slugfest, the relationship was still viable.
“Did you think that you were headed for a breakup?” Bruce asked.
“No,” replied Volz. “This is not abnormal.”
She did not go to the emergency room that night, but Volz told the court that she went to the doctor the next day. On a subsequent visit, she received a sling that she wore on the stand, but which Guillermo says she rarely used before that day. Her stepfather says that she sustained a “first degree [shoulder] separation” during the fight. This injury would, in part, lead to Guillermo being charged with felony aggravated assault, more than a week later.
Juan Carlos’ girlfriend Kate Kalil says that when she saw Volz early the next day, “She had no visible injuries. No cuts, no bruises on her face.”
Kalil also recalls a chilling note that Volz left scrawled on a napkin for Juan Carlos. “It was written in all capital letters in blue ink,” she remembers. It read, “If you fuck with me, I’ll fuck with you.”
In court, Volz confirmed the note and its content.
Somehow, the couple managed to reconcile once more and were on peaceful terms until the night of Dec. 14, one week later.
“He was ignoring me,” Volz told the court when asked how their next fight started. “On the morning of the 15th before he went to work, I pleaded for him to talk to me.”
Instead, Volz says, Guillermo went berserk, “smashing up everything on my dresser, including a laptop.”
Guillermo admits to damaging the laptop. “I did break her computer,” he says from behind bars. “She hit me, and I got angry. To be honest, I feel very bad about that.”
After Guillermo went to work, Volz testified in court that she went to lunch and had a couple of margaritas. At some point, she fell asleep and awoke at about 11 p.m. to the sound of the brothers arguing about her.
She confronted the men, standing “chest to chest” with Juan Carlos and yelling at him.
Eventually, she admitted on the stand, “I pushed him.” She claimed that Juan Carlos then tried to hit her, missed, and she countered with a slap to his face.
She testified that Juan Carlos then “turned and side-kicked me,” causing her to lean against the wall. At this point, she told the court, Guillermo came over and they once more traded blows.
“We started hitting each other back and forth…. We probably exchanged hits five times…. It ended with me on the couch and his hands around my neck.”
Volz, who is only 5-feet-4 and 115 pounds according to her shoplifting arrest record, admitted that she was not seriously injured by Guillermo’s punches, even though he stands 6-feet-2 and weighs 174 pounds. She also told the court that she did not lose consciousness while being choked.
In fact, the only wounds she claimed to have suffered were “finger bruises on my neck” and some bruises on her shoulder.
Also remarkable is the fact that Volz waited until the night of Dec. 17—nearly three days later—to go to police. She claimed that it was her mother who, after hearing the incredible facts of her ordeal, eventually convinced her to “take action and protect myself.”
Guillermo Diemarch says that during Volz’s testimony he just laughed. “How could she do all that pushing and punching if her shoulder had been hurt the week before?” he asks. “Both things can’t be true.”
The judge—Dianne Turner—didn’t see it that way.
“I do not hold Ms. Volz blameless in this situation,” she said. “I do think that she antagonizes, and I do think she starts some things sometimes.” Judge Turner then decided that this was in fact an incident of domestic abuse and ruled that the case be bound over to a grand jury.
Bail was set for both men—$30,000 for Guillermo and $5,000 for Juan Carlos.
What happened next stands out, even in a case as unusual as this.
Juan Carlos’ girlfriend Kalil posted his bond, apparently unaware that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold had been placed on him as soon as his 287g search was completed. The brothers’ immigration attorney Charla Haas would not speak to the Scene about the case. No matter how much bail Kalil came up with, neither Diemarch brother would be able to leave jail.
Of course, the sheriff’s department didn’t notify Kalil of this when taking the bond money. Sheriff’s department spokeswoman Karla Crocker says that when this transaction was processed a computer error occurred, mistakenly notifying ICE that Juan Carlos was available for deportation. “The computer for some reason did not read that there was a pending charge,” Crocker says. As a result, Juan Carlos was picked up by ICE and transported out of Tennessee to a federal holding facility, even though he still faces charges in Nashville.
Crocker says the case has made the sheriff’s department double-check the deportation availability of every undocumented immigrant in the system. “We are [now] manually checking every single person in addition to using the computer list,” Crocker says.
Crocker also says that the sheriff is worried about immigrants gaming the system by using all of their constitutionally protected rights.
“We don’t want the system to be able to be manipulated,” she says. “Some of these people that have misdemeanor cases locally are appealing the misdemeanor cases.” She says that the appeals can take months and the sheriff is talking to local judges about whether such cases should be properly adjudicated or if the immigrant defendants should just be deported. “We’re going to have to figure out exactly what we’re going to do,” Crocker says.
Elliot Ozment, a Nashville immigration attorney who sits on Sheriff Hall’s 287g citizen review board, is aghast that the city’s jail keeper has such a cavalier attitude toward the appeals process.
“The last time I checked, anybody that thinks that they have a basis for an appeal to a higher court is not gaming the system but exercising their rights under the Constitution,” Ozment says. “Since when could anybody characterize that as gaming the system?”
The attorney says that he was unaware that the sheriff was consulting with judges about the disposition of criminal cases. If such meetings are in fact taking place, “It should be of paramount concern that the jail keeper is talking about adjudication of criminal cases with judges…. I don’t know why Metro’s jail keeper would have any standing to talk to a criminal judge about the adjudication of a criminal case or criminal cases in general unless it impacted jail conditions.”
Ozment is concerned that such moves could be a signal of a larger trend in Metro’s legal system when it comes to immigrants. “I have some serious concerns about attempts by local officials to tilt our judicial system against the foreign born,” says Ozment. “I think it would call into question serious constitutional implications.”
As for Juan Carlos Diemarch, he’s now hundreds of miles away from here in either Alabama or Louisiana, at an ICE federal holding facility.
The sheriff’s department has agreed to foot the bill for returning Juan Carlos to Nashville should the district attorney’s office decide to go forward with prosecuting the single misdemeanor charge against him.
When asked if he’d make a formal request to have Juan Carlos returned to Nashville for trial, Hugh Ammerman, who’s prosecuting the case, says he doesn’t think so. “I’m not going to request that,” he says, “but as far as I’m concerned the charges are still pending…. He’s just like anyone else who makes bond.”
Ammerman seems unconcerned that Juan Carlos is in federal custody and will miss his court date unless returned to Nashville. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” he says.
No matter how the criminal charges are adjudicated, the brothers will be sent back to Uruguay without a hearing before an immigration judge. Uruguay is a “visa waiver” country, which means that it’s easier to get a visa to visit the U.S. But if you overstay that visa, you are sent directly back without a hearing.
“Do not pass ‘Go,’ do not collect $200,” says Crocker, describing the Diemarches’ future travel plans.
Sheriff Hall has said repeatedly that the purpose of 287g was to detain and deport violent felons. While the Diemarches don’t exactly fit that bill, Crocker says that the system is working.
“We learned very early on that we had to make the distinction that if you were physically arrested that you’re going to be subject to this [287g] investigation,” says Crocker.
When examining the recent histories of Eric Volz and the Diemarch brothers, it’s hard not to notice startling ironies.
Juan Carlos Diemarch
This time last year, a benefit concert was being planned at Belmont University to raise money for Eric Volz’s defense. Now Caryn Cast, a friend of the Diemarch brothers, is organizing a benefit concert at a local venue to raise money for their defense and possible deportation expenses. “I’m willing to do whatever I have to do to make this happen,” Cast says.
When Volz was arrested in Nicaragua, popular opinion had him tried and executed before he even set foot in a courtroom. Given Tennesseans’ attitudes about undocumented immigrants lately—and the positive reaction to Sheriff Darron Hall’s 287g program here in Nashville—it’s unlikely that most locals will give the Diemarches the benefit of the doubt either.
And then there are the legal systems of Nashville and Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, Volz received a three-day trial where most of the evidence that comprised his defense was thrown out. In Juan Carlos Diemarch’s case, he may not even get a trial because the district attorney’s office seems unconcerned about getting him back here to receive due process. It also seems that the sheriff’s office would rather do away with the whole business of appeals and adjudication and just go straight to deportation.
There is a final, more poignant similarity between these three men.
On the Today show last week, Eric Volz said that he bore no ill will toward the people or nation of Nicaragua and would even like to return there someday. “I have no resentment towards the Nicaraguan people,” he told Today’s Meredith Vieira.
Guillermo Diemarch also forgives his accuser completely.
“I have to forgive her because it makes me feel better,” he says, leaning his head against the thick Plexiglass that separates him from the world. “It makes me feel better to take the high road.”
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