The unsolved killing of Irene Garza, 25, who was last seen at church, has haunted the city of McAllen. Yet despite ample incriminating evidence, Feit escaped prosecution.
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In the beginning, the evidence pointing to Feit was telling but not sufficient to sustain a charge.
John Feit, the former priest who has been arrested in the 1960 slaying of a 25-year-old Texas schoolteacher and beauty queen, Irene Garza.
District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez presented his case to a grand jury last week, where they finally voted to indict him. Rodriguez ousted the 32-year incumbent and told supporters he would re-examine the case.
What also made police suspicious was that 24 days before the killing, Feit had been arrested for attacking another young woman at a church in a town about 10 miles from McAllen.
As well as teaching disadvantaged children, Garza was the first person in her family to graduate college, according to the Washington Post. Garza disappeared in April 1960 after going to confession at Feit’s church, Sacred Heart, the Saturday before Easter. The schoolteacher’s body was found several days later in an irrigation ditch about a mile from the church where Feit was a priest.
Editor’s note: This story appeared in the October 16, 2003, editions of The Dallas Morning News.
The death certificate states Garza was raped, beaten on the head and suffocated. Enlarge © Bettmann/Corbis John Feit when he was 28.
Among the evidence that pointed to Feit as a suspect over the years was his portable photographic slide viewer which was found near Ms Garza’s body.
Noemi Sigler, a cousin of Garza who was just 10 at the time of the murder, told CNN, “It was impossible for a priest to do such a deed”.
Then-Hidalgo County DA Rene Guerra said he concluded that Father O’Bien and Tacheny were unreliable based on information from police and other sources, but acknowledged that he and his staff never sought to interview the witnesses. And that was the end of that. However, he was not charged in Garza’s murder.
The crime shocked the people of McAllen.
During the next four decades, the case grew colder and eventually faded from the headlines.
Feit, 83, was arrested outside of his apartment in the Phoenix area.
While O’Brien has passed away, Tacheny’s testimony may prove crucial to Feit’s trial.
The following week, her body was found, fully-dressed and badly bruised, retrieved from a canal in which someone had left her to decompose, her corpse washed clean of evidence. Feit was the chief suspect in the murder case for nearly 50 years.
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But that never happened. “We sent them a completed case with what we thought was a viable suspect”, said Lt. Tony Leal of the Rangers’ cold-case unit. On June 9, 2004, the jury declined to indict the named defendant, John Feit, and no-billed the case. Feit denied any connection to her murder. No one was ever arrested for the crime until Tuesday.
