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Rio Grande Valley waits for justice

He was tied to teacher’s 1960 slaying

By , Rio Grande Valley BureauUpdated
Family photos of Irene Garza as a teen and beauty queen.
Family photos of Irene Garza as a teen and beauty queen.DELCIA LOPEZ/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

McAllen — For decades, Rio Grande Valley residents suspected that a former priest, now a grandfather living in a retirement community in Arizona, played a role in the disappearance and choking death of a parishioner.

Speculation persisted, even after John Feit left town and the priesthood. It was a chilling thought, that a young schoolteacher could disappear from a church, where she’d gone to say confession during Holy Week.

Irene Garza, 25, left few clues that evening in April 1960: a purse, a scuffed shoe and a slide projector that belonged to Feit.

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Her disappearance set off a massive manhunt, and a few days later authorities fished her body from an irrigation canal. She had been bludgeoned and suffocated.

Tuesday night, nearly 56 years after the killing and decades after many had lost hope of an arrest, Feit, now an old man, was arrested in Phoenix and charged with murder. He will contest his extradition to Texas at a hearing scheduled for Feb. 24, authorities said Wednesday.

The Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, which wasn’t established until 1965, said in a statement that it hopes and prays “for healing for the family and everyone involved.”

“It is our hope that justice is served in this case,” the statement continued.

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At Sacred Heart Church, where Garza last was seen, parishioners attending the evening Mass on Wednesday were reluctant to talk about the case. One said he knew about Garza, but didn’t want to talk about it. Another said she had heard about it on the news, but wasn’t familiar enough to comment and didn’t want to give her name.

Garza family members couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.

Feit, 83, was indicted last week after evidence was presented to a grand jury by Hidalgo County District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez, who campaigned two years ago on a promise to reopen this case. According to the indictment, the grand jury concluded Feit, with “malice aforethought” caused Garza’s death by asphyxiation.

“The arrest of John Feit (on) Tuesday night is the first step in providing justice for the murder of Ms. Irene Garza,” Rodriguez said Wednesday. “After nearly 56 years, Ms. Garza’s family and our community will finally see that justice is served.”

“At this point, Mr. Feit stands innocent until proven guilty in a court of law,” the DA said, adding that his office is working to ensure Feit comes back to Hidalgo County to stand trial.

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He declined to discuss any details about the case against Feit, pending the completion of the extradition process.

Garza’s family long has sought justice.

Two weeks before the disappearance of Garza, who had been crowned Miss All South Texas Sweetheart in 1958 and also was a former prom and homecoming queen at Pan American College, Feit attacked a woman in a nearby Edinburg church.

He was charged with assault and attempted rape in that case, and briefly was declared a fugitive after he left the state. He soon surrendered. The case against him ended in a mistrial, but in 1962 he pleaded no contest to aggravated assault and was fined $500.

Back then, when the Valley still was a smattering of small communities and Anglos were the majority, Garza had accumulated many successes: She was the first Hispanic twirler and drum majorette, media reports state. She had earned a college degree, the first in her family to do so, and was a compassionate teacher who was inspired by the second-graders she taught at a McAllen elementary school.

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On the night of her disappearance — April 16, 1960 — Garza visited Sacred Heart Church in McAllen where Feit, then 27, was a priest. She had borrowed her family’s car, after telling her parents she wanted to quickly attend confession. Other parishioners saw her at the church, and — according to past coverage — no one saw her leave.

Feit, who had moved to the McAllen parish shortly after finishing his seminary training in San Antonio, left in 1963. He moved on to Assumption Abbey, a Trappist monastery in southwest Missouri. Nearly a decade later, he left the church, married and had children.

For decades, Feit has publicly insisted he didn’t kill Garza. As the case lay dormant, its intrigue generated widespread interest and has been the subject of many high-profile stories, including a “48 Hours” special on CBS, a CNN documentary and an exhaustive narrative in Texas Monthly.

The case was reopened by the Texas Rangers in 2002.

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Among the more compelling evidence investigators gathered was testimony from Dale Tacheny, a former priest who spent time with Feit in Missouri. Tacheny told investigators that Feit had confessed to killing a woman in Texas during Holy Week.

Investigators also interviewed Father Joseph O’Brien, a McAllen priest, who reported scratches on the young Feit’s hands at the time of Garza’s disappearance. After confronting him months later, Feit allegedly confessed to the slaying.

But Rene Guerra, then district attorney of Hidalgo County, refused to take the evidence to a grand jury.

Facing scathing criticism in the media, Guerra eventually relented, and in 2004 he agreed to present the evidence to a grand jury, which called neither Tacheny nor O’Brien to testify, and declined to indict Feit.

A decade later, during a hard-fought campaign for re-election, Guerra came under fire from Garza’s family for his handling of the homicide investigation.

Rodriguez, who ousted Guerra as DA, was elected to office in 2014, in part, after pledging to revisit the unsolved case. The district attorney’s office, McAllen police and Texas Rangers investigated the case against Feit.

anelsen@express-news.net

Twitter: @amnelsen

|Updated

Aaron Nelsen is based in McAllen and is responsible for covering the Rio Grande Valley. Before joining the San Antonio Express-News in 2013, he was a freelance reporter and the TIME Magazine correspondent in Chile. He has also been a staff writer for the Brownsville Herald.