Family gets justice for McAllen murder after more than 50 years
Jurors in Hidalgo County this week returned an extraordinary verdict.
A timely one, too, given our ongoing national discussions about abuse of power — although the case at hand is one that has haunted the Rio Grande Valley for more than half a century. On April 16, 1960, Irene Garza, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, drove to the Sacred Heart Church in McAllen. It was the Saturday evening before Easter, and she planned to go to confession. Garza never came home. Several days later, police found her body floating in a canal. An autopsy determined that she had been beaten into a coma, then raped, before her body was discarded.
In 2016, a former priest, John Feit, was charged with Garza’s murder. And Thursday, after a six-day trial, he was convicted.
The news that he had been found guilty would have come as no surprise to Garza’s friends or family. Nicolas and Josefina Garza, for example, passed away before Feit was brought to trial, but they suspected he was their daughter’s killer from from the outset.
In 2005, journalist Pamela Colloff examined the case for Texas Monthly, and her story, “Unholy Act,” makes it clear how much evidence pointed in that direction.
At the time, Feit declined Colloff ’s request to be interviewed about the subject.
“The speculation intrigues me,” he told Colloff, after she knocked on his front door in Arizona.
He added, “God bless you, dear,” as he shut it.
Feit, who was in the Rio Grande Valley for a year of pastoral training, had been at Sacred Heart that evening. He acknowledged being alone with Garza that night and taking her confession at the rectory. Later, after midnight Mass, several of the people with whom he was drinking coffee noticed that he had scratches on his hands.
After investigators found a long black cord at the bottom of the canal where the body had been found, Feit came forward; he was, he volunteered, its original owner.
Further, Feit was an obvious person of interest in an attack on another young woman, Maria America Guerra, that had taken place in the Sacred Heart Church in nearby Edinburg several weeks prior to Garza’s murder. Guerra, who had fought off her attacker, had picked Feit out of a lineup. So had another eyewitness.
In June, while Feit was being questioned as part of the investigation into both of these crimes, he told the polygraph examiner that it was possible he had “said something or acted in some way” to cause Garza’s death. But he denied having attacked Guerra or killed Garza. And there would be no way of convicting him of either crime, he added, without his confession. A confession
That prediction proved more than correct. In August 1960, Feit was charged with the assault on Garza; the result was a mistrial, and in 1962, he pleaded no contest to reduced charges. And more than four decades later, he had yet to be charged with anything in relation to Garza’s murder.
But Feit, as Colloff reported, had already confessed to it.
In 2002, a man named Dale Tacheny, who was then living in Oklahoma City, had called the homicide division of the San Antonio police department to tell them an extraordinary story.
In 1963, Tacheny explained, he had been living at a Trappist monastery in Missouri, and the abbot asked him to counsel a young priest who was living among the novices. The priest was Feit, and during the course of their sessions he told Tacheny that he had murdered a young woman.
The latter had, at the time, felt obligated to keep Feit’s secret. But the knowledge gnawed at him until he came forward, years later.
Tacheny’s account was relayed to the Texas Rangers, who brought it to the attention of the longtime Hidalgo County district attorney, Rene Guerra, who responded by deciding not to ask a grand jury to consider it.
“Why would anyone be haunted by her death?” Guerrera asked rhetorically in 2002, after the Rangers’ cold-case unit decided to reopen the investigation. “She died. Her killer got away.”
In 2014, he was unseated by Ricardo Rodriguez, who had campaigned, in part, on a promise not to be so callously indifferent about the subject. Measure of justice
The resulting conviction has been a relief to the Texans who never forgot about this horrible crime and who never gave up hope that Garza’s family might someday see a measure of justice.
It’s a lesson to us all, too. Realistically, the odds of Garza’s killer being brought to justice were minimal, after the initial investigation stalled. But the fact that Feit was never charged in the first place was, in itself, a stunning injustice, considering that in addition to the evidence against him, the police had no other suspects.
Tacheny, who is also now in his 80s, testified in the recent trial that during their counseling sessions in Missouri, Feit explained that the Catholic Church, along with local law enforcement officials, had helped protect him. ‘Literal men of God’
Neither of those institutions was actually on trial last week, but it’s not hard to believe that they could have helped him. Feit, who had completed his seminary training in San Antonio, was new to the Rio Grande Valley, but he was a stranger in a position of power in the community.
“Priests were viewed as literal men of God, absent of moral failings, not the subjects of criminal inquiries,” wrote Colloff in 2005, explaining why so many locals were reluctant to broach what were clearly — and not just in retrospect — reasonable suspicions.
Some leaders may have been dissuaded, consciously or not, by the fact that the stakes might have seemed unusually high. There was a presidential election that year, and Texas, which was then under Democratic control, was considered crucial to the party’s prospects of retaking the White House.
At the 1960 Democratic National Convention in July, John F. Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in part because he thought the latter’s presence on the ticket would help shore up support in the state, with its 24 electoral votes. In the end, Kennedy carried the state by just two points.
And Kennedy was, of course, the first Catholic to win a major party’s presidential nomination. The “so-called religious issue” loomed over his campaign from the outset, as he acknowledged himself.
“I do not speak for my church on public matters — and the church does not speak for me,” he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September that year, vowing that if elected president, he would make his decisions after consulting his own conscience, and in consideration of the national interest.
The fact that Kennedy had to say that is, of course, a measure of religious intolerance that would hardly have been allayed by the news that less than five months earlier a young woman in South Texas had been brutally murdered by a priest, who had sought to use his status as a religious authority to shield him from the consequences of his actions.
Garza’s family had no such status. But they deserved a measure of justice regardless, and so last week’s verdict, so many years later, is a testament to their faith.
“Priests were viewed as literal men of God, absent of moral failings, not the subjects of criminal inquiries.” Pamela Colloff, Texas Monthly reporter