Murder of Irene Garza

Feit was incarcerated at the W.J. Estelle Unit, ten miles (16 km) north of central Huntsville, Texas. He died of natural causes on February 12, 2020.

The investigation into Garza's death was renewed in 2015 after a new district attorney took office in Hidalgo County. In February 2016, the 83-year-old Feit was arrested in Arizona in connection with Garza's death. He was later extradited to Texas. His murder trial began in late November 2017. On December 7, 2017, Feit was found guilty of murder and the next day he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Feit died in February 2020.

On December 7, Feit was convicted of Garza's murder. In the punishment phase of the trial, Feit's defense attorney asked that Feit be given probation, citing his lack of felony convictions since Garza's death. The prosecution asked for a sentence of 57 years, which was symbolic of the amount of time that had passed since Garza's death, but on December 8, 2017, the jury pronounced a sentence of life in prison.

In February 2016, Feit was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 83 at the time of his arrest, and he used a walker when he appeared in court. Feit was extradited to Texas in March 2016 and incarcerated at the Hidalgo County Sheriff Adult Detention Facility. He entered a plea of not guilty. The prosecution requested a $750,000 bond, while the defense team asked for a $100,000 bond, adding that Feit had stage 3 kidney and bladder cancer. Judge Luis Singleterry set a $1 million bond.

Status hearings in the case were held in June and November 2016, and the discovery process was ongoing as of November. In February 2017, a judge set a late April 2017 trial date, and Feit remained under medical supervision at the Hidalgo County Jail. In April, Feit's defense filed for a change of venue because they believed that their client would not receive a fair and impartial trial in Hidalgo County. They filed a 700-page document with evidence showing that reporters allegedly condemned Feit as a murderer, and that the only reason why he avoided prosecution for years was because the Catholic Church protected him. Sometime in March, Tacheny testified against Feit in closed deposition. This was permitted under Texas law given the witness's age and exclusive knowledge of the case.

In the days after the vote was announced, Guerra sought to appoint Rodriguez as a special prosecutor in the Garza case. Rodriguez declined, saying that he preferred to take a new look at the evidence once he took control of the district attorney's office in January 2015. In April, he announced that the Garza case was open again. Without mentioning any suspects or elaborating on new evidence, he said that several employees in his office were working on the case.

In 2014, district court judge Ricardo Rodriguez campaigned to unseat Guerra as district attorney, and the Garza case arose as a campaign issue. Rodriguez said that he wanted justice for the Garza family, and promised to take a new look at Garza's case if he were elected. He won the election.

Father John Bernard Feit, the priest who heard Garza's last confession, was the only identified suspect in her death. Two clergymen, Dale Tacheny and Joseph O'Brien, came forward to authorities in 2002 to say that Feit had confessed his crime to them shortly after the murder. Feit had left the priesthood in the 1970s, married and had a family. For many years, the district attorney in Hidalgo County considered the evidence against Feit to be too weak to secure a conviction. He brought the case before a grand jury in 2004, but Feit, Tacheny and O'Brien were not subpoenaed, and the jury did not indict Feit.

In 2002, Tacheny decided he could no longer keep the secret of Feit's confession. Thinking that the murder had taken place in San Antonio because Feit had trained there, Tacheny called authorities in that city. The investigation into Garza's death was reopened that year. Texas Rangers investigator Rudy Jaramillo contacted Father Joseph O'Brien, a priest who had worked with Feit at the time of Garza's death. While O'Brien had told a television program in 2000 that he did not know anything about Garza's death, he admitted to Jaramillo that Feit had confessed shortly after the murder. Later in 2002, the polygraph examiner who had tested Feit in 1960 said that he questioned the reported results. The initial report said that Feit passed the polygraph, but the report was later edited to say that the results were inconclusive. The examiner felt all along that Feit had failed the test.

Rene Guerra, the district attorney of Hidalgo County from the 1980s until 2014, chose not to bring the Garza case before a grand jury until 2004. Tacheny, O'Brien and Feit did not receive subpoenas in the case, and the grand jury declined to indict Feit. O'Brien died in 2005.

Feit left the priesthood in the 1970s. He married, moved to the Phoenix area, and had three children. He worked at the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul as a food charity volunteer for seventeen years.

Three weeks before Garza's death, a woman named Maria America Guerra had been sexually assaulted while kneeling at the communion rail at another Catholic church in the McAllen area. Rumor held that Feit was responsible, but local church leaders discouraged people from considering the possibility that a priest could have been involved in a violent crime. Feit admitted to visiting a priest at that church on the day of Guerra's attack, but he denied assaulting her. He was later charged with rape, and the trial ended in a hung jury. In 1962, rather than face a second trial, Feit entered a plea of no contest to a misdemeanor charge of aggravated assault and paid a $500 fine. Years later, Feit said he did not understand that a no contest plea would be considered a conviction in the case.

On Saturday, April 16, 1960, Garza – who lived with her parents – told them that she was going to confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen. She was often conspicuous in the congregation because of her striking appearance, and several parishioners remembered seeing Garza at the church that night. When Garza's parents did not hear from her that evening, they first thought that she had stayed at the church for midnight mass. When Garza did not return home by 3:00 a.m., they went to the McAllen Police Department to report their daughter missing.

Feit did not feel comfortable with the monastic lifestyle at Assumption Abbey. He was sent to Jemez Springs, New Mexico, to a treatment retreat for troubled priests run by the Servants of the Paraclete, after which he joined the order as a staff member and worked his way into a supervisory role at the center. Father James Porter came to the center after he was known to have begun molesting children in the 1960s, and Feit cleared him for placement in another parish. Porter was later defrocked and imprisoned after abusing as many as 100 children.

Irene Garza (November 15, 1934 – April 1960) was an American schoolteacher and beauty queen whose death was the subject of investigation for several decades. Garza was last seen alive on April 16, 1960, when she went to confession at a church in McAllen, Texas. She was reported missing the following morning. Following the largest volunteer search to that date in the Rio Grande Valley, Garza's body was discovered in a canal on April 21. An autopsy concluded that she had been sexually assaulted before being killed; the cause of death was suffocation.

Irene Garza was born in 1934. Her parents, Nicolas and Josefina, owned a dry cleaning business in McAllen, Hidalgo County, Texas, a city located in the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. By the time Garza was a teenager, her parents' business had become successful and the family was able to move from the south side of McAllen to a more affluent area on the north side of the city. She graduated from McAllen High School, where she had become the first Latina to perform as a twirler or head drum majorette. Garza was crowned the 1958 Miss All South Texas Sweetheart and was a homecoming queen at Pan American College.