The murder of Irene Garza

Suspicion fell on John Feit almost immediately in 1960, a visiting priest from the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate who had heard Garza's final confession and gave shifting accounts of his whereabouts. A photographic slide viewer linked to Feit was recovered near where her body was found in the canal, fellow priests noted scratches on his hands after Easter, and just weeks earlier a woman named America Guerra had been attacked inside a church in nearby Edinburg by a man she later identified as Feit, an assault to which Feit pleaded no contest. Yet no murder charge followed; the Catholic Church transferred Feit among monasteries in Texas, Iowa, Missouri, and New Mexico, and the case stalled for more than 40 years. The decisive break was human testimony. In 2002 Dale Tacheny, a former Trappist monk who had counseled Feit at a Missouri monastery in the early 1960s, told Texas Rangers and Garza's family that Feit had confessed to him that he had murdered a young woman during Easter weekend, suffocating her after an assault. Around the same time, Joseph O'Brien, a priest who had been close to Feit in 1960, came forward to say Feit had effectively admitted the killing to him shortly after it happened. A 2004 grand jury convened under then-District Attorney Rene Guerra heard the case but declined to indict; critics, including the priests, said key witnesses were not called. The case was resurrected after Ricardo Rodriguez Jr. campaigned in 2014 on reopening it and defeated Guerra. A Hidalgo County grand jury indicted Feit, and he was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, on February 9, 2016, and extradited to Texas. At his trial in late 2017, Tacheny, then in his late 80s, was the prosecution's star witness, recounting Feit's confession; the jury also heard about the slide viewer, the scratches, the Guerra assault, and Feit's conflicting statements. On December 7, 2017, the jury found Feit guilty of murder; the next day he was sentenced to life in prison. He died at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville on February 12, 2020, at 87, his appeal pending and never showing remorse, according to Garza's family.