Unholy Act
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Despite the lack of evidence, Hidalgo County sheriff E. E. Vickers vowed that his detectives would “leave no stone unturned.” Mayor Phillip Boeye announced that McAllen’s city commissioners were giving the police department a blank check for the cost of the probe so its detectives would have “whatever money is necessary to help solve the crime.” Local businesses, including the bedrock of the city’s Anglo establishment, the Bentsen Brothers, posted reward money totaling $10,000. The investigation was no less ambitious; detectives questioned more than 500 people in the weeks following the murder, taking statements from Irene’s friends, family members, ex-boyfriends, co-workers, and anyone who might have seen her the night she disappeared. Sex offenders across the Valley were interrogated, as were suspects from as far away as El Paso, seven hundred miles to the west. Polygraph examiners from the Department of Public Safety in Austin administered lie detector tests to no fewer than 61 people, grilling any man who had had the luck to take Irene out on a date. The Texas Rangers, who conducted extensive interviews of everyone who had been at Sacred Heart on the night before Easter, went so far as to reconstruct that evening’s confession lines, mapping out who had stood in front of, and behind, whom.
Had Irene hailed from Southtown, where most of McAllen’s Hispanic population lived, the investigation into her murder might not have been so dogged. McAllen was more tolerant than other towns around the Valley, but it was still deeply divided; when Irene was a child, its one public swimming pool, the Cascade, barred Hispanics, who made do during the scorching South Texas summers by swimming in the town’s irrigation canals. Irene had often been the exception to the rule; at McAllen High School, where Anglos were the majority, she was the first Hispanic twirler and head drum majorette. When she was fifteen, the Garzas’ dry-cleaning business had become prosperous enough that they were able to move north of the railroad tracks. In the predominantly Anglo neighborhood where they settled, which was home to a number of Hispanic doctors, lawyers, and merchants, Irene fit in. Fair-skinned and well educated, she was always perfectly turned-out in pillbox hats and sweater sets and her own worldly glamour. But she never lost her foothold in the old neighborhood. She taught at Thigpen Elementary, south of the tracks, where some of her students came to school barefoot from the nearby colonias. She had spent her first paycheck on them, buying them clothes and books.
Publicly, the investigation into her murder seemed to proceed with little progress: “Police Still Sift for Murder Clue,” read the Valley Morning Star on April 26, and on May 1, “Police Search for Break in Garza Murder Case.” But behind the scenes, detectives had begun to focus their attention on a 27-year-old priest named John Feit who had recently finished his seminary training in San Antonio. Police knew little about the young man with the dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses, except that his name kept turning up in their investigation. He had come to the Valley for a year of pastoral training, performing baptisms and offering communion with his order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. He was bright and well mannered, and he delivered his sermons in Spanish with ease. But he struck parishioners as aloof and a bit of a loner. Unlike the warm and good-humored Father Joseph O’Brien, an assistant pastor at Sacred Heart who enjoyed the demands of parish work, Father Feit seemed more ambivalent about his vocation. When he was once asked why he had joined the priesthood, Father Feit did not speak of his deep faith or of hearing the call. “I just wanted to give it a try,” he said offhandedly.
On the night that Irene disappeared, Father Feit had assisted the clergy at Sacred Heart, hearing confessions and taking part in midnight mass. He had also met privately with Irene, he admitted to his superiors, in the church rectory. Father Feit’s account of what took place that night shifted in the weeks after Irene’s murder. Initially, he claimed that Irene had come to the rectory to discuss a “question of conscience” with him that he could not disclose, after which he had sent her to the sanctuary to confess. But in a later telling, the priest said that he had heard her confession in the rectory—viewed by the other priests as highly inappropriate—after Irene had expressed a fear of being overheard. There were other peculiar details: Several parishioners who had stood in his stalled confession line that night told detectives that he seemed to be absent from the sanctuary for long periods of time. Father O’Brien stated that when he and several other clergymen had gathered to drink coffee after midnight mass, he had noticed that the young priest had conspicuous scratches on his hands.
Detectives’ interest in Feit deepened when they learned of another attack in a nearby Catholic church. On March 23, three weeks before Irene was killed, twenty-year-old college student Maria America Guerra had visited Sacred Heart Church in Edinburg, twelve miles from Sacred Heart in McAllen. In a statement that she later gave to detectives investigating Irene’s murder, she said that she had noticed a young man with dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses sitting alone in one of the back pews. He resembled a stranger she had seen late that afternoon who had watched her from his blue-and-white sedan. “The thought that it was the same man that I saw earlier entered my mind, but being in the house of God, I dismissed any thoughts of fear of foul play,” she told detectives. “I went to the altar and knelt at the communion rail to pray my rosary.” No sooner had she begun, Guerra said, than the man grabbed her from behind and tried to clamp a rag over her mouth. Screaming, she fell backward onto the floor, where her attacker struggled to cover her mouth with his hands. She bit down on his fingers until she drew blood. As he threw her to the wall, she ran out a side door of the church. “I was screaming and crying and yelling for help, as I had fear for my life,” she said.
What Guerra then told investigators was already widely known by many Catholics around McAllen, since her story had been quietly told and retold in the days following Irene’s disappearance. “I thought that the man that attacked me was a priest,” Guerra said in her sworn statement. She could not point to any specific proof that he was a clergyman, just that he had been wearing black pants, as priests often did. She felt ashamed for even voicing the suspicion, she said, but she was simply repeating her “original impression of the man.” Around McAllen, the theory that a priest had had a hand in both crimes could be broached only discreetly. Priests were viewed as literal men of God, absent of moral failings, not the subjects of criminal inquiries. “The feeling was that if you wanted to remain a Catholic, you’d better not discuss it,” remembered a friend of Irene’s who asked not to be named for fear, she said half-jokingly, of “excommunication.” She recalled attending Sunday mass after Irene’s funeral, at which parishioners were sternly warned not to bear false witness against any member of the clergy. “The priest at Our Lady of Sorrows said he knew that rumors were going around about a priest being involved in Irene’s murder,” she said. “He told us, ‘It is impossible that a priest would commit a crime like this. Don’t speak of it. Don’t even let yourselves think it.’”
In late April, detectives drained and dragged the portion of the Second Street canal where they had discovered the muddy shoe print. Lying on the bottom, a few feet from where investigators believed that Irene’s body had been dumped into the water, was a light-green Eastman Kodaslide viewer with a long black cord. Police appealed to the public for help in finding its owner, and two days later, Father John Feit stepped forward and said that he had purchased it the previous summer at a Port Isabel drugstore.
WHEN THE PRIEST finally sat down with detectives in early May, he provided a meticulous accounting of his actions on Easter weekend. That Saturday night, he confirmed, he had counseled Irene in the Sacred Heart rectory. He had last seen her, he claimed, when they exited the rectory between 7:15 and 7:20 p.m. Afterward, he had heard confessions for several hours in the sanctuary and had twice returned to the rectory to smoke cigarettes. As he had sat in the confessional that night, he had accidentally broken his glasses; he had a “nervous habit of playing around” with them when he had to listen to parishioners talk for any length of time, he explained. At ten o’clock, he drove to his residence in the Pastoral House of the Oblate Fathers, five miles away in San Juan, to get his other pair. Upon arriving there, he had found that the doors were locked and that he had no key. “Because of this, I had to make my entrance through a second-floor balcony, propping up a wooden roadblock or barricade against the side of the house and climbing in in this fashion,” he said. “While entering the house in this way, I scraped the back of my right hand slightly and the index finger and middle finger of my left hand more severely on the brick wall.”
