Unholy Act
(Page 3 of 5)
Father Feit had been troubled, he explained, when he had learned on Easter that the same woman he had talked to in the rectory the previous night had disappeared. But it had been a busy Sunday for the priest; he had offered two morning masses and a late-afternoon mass and performed baptisms that afternoon. That evening, he had returned to Sacred Heart to pick up his suit coat and Roman collar, which he had left behind. A priest he saw in the rectory asked him if he would speak to Irene’s parents, Nick and Josefina, who were frantic for information about their missing daughter. The Garzas had heard that he had met with Irene the previous night. “They wanted to know if I had perhaps said anything which might have upset or disturbed their daughter,” he said. “I replied in the negative.” Afterward, he did not drive back to San Juan right away. “My talk with the girl’s parents had disturbed me,” he said. “Perhaps I had said something, unintentionally, that might have upset this girl? At any rate, it seemed that no one had seen or heard from her since she left the rectory that Saturday night, since she talked to me. I was worried and drove around aimlessly for a while.”
Father Feit never explained how his slide viewer found its way into the canal, and there was plenty else for investigators to puzzle over. Their questions only multiplied the following day when they sat Father Feit down again to question him about the attack on Maria America Guerra. In a signed sworn statement, he acknowledged stopping by the Sacred Heart Church in Edinburg late in the afternoon on March 23, the day of the assault, to talk to a priest in the rectory. He also conceded that he had entered the sanctuary and knelt in a back pew to say his rosary. And, he allowed, he had been driving a blue-and-white 1956 Ford sedan. But he insisted that he had left Edinburg at least an hour before the attack, returning to the pastoral house in San Juan in time to ring the five-thirty bell. As for his finger, which investigators had learned had been badly cut, he had a simple explanation: The day before he went to Edinburg, he had gotten it caught in a mimeograph machine. Several priests later told detectives that Father Feit had not returned to San Juan in time to ring the bell and that his finger had not been hurt until the night of the attack. They also recalled that Father Feit had been wearing the same clothes that Guerra said her assailant had on. Both she and an eyewitness who had seen her attacker fleeing the church subsequently picked Father Feit out of a lineup.
Investigators brought in the foremost polygraph team in the nation, the Chicago-based John E. Reid and Associates, whose founder had literally written the book on lie detector tests. During two days of intense questioning in a Holiday Inn hotel room that June, Father Feit was evasive, and at times seemed to enjoy baiting his interrogators. When asked to suggest a question that the polygraph examiner should pose to him, the priest put forward one: “Do you believe it is possible that you may have said something or acted in some way to cause Irene’s death?” To his own question, he answered yes. (“The subject stated that he was referring to the harsh way he had treated her in the rectory the evening she disappeared,” the examiner noted in his report, without further explanation.) After urging Father Feit to be candid about the crime, the examiner recorded that “the subject in very deliberate and explicit words stated there will never be any evidence turning up in the future in this case. Further, that without a confession on his part there is not enough evidence in either of these cases to convict him or that a good defense attorney could not tear holes in.” The tests “definitely implicated him in both crimes,” read the report. “The examiner was convinced that the subject was not telling the truth when he denied killing Irene Garza or attacking Maria Guerra.”
In August Father Feit was indicted for assault with intent to rape Guerra. He was declared a fugitive when church officials at the San Antonio headquarters of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate told arresting officers that he had left the state. The priest later surrendered, claiming that he had suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by the police interrogations, and stood trial the following year. The jury deadlocked nine to three in favor of conviction, and the proceedings ended in a mistrial. Rather than face a second criminal trial, in 1962 Father Feit pled no contest to reduced charges of aggravated assault and was fined $500.
No murder charges were ever filed against Father Feit. As months passed after Irene’s death with no indictment, the investigation, which law enforcement officials said was still open, seemed to hit a brick wall. Detectives moved on to other cases, and the newspapers eventually dropped the story. South of the railroad tracks, where injustice was an accepted fact of life, people wondered aloud whether a deal had been struck, or whether the elected officials in their overwhelmingly Catholic town were afraid to challenge the church any more than they already had. Nick and Josefina Garza, who would both pass away in the nineties without ever seeing anyone prosecuted for their daughter’s murder, were assured that Father Feit, whom they had suspected from the outset, would be sent to a monastery. “Father O’Brien promised the family that the church would punish him if it found that he had done wrong,” remembers Josefina’s sister Herlinda de la Viña. “He told us that the church’s punishment was greater than any sentence handed down by the courts, and we believed him. Who were we to question a priest?”
FORTY-TWO YEARS after the murder of Irene Garza, the phone rang in the homicide division of the San Antonio police department on a warm spring afternoon in April of 2002. On the other end of the line was a man who identified himself as a former priest living in Oklahoma City. He had information, he told detective George Saidler, about a murder that had taken place in the early sixties. He had left the priesthood long ago, the caller explained, but in 1963 he had resided at a Trappist monastery in Ava, Missouri. “I counseled another priest there who came from San Antonio,” he said. “He told me that he had attacked a young woman in a parish on Easter weekend and murdered her.” Saidler listened with the skepticism that had become second nature after 28 years of police work. Newspapers around the country were running front-page headlines about the sexual abuse scandal engulfing the Catholic Church, and he suspected that what he was hearing on the phone was the product of an overactive imagination. Priests, even those who had left the priesthood, did not call cops to snitch on one of their own. But the caller was insistent, and he began to elaborate on what he knew. Saidler took down the man’s number and told him to put what he remembered in writing. “I’ll get back to you when I’ve got something,” the detective said, and hung up the phone.
Ten miles away, in a spare, fluorescent-lit office on the north side of San Antonio, Texas Ranger Rudy Jaramillo kept a framed black and white photograph of Irene on his desk. It is a haunting portrait—she is young and beautiful, a half-smile gracing her face—and sometimes it looked as if she were staring back at the detective as he pored over old witness statements and police reports late into the night. Jaramillo was one of eight detectives on the Texas Rangers’ new cold-case unit, which had, at the request of McAllen law enforcement, begun to reinvestigate the case that spring. McAllen police chief Victor Rodriguez hoped that the Unsolved Crimes Investigation Team, with the assistance of his own department, could solve the murder that residents still talked about. But Jaramillo had little to work with; DNA testing of Irene’s clothes had turned up nothing new, and many people who were knowledgeable about her murder, including nearly all of the detectives who had originally investigated it, had died years before. He was fortunate that the 1960 investigation had been remarkably methodical and well documented, but the case file did not answer some of the most basic questions that a jury would ask: Where exactly had Irene been murdered? What was she killed with? When was her body dumped into the canal?
