Unholy Act
(Page 4 of 5)
The clues lay in a neatly typed, two-page letter that detective Saidler received from the former priest in Oklahoma City. It recounted a few details that the man had gleaned during his time at the Trappist monastery, and it named the priest whom he had counseled. Saidler read the letter over and over again—The priest took her to the parish house to hear her confession. After hearing her confession he assaulted her, bound her, and gagged her—but he couldn’t make sense of it. Had Jaramillo had the opportunity to read what was written, he would have immediately understood its significance; he had spent thousands of hours learning the facts of the case, interviewing more than seventy people, in places as far away as Mexico City. But detective Saidler knew none of this. He had diligently exhumed hundreds of old newspaper articles and what meager police records still existed from the early sixties, yet he could find no murders that matched the details in the letter. No young women in San Antonio had been attacked in a church. No bodies had been dumped around Easter. Saidler had other work to do; he was in charge of San Antonio’s backlog of 1,420 unsolved murders. He set aside his notes in the case and moved on.
A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Texas Ranger Rocky Millican stopped by Saidler’s office to pick up some evidence in a case he was working. As he talked about the progress of his investigation, he mentioned that the Texas Rangers’ cold-case unit had been busy. It was amazing, Millican marveled, how old some of the cases were. “They’ve got one out of the Valley that dates all the way back to 1960,” he said. “A woman was murdered on Easter weekend, and the main suspect was a priest.”
Saidler couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He pressed Millican for more details, and the Texas Ranger relayed what little he knew. Early that evening, Saidler stopped and talked with Jaramillo in a parking lot in the same small town where they both lived outside San Antonio. The two men had never met before, although they lived less than two miles apart. The two detectives talked until it grew dark, and as they compared notes, they agreed that their separate investigations were in fact one and the same.
Nearly all cold cases stay cold: Witnesses die, memories fade, evidence languishes or is eventually thrown away. Only a fraction of them are ever revisited. What small number of unsolved crimes that happen to spark the interest of detectives have no guarantee of ever being solved. The odds that the key witness in a cold case would decide to contact law enforcement 42 years after the fact was extraordinary enough. That the case was being actively investigated at that same moment—in the city where the witness mistakenly thought the crime had taken place—was beyond anything that its seasoned detectives had ever experienced. “There were times when I felt that Irene was pointing us in the right direction,” Jaramillo says.
THE MAN WHOSE name appeared in the letter from Oklahoma City was still alive and well. John Feit had left the priesthood in 1972 and had gone on to live a quiet, ordinary life in Phoenix—marrying, having children, and working for six years as an insurance salesman. He later became a spokesperson for the Catholic charity St. Vincent de Paul, where he was an impassioned advocate for the poor and the homeless. When the Texas Rangers began to reinvestigate the case, he was 69—two years older than Irene would have been were she still alive.
Feit’s name had briefly surfaced in legal documents in the early nineties, after the defrocked priest James Porter was imprisoned for molesting 28 children. Porter was one of the most notorious pedophiles to ever find refuge in the church; before his death earlier this year, he admitted to molesting up to 100 children. Feit had crossed paths with him in the sixties in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, at a home for troubled priests, where Feit was sent by his superiors after his stay at the monastery in Missouri. At the Order of the Servants of the Paraclete treatment center, where Feit lived for six years, he managed to work his way up to the position of superior, a role in which he rubber-stamped weekend furloughs and secured new parish assignments for Porter despite the fact that he continued to molest children. Feit did not reveal his connection to Porter when he was quoted in the Arizona Republic in April 2002 praising the church’s new guidelines that required that any sexual abuse allegations made against a clergy member be reported to civil authorities. “It has to be that way,” Feit said. “It means that if someone is doing something wrong, they are not above the law simply because they are an ordained minister.”
At the outset of the renewed investigation, Texas Rangers worked with the McAllen police department to explore every avenue. “We pursued numerous suspects: Irene’s friends, ex-boyfriends, family members, other priests,” says Jaramillo’s lieutenant, Tony Leal. “But the facts that led investigators in 1960 to focus on one person led us to the same conclusion.” Hoping to shake loose any new information from the man who had once been the main suspect, a lawman associated with the probe, who asked not to be named, called Feit to tell him that the decades-old murder case had been reopened. Was there anything he wanted to share with law enforcement, anything that, as someone who had seen Irene on the night she went missing, was important to know? The former priest’s answer was succinct. “That man doesn’t exist anymore,” Feit said.
As with most of Feit’s comments to investigators over the years, his statement was bizarre, but it did not prove that he had committed murder. What the Texas Rangers needed to do was develop a case that could be presented to a jury. They found their star witness in Dale Tacheny, the former priest from Oklahoma City. A silver-haired tax specialist who had left the priesthood more than thirty years earlier to marry, he made the long drive to San Antonio in late November and proceeded to tell Jaramillo what he knew. In the summer of 1963, he said, his superior at Our Lady of Assumption Abbey, in Ava, Missouri—an abbot who had since passed away—told him of a young priest from San Antonio who had murdered a woman. The abbot asked Tacheny to counsel the young man while he stayed at the monastery and to have him live with the novices to see if he might have a vocation as a monk. The priest was named John Feit, and what he had revealed during their six months of counseling sessions Tacheny had kept to himself out of a sense of religious obligation for more than four decades. Now in his seventies, he had had a change of heart. “I did not feel comfortable with the idea that I had in fact been part of a cover-up, along with my abbot, of a priest that had committed murder,” he said.
As Tacheny sat and shared what he remembered, Jaramillo listened in amazement. Tacheny did not know the victim’s name, but he recalled that she had gone to church during Holy Week to say confession. He then repeated what he claimed the priest had told him long ago: Father Feit had asked her to come to the church rectory and had heard her confession there. After the confession, he had restrained the woman—Tacheny thought that she might have been bound and gagged, but he was not certain—and he had fondled her breasts. Before he returned to the sanctuary to hear confessions, he had moved her to the rectory basement. Later that evening, or in the days that followed, he moved her to another location. Then, on Easter Sunday, he put her in a bathtub and placed a bag over her head. “He heard her saying, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,’” Tacheny recalled. “When he came back later on that day or early evening, he found her dead in the bathtub. And then that night, at what hour I’m not certain, he put her in the car that was available to him and removed her and said he dropped her off along the roadside where there was a canal.”
Tacheny’s account seemed to answer questions that detectives had been knocking around since the original investigation: Why had Father Feit driven around McAllen aimlessly on Easter Sunday night? Why had he left Sacred Heart the previous evening to drive to the pastoral house in San Juan? His story also dovetailed with key facts in the case, with one glaring exception: Tacheny thought that the murder had occurred in San Antonio in 1962 or 1963. (He explained that because Father Feit had come to the monastery in 1963 from San Antonio, he had been under the impression that the crime had occurred there.) “He didn’t show what I would consider to be compunction or sorrow or grief or anything like that,” Tacheny said, remembering his conversations with the young man. “I felt at the time rather appalled by what had come about. But that wasn’t my job to judge him.” As the interview wound to a close, the tension in Tacheny’s face slackened. He thanked Jaramillo and the other detectives for allowing him to unburden himself of the secret he had carried with him for so many years. When Jaramillo turned the tape recorder off, the former priest broke down and wept.
THE FIRST HINT that a jury would not hear the case came in July 2002, when the Brownsville Herald ran a front-page story on Irene’s murder and the suspicion that continued to surround John Feit. Hidalgo County district attorney Rene Guerra was asked if he planned to pursue an indictment in the case. “I reviewed the file some years back; there was nothing there,” he said. “Can it be solved? Well, I guess if you believe that pigs can fly, anything is possible.” What he added next still galls Irene’s family—more than a dozen first cousins, aunts, and uncles who live scattered around Hidalgo County. “Why would anyone be haunted by her death?” the district attorney wondered. “She died. Her killer got away.”
