Unholy Act
Forty-five years after the body of beauty queen Irene Garza was pulled from an irrigation canal in McAllen, there is still only one suspect: the priest who heard her final confession.
(Page 5 of 5)
Much had changed in McAllen since Irene’s murder; the booming border economy had transformed the once-insular town into one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, a place where citrus orchards had been transplanted by big-city traffic and suburban sprawl. The Anglo population had dwindled to 10 percent, and the railroad tracks had ceased to be a dividing line. Guerra, who was voted into office in 1982, had been part of the wave of Hispanic politicians who succeeded the county’s Anglo establishment and helped alter the political landscape. So influential was Guerra that his detractors liked to joke, “¿Es el rey o el DA?” (“Is he the king or the DA?”) But beneath the veneer of decades of change, McAllen was still a place where the notion of prosecuting a priest, even a former priest, on murder charges met with resistance. When the Texas Rangers submitted the findings of their investigation to the district attorney’s office in the spring of 2003, Guerra dragged his feet. “It was a good, solid case,” says Ranger Tony Leal. But Guerra declared that the evidence was weak and that he would not be presenting it to a grand jury.
To the investigators who had worked for more than a year exhausting every lead, it was a demoralizing blow. Dale Tacheny was not their only witness. That spring, they had visited Father Joseph O’Brien, who was living at a retirement home for priests run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in San Antonio. He told investigators that he had suspected Father Feit from the very start; the lacerations on his hands that Easter weekend were plainly fingernail scratches, he said. He had been suspicious enough of Father Feit that he and another priest had searched the attic and the basement of Sacred Heart on Easter Sunday, looking for any sign of Irene. Later that day, he had followed Feit when he drove back to San Juan and had lost the priest at a red light. But he did not know anything more than that, Father O’Brien assured investigators. “We felt that he was holding back information and not giving us everything he knew,” Jaramillo says. During the last round of questioning, which chief Rodriguez took part in, the priest came undone. He pounded his fists on the table and said that during the summer of 1960, when he had confronted Father Feit about whether he had killed Irene, the young priest had told him everything. And he would be willing to say so in court. But because of Guerra’s decision, the priest’s account would go unheard.
Local media jumped on the story and demanded to know why the district attorney was not pursuing murder charges. At first, Guerra said that there was insufficient evidence; without DNA or a confession from the killer, he could not present such an old case to a jury. Later, he would cast doubt on the integrity of the investigation as a whole, accusing the Texas Rangers and local police investigators of refreshing the memories of old witnesses, a charge that law enforcement heatedly denied and one that Guerra never substantiated. A public war of words soon erupted between the district attorney and chief Rodriguez. “This case needs to be tried by a jury, not a single person,” Rodriguez told the McAllen Monitor. Letters to the editor criticizing Guerra flooded local newspapers. Vigils were held on the anniversary of Irene’s death and on the Day of the Dead to call attention to the fact that her murder remained unsolved. Former police investigator Sonny Miller, who had tried unsuccessfully to resurrect the case during the nineties and who remained certain that the original investigation had been impeded by church officials, lobbed a grenade at Guerra in the Brownsville Herald. “I wonder if he thinks he would be excommunicated if he took the case to a grand jury,” Miller told the newspaper.
After months of negative publicity, Guerra relented, and in March 2004, he asked two of his prosecutors to present the evidence to a grand jury. The panel met every Wednesday for fifteen weeks while hearing other cases. From the start, the proceedings struck those who waited outside the courtroom—several of Irene’s relatives and a clutch of reporters—as unusual. Law enforcement was not called to testify until the eleventh week. Stranger still, Dale Tacheny and Father O’Brien were never called at all. Nor was John Feit ever subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury, which would have compelled him to either testify or invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. The only person from Sacred Heart who did appear before the grand jury was Elena Sanchez, the church secretary who had been a defense witness for Feit during his 1961 assault trial. “The DA had already made public statements that ran in the papers and on TV that there was insufficient evidence in this case,” said Irene’s relative Noemi Ponce Sigler. “Jurors knew where the DA stood when they were making their deliberations.” On June 9, 2004, the jury declined to indict the named defendant, John Feit, and no-billed the case.
Later that week, chief Rodriguez announced that he was closing the investigation, a move that he believed would make the case files subject to open-records requests. But Guerra threatened to prosecute the chief if he showed the files to the media, insisting that it was still an open case. (The police records on which much of this article is based were obtained from a source who is not affiliated with law enforcement.) A grand jury will hear the case again, Guerra has said, only if a confession is forthcoming. When I visited him at the Hidalgo County courthouse in January, Guerra defended his prosecutors’ decision not to call key witnesses, stating that the usual policy of his office in grand jury proceedings is to rely on their recorded statements to police. He insisted that he had been supportive of the investigation from the start—“I gave them my blessing”—and that he hoped to see justice in the case. As for the widely held belief that he had failed to convene a grand jury for nearly a year because the target of the inquest would be a former priest, Guerra called the attacks “unfair and unsubstantiated.” He and the case’s lead prosecutor, Homer Vasquez, grew up attending Sacred Heart in Edinburg, he allowed, but his faith would always be subordinate to his oath of office.
Dale Tacheny and Father O’Brien had both waited for the call last spring that would have summoned them to the Hidalgo County courthouse, but it never came. After the no bill was handed down, Tacheny drove to McAllen and apologized to Irene’s family for the role he had played. “For me, talking to the Rangers didn’t fulfill the moral obligation that I felt I had,” he told me. He spent several days in the Valley, where he met with Irene’s relatives and visited her grave. On his way back to Oklahoma, he stopped by the courthouse and introduced himself to Guerra. “I stuck out my hand, and he took awhile to extend his,” Tacheny said. “The feeling I got was that he wanted me, and this whole thing, to go away.” Tacheny, who is 76, noted that Father O’Brien, who is a year his senior, is in poor health. “It’s a waiting game,” Tacheny said. “When O’Brien and I are dead, that’s the end of it.”
John feit lives in central Phoenix near the foothills of Camelback Mountain, where the desert blooms with orange trees and the sun always seems to shine. The air was cool and dry on the day I visited in January, turning down a succession of straight, orderly streets that led north from the airport toward his condominium. Two weeks earlier, I had sent Feit a letter asking if he might tell me his side of the story and had received no response. Others had come to the desert to talk to him—Kristine Galvan, a pretty young TV reporter from the Valley, had put a microphone in his face and asked, “Did you kill Irene Garza?”—with little luck.
I knocked on the front door and waited. What sounded like a small dog padded around inside, his toenails clicking on the tile floor. After a while, a man came to the door. He was neatly dressed, in a plaid button-down shirt and tan slacks, and he was taller than I had expected. His hair had thinned, and he had gone soft in the middle; he was no longer the serious young man in the Roman collar and horn-rimmed glasses. Beyond him, through the door, was a tidy living room, where sun streamed in through the windows. His wife did not appear to be home, but there was a kitchen table in an alcove where, I imagined, they probably drank coffee and talked about their grandchildren. I wondered what he had told her, or not told her, while they sat at that table. He greeted me with a genial smile.
I introduced myself, explaining that I had come all the way from Texas. I said that I would appreciate a few minutes of his time to talk about Irene Garza. For an instant, his brown eyes widened behind his glasses. Then he shook his head, graciously declining to be interviewed. “I know you have a job to do,” he said. “But I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”
He stood there for a moment, as if pondering what to do next. There were many things he could have said that he did not: That he was innocent. That Irene’s murder had been a senseless crime. That he was tired of strangers knocking on his door, asking about a terrible thing that had happened a long time ago. Instead, he said something that I would think back to many times in the weeks to come.
“The speculation intrigues me,” he said. Then, as he turned to shut the door, he added, “God bless you, dear.”
My Library
