Ex-Priest Held Over 1960 Killing Of Teacher

The former priest, now 83, was arrested Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, in Arizona in the 1960 killing of a 25-year-old Texas schoolteacher and beauty queen, Irene Garza.

The case took a political angle in 2014 when the family of Irene Garza called out former long-time Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra for never going after Feit. Mr Rodriguez had promised that if elected, he would re-examine the case.

Feit’s neighbors described him as a nice, older gentleman who always took time to greet them. She spent her first paycheck on them, buying them books and clothes.

The McAllen schoolteacher’s body was found days later in an irrigation ditch about a mile from the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where Feit served as a priest. Near her body, investigators found items that belonged to the church, including a candelabra.

The Dallas Morning News reported that an autopsy determined she had been raped and bludgeoned.

Feit has been a free man his whole life and denied a role in Irene Garza’s murder.

The exhaustive investigation that followed turned up one suspect: Father John Feit. John Feit is a native South Sider who still speaks with an Irish-tinged accent. He placed her in a bathtub, Feit told Tacheny.

Mr. Feit left McAllen shortly after Ms. Garza’s death – on orders from his church superiors – and later left the priesthood. Less than a month before Garza was killed, Feit had also been arrested for attacking a woman at a church 10 miles from McAllen; he pleaded no contest to aggravated assault and paid a $500 fine. And that was the end of that.

In 2007, a CNN reporter approached Feit in a Phoenix grocery store parking lot and asked him if he murdered Garza.

Many people in McAllen wondered whether a deal had been struck between the church and the DA’s office, or if elected officials in the overwhelmingly Catholic town were afraid to challenge the church.

Garza’s cousin Lynda De La Vina, who was nine years old at the time, told CNN: ‘We were accusing a priest that – in those days priests were infallible’.

During the next four decades, the case grew colder and eventually faded from the headlines. “It was presented last week, and they came back with a true bill”.

Tacheny says he continued thinking about the conversation over the years, but he didn’t learn until years later that the woman was Garza. Then he dumped her body near the canal, Feit said.

Meanwhile, Feit is shocked and can not believe that he is once again involved with a case that happened more than 50 years ago.

“For me, the right thing is being done”, Tacheny, 86, said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

The case grew colder and colder until a grand jury chose to hear the case in 2004 but decided not to indict Feit. The church moved Feit into a monastery, according to old press reports on the case. No one was ever arrested for the crime until Tuesday.