AP article published November 20, 2004 in the Tyler Morning Telegraph
(Attribution to Crusade Against Clergy Abuse)
Two clergy colleagues of a former Catholic priest say the priest admitted killing a 25-year-old woman last seen going to confessional 44 years ago, an unsolved murder that still haunts this South Texas border town.
A grand jury re-examined the case earlier this year, but neither the priest nor his colleagues were called to testify. The woman's family remains devoted to seeing someone prosecuted for her death, but the district attorney says he's done all the law will allow.
Irene Garza, a school teacher and beauty queen, was found raped and bludgeoned to death in a irrigation canal in 1960. Her body was discovered five days after she disappeared; she was last seen going to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church to give an Easter eve confessional.
The Rev. Joseph O'Brien, who left active ministry a few years ago and lives in San Antonio, and Dale Tacheny, a tax consultant in Oklahoma City, told The Dallas Morning News in a story for Sunday editions that John Feit, a priest working in McAllen in 1960, told them he killed a woman.
O'Brien, 76, supervised Feit at Sacred Heart in 1960. Tacheny, 75, was a priest at a Missouri monastery where Feit lived in 1963.
Both men said they kept their information private for many years out of a sense of religious obligation.
Feit never named his victim, Tacheny said, and never said when or where the crime occurred. Tacheny said he felt relieved after he finally talked to police two years ago. "I was part of a cover-up," he said.
Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra has publicly criticized the McAllen Police Department's renewed attempts to solve the case since 2002, calling it unsolvable unless "you believe pigs can fly".
Police Chief Victor Rodriguez enlisted the Texas Rangers' cold-case unit to investigate Garza's slaying after published reports named Feit among priests whose recommendations helped some of the church's worst molesters gain new assignments.
The unit helped turn up several new witnesses to supplement old evidence, according to the Morning News, but neither the chief nor the Rangers would comment on the case.
At the urging of Garza's family, Guerra took new, undisclosed information to a grand jury, but the panel said in June it did not find sufficient evidence to indict anyone.
In 1960, Feit told investigators he did not kill Garza, and he has repeated that statement to reporters in recent years.
The Morning News cited old police records obtained from an unnamed source that question Feit's innocence. Among the findings in both the records, according to the newspaper:
-Feit's portable photographic slide viewer was found near where Garza's body was dumped.