Murder of Irene Garza

Irene Garza was a 25-year-old second-grade schoolteacher and former beauty queen — she had been crowned 1958 Miss All South Texas Sweetheart and was a homecoming queen at Pan American College — who taught indigent students at an elementary school on the south side of McAllen, Texas. She was the daughter of Nicolas and Josefina Garza, who owned a McAllen dry cleaning business. Garza was an active member of the Legion of Mary and attended daily Mass and Communion.

On the evening of Saturday, April 16, 1960, Garza told her parents she was going to confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen. Several parishioners recalled seeing her at the church that night, but she never returned home. When she had not come back by 3 a.m., her parents reported her missing to the McAllen Police Department.

On April 18, searchers found a trail of Garza's belongings — her purse, a shoe, and a lace veil — scattered along a McAllen road. Authorities and volunteers mounted what was, at the time, the largest search in Rio Grande Valley history. On April 21, Garza's body was recovered from a canal several miles from where her belongings had been found. An autopsy determined that she had been raped while unconscious, beaten, and killed by suffocation; any physical evidence that might have identified her attacker had been washed away during the time her body spent in the water.

Investigators questioned about 500 people and conducted nearly fifty polygraph examinations. Suspicion quickly centered on Father John Bernard Feit, the 27-year-old priest who had heard Garza's confession that night; witnesses said his confession line moved unusually slowly, and fellow priests noticed fresh scratches on his hands afterward. Feit gave shifting accounts of his movements that evening and was not charged in Garza's death at the time. He was later charged with the rape of another woman, Maria America Guerra, in a separate assault near McAllen weeks before Garza's death; that trial ended in a hung jury, and in 1962 Feit pleaded no contest to a reduced misdemeanor charge and paid a $500 fine.

The case stagnated for decades. In 2002, two clergymen, Dale Tacheny and Joseph O'Brien, told investigators that Feit had confessed to killing Garza shortly after her death, and the case was reopened. Hidalgo County's district attorney brought the case to a grand jury in 2004, but jurors declined to indict Feit. The investigation was reopened again in 2015 under newly elected District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez. In February 2016, Feit — then 83 — was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, and extradited to Texas the following month.

Feit's trial began in Hidalgo County in late November 2017. On December 7, 2017, a jury convicted him of murder with malice, and the next day he was sentenced to life in prison. Feit died of natural causes on February 12, 2020, at a Texas state prison unit near Huntsville.