TEXAS
The Dallas Morning News
BRENDA RODRIGUEZ and DOUG J. SWANSON
Staff Writers
Editor’s note: This story appeared in the Nov. 3, 2002, editions of The Dallas Morning News.
McALLEN, Texas – Those who knew and loved Irene Garza remember her as serenely beautiful and deeply religious. When the 25-year-old schoolteacher was raped and murdered in 1960, some of them – devout Catholics like Miss Garza – began to ask a single, corrosive question: Could a man of God have committed such a horrible crime?
Forty-two years later, they’re still asking it.
Not long after Miss Garza’s muddy, battered body was pulled from a murky canal, the Rev. John Feit, a Catholic priest, denied killing her. Many in McAllen believed he was lying.
As police try to reignite the cold investigation, Mr. Feit continues to insist he is innocent. “I did not kill Irene Garza,” he said recently.
And many persist in their suspicion that he’s not telling the truth. Clint Mussey, McAllen’s police chief in 1960, says he strongly suspected Mr. Feit at the time. That feeling hasn’t abated.
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