EDINBURG (TX)
Court House News
December 4, 2017
By Erik De La Garza
EDINBURG, Texas (CN) – A South Texas beauty queen struggled to understand why a new Catholic priest kept pulling her from the confessional days before she vanished on Easter weekend 1960, testimony in John Feit’s murder trial revealed Friday.
The 85-year-old former priest is on trial in Hidalgo County for the murder of Irene Garza, whose partially decomposed body was found in a canal five days after she was last seen alive, going to confession at Sacred Heart Church. Feit was the prime suspect in the McAllen schoolteacher’s rape and murder but was not charged until February 2016 after the election of a new district attorney, who said “new facts and evidence” had been uncovered.
Hidalgo County prosecutors breezed through seven witnesses on the second day of trial, where jurors saw articles of Garza’s clothing, including her shoe, purse and floral-colored skirt. A McAllen Police Department evidence technician spent the morning unsealing what was left of the items Garza wore on the night she went missing over a “running objection” from defense attorneys.
Feit briefly closed his eyes as Assistant District Attorney Michael Garza held up Irene’s petticoat, more than half a century after Feit sat in the same courtroom for the attack on another South Texas woman, 20-year-old college student Maria America Guerra. He pleaded no contest in 1962 to a reduced charge of aggravated assault in that case and was fined $500, but faced no jail time.
Guerra is slated to testify as a prosecution witness.
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