EDINBURG (TX)
The Washington Post
December 8, 2017
By Samantha Schmidt
[Note: See also a PDF of the original Pawlicki letter and See also South Texas DA Refuses to Pursue Ex-Priest, by Brooks Egerton, Dallas Morning News, November 21, 2004.]
For more than five decades, the black-and-white image of Irene Garza has haunted the town of McAllen, Tex., her story painfully recounted again and again.
She was a 25-year-old dark-haired former beauty queen, her high school’s first Latina drum majorette, the first in her family to graduate from college. She was named Miss All South Texas Sweetheart, and worked as a teacher for disadvantaged children.
But at the center of Garza’s life was her Catholic faith. In a letter to a friend in April 1960, she wrote about how she was no longer afraid of death. “You see, I’ve been going to communion and Mass daily and you can’t imagine the courage and faith and happiness it has given me,” she wrote in the letter, according to Texas Monthly.
And so when Holy Week came, the most sacred time of year for Catholics, Garza decided to go to confession.
On the eve of Easter, she drove to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen.
She never came home. Two days later, her beige, high-heeled shoe was found inches from the curb near the church. The following Thursday, her body was found floating in an irrigation canal.
An autopsy would later determine she had been beaten, suffocated, and raped while unconscious.
Authorities found few clues and struggled to piece together the moments before her death. But one fact soon became clear. Among the last to see her was a 27-year-old priest with horn-rimmed glasses — the Rev. John Feit.
The young priest admitted he had heard Irene’s confession that night, in the rectory instead of the confessional. But he denied killing the young woman. The priest avoided criminal charges, decade after decade. As the years passed, witnesses died, detectives changed and the investigation into Garza’s murder stalled.
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