EDINBURG (TX)
Courthouse News
Dec. 13, 2019
By Erik De La Garza
A former Catholic priest convicted two years ago of murder in the 1960 death of a South Texas schoolteacher is asking a state appellate court for a new trial based largely on hearsay claims from witness testimony.
In a 152-page filing made public on Friday, an attorney for John Feit, 87, urged the 13th Court of Appeals to reverse his conviction, arguing 11 points of error to support the former priest’s decades-old claim that he had nothing to do with the Easter weekend 1960 suffocation death of Irene Garza, an elementary schoolteacher and former Miss South Texas.
Testimony at Feit’s seven-day trial in Edinburg centered around an alleged 57-year-old Catholic Church-led conspiracy blamed for covering up Garza’s murder, one of the nation’s oldest cases brought to trial.
“There were no eye witnesses to corroborate the state’s theory that appellant was responsible,” defense attorney O. Rene Flores wrote in the brief. “There was no physical, scientific, or forensic evidence obtained in the 56 years since the disappearance and murder of Irene Garza that somehow linked appellant to this offense.”
According to Flores, jurors were fed hearsay statements from the onset of the trial and should not have heard testimony from Dale Tacheny, a former monk and key prosecution witness who claimed Feit confessed to murdering a woman – his former parishioner – while the two were at a Trappist monastery in Ava, Missouri in 1963.
On the first day of trial, former TV news reporter turned attorney Darryl Davis testified that Feit escaped justice because prosecutors in the 1960s cut a deal with the Catholic Church: Feit would not be prosecuted for Garza’s murder if he agreed to plead no-contest in a case involving 20-year-old college student Maria America Guerra.
Guerra, who did not testify during trial because of health issues, was attacked by Feit from behind as she knelt to pray in church, prosecutors said. Feit pleaded no-contest in 1962 to a reduced charge of aggravated assault in that case after a trial ended in a hung jury the year before.
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