TEXAS
Washington Post
Yanan Wang February 10
Fifty-six years ago, a young schoolteacher went to church during Holy Week and never came home.
The next day, a few of her possessions were found scattered along the road outside the local Sacred Heart Church, as Texas Monthly recounted. One high-heeled shoe, a patent-leather handbag, a piece of crumpled white lace.
The following week, her body was found, fully dressed and badly bruised, retrieved from a canal in which someone had left her to decompose, her corpse washed clean of evidence. An autopsy found that she had been raped while comatose.
This was Irene Garza, a 25-year-old, dark-haired belle of McAllen, Tex., who was once named Miss All South Texas Sweetheart. She was her high school’s homecoming queen, the first person in her family to graduate from college and a teacher for disadvantaged children.
Above all, Garza was a devout Catholic. The last place she was seen was at Confession.
The last person to see her? According to Texas Monthly, it was her priest.
The then-27-year-old John Feit was known to be easygoing, if not a little aloof. He had dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses, according to Texas Monthly. On the night of Garza’s disappearance, the priest heard Confessions and celebrated midnight Mass. That was the extent of his activities that night — or, at least, the extent of what he has disclosed to authorities in the last five decades.
Nevertheless, speculation festered. Many in the valley town knew that there was a chance Feit could have been Garza’s killer, but few dared to say it out loud. He was never indicted in the years just after her slaying, nor was he indicted when the case against him was presented to a grand jury in 2004. …
In he beginning, the evidence pointing to Feit was telling but not sufficient to sustain a charge, officials said. While the investigation into Garza’s slaying went on for months after her death, Feit was charged with a separate but eerily similar crime. At a Sacred Heart Church in a neighboring town, a college student named Maria America Guerra reported that she had been attacked three weeks before Garza disappeared.
While she was kneeling at the Communion rail, CBS reported, a man matching Feit’s description grabbed her from behind and tried to put a rag over her mouth.
When asked to pick her assailant out of a police lineup, Guerra chose Feit. When he took a polygraph test and denied that he had harmed either Garza or Guerra, the examiner concluded that he was lying.
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