TEXAS
The Dallas Morning News
BROOKS EGERTON begerton@dallasnews.com
Staff Writer
Published: 10 February 2016
Editor’s note: This story appeared in the Nov. 21, 2004, editions of The Dallas Morning News.
McALLEN, Texas – Police thought they had cracked the sensational old murder case and finally could make an arrest. They thought their new witnesses might finally mean justice for Irene Garza, a schoolteacher who vanished from church on Easter weekend in 1960 after meeting a young priest named John Feit.
The police, however, ran into an immovable opponent on their own side of the law: veteran Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra, who refused to prosecute.
Mr. Guerra publicly criticized investigators’ work and called the case unsolvable unless “you believe pigs can fly.” He refused for months to take it to a grand jury before relenting under pressure from the victim’s family. He had assistant prosecutors present evidence this year – but they had “no targets in mind,” Mr. Guerra acknowledged recently, and the secret proceeding ended with no indictment.
The main obstacles to prosecution, Mr. Guerra said, are contradictory physical evidence gathered in 1960 and the new witnesses’ unreliability.
But old police records obtained by The Dallas Morning News call that explanation into question, as do interviews with the new witnesses.
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