Father John Feit

I debated on adding the word “Father” in the title of this one for a few reasons. For one, John Feit left the priesthood in the early 1970's and went on to marry and have children. Secondly, I fear that by adding that title people will take that title as a slight to the Catholic religion. But, John Feit was a priest when the crime occurred and he is still most known using that term despite no longer being a priest.

Before I go much further I would like to make clear that while the crime itself has gained more notoriety based on the fact that it involved a priest, among other reasons, I personally do not necessarily believe this is against the Catholic Church themselves. I realize that there are those who argue that the “higher ups” in the church did little when it came to crimes in which their members were involved with and obviously either ignored or covered up things. But, in my opinion I believe that shows more of the character of the person that did the covering up than it reflects on the church as a whole. There are bad and shady people everywhere. I think our current Pope learned a bit of a lesson recently when a Cardinal passed away and he showered him with praise and all but spoke of what a wonderful person that man was. The Pope himself faced criticism for those words because the Cardinal that he spoke of was instrumental in helping not only hide child molestation committed by priests but kept moving those priests to different parishes where they would continue their crimes. I have my own feelings on just why there seemed to be in influx of priests who preyed on children for so long but that is for another day. This case is not about a priest who molested children, it is about a priest accused of murder.

On April 16, 1960 twenty-five year old schoolteacher, Irene Garza left the McAllen Texas home she shared with her parents to go to confession at the local Catholic Church. She left about 6:30 that evening, taking the car and telling her parents she would not be gone long. Many parishioners remembered seeing the former beauty queen that night at the church. None saw her leave. As the night dragged on and she did not return home Irene's parents at first just thought she must have stayed for the Midnight Mass. By the time it became three in the morning they knew something was wrong and contacted the police. A huge search effort was made, said to be the largest in the state up to that point. The car she had been driving was found just down the street where she likely parked before going into the church. One lead came out early but it was deemed to be false. Irene's parents received a phone call, allegedly from Irene stating she had been kidnapped and taken to a hotel. It was later determined to be a prank call. It was not until the 18^th that anything else was found. It was then that Irene's purse was found on the side of a road. It was theorized that it was found in a way that it looked as if someone had thrown it out of a moving vehicle. A search of that area recovered one of Irene's shoes and a white veil she carried with her. Several miles away Irene's body would be found on April 21, 1960. She was face down in a canal and her dress had been pulled up. Her face had been badly bruised. An autopsy concluded that she had been sexually assaulted and beaten but her official cause of death was listed as suffocation.

While local businessmen in the area began offering rewards for the capture of the perpetrator, the investigators had their hands full. The water from the canal would wash away any sort of semen or hairs that may have been available, but remember, this was 1960 so little could have been tested anyway. Initially the only real evidence they found was a muddy shoe print and tire tracks some four blocks from where her body was found. A strand of Irene's hair was found in the muddy print but the rain had all but made the print unusable. All they could later say was that the size was somewhere between an eight and an eleven. The canal was drained and a “photo slide viewer” was found under where the body had been. Now, I put this in quotes because I am unsure what this actually was in terms of the times. I did a bit of a search on them as I was picturing one of those things we all may have seen as children or decades ago as being a very big object but it does appear there could have been some not much larger than a handheld devise. It was later said (not sure how much later) that the viewer belonged to Father Feit.

Investigators would question more than 500 people in this case including family, friends, criminals, ex-boyfriends, just about everyone. About fifty of them, including John Feit would be given lie detector tests but they seemed to get no where. It was said at the time that John Feit passed his lie detector test. This was of importance in 1960 as well as today. As we know lie detector test results are not allowed in court because of their unreliability. That was never more true back in 1960, but surprisingly they were used much more and relied upon much more in investigations. Over time the way results are read have become different and it was said that several years, or decades later, what was said in John Feit's case as a pass, was nothing but. Some reports seemed to indicate that the original administrator to the test is the one who has since said his results were wrong in 1960 but to be fair I cannot be certain that it was the original administrator and not someone else. It was also said that while the more modern reading was said to indicate that John Feit failed, that officially it has gone down as “inconclusive.” I would gander to guess that once the slide viewer was found he was even more in the hot seat.

As I stated earlier there were several witnesses who said they saw Irene at confession that night. They had also stated that the line was moving slower than normal that night and that John Feit seemed to be away from the sanctuary several times. John Feit did not necessarily help himself in becoming the prime, and later only, suspect when he initially told investigators he had not seen, nor taken Irene's confession that night. He would later admit that he had. As far as being away from the rectory he told investigators that he had broke his glasses and had to go to the pastoral house to get another pair. When investigators questioned him about the fact that it had been reported that after the Midnight Mass a few priests had claimed to have seen scratches on his hands he said that when he got to the pastoral house he did not have a key and had to climb through a second story window, hence scratching his hands.

There were many questions over the next several decades as to what just happened to stall the investigation. Was it the lack of cooperation the investigators received from Feit and those in the church? Was it the lack of hard evidence to link Feit despite the fact that everything still seemed to point to him? Or was it as some believe, the church had all but “paid off” or influenced the investigators to stop looking into Feit? For me, I am unsure that I believe the investigators were in essence paid off per se but I do believe they may have been encouraged in a way.

Whether the case of Maria Guerra was discovered prior to Irene's murder or after is not clear. In my opinion knowing just when authorities learned of Guerra may have played a role in a few things. About three weeks before Irene's murder Maria Guerra had attended communion at another local Catholic church in the area. She would claim that while kneeling John Feit had sexually assaulted her by touching her. This is where I am unsure if she reported this immediately or not until after Irene's murder but according to Guerra she was discouraged by the church leader from reporting the issue. This was a common practice as leaders in a sense I guess attempted to convince their congregations that priests were capable or could in any way be involved in any sort of violent or shady behavior. To accuse a priest was blasphemy more or less. It just was not done. Of course there were whispers and talk among some, remember this was actually at the height of some of the most well known cases of child molestation going on within the church, but few spoke of it out loud. If you watch interviews with people who say they were molested as children by priests many of them will tell you that even when they did tell they were chastised and accused of lying. But eventually Maria Guerra's story did make it to authorities and John Feit did admit being at that church at that time. So, sometime after Irene's murder John Feit would go on trial for rape. The trial would end in a hung jury but in 1962 he pleaded “no contest” to misdemeanor aggravated assault and paid a $500 fine. He would claim in later years that he did not know that his plea meant a conviction, but that seems difficult to believe.

At any rate, after the Guerra case ended John Feit was sent to a monastery in Missouri. It was there that he met a Monk named Dale Tacheny. In 2002 Dale would tell his story to authorities for the first time. According to Tacheny he was was told first by a superior, and later by Feit himself, that he had not only assaulted a woman, but he had also murdered another. Dale Tacheny was told to counsel John Feit for a while to see if he had the “disposition” to become a Monk. But, Feit did not like the monastery so he then went to a “retreat” in New Mexico. This was apparently a place that the church sent their “troubled” priests and considered it to be treatment. In reality I believe it was a “treatment center” in name only and was simply a way for the church to allege they had given treatment to a priest before they assigned him to another area. While in New Mexico Feit started as simple “staff member” but later worked his way up into a position in which he got to make the big decisions, like who had recovered and well and who was not. To be fair I cannot tell you if Feit, or any of the others in that position ever determined that someone was “not” fit to carry on in their duties. In fact one of the priests that Feit was responsible for was a man named Father James Porter. Feit would claim that Porter had “recovered” and cleared him for a new parish. Porter would later be “defrocked” as they say and was eventually convicted for the molesting at least twenty-eight children, although the number of actual victims is thought to be closer to one hundred.

The story of Feit kind of jumps from here to just simply saying that in the early 1970's he left the priesthood. Whether there was an incident that encouraged or forced this I cannot say. John Feit would go on to marry, move near the Phoenix area and have three children. For many years he was a volunteer for St. Vincent dePaul in the food charity department. It seemed that for the most part the Irene Garza murder case had faded.

Then in 2002 Dale Tacheny, who himself was no longer a Monk, contacted the San Antonio police department with his story about John Feit. He had contacted them because he had mistakenly believed the crime had occurred in that area. In the end he was led to the right authorities which would also include the FBI. The investigation into Irene Garza's murder was officially back open. According to Tacheny, Fiet had not just confessed to the crime had said that it had occurred at the pastoral home, in the bathroom. Investigators would also talk to Father Joseph O'Brien. O'Brien had apparently claimed in 2000 when asked about the case to know nothing. By 2002 he had a different story to tell. It was then that he told investigators that he had suspected Feit was involved at the time and that when he confronted him about it Feit had confessed. It has been said that Father O'Brien had helped in the cover up and getting rid of evidence.

Everything that had been discovered in the new investigation was taken to then District Attorney, Rene Guerra. Guerra (apparently no relationship to Maria Guerra) was widely criticized when he failed to act on the information. Guerra called the initial police case “shoddy,” saying the evidence simply was not there. Under pressure from the community he did finally take the case to a grand jury in 2004 but again he came under fire when he failed to present Tacheny or O'Brien to the jury. Not surprisingly the grand jury decided not to indict. Guerra thought that was the end of it. What it really was it seems was the beginning of the end of his career. It would be another ten years before he would be ousted from office but many believe that when it did happen the Irene Garza case was the reason.

In 2014 Ricardo Rodriguez ran against Guerra for the position of District Attorney, a position that Guerra had held since the 1980's. I would gander to guess that Guerra was pretty comfortable in that position and it was not until near the end of the campaign that he saw there was a real chance he would lose. It seems that Rodriguez worked in the office and in his own campaign had promised to look at the Garza case. It was said after the campaign ended Guerra attempted to put Rodriguez in charge of the case and file charges but Rodriguez refused stating that he planned to look over the entire case himself once he took over. Some speculated that Guerra did not take the case seriously or wanted to prosecute a former priest. Guerra would dispute that but it did not stop people from believing it.

In April of 2015 Ricardo Rodriguez announced that the case was once again reopened in the prosecutors office. In February of 2016, at the age of eighty-three, John Feit was arrested in his Arizona home. At his bond hearing the prosecutors asked for a $750,000 bond. The defense argued for $100,000 citing Feit's age and the fact that he had stage 3 kidney and bladder cancer. The judge set the bond at one million dollars. Whether he remained in jail until his trial is unclear but when he was in jail it was said that he was under medical supervision. The defense attempted to argued for a change of venue saying that the media had already condemned him and were saying that he had only avoided prosecution because the church had protected him. The judge denied this.

After several delays for different reasons John Feit would go on trial in late November 2017. It seems that several years before both Dale Tacheny and Father Joseph O'Brien had made official statements and depositions that were recorded. It was apparently feared that after the many decades that had passed the witnesses would either die or lose their memory if much more time passed. This seemed to be a good thing because Father O'Brien would die in 2005. Surprisingly before the start of the trial it was estimated that it would last approximately two weeks and yet there was only five days of testimony in the case. The prosecutor described Feit as a “wolf in priests clothing” while the defense argued that Tacheny and O'Brien had been fed information in order to procure a conviction against his client. When it came time John Feit decided not to testify in his own defense. It seems that the testimony of Tacheny and O'Brien, along with the facts that Feit had been the last known person to see Irene and his property was found with the body all but secured a conviction. On December 7, 2017, after six hours of deliberation the jury found the former priest guilty in the murder of Irene Garza. The following day the judge sentenced Feit to life in prison.

I have to say that I do believe that John Feit was in fact guilty in the murder of Irene Garza and while the defense would argue that Feit had never committed another crime (aside from the Maria Guerra case which apparently he still said he was innocent), I wonder just how many more victims are out there. It is true that since the early 1970's Feit lived as an ordinary citizen and likely did not have the Catholic Church behind him sending him here or there or even possibly making deals with investigators, but that does not mean the man never did anything wrong. We also have no idea if over the preceding years if Feit had any sort of counseling or therapy of any kind. Sex crimes are still wholly under reported. We have no idea what came about for him to make the decision to leave the priesthood.

For the Garza family I am sure they were happy to finally see John Feit convicted but really how much justice can there be? The man went on to have a seemingly normal life. He committed acts behind the facade of being holy through the church and it would seem he could have done that for a very long time to come, well, at least until the church began having to change their ways, at least publicly. That being said when he left the priesthood he went on to have a life that he deprived Irene Garza from... marriage, children, grandchildren. And in the end we have to ask really how much time the man will be in prison. He walked into the courtroom in 2016 with a walker. His lawyers say he has two forms of cancer and the jail officials say he is under constant medical care. Did John Feit just get a nursing home in a prison? He is eligible for parole in March of 2028, when he is ninety-five years old. Odds are he will not last that long, and if he does he would likely get parole due to his age. That means that he would serve about twelve years at that point. In other cases it would be unlikely that a prisoner would be released after such a time, so again, how much justice was really served.