Cold Case File DA resurrects Irene Garza murder

News about this murder cold case really broke last month – Hidalgo County District Attorney Ricardo “Ricky Rod” Rodriguez has kept his campaign promise to the family of slain 25-year-old beauty queen Irene Garza. He’s reopening the investigation into her 1960 murder. Perhaps the best part to this particular cold case is, despite the passage of so many years, the chief person of interest in her murder is still alive. The Advance asked Rodriguez this week how the case was progressing. Yes, he said, assistant prosecutors are reviewing the facts into her murder. “Our position right now is that we’re looking into it,” he said by Cold Case File DA resurrects Irene Garza murder phone Tuesday morning. “Without going specifically into detail, you know, one thing that was true that was talked about during the campaign (Democrat primary March 2014), was that this is a difficult case because so much time has passed. And do I believe that at one point in time, this case was strong in the sense that it could have been prosecuted to a jury in a courtroom? I think it was strong. Now, I’m not saying that can’t happen now. But again it’s just under different circumstances.” Without a doubt, there are other cold cases also that are out there, Rodriguez said. “But that I know of right now, this is the only case that we have that we could be very close to going forward on it and have so much available, unlike other cold cases, where we’re still waiting if we find DNA or if somebody gets arrested. And I say that because there are people out there who are also trying to put closure to their case or their family’s case and saying, why not my case?” But as Rodriguez points out, the resources inside his DA’s office are limited. When the grand jury met during Rene Guerra’s tenure in 2004 to look into the murder of Irene Garza, what struck some people is that the chief person of interest in the crime, the former priest, John Feit, was never subpoenaed to testify. “There were a lot of things that could have been done (that weren’t done) when (the 1960 Irene Garza murder case) was presented to the grand jury (in 2004),” said Rodriguez. THE MURDER FACTS The facts to the case are this: School Teacher Irene Garza went to confession at Sacred Heart Catholic Church (McAllen) on Saturday night, April 16, 1960. She only lived a few blocks away. But she never returned. Her partially clothed body was discovered in an irrigation canal five days after her disappearance. An autopsy revealed that she had been a victim of blunt-force trauma to the head and then suffocated. She had also been raped while comatose, according to the medical examiner. Local police had little to go on. No eyewitnesses, noonfession, no fingerprints. But there was this odd green slide viewer with a long black cord that police suspected may have been used to bind the victim’s hands. It was found in the canal after police drained it, looking for clues following the murder. Police asked the public for help in finding its owner. A few days later, a Catholic priest, John Feit, sent a note to police, saying it belonged to him. He had no idea how it had gotten in the canal. He admitted he had heard Garza’s confession that Saturday night but wasn’t entirely clear on the matter. Plus, he had some scratches on his hand. Twenty-three days prior to Irene Garza’s disappearance, a young woman kneeling at the communion rail inside a Catholic church in Edinburg had been assaulted. She’d fought off her attacker and escaped. She claimed he looked as if he were wearing a clerical collar but she couldn’t be sure. Now that police were suspicious of Feit as it related to the Garza murder, they placed him in a line-up, and the Edinburg assault victim pointed him out as her attacker. He was arrested and indicted for attempted rape, which first made public his name. The jury came back dead-locked in his 1961 trial. For reasons unclear today, Feit copped a plea with prosecutors to a lesser offense and paid a $500 fine. He disappeared from the Valley shortly thereafter, leaving the Irene Garza family with no where to turn. The Irene Garza murder case re-surfaced on a local TV show in 2000. One local priest interviewed, Father Joseph O’Brien, who was part of the Sacred Heart parish at the time of the murder, said he thought the murder case had been thorough at the time, but maybe police focused a little too much on the church. In 2002, McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez asked the Texas Rangers’ newly-formed cold case unit to investigate the Irene Garza murder. DNA evidence was performed on her clothing. But nothing turned up. The Texas Ranger in charge of the investigation interviewed O’Brien, who said he was suspicious of Feit from the get-go. From there he segued into telling the Ranger that Feit had told him that he was the murderer. One of Irene Garza’s other cousins also tracked down O’Brien and interviewed him over the phone. She’s got him on a recording, admitting that Feit had told him that he had murdered Irene Garza. And that “we” knew he was dangerous so “we,” meaning the Catholic Church, shipped him off to a monastery. So why didn’t O’Brien say anything back in 1960? Because he was in control of his mental faculties back then, said Rene Guerra in 2004 shortly after the grand jury failed to return an indictment against anyone. “When he started making these other statements, he was already suffering from a form of dementia that can make people fabricate things.”