[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: 25-year-old schoolteacher
Irene Garza gets ready to leave her parents'
house for confession.
It was Holy Saturday, day before Easter.
Irene was very pious.
Church was extremely important to her.
LYNDA DE LA VINA: One of her last phone
calls, and I spoke with Irene.
The last thing she said was I've got
to call to see if they're still having confessions
because it's kind of late.
NARRATOR: Irene burrows her parents' car
to make the 12-block drive to her family's
church in McAllen, Texas.
We were all listening to music when one of the cousins
walked in, and you knew instantly by his face
that something was wrong.
He asked that all the music be turned off
and told us that Irene was missing.
LYNDA DE LA VINA: All of us go to the church together.
Her car is still parked there.
What happened?
Irene was observed by many witnesses
at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
They saw her walk from her car into the church.
They saw her standing in line in the confessional.
NARRATOR: After 8:00 that evening,
no one sees Irene again.
LYNDA DE LA VINA: Irene was the first Mexican-American twirler
in the McAllen High School band.
Never had any before.
She became sort of iconic in college
with her beauty and her charm and her likability.
She graduated from college.
She became a teacher in a Mexican-American neighborhood
with kids that really needed help.
They canvassed the entire area of McAllen.
People actually volunteered to help.
They had people out on horseback.
They had people looking.
They found a shoe that had been thrown in a field that had mud.
You get that funny feeling in the pit of your stomach
that that's just not right.
It doesn't feel right.
MICHAEL GARZA: Another day goes by.
They find her purse in a field along that same route
where they found one of her shoes.
They took the purse over to Irene's house,
where her parents and family members identified it.
NARRATOR: The Thursday after Easter, McAllen Police receive
a call that a woman's body has been found floating
in the Second Street canal.
MICHAEL GARZA: She was lying in a canal
for four days in the mud.
You saw her body and how muddy and dirty it was.
NARRATOR: She's missing her shoes and underwear.
MICHAEL GARZA: The cause of death
was asphyxiation without strangulation.
Perhaps the most significant finding was there
was no water in the lungs.
So we knew that she had been killed prior
to being dumped in the canal.
The autopsy seemed to indicate that she
had been sexually assaulted.
So they were looking for a male suspect.
They actually drained the portion
of the canal where she was dumped to see if they
could find a murder weapon.
And what they found was a Kodak Slide Viewer,
where you could put a single slide in it
and project that image on the wall.
They publish in the paper, if anybody
has any information about this Slide Viewer,
please contact us.
They received a phone call from John Feit,
who was a new, I guess you can call, rookie priest
at the Sacred Heart Church.
John Feit tells the McAllen PD,
this Slide Viewer belongs to me.
NARRATOR: Brother Feit says Irene met him
in the rectory for a private confession
a little after 7:00 PM.
Then after he confessed her, he walks her out the door,
and she goes back across to the church where she went in.
And last thing he saw, it was Irene putting on her veil.
NARRATOR: Feit's story raises eyebrows, but he has an alibi.
MICHAEL GARZA: He does the high mass
at midnight on Holy Saturday.
He does mass on Easter Sunday, as well.
NARRATOR: Since Father Feit is a trusted priest
in a religious community, investigative interest in him
quickly fades.
MICHAEL GARZA: For months, investigators
interviewed a hundred different witnesses
and suspects, took their statements.
Many of them were subjected to polygraph tests.
There didn't seem to be any other suspects to the murder.
The case went cold.
My dad tried to pursue it, but what
do you pursue when every person in a law enforcement position
wants it to go away?
In the early 2000s, I made the decision
to pursue Irene's case with my cousin, [INAUDIBLE],, in 1960.
Her father was a deputy sheriff, and he
was part of the team that was investigating Irene's murder.
He felt like he knew who had killed her.
And he was taken off the case by the Sheriff Vickers
at that time.
And it just was unbelievable.
VICTOR RODRIGUEZ: Front and center for me was the question,
was there DNA evidence that we could process
that wasn't available back then that we
might be able to do today?
And unfortunately, as we went forward,
we did not get anywhere with it.
Before I started working the case,
George Sadler was the cold case detective.
George Sadler received a letter from a former monk.
And that monk had told him about this priest
that had killed a young Hispanic girl on Easter.
According to Dale Tacheny, John Feit
placed Irene in the basement of the rectory
there at the Sacred Heart Church.
That's where Irene was locked while he went and heard
the rest of the confessions.
He had her gagged and bound with a long electrical cord
of the Kodak Slide Viewer.
Feit asked the head priest, Father O'Brien,
if he could borrow the parish vehicle
to go to the pastoral house in San Juan.
He took Irene to the pastoral house
while the other priests were still busy with confessional.
NARRATOR: According to Dale Tacheny,
Feit said that after midnight mass,
he returned to the pastoral house.
He raped Irene, then loaded her limp body into the church car.
42 years after the original investigation,
Texas Ranger Rudy Jaramillo looks at Father John
Feit's alibi with fresh eyes.
When they first took him in for questioning,
investigators discovered scratches on his hands.
RUDY JARAMILLO: John Feit was trying to stay
two steps ahead of everybody.
He told the authorities that he goes by Whataburger
and starts driving aimlessly.
But in reality, that was really when
he was getting rid of her evidence,
the purse and the shoes and also the body of Irene.
That's when he placed her in the canal.
NARRATOR: After a second look at John Feit's original alibi,
Jaramillo can see right through it.
And he's shocked to learn what the original investigators
knew.
He did not pass one of them.
I mean, he just kept on failing the polygraphs.
John Reid believed strongly that John Feit was involved
in the murder of Irene Garza.
Three weeks prior to Irene going missing,
a young lady had been attacked at a Catholic Church
in Edinburg, Texas, which is about 6 miles away.
America Guerra had gone to church to pray between classes.
As she entered the church, a man came up
behind her and with a cloth placed it over her mouth
and tried to suffocate her.
She bit his finger hard enough that he released her,
and she got away.
Investigators are kind of working that case when
two weeks later, Irene's body is found,
and they start seeing that there may be a correlation
between the two cases.
It wasn't until they showed her photographs that America
identified John Feit.
NARRATOR: John Feit pleads no contest
to aggravated assault of America Guerra and is fined $500.
Prior to him pleading guilty, the church
had sent some officials down.
And they had made a decision that Feit would be sent off
to a monastery and that the punishment would
be far greater than what he would receive
through the justice system.
Included in that was an understanding
that the Irene Garza case would not be pursued.
So there's a reason why the case went cold.
During the whole investigation,
I had a sense that the Catholic Church knew that John Feit had
committed the murder, but there was covering
up to protect the church.
But then again, we couldn't prove anything.
My cousin [INAUDIBLE] father, he knew.
I think a lot of people knew that there had to be collusion
to suppress this case.
We tried to pursue it, but law enforcement
was part of the cabal.
NARRATOR: With a team of investigators
building a case against John Feit,
Irene's family points them to a key witness, a man whose
silence in 1960 only made them more suspicious of what he
knew, the head priest at the time of Irene Garza's
murder, Father Joseph O'Brien.
NARRATOR: Confident in the strength
of his case, Michael Garza issues an arrest
warrant for John Feit.
In 2020, only two years into his life sentence,
John Feit dies at Huntsville Prison.
There was a sense of complete closure when he passed.
The case was over with and done and would never come back.