Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [61]
Phoenix Police Department investigators tell New Times there are no cold-case files in the Valley that match the modus operandi in the Irene Garza murder or the 1960 aggravated assault in which Feit pleaded no contest.
Even in retirement, Feit spends much of his days counseling and helping the infirm or disadvantaged. At his local parish, Feit is one of the organizers of the JustFaith program, an intensive educational program designed to help Catholics put their belief into action on social justice issues.
But this angel in Phoenix remains a devil in McAllen, Texas.
There—with renewed interest in the murder of Irene Garza, along with new evidence in the case—citizens are clamoring for an indictment of John Feit.
The old evidence, much of which has been reviewed by New Times, makes a strong case that their quest for justice is warranted.
The new evidence—which includes testimony from two of Feit’s closest associates, who say the ex-priest confessed to them that he killed Irene Garza—seems to make a case against him a slam dunk.
Yet the district attorney in south Texas, in whose jurisdiction the murder occurred, seems content to let things die.
Feit also wants the case to die. He has said, “I did not kill Irene Garza.”
In that sentence begins an even deeper mystery, one that may only be solved by understanding a brilliant man’s own concepts of faith, contrition, justice, and personality.
When asked by a reporter at his Arcadia home if he should be considered a danger to the community, he yelled: “Look at my record for the last forty-five years!”
Irene Garza’s body was thrown in a McAllen canal on Easter Sunday, 1960—forty-five years and two months ago.
THE WEEK BEFORE EASTER, 1960, had been unusually hot along the Texas-Mexico border. With highs already touching the nineties, residents of the valley surrounding McAllen were predicting a long, dismal summer.
Throughout the week, young adults raised in the area were streaming back to McAllen from college or new jobs. The Easter vacation was a time to see old friends, maybe even to rekindle or start a love affair.
The scuttlebutt among some returning young men was that Irene Garza was no longer seeing Sonny Martinez.
This was big news. Irene, as one unrequited suitor wrote, “was the closest thing to an angel” he’d ever met.
So bright, so beautiful, such a sweetheart, such a good heart.
Irene was the first in her family to go to college. After graduation, she returned to do what she had set out to do: teach disadvantaged children in McAllen.
She taught second grade at a school south of the railroad tracks, the line between the haves and the have-nots, the Anglos and the Hispanics, the longtime Mexican Americans and the new immigrants.
She spent her first paycheck on books and clothing for her students. She spent early mornings, late evenings, and weekends giving her students extra learning and fun. She worked with the local PTA.
Her students, she admitted in letters, were becoming her children, her life. She wanted her students to be able to cross the tracks if they chose to.
Like she had done. Irene Garza had become the first Hispanic twirler and head drum majorette at the Anglo-dominated McAllen High School, just a year after her parents’ prospering dry-cleaning business had allowed them to afford a house north of the tracks.
Irene was Prom Queen and Homecoming Queen at Pan American College. She was Miss All South Texas Sweetheart 1958.
The catty teenage girls in her old neighborhood blamed her success on her light skin and bone structure and on her Doris Day–style clothes. She was tall and thin, as well as proper and dainty in pillbox hats and high heels.
To some of the little girls in her old neighborhood, though, she was a goddess.
“I can still see her,” says Noemi Ponce-Sigler, the cousin of Irene’s, who was ten when she died. “She was so beautiful and so good to us kids. [To] a little