Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [63]
Easter weekend of that year, Father Feit was asked to help Father Joseph O’Brien and his two associate priests give confession and offer Mass at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen.
Like every Easter weekend, it was a hectic time for priests. Confession lines and pews were bloated with visitors, children back for holiday and the multitude of Catholics who practice their faith only at Easter and Christmas.
The three priests and the visiting priest gave confessions that morning, then from 3:00 to 6:00 P.M., Saturday afternoon.
At 6:00 P.M., they returned to the rectory for dinner. The priests would resume confessions in the church at 7:00 P.M. Irene Garza phoned the church rectory and spoke to Feit just before 7:00 P.M.
Witnesses saw Irene walking from her car to the church about 7:00 P.M.
Witnesses saw three of the four priests return to the church from the rectory at 7:00 P.M. The visiting priest, Feit, thin, dark-haired, with distinctive horn-rimmed glasses, was not with them.
Witnesses said they then saw Irene Garza walking to the rectory.
At 7:20 P.M., Irene was seen walking from the rectory.
She was last seen by witnesses about 8:00 P.M. outside the church.
TWO DAYS AFTER IRENE DISAPPEARED, one of her high-heeled shoes was found alongside a road on the edge of McAllen.
Her purse was found the next morning.
At that point, it was obvious she hadn’t run off with a lover.
By midweek, her disappearance had already sparked one of the largest investigations in McAllen-area history.
Seventy sheriff’s department posse members scoured the region on horseback looking for her body. Sixty-five National Guardsmen were called in. Investigators followed dozens of leads, most pointing toward ex-boyfriends, unrequited admirers or transients.
Skin divers dragged irrigation canals. They just dragged the wrong ones.
On a balmy Thursday morning, four days after Easter Sunday, Irene’s body rose to the surface of the Second Street Canal and was spotted by several passersby.
Frightened valley residents began locking their doors. The search switched to a manhunt. There was a murderer on the loose.
In the days after Irene’s disappearance, investigators learned of an attempted sexual assault three weeks earlier inside another Catholic church in Edinburg, a nearby town in the valley. Again, the victim, Maria America Guerra, was a young Hispanic female.
Investigators quickly linked the two attacks. And investigators in the Garza case began digging deeper for information on the Edinburg attack.
They re-interviewed the victim. She repeated that her assailant was a white male with horn-rimmed glasses in a light-tan shirt and dark trousers—clothing she assumed was that of a priest.
At the time, police were looking for a serial rapist who seemed to lurk around valley Catholic churches preying on attractive young light-skinned Hispanic women. Perhaps the rapist was masquerading as a priest?
The same day Irene’s body was found, police investigating the Edinburg case made a stunning discovery:
The priest who last saw Irene Garza alive not only was at the Edinburg church the day of the earlier attack, he matched the victim’s and another witness’s description of the attacker.
As police continued to publicly state they had no hard leads, they quietly began zeroing in on Father John Feit.
Catholic leaders dreaded the possible fallout if one of their own was the culprit. Not only would it bring scandal to the church, it would give fodder to already deep prejudices within the Protestant community.
Bridges between Anglos and Hispanics, Protestants and Catholics, were just beginning to be built in earnest in deep south central Texas (Irene Garza was seen as an ambassador in that effort).
The investigation of Feit would be kept as quiet as possible.
After Irene’s body was found, police spoke again with Feit’s supervisor, Father Joseph O’Brien from Sacred