Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [69]
To a ten-year-old girl, Irene Garza seemed to be everything a woman should be.
“She was beautiful, so graceful, so loving,” Ponce-Sigler says.
In 1988, Ponce-Sigler was visiting the house of her aunt, also one of Irene’s aunts, when she suddenly felt as if someone were watching her. Nobody was in the room. But on the wall was a large portrait photo of Irene.
“I don’t know, I’m sure it was the light or something, but it seemed like she was staring at me,” Ponce-Sigler says. “I stared at her photo, and just began asking myself questions about what happened to her. From that visit on, I’ve just continued to knock on doors asking questions.”
She contacted Sonny Miller, then a detective with the McAllen police force. Miller was still interested in the case. He pulled the old files on Irene’s murder and began digging again.
He found more new evidence. Still, the local district attorney had no interest in filing charges.
“Everything said this guy Feit was as guilty as sin,” Miller, who is now retired, tells New Times.
Besides loads of evidence, Miller says he discovered something else. In the year following Irene’s murder, it seemed like everyone lost interest, or was told to lose interest.
Police even later found candlesticks near where Irene’s body was thrown into the canal that had come from Sacred Heart Church. But, Miller says, investigators never tried to match them to the wounds on her head.
Miller talked to several of the investigators from the time of the murder, as well as to the daughter of then–police chief Clint Mussey. It became clear that from the turmoil caused just by Feit’s sexual-assault trial, the powers that be at the time didn’t want to see a priest tried for murder in the valley.
“It frustrated the hell out of the people who knew [that] Feit was the guy,” Miller says. “Justice was not done.”
In 2002 the Texas Rangers reopened the case.
By 2004 the Rangers and the Garza family believed that justice might finally be had.
And by last year, Noemi Ponce-Sigler believed she finally knew what actually happened to Irene Garza.
“Once I was able to talk to Dale Tacheny and Father O’Brien, it was all pretty clear,” she says. “The only thing left is justice for the killer.”
DALE TACHENY WAS A GUILT-RIDDEN young man. When he left the U.S. Army in the late 1940s, he decided to become a monk to save his eternal soul.
“It was a very selfish decision,” says Tacheny from his home in Oklahoma City. “I wanted to save myself. I wasn’t thinking about others.”
Forty years later, it was guilt, Tacheny says, that finally led him to speak publicly about his involvement with John B. Feit.
Tacheny began his religious training in 1949 at age twenty.
By twenty-seven, he was already something of a golden boy in the Trappist order.
In the fall of 1958, Tacheny, known as Father Emmanuel, was sent to Rome for two years of study. When he returned to the United States, he was promoted to second in command at Our Lady of Assumption Abbey in Ava, Missouri.
Tacheny was Novice Master. As such, he was the abbot’s right-hand man and the priest in charge of all of the abbey’s newest postulants.
He was a sort of spiritual drill sergeant for seven to ten young men seeking to become monks within the Order.
In 1963, Tacheny says, he was given his strangest assignment ever.
“The abbot called me in and said, ‘There is a priest who murdered a woman who is in the guest house. He wants to become a monk. We are instructed to take him in.’”
Tacheny was told that the priest had been sent to Assumption Abbey from New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa, where, a month earlier, he had attempted to attack a woman as she got into her car outside the abbey.
This attack, he was told, had followed similar attacks in Texas, one of which had led to the death of a young woman.
Tacheny says he then went to the guest house, where he met Father John Feit.
In the days that followed, Tacheny started his new novice down the quietly arduous path to becoming a monk.
The novices