Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [71]
The idea of justice here on Earth was of no concern. It was many years later before Tacheny began ruminating over the plight of the victims and their families.
He now believes he did the wrong thing. That, he says, is why he is talking now.
At the time, though, he firmly believed he was doing the right thing.
Which began, he says, by getting to the bottom of what happened in the slaying.
“I remember [Feit] said it happened Easter weekend,” Tacheny says.
“Feit said he was hearing confessions with several other priests, four to six priests. He said a woman came, and he suggested going to the rectory to hear confession. He took control of her somehow. He told me the only thing he did sexually was take her blouse off and fondle her breasts.
“He said he tied her up, took her to the basement, then went back to the church to hear confessions. That night, he said, he took her back to someplace where the [interning priests] were staying. Feit said he put her in a room and locked her up there until the next day. He told me he went to Sunday services, then came back…for lunch in his room. Before he left, he said, he put a bag or something over her head and put her in a bathtub.
“I remember Feit saying that, as he left, the woman says, ‘I can’t breathe,’ but he goes on anyway. He said that when he returned, he found her dead in the bathtub.”
Tacheny says Feit would never say the woman’s last name. He just called her “Irene.”
Tacheny says Feit then explained how he disposed of her body: “That night he put her in a car and drove her to a canal. I remember him saying he patted her on the chest as he drove, saying, ‘Everything is okay, Irene.’
“It was very disturbing, I had never had to deal with anything like this,” Tacheny says.
But Feit, he says, talked about Easter, 1960, as if it was any other weekend.
“He was usually very nice and cooperative, but it was chilling that there didn’t seem to be any remorse,” Tacheny recalls.
Tacheny says he then began questioning Feit about “the things that bothered him.”
“Feit said one thing that really bugged him was the ‘click, click, click of women’s heels on solid flooring,’” Tacheny says.
“Which led to discussions about whether he believed he would have a problem leaving. At that point, he tells me he sometimes has this urge to attack women from behind. Especially as they are kneeling. A compulsion. So we began working on that. We talked it through.”
Tacheny says they finally got to a point in the therapy when Feit said he thought he could control his urges in the future.
So, Tacheny says, Feit was sent on a mission.
Amazingly, Feit was told to go to several churches—in St. Louis and then in his home of Chicago—and see if he could stand behind women without feeling a compulsion to attack them.
“He came back and said he had accomplished the task,” Tacheny says. “So I made a judgment after that that he could go back into the world.”
Tacheny says he remembers hearing that a priest who knew Feit before he came to the monastery was arguing that he should not be allowed to leave. Tacheny later found out the priest was Father Joseph O’Brien.
Feit was then transferred to Jemez Springs, New Mexico, to a treatment center for troubled priests run by the Order of the Servants of the Paraclete.
That treatment center (and Feit himself, who rose to the position of superior at Jemez Springs) later became notorious for quietly sending pedophile priests back into communities around the country.
While in New Mexico, Feit met a young light-skinned Hispanic woman in a church in Albuquerque. Her Spanish ancestry dated back to the 1600s in northern New Mexico.
They fell in love. In 1971, Feit sent a letter to Rome asking that he be released from his priestly duties.
He headed back to Chicago with his new wife to start a family. He bounced through several jobs in the Midwest before finally moving to Phoenix and into the parish where his brother was a pastor, St. Theresa.
NOEMI PONCE-SIGLER COULDN’T BELIEVE what