The Best American Crime Writing 2006

by Mark Bowden

  In effect, the stated belief by examiners that Feit was “concealing the truth” would mean nothing in a courtroom.

  Feit had been taken to Austin and then Chicago for the polygraph tests.

  Each time, he was escorted by Father Joseph O’Brien, his supervisor at Sacred Heart Church.

  It was clear that O’Brien had been placed in charge of Feit by his superiors within the Order of Mary Immaculate.

  PROSECUTORS FINALLY DECIDED to first move forward with the attempted sexual assault case against Feit.

  When charges were filed, John Feit became a household name.

  It was the biggest story in the McAllen valley in years. And as leaders had feared, it tore the community apart.

  Feit remained confident. As he told investigators, he “had the best attorneys money can buy.”

  The trial was moved to Austin. It was believed Feit couldn’t get a fair trial in Hidalgo County.

  His trial ended with the jury deadlocked 9 to 3 in favor of conviction.

  Rather than face a second trial, Feit pleaded no contest to the reduced charges of aggravated assault and was ordered to pay the five-hundred-dollar fine.

  No murder charge was ever filed.

  The assumption in McAllen was that a deal had been struck to avoid both further embarrassment to the church and a prolonged fight between the church and elected officials in this predominantly Catholic town.

  Documents in the case seem to support the assumption.

  Indeed, it is clear that the church promised to ship Feit away from the valley and lock him up in the monastery system.

  Irene’s aunt, Herlinda de la Vina, remembers Father Joseph O’Brien telling her as much.

  “He told us that the church’s punishment was greater than any sentence handed down by the courts, and we believed him.”

  Father O’Brien told the family that Feit would be sent to a monastery and kept there so he would be unable to hurt anyone else.

  And that’s what happened. For the next decade, Father O’Brien essentially served as John Feit’s probation officer, as well as the liaison between civil and church authorities in the matter.

  O’Brien was even named a “special investigator” by the city manager of McAllen.

  O’Brien’s role in the case ended with a short letter sent to McAllen police in December 1971:

  “Dear Chief:

  “I have just received notice that John Feit has left Denham Springs, New Mexico, and is now living in the Chicago area. He is seeking employment as a layman and will no longer function as a priest. This was his own decision and was not due to a problem.

  “If any further information is needed please feel free to call upon me.

  “Father Joseph O’Brien, OMI.”

  NOEMI PONCE-SIGLER WAS ten years old when Irene Garza was murdered.

  The cousins, part of a close-knit extended Mexican-American family, were often at the same homes, the same family parties, the same town events.

  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 rose at 2:00 A.M., and their day included classes, meditation, manual labor in the fields surrounding the abbey, and vespers. They were to be in bed by 8:00 P.M.

  Once a week was the Office of Faults, when novices professed or found themselves accused of sinful thoughts or actions. The novices then self-flagellated for one minute by beating their bare shoulders with a knotted rope.

  Tacheny met with each of his novices weekly to explain, or be told, how they were doing.

  Tacheny remembers Feit having trouble adjusting to the abbey and his fellow novices. For one, he didn’t fit in. He was an ordained priest in his late twenties. The others were barely out of high school.

  It was during one of their weekly meetings, Tacheny says, that he finally began asking Feit about his past.

  “I just asked, ‘Why are you here and not in prison?’” Tacheny says. “It was very matter-of-fact.

  “F
eit said, ‘The church is behind me.’ Feit said that any time the authorities would get close to anything, he would just say he couldn’t speak because of confessional secrecy.”

  Then, Tacheny says he remembers asking Feit why the church would stand behind him.

  “Feit said he was told by his superiors that they didn’t want the faithful to be scandalized,” Tacheny says.

  “To be honest, at the time, it all didn’t seem that strange,” Tacheny says. “Over the whole issue was our belief that we could help him more than some prison and that he wouldn’t be a threat because he was locked up in a monastery somewhere. Civil justice wasn’t part of the equation at that time.”

  As the months passed, it became clear that John Feit would not be able to handle the monastic life. Tacheny says Feit himself asked to be transferred.

  Tacheny was then told that it was his job to prepare Feit to return to society.

  Tacheny had studied psychology, but he admits he was completely unqualified to “try to cure him, whatever that means.”

  At that point, Tacheny says, his relationship with Feit changed. It was now his job to probe Feit’s mind, get the truth about “this murder” and break Feit of whatever impulses led him to attack women.

  Tacheny says he did his job. And he still believes he was successful.

  But in the decades that followed, as he left the abbey, then the priesthood, Tacheny again became eaten by guilt.

  He increasingly felt as though he was an accomplice to murder and that he may have unleashed a dangerous man on society.

  In 2002 Tacheny sent a two-page letter to the Texas Rangers. In it, Tacheny laid out to detectives what he remembered being told by Feit in 1963.

  The problem: Tacheny wasn’t ever told where the murder took place or on which Easter it had taken place. Since he knew Feit had been shipped to the Midwest abbeys from San Antonio, Tacheny says, he assumed the murder Feit described to him had taken place in San Antonio the year Feit came to Assumption Abbey in 1963.

  The Ranger who received the letter, Detective George Saidler, went hunting through records of unsolved murders in San Antonio. Nothing matched. So he moved on.

  Late in 2002, another Ranger, Rocky Milligan, stopped by Saidler’s office to talk about an investigation. During that conversation, Milligan went on to talk about the Rangers’ cold-case unit, which, he said, was working on cases more than forty years old.

  “[There’s] one out of the [McAllen] valley that dates all the way back to 1960,” he told Saidler. “A woman was murdered on Easter weekend, and the main suspect was a priest.”

  The Rangers called Tacheny.

  ONCE IT WAS CLEAR that John Feit was not going to be a monk, Dale Tacheny says, it was his job to make sure Feit would not be a danger once he left the monastery.

  “We were very concerned,” Tacheny says. “By that point, he had a history of attacking women. We needed to get to the bottom of his problem and help him control it.”

  There was the mindset within the Trappist order at the time, he says, that priests could be healed. The order was intent on forgiveness. It would hate the sin, not the sinner.

  If sin and sinner continued to live as one, punishment was better meted out by God than some secular judge, in purgatory or hell rather than a Texas prison.

  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 she was hearing when she picked up the phone last year. It was the voice of Father Joseph O’Brien.

  He was calling from a nursing home for retired priests. He had decided it was time he told the family what he knew before his mind slipped or his body failed.

  By 2004 both O’Brien and Tacheny were willing to become vocal about Feit’s role in the Irene Garza case. They were also willing to talk about their frustration with Hidalgo County District Attorney Rene Guerra.

  It was Guerra’s job to consider charges in the reopened case against Feit in the slaying of Irene Garza.

  For years, Guerra avoided the case. In 2002, when asked
if he would pursue charges now that evidence seemed overwhelming in the old case, Guerra told the Brownsville Herald: “I reviewed the file some years back; there was nothing there. Can it be solved? Well, I guess if you believe that pigs fly, anything is possible.”

  He concluded, “Why would anyone be haunted by her death? She died. Her killer got away.”

  Guerra’s comments naturally angered the Garza family, which still includes more than a dozen first cousins, aunts, and uncles (her parents passed away in the 1990s). But it did not surprise them.

  “Guerra is just known to be politically motivated, pretty dang bad at his job, and also arrogant as hell,” Noemi Ponce-Sigler says.

  He is also part of a powerful Catholic family in the McAllen valley.

  In 2003 the Texas Rangers submitted information from the agency’s new investigation into the case to Guerra, but the D.A. refused to present the findings to a grand jury.

  Leaders and media across Texas jumped on Guerra. Finally, in 2004, he agreed to let grand jurors consider the case.

  Incredibly, though, Guerra refused to call witnesses such as O’Brien and Tacheny. And Guerra continued to trash the case even as he presented it to a grand jury.

  In fact, Guerra called only one witness, a secretary from Sacred Heart Church in McAllen who had served as a defense witness for Feit in the 1961 assault trial.

  The grand jury came back with a no bill, meaning Feit was off the hook again.

  To investigators, witnesses, family, and many in McAllen, it was clear what was happening.

  “[Guerra] didn’t want to stir this up again,” says retired McAllen detective Sonny Miller. “He badly wants this thing to die.”

  Soon after the grand jury decision, Father Joseph O’Brien called Noemi Ponce-Sigler to get some things off his chest.

  With O’Brien’s consent, Ponce-Sigler recorded O’Brien’s comments for posterity:

  Noemi: “Feit told you that he had killed [Irene]?”

  O’Brien: “Yes.”

  Noemi: “Oh my God!”

  O’Brien: “I suspected him from the very beginning.”