Irene Garza (November 15, 1934 - April 1960) is a South Texas teacher and beauty queen whose death has been the subject of investigation for decades. Garza last seen life on April 16, 1960, when he confessed a sin at a church in McAllen, Texas. He was reported missing the next morning. After the largest volunteer search on that date in the Rio Grande Valley, Garza's body was found in a canal on 21 April. An autopsy concluded that he had been sexually assaulted before being killed; the cause of death is suffocation.
Father John Feit, the priest who heard Garza's final confession, was the only suspect identified in his death. Two ministers, Dale Tacheny and Joseph O'Brien, came forward in 2002 to say that Feit had confessed to them shortly after the assassination, but the Hidalgo County district attorney deemed the evidence too weak to guarantee a conviction. The district attorney brought the case before the grand jury in 2004, but Feit, Tacheny and O'Brien were not called, and Feit was not charged.
The investigation into Garza's death was renewed in 2015 after a new district attorney came to power in Hidalgo District. In February 2016, Feit, 83, was arrested in Arizona in connection with Garza's death. He was then extradited to Texas. His murder trial began in late November 2017. On December 7, 2017, Feit was found guilty of his death and on December 8, 2017, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Video Death of Irene Garza
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Garza was born in 1934. His parents, Nicolas and Josefina, own a dry cleaning business in McAllen, a town in Hidalgo County and part of the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. By the time Garza was a teenager, his parents' business had become a success and his family could move from the southern side of McAllen to a more affluent area on the north side of the city. He is a McAllen Middle School graduate. White students make up the majority at school, and Garza was the first Latin to become major or play drum. He was crowned 1958 Miss South Allen Texas Sweetheart and a queen of homecomers at Pan American College.
At the time of his death Garza was a second-grade teacher; he taught poor students at an elementary school on the south side of McAllen. In a letter Garza wrote to a friend shortly before he disappeared, Garza described himself as very shy, but he expressed satisfaction in his work. Since he recently became secretary of the parents-teacher association, he said that he was beginning to feel more confident in himself. A member of the Legion of Mary, Garza took his Catholic faith seriously. In his letter, he points out that finding comfort in attending Mass and Communion every day.
Garza lived with his parents, and on Saturday, April 16, 1960, he told them that he was going to confess at the Church of the Sacred Heart in McAllen. Garza often stands out in court for his striking appearance, and some parishioners remember seeing Garza at church that night. When Garza's parents did not hear from him that night, they first thought he had lived in church for a midnight mass. When Garza did not return home at 3:00 AM, Nicolas and Josefina went to the McAllen Police Department to report that their daughter was missing.
Maps Death of Irene Garza
Investigation
On April 18, amid a trail of evidence stretching several hundred yards down McAllen Street, passersby found Garza's wallet, his left shoes, and his veil. Authorities and volunteers began the greatest quest in the history of the Rio Grande Valley at that time. A woman calls Garza's house who claims to be Irene, saying that she has been kidnapped and taken to a hotel near Hidalgo, but the call turns out to be a joke. Someone else told a waiter Edinburg that he had killed Garza, but it was a joke made after he drank a lot.
Garza's body is located on a canal on April 21, in an area several miles away from other evidence. From postmortem examination, medical examiners can know that Garza died from suffocation. She was raped when she was unconscious and beaten. There were bruises on both eyes and to the right side of his face. Any physical evidence that might have identified an attacker, such as hair, blood, or semen, seems to have drifted during the time the body spent on the canal.
Law enforcement officials questioned about 500 people in several cities in Texas, including prominent sex offenders and Garza family members, co-workers and ex-boyfriends. They do almost 50 polygraph examinations, and they offer a $ 2,500 reward for information about his death, which is greater than the amount of money previously offered in the Rio Grande Valley murder case. The South Texas businessman then posted a $ 10,000 reward. The priest who heard Garza's last confession, Father John Feit, was suspected as soon as he disappeared. The 27-year-old priest has been in the church since completing his seminary training in San Antonio.
Church members reported that Father Feit's line of confession moved slowly that night and that he was away from the sanctuary several times. When the canal at the scene is drained a few days after the discovery of Garza's body, the Feit slide photo viewer is found on the channel. The fellow priests noticed the marks on Feit's hand after midnight mass, and they said it was irregular for Feit to take Garza to the rectory to hear his confession. The McAllen Police Department initially said that Feit passed a polygraph test, but the test was later said to be inconclusive.
Feit initially denied hearing Garza's confession at the rectory, but he later admitted having done so. He explained his absence from the sanctuary by explaining that he had broken his glasses that night; she said that she often played with her glasses nervously when she listened to confessions. Feit says that he has returned to the pastoral home to get his glasses again, and when he arrives he does not have a key, so he has to go up to the house on the second floor. He says that he suffered a scratch on his hand as he climbed the outside of the brick structure.
Three weeks before Garza's death, a woman named Maria America Guerra had been sexually assaulted on her knees at the fellowship rail at another Catholic church in the area. Rumors state that Father Feit is responsible, but local church leaders do not encourage people to consider the possibility that a priest may engage in violent crime. Feit confessed to visiting a priest in the church on the day of the Guerra attack, but he denied attacking him. He was later charged with rape, and the trial ended with a suspended jury. In 1962, instead of facing a second trial, Feit filed a plea for allegedly infringing an aggravated assault, and he paid a $ 500 fine. Years later Feit said he did not understand that no contest petition would result in his conviction.
Stagnation in case
After the legal process in the case of Guerra, Feit was sent to Assumption Abbey, Trappist monastery in Missouri. A abbot there told Dale Tacheny monk that Feit had killed someone and he asked Tacheny to counsel Feit for several months and to determine whether Feit had a tendency to become a monk. Tacheny said Feit claimed to hurt a young woman and killed another, but it was not Tacheny's job to assess Feit at the time, so Feit's confession has not been reported to the authorities for years.
Feit does not feel comfortable with the monastic lifestyle at Assumption Abbey. He was sent to Jemez Springs, New Mexico, to the care of the troubled ministers run by the Servants of Paraclete. Feit joins the order as a staff member and works by becoming a central supervisor. Pastor James Porter came to the center after he was known to start torturing children in the 1960s, and Feit cleaned it up to be placed in another parish. Porter was later dismissed and jailed after abusing as many as 100 children. Feit left the priesthood in the 1970s. She married, moved to the Phoenix area, and has three children. He worked in the Saint Vincent de Paul Society as a charity volunteer for 17 years.
In 2002, thinking that Garza's murder had occurred in San Antonio because Feit had been trained there, Tacheny called the city authorities and said that he could no longer keep the secrets of Feit's confession. Investigation of Garza's death reopened that year. Investigators â € <â € Rene Guerra served as district attorney in Hidalgo County from the 1980s to 2014. Guerra chose not to take the case before the grand jury until 2004. Tacheny, O'Brien and Feit did not receive a court call in this case, and the grand jury refused to indict Feit. O'Brien died in 2005. Guerra was reluctant to review the case, saying that an early police investigation was bad, that O'Brien suffered from dementia when he was questioned, and that there was no physical evidence. He said that Jaramillo had improperly fed Tacheny the location of the murder after the monk mistakenly said it was happening in San Antonio. Guerra angers Garza's family by asking, "Why is it haunted by his death? He died. The killer got away."
Updated attention
In 2014, district court judge Ricardo Rodriguez campaigned to thwart Guerra as district attorney, and Garza's case emerged as a campaign issue. Rodriguez says that he wants justice for Garza's family. He said that he would take a new look at Garza's case if he was elected. Rodriguez won the election. In the days after the ballot was announced, Guerra attempted to appoint Rodriguez as the special prosecutor in Garza's case. Rodriguez refused, saying that he would rather see new evidence after he took over the district attorney's office in January 2015. In April, he announced that Garza's case was reopened. Without mentioning the suspect or breaking new evidence, he said that several employees in his office were working on the case.
In February 2016, Feit was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 83 years old at the time of his arrest, and he used a walker when he appeared in court. Feit was extradited to Texas in March 2016 and imprisoned in the Hidalgo County Sheriff (Texas) Adult Detention Office. He pleaded not guilty. The prosecutor asked for $ 750,000 of bonds, while the defense team asked for $ 100,000 worth of bonds, adding that Feit had kidney and stage 3 bladder cancer. Judge Luis Singleterry set a $ 1 million bond.
The hearing status in this case was held in June and November 2016, and the discovery process was under way in November. In February 2017, a judge set a trial date in April 2017, and Feit remained under medical supervision at Hidalgo County Prison. In April, Feit's defense filed a change of venue because they believed that their clients would not receive a fair and impartial trial in Hidalgo District. They filed a 700-page document with evidence showing that journalists allegedly condemned Feit as a murderer, and that the only reason he avoided demands for years was because the Catholic Church protected him. One time in March, Tacheny testified against Feit in a closed deposition. This is permissible under Texas law considering the age of the witness and the exclusive knowledge of the case.
On May 24, Judge Singleterry heard arguments from the plaintiff and pleaded on request for a change of venue. On June 7, he rejected a request to change places after considering that the defendant failed to prove that there was any prejudice against him in the Hidalgo community. On July 19, Feit appeared in court for a trial. The trial is expected to take place on September 11. However, on September 10, the court decided to push the trial back because of the scheduling of the conflict; one of Feit's lawyers defended another murder suspect in Hidalgo County. Feit appeared in court on Sept. 11 - for the first time without a prison uniform - expecting to face trial that week. The initial phase of jury selection takes place in mid-September; the trial was postponed until mid-October. On October 30, Feit's defense filed a motion for continuation; the selection of the jury reset to November 14 and the November 6 trial date was moved back to 28 November.
On December 7, Feit was found guilty of Garza's murder. In the trial sentence phase, defense lawyer Feit requested that Feit be given a probationary period, citing the lack of conviction of crimes since Garza's death. Prosecutors demanded a 57-year sentence, which is a symbol of the amount of time that has elapsed since Garza's death. On December 8, the jury announced a life sentence in prison.
References
Further reading
- Fanning, Diane (2016). "3". Sacrifice . Diane Fanning. p.Ã, 92. < span>
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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