I don't get why Feit's colleagues, who knew he killed Irene, didn't go to the cops.
That's an intriguing aspect of this case. Imagine how many priests and former priests have gone to their graves bearing such a burden.
Snipped from the
2005 Texas Monthly article:
Nick and Josefina Garza, who would both pass away in the nineties without ever seeing anyone prosecuted for their daughter’s murder,
were assured that Father Feit, whom they had suspected from the outset,
would be sent to a monastery.
“Father O’Brien promised the family that the church would punish him if it found that he had done wrong,” remembers Josefina’s sister Herlinda de la Viña. “
He told us that the church’s punishment was greater than any sentence handed down by the courts, and we believed him. Who were we to question a priest?”
[...]
Forty-two years after the murder of Irene Garza, the phone rang in the homicide division of the San Antonio police department on a warm spring afternoon in April of 2002...
He had left the priesthood long ago, the caller explained, but
in 1963 he had resided at a Trappist monastery in Ava, Missouri. “I counseled another priest there who came from San Antonio,” he said. “He told me that he had attacked a young woman in a parish on Easter weekend and murdered her.
[...]
Tacheny did not know the victim’s name, but he recalled that she had gone to church during Holy Week to say confession. He then repeated what he claimed the priest had told him long ago: Father Feit had asked her to come to the church rectory and had heard her confession there. After the confession, he had restrained the woman—Tacheny thought that she might have been bound and gagged, but he was not certain—and he had fondled her breasts. Before he returned to the sanctuary to hear confessions, he had moved her to the rectory basement. Later that evening, or in the days that followed, he moved her to another location. Then, on Easter Sunday, he put her in a bathtub and placed a bag over her head. “He heard her saying, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,’” Tacheny recalled. “When he came back later on that day or early evening, he found her dead in the bathtub. And then that night, at what hour I’m not certain, he put her in the car that was available to him and removed her and said he dropped her off along the roadside where there was a canal.”
“He didn’t show what I would consider to be compunction or sorrow or grief or anything like that,” Tacheny said, remembering his conversations with the young man.
“I felt at the time rather appalled by what had come about. But that wasn’t my job to judge him.” As the interview wound to a close, the tension in Tacheny’s face slackened. He thanked Jaramillo and the other detectives for allowing him to unburden himself of the secret he had carried with him for so many years.
When Jaramillo turned the tape recorder off, the former priest broke down and wept.
[...]
Dale Tacheny was not their only witness. That spring, they had visited
Father Joseph O’Brien, who was living at a retirement home for priests run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in San Antonio. He told investigators that he had suspected Father Feit from the very start; the lacerations on his hands that Easter weekend were plainly fingernail scratches, he said. He had been suspicious enough of Father Feit that he and another priest had searched the attic and the basement of Sacred Heart on Easter Sunday, looking for any sign of Irene. Later that day, he had followed Feit when he drove back to San Juan and had lost the priest at a red light. But he did not know anything more than that, Father O’Brien assured investigators. “We felt that he was holding back information and not giving us everything he knew,” Jaramillo says.
During the last round of questioning, which chief Rodriguez took part in,
the priest came undone. He pounded his fists on the table and said that during the summer of 1960, when he had confronted Father Feit about whether he had killed Irene,
the young priest had told him everything. And he would be willing to say so in court. But because of Guerra’s decision, the priest’s account would go unheard.
much more at the link
======================================
Even after the priests came forward, Guerra refused to prosecute the case, citing insufficient evidence, and lack of confidence in the integrity of the investigation. When Guerra caved under pressure, and the case was brought before a grand jury in 2004, the priests were not called to testify, though
transcripts of their recorded statements were presented as evidence.
"When I visited him at the Hidalgo County courthouse in January, Guerra defended his prosecutors’ decision not to call key witnesses, stating that the usual policy of his office in grand jury proceedings is to rely on their recorded statements to police."
