Irene Garza (November 15, 1934 – April 1960) was an American schoolteacher and beauty queen whose death was the subject of investigation for several decades. She was last seen alive on April 16, 1960, when she went to confession at a church in McAllen, Texas. She was reported missing the following morning. Following the largest volunteer search to that date in the Rio Grande Valley, Garza's body was discovered in a canal on April 21. An autopsy concluded that she had been sexually assaulted before being killed; the cause of death was suffocation.
Father John Bernard Feit, the Catholic priest who heard Garza's last confession, was the only identified suspect in her death. Two clergymen, Fr. Dale Tacheny and Fr. Joseph O'Brien, came forward to authorities in 2002 to say that Feit had confessed to Garza's murder shortly after the crime. He had left the priesthood in the 1970s, married and had a family. For many years, the district attorney in Hidalgo County considered the evidence against Feit to be too weak to secure a conviction. He brought the case before a grand jury in 2004, but Feit, Tacheny and O'Brien were not subpoenaed and the jury did not indict Feit.
The investigation into Garza's death was renewed in 2015 after a new district attorney took office in Hidalgo County. In February 2016, the 83-year-old Feit was arrested in Arizona in connection with Garza's death. He was later extradited to Texas. His murder trial began in late November 2017. On December 7, 2017, Feit was found guilty of murder and the next day he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Feit died in February 2020.
Background
Irene Garza was born in 1934. Her parents, Nicolas and Josefina, owned a dry cleaning business in McAllen, Texas, a city located in the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. By the time Garza was a teenager, her parents' business had become successful, and the family was able to move from the south side of McAllen to a more affluent area on the north side. She graduated from McAllen High School, where she had become the first Latina to perform as a twirler or head drum majorette. Garza was crowned the 1958 Miss All South Texas Sweetheart and was a homecoming queen at Pan American College.
At the time of her death, Garza was a second-grade schoolteacher; she taught indigent students at an elementary school on the south side of McAllen. In a letter written to a friend before her disappearance, she described herself as extremely shy but expressed fulfillment in her work. Noting that she had recently become secretary of her parent-teacher association, Garza said that she was beginning to feel more confident in herself. A member of the Legion of Mary, she took her Catholic faith seriously. In her letter, Garza indicated that she found comfort in attending daily Mass and Communion.
On Saturday, April 16, 1960, Garzawho lived with her parentstold them that she was going to confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen. She was often conspicuous in the congregation because of her striking appearance, and several parishioners remembered seeing Garza at the church that night. When her parents did not hear from her that evening, they first thought that she had stayed at the church for the Easter Vigil mass. When Garza did not return home by 3:00 a.m., they went to the McAllen Police Department to report their daughter missing.
Investigation
On April 18, in a trail of evidence stretching several hundred yards down a McAllen road, passersby found Garza's purse, her left shoe and her lace veil. Authorities and volunteers started a search that was the largest in Rio Grande Valley history at that time. A woman claiming to be Garza called her home, saying that she had been kidnapped and taken to a hotel in nearby Hidalgo, but the call was found to have been false. Another person told an Edinburg waitress that he had killed Garza, but that was found to be a joke made after the man had been drinking heavily.
Garza's body was found in a canal on April 21, in an area several miles away from the other evidence. From the postmortem examination, medical examiners could tell that Garza had died of suffocation. She had been raped while unconscious and beaten. There was bruising over both of her eyes and to the right side of her face. Any physical evidence that might have identified an attacker, such as hair, blood or semen, appeared to have been washed away during the time the body spent in the canal.