Murder of Irene Garza

Death of Irene Garza

Date	April 1960
Location	McAllen, Texas, U.S.
Cause	Suffocation
Arrests	John Bernard Feit
Convicted	Murder
Sentence	Life imprisonment

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 was sentenced to life imprisonment. Feit died in February 2020.