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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 I960," 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 si
If sin and si
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, I960, 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-ski
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.