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To investigators, witnesses, family, and many in McAllen, it was clear what was happening.
"[Guerra] didn't want to stir this up again," says retired McAllen detective So
Soon after the grand jury decision, Father Joseph O'Brien called Noemi Ponce-Sigler to get some things off his chest.
With O'Brien's consent, Ponce-Sigler recorded O'Brien's comments for posterity:
Noemi:"Feit told you that he had killed [Irene]?"
O'Brien:"Yes."
Noemi:"Oh my God!"
O'Brien: "I suspected him from the very begi
O'Brien:"It was Easter week.We had a lot of confessions. After the Mass, we sat down and [Feit's] hands were all scratched. He gave me two different reasons. 'Well,' I said, 'okay, something is wrong here.'
"So, then, Father Busch-he's dead now-[and I] searched the attic for her.That's how suspicious we were." Noemi: "She did go to church?"
O'Brien: "Yes. She went to the rectory. I was in the church. Father Busch was in the church. [Feit] went back to answer the phone. We went and heard confessions. [Feit] goes back to the rectory. [Feit] took her to the pilgrim house in San Juan, kept her overnight.
"I'm just speculating that he hit her in the head with the candlestick."
Noemi: "Was [the candlestick] found in the canal?" O'Brien:"Yes."
Noemi: "When in the world did he ever tell you about the murder?"
O'Brien:"To be honest, I sort of tricked him. I said,'How can I help you if you don't tell the truth?' I kept asking him the question, over and over.Then he came at me. I said, 'Oh, this is great, one more step and [I'm] dead.' Then he went back to reading the prayer book he was reading.Then he finally admitted it."
Noemi: "When he admitted that he killed her, did he say, like, 'Sorry'?"
O'Brien:"No.Well, I don't know if he did later. I imagine so.We took him to Chicago to John Reid, the guy who literally wrote the book on polygraph tests. He said, 'This man is guilty.'
"What happened is, we knew he was dangerous, okay? We shipped him off to [monasteries]. Stayed ten years. Then he got married."
O'Brien is currently in the hospital. His health appears to be failing.
But the Texas Rangers have his complete story on tape. Now they just need a prosecutor.
More than a million meals go out to the needy each year from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul's sprawling kitchen and warehouse facility in south central Phoenix.
The Society would be unable to feed the city's disadvantaged, as well as offer them clothing, medical aid, and numerous other forms of assistance, if it was not for the charity's six thousand volunteers in the Valley of the Sun.
From the 1980s to 2003, it was John Feit's job to recruit and coordinate the activities of the Society's volunteers. There are thousands.
The Society's Steve Jenkins and Steve Zabilski were asked to talk about the John Feit they know.
"He was phenomenal at reaching out to the community and teaching volunteers what it meant to grow closer to God through charity," says Jenkins, a longtime coworker and friend. "He is so clearly a man who has a genuine love for serving others."
"John often went beyond what anyone would remotely imagine a man doing," says Society executive director Zabilski. "He truly lived his beliefs.And his passion motivated many others to do more than they otherwise would have done."
The man they described is humble, deeply charitable, wise, kind, and gentle. Their John Feit has a mind that is nimble with history, scripture, and philosophy.
Their friend is nothing like his alter ego, the lead suspect in the brutal slaying of Irene Garza.
"It's black and white," Jenkins says. "We knew nothing about these past issues.We've only seen the white."
Feit began volunteering for the Society soon after joining the parish of St.Theresa near his home in the early 1980s. In the mideighties, Jenkins says, Feit was asked to join the Society's staff to liaise with volunteers.
"He was perfect for the job," Jenkins says. "He spoke with such passion and clarity about the mission of the Society."
Jenkins and Feit worked countless hours together, including during a trip into Mexico to do the charity's work. There, he says, Feit was the interpreter:"He speaks fluent Spanish."
Zabilski, director of the Society since 1997, says Feit's personal charity "knew no bounds." Several years ago, Zabilski says, one of Feit's co-workers was facing financial difficulties trying to support a family.
"So John comes to me and asks that I reduce his salary and give the other person the money," Zabilski says. "He's the only person in my twenty-five years of doing this who has ever done that. His only request was that I don't tell anyone where the money came from."
Feit also was instrumental in raising fifty-five hundred dollars to purchase and renovate a house for a poor couple trying to raise their twelve grandchildren. It was the first time the Society "got into the extreme makeover business," Zabilski says.
Feit retired from his Society job in 2003.
Jenkins and Zabilski were asked to read through the evidence and allegations from the 1960 cases.
"This is simply not the John Feit we know," Zabilski says. "To us, it's like two completely different people."
A visitor comes to John Feit's door asking for information about the JustFaith program he's involved with at St.Theresa's church.
Feit opens the door to the guest with a broad smile. He says he would be pleased to tell the visitor more.
Feit's hair is no longer black, the glasses no longer hornrimmed. His thick shoulders are somewhat hunched, but he is vibrant and expressive. He still has that south Chicago accent tinged with the Irish brogue.
On the wall of his small condo is a picture of his two daughters and his son.
His wife, Mary, is at the store. On the wall is a knitted plaque: "Dull Women Have Immaculate Homes."
Feit shows the visitor something he wrote about JustFaith to the pastor at St. Theresa: "My experience," Feit wrote, "has been that Stephen A. Covey's observation-'The enemy of the best is the good'-applies in a peculiarly perplexing way in Catholic parishes. Too often a 'Put on your blinders, hunker down and do your own thing' mentality divides rather than unites the community."
Feit discusses the Catholic Church's early history in Rome and its original concepts about charity to the poor.
Near the end of the conversation, he observes, "You know, we all [would] like to write the story of our life. And we all like happy endings."
In Texas, investigators and the Garza family are fighting to have a special prosecutor brought in to review the murder case.They hope state and federal officials will work around the local D.A. and get all the information in the case to a grand jury for a change.
For Garza's family and many others in south Texas, the happiest ending they could hope for would be seeing Feit sitting in court facing charges in the murder of their beloved Irene.
On a return visit, Feit implores the visitor to judge him by his last forty-five years of service to his church and community. Remember, he told that Texas Ranger two years ago that the Father John Feit who lived in south Texas in I960 no longer exists.
"Perhaps we're all operating with different ideas of justice," says Noemi Ponce-Sigler. "All I know, though, is [about] the pain this has caused so many people.
"All I know is that Irene was murdered, and that nobody has seen justice."
Robert Nelson has been a writer for the Phoenix New Times for six years. In that time, he has won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award from the Death Penalty Information Center, has been twice a finalist for Arizona Journalist of the Year, and has twice won the John Kolbe Award for political writing. In 2003 he won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' first-place award for political commentary. Nelson is finishing his first nonfiction novel, Bleeding Arizona, which follows a clan of violent abolitionists from the fight for a free-state Kansas to the postwar battle for the soul of the wild new territory of Arizona.