The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (21 page)

"I just asked, 'Why are you here and not in prison?' " Tacheny says."It was very matter-of-fact.

"Feit said, 'The church is behind me.' Feit said that any time the authorities would get close to anything, he would just say he couldn't speak because of confessional secrecy."

Then, Tacheny says he remembers asking Feit why the church would stand behind him.

"Feit said he was told by his superiors that they didn't want the faithful to be scandalized,"Tacheny says.

"To be honest, at the time, it all didn't seem that strange," Tacheny says. "Over the whole issue was our belief that we could help him more than some prison and that he wouldn't be a threat because he was locked up in a monastery somewhere. Civil justice wasn't part of the equation at that time."

As the months passed, it became clear that John Feit would not be able to handle the monastic life.Tacheny says Feit himself asked to be transferred.

Tacheny was then told that it was his job to prepare Feit to return to society.

Tacheny had studied psychology, but he admits he was completely unqualified to "try to cure him, whatever that means."

At that point, Tacheny says, his relationship with Feit changed. It was now his job to probe Feit's mind, get the truth about "this murder" and break Feit of whatever impulses led him to attack women.

Tacheny says he did his job. And he still believes he was successful.

But in the decades that followed, as he left the abbey, then the priesthood,Tacheny again became eaten by guilt.

He increasingly felt as though he was an accomplice to murder and that he may have unleashed a dangerous man on society.

In 2002 Tacheny sent a two-page letter to the Texas Rangers. In it, Tacheny laid out to detectives what he remembered being told by Feit in 1963.

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 sinner.

If sin and sinner continued to live as one, punishment was better meted out by God than some secular judge, in purgatory or hell rather than a Texas prison.

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-skinned Hispanic woman in a church in Albuquerque. Her Spanish ancestry dated back to the 1600s in northern New Mexico.

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.

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 Sonny Miller. "He badly wants this thing to die."

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 beginning." Noemi: "What happened that night? You're the only one who knows besides him."

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."