Murder of Irene Garza

Common card · No. 258139

Irene Garza (November 15, 1934 – April 16, 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. John Bernard Feit, the Catholic priest who heard Garza's last confession, was the only identified suspect in her death. Two clergymen, Dale Tacheny and Joseph O'Brien, came forward to authorities in 2002 to report that Feit had confessed to Garza's murder shortly after the crime. He had since left the priesthood, married and had a family. For many years, the district attorney in Hidalgo County considered the evidence against Feit to be too...

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