EDINBURG (TX)
Courthouse News
December 7, 2017
[Note: See also a PDF of the original Pawlicki letter and See also South Texas DA Refuses to Pursue Ex-Priest, by Brooks Egerton, Dallas Morning News, November 21, 2004.]
EDINBURG, Texas (CN) – Accused murderer John Feit will not testify in his own defense, so after closing arguments Thursday the jury must decide whether the former Catholic priest killed a South Texas schoolteacher 57 years ago, suffocating her in a bathtub in the church rectory.
“It was a wrestling match between my vanity and my common sense, and my common sense prevailed,” Feit told Hidalgo County Judge Luis Singleterry on Wednesday, outside the jury’s presence, on the fifth and final day of testimony.
Feit is charged with the first-degree murder of Irene Garza, a 25-year-old elementary school teacher and beauty queen, who was assaulted, bound and suffocated to death with a cellophane bag on Easter weekend in 1960, testimony revealed.
Feit, then a 27-year-old visiting priest at McAllen’s Sacred Heart Church, pulled the devoutly religious schoolteacher by the arm and told her she was “too good” to give confession in church, prosecutors said. He led her to its next-door rectory, and killed her there on Holy Saturday, according to the state.
Prosecutors called the 57-year-old cold case a Catholic Church cover-up, a claim bolstered by an internal church letter dated Oct. 1, 1960 that showed a relationship between the church and local authorities, to avoid the potential scandal to it “as an institution.”
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