Ex-priest arrested in 1960 killing of Texas schoolteacher

Now he’s finally been arrested for the 1960 murder.

Feit was jailed pending extradition to Texas, a spokesman for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona said in a statement. He faces up to life in prison. During an initial court appearance Wednesday, Feit told a Maricopa County judge he will fight the return to Texas.

Investigators came to Arizona and questioned him extensively in 2003, he said. “I’m totally puzzled by something coming up now, after the fact”. However, Lynda and Noemi didn’t want the case to close completely or be forgotten.

Authorities said Garza visited Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen, where Feit was a priest, on April 16, 1960.

If that evidence didn’t seem damning enough, there was the unsolved mystery of another attack. She managed to get away by biting the attacker’s finger and then she screamed. It was the same man she had seen earlier in the afternoon watching her from his sedan, but she had dismissed her concerns. When he took a polygraph test and denied that he had harmed either Garza or Guerra, the examiner concluded that he was lying.

The case was reopened in 2004 and sent to a grand jury, still an indictment was not returned.

According to ABC15 sister station KRGV.com, Feit is officially being charged with the murder of Garza. Garza’s family over the decades has pushed for another investigation and has claimed that Feit was protected from prosecution because he was a priest at a time – 1960 – when many considered priests incapable of criminal behavior. “I mean, if you thought of it, that would be sacrilegious”.

Suspicion quickly turned to Feit after authorities determined he was in Edinburg in March when another woman there reported that a man, whom she later identified as Feit, had grabbed her from behind as she prayed alone in a church.

Feit was allegedly the last person to see her alive after hearing her confession the night before Easter Sunday. An autopsy showed that Garza had been raped and bludgeoned to death.

Feit later spent time at a treatment center in New Mexico for troubled priests and after that became a supervisor and had a part in clearing priests for assignments to parishes.

But Feit was the likely suspect, said former Texas Ranger Lt. Rudy Jaramillo, who started investigating the murder in 2002 when he served with a Rangers cold case unit.

District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez confirmed late Tuesday his office presented the case to the grand jury last Thursday, and it came back with a true bill.

Tacheny told the police that Feit had described in detail Garza’s last moments, according to CNN. Unsurprisingly, the grand jury chose not to indict. Rodriguez ousted the 32-year incumbent and told supporters he would re-examine the case. Feit was a suspect in the killing but was never charged.