© Maricopa County Sheriff’s OfficeJohn Feit, the former priest has been arrested Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2016, in Arizona in the 1960 slaying of a 25-year-old Texas schoolteacher and beauty queen, Irene Garza.
For more than half a century, the unsolved killing of a young schoolteacher and beauty queen who was last seen at church haunted the Texas city of McAllen.
But now, nearly 56 years after the bludgeoned body of 25-year-old Irene Garza was pulled from an irrigation canal, police have arrested the man long suspected in her slaying: the former priest who apparently heard her final confession.
Using a walker, a frail-looking John Bernard Feit, now 83, appeared in court Wednesday in Phoenix after being arrested a day earlier at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona, on a murder charge. He was jailed on $750,000 cash bail while he awaits transfer back to Texas.
"This whole thing makes no sense to me because the crime in question took place in 1960," Feit said, adding that he plans to fight extradition to Texas.
Comment: That is an unspeakably barbaric thing to do to someone.