Priest Killed Woman Who Came for Confession and Got Away With It For Decades

[NeoGreen]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2018/01/31/priest-killed-woman-who-came-for-confession-and-got-away-with-it-for-decades/

Priest Killed Woman Who Came for Confession and Got Away With It For Decades
January 31, 2018 by David G. McAfee

Justice isn’t always swift.

It took decades to bring Father John Feit to trial for the murder of Irene Garza, but when the court evaluated the evidence, it took only seven days to convict him and sentence him to life in prison.

Last month, the jury found Feit — a former priest who is now 84-years-old — guilty of the 1960 murder. He killed Garza, a school teacher and beauty pageant winner, when she (unfortunately) trusted him enough to come to him for confession.

Ten years later, Feit left the priesthood and moved to the Arcadia neighborhood of Phoenix, where he raised three children with his wife and volunteered with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

Feit was arrested in 2016 in Scottsdale after years of suspicion about his possible role in the murder, which was left unsolved for the better part of 50 years.

This “cold case” went unsolved since April of 1960, when Garza told her family she was going to church for confession. Sadly, she didn’t return.

Five days later, her body was found dumped in a canal. Police say she was beaten, sexually assaulted and suffocated. Investigators kept turning to one person — Father John Feit, then 27, who admitted hearing Garza’s last confession in the church rectory. Investigators grew more suspicious when they learned that three weeks before Irene’s murder, another young woman had been attacked in a nearby church. That woman later identified Feit as her attacker.

Feit would eventually plead no contest to aggravated assault in that case and was fined $500, but the investigation in the Irene Garza murder eventually stopped and the case went cold.

Feit was fined a measly $500 for attacking one woman, and got off scot-free for murdering a second… for 57 years. He sexually abused Garza and killed her, so how did he get away with it for so long? It turns out the church, and a Catholic sheriff, had something to do with it.

Emphasis added.