Cold Case Files - Devil In Disguise

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

23-year-old former beauty queen and devout Catholic Irene Garza, vanishes in April 1960 after giving confession in her town of McAllen, Texas. Her body is eventually found floating in a drainage canal. Rumors run rampant that a member of the Catholic clergy is involved, but gradually the case goes cold, before a break in the case reignites the case 42 years later. Check out our great sponsors! 1-800-Contacts: Order online at 1800contacts.com - download their free app - or call 1-800-266-8228 SimpliSafe: Save 20% on your security system when you sign up for an Interactive Monitoring plan and get your first month FREE at SimpliSafe.com/coldcase  Progressive: Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive!

An A&E original podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. There was a time when the Rio Grande Valley was called the Magic Valley. We feel like Irene was the magic in the valley. And unfortunately, she became the tragic in the valley. There are 120,000 unsolved murders in America. Each one is a cold case.

Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's the evening of Saturday, April 16, 1960, in McAllen, Texas, a city on the southern Texas border that sits in the lower Rio Grande Valley, just seven miles from the international bridge that joins Hidalgo to Reynosa, Mexico. McAllen has always had a large Mexican-American population, and the area is filled with ranches and farmland. Throughout the 1950s, McAllen had grown from a farming community into a busy city.

Legal segregation ended, and Trans Texas Airlines was operating from Miller International Airport. Hidalgo County Assistant District Attorney Michael Garza speaks about the importance of religion for those in the area. The Valley is a very Catholic community. Most of us were raised in the church. Your social functions revolved around the church around the Easter time of the year. People stand in line for confession for hours in order to have their soul cleansed before receiving communion. It's Holy Saturday, 1960, the day before Easter and one of the most important dates in the Catholic calendar. 25-year-old school teacher Irene Garza gets ready

to leave her parents' house for confession. It's getting late, so after calling to make sure confessions are still taking place, Irene borrows her parents' car and drives the 12-block distance from her house to Sacred Heart Catholic Church in McAllen. By 11 p.m., some of Irene's family members and her god sister Sylvia Stern are at her house waiting for her to return. It's pouring rain. We had been invited to the home of Irene, and so we were all listening to music when one of the cousins walked in and you knew instantly by his face that something was wrong.

He asked that all the music be turned off and told us that Irene was missing. At 3 a.m., Irene's father, Nick, phones the McAllen police to report that his daughter has not returned from church. He told the officers

that he's found the car parked south of the church on 15th Street. He's afraid something may have happened to her because she usually calls her mother to tell her when she's going to be late.

The police told Nick to call again if Irene's going to be late. The police told Nick to call again if Irene wasn't back by morning. So Nick drives the car home to look for Irene while her brother-in-law parks close to the church in case she comes back. At 7 a.m. the following morning, the family calls the police again and a missing person's investigation begins. Once they got the car home, they of course started looking for clues or details about where Irene could be. The car doors were all locked except for the front right door. The keys were missing, but there were no signs of a struggle. Witnesses saw Irene walking from her car into the church and also saw her waiting in line for the confessional. But after 8 p.m. that evening,

no one sees Irene again. Her cousin Linda remembers how she felt at the time. We had planned to go to church together the next day and have an Easter egg hunt, and all of a sudden, Irene is missing. There was still the hope at that point that, you know, she would come home. Irene Garza came from a large, close-knit family. McAllen in 1960, there were actual railroad tracks. The Anglo-Saxon community lived on one side of the tracks. Irene Garza's father grew up on the Hispanic side and then became a business owner and moved his family out of there. Irene attended McAllen High School,

where she was popular and well-known for her talent, kindness, and beauty. She became sort of iconic in college with her beauty and her charm and her likability. She was the first Mexican-American Bronco queen. She was the first Mexican-American Bronco Queen. She was the first Mexican-American Miss South Texas. She graduated from college. She became a teacher in a Mexican-American neighborhood with kids that really needed help.

She was a wonderful soul. And all of a sudden, everything was focused on what happened to Irene. Irene made sure that her students had what they needed, even if it came out of her own paycheck. So when she doesn't return home from church on Holy Saturday, the community comes together to try and find her. People actually volunteered to help. They had people out on horseback.

They had people looking. I went with my dad walking along canals, seeing if we could find her. Two days pass without any sign of Irene. But then, something is found on the west side of McCall Road in McAllen that intensifies the search. I was at Irene's house when the shoe was found. You get that funny feeling in the pit of your stomach that that's just not right. It doesn't feel right. A mud-covered beige shoe is identified as belonging to Irene.

So the volunteers begin to concentrate their efforts in the area where it was found. The heavy rainfall from Easter Sunday has soaked the ground along the search route. But on the morning of the third day of the investigation, Irene's purse is found in a field along McCall Road. Investigators believed it had been thrown there sometime after Irene vanished. Tips start to come in regarding the case, and one call has investigators jumping into action. A female caller identifies herself as Irene and claims that she has been kidnapped

and is being held at a motel room in the neighboring town of Hidalgo. And all of a sudden, hope springs eternal that she's okay. And the real key was, where was she? McAllen police officers raced to a motel in Hidalgo, hoping to rescue Irene Garza from her captor. Only to discover that the call was a hoax. It was so sickening. I couldn't imagine that people could be that cruel.

The investigators are back at square one, and the search continues. McAllen is an agricultural area, and the fields are irrigated by water canals that run through the community. Early in the morning of April 21st, five days after Irene disappeared,

McAllen police receive a call that a woman's body has been found floating in the Second Street Canal. She was discovered by some people that were walking by. She was lying in a canal for four days in the mud. You saw her body and how muddy and dirty it was. The body was found face down in the water,

fully clothed except for underwear and shoes. Her petticoat is also ballooned over her head, and her blouse is unbuttoned. The body is taken to the morgue where the victim is identified by parish priest Father O'Brien before an autopsy is conducted. It was the body of Irene Garza. The cause of death was asphyxiation without strangulation. Perhaps the most significant finding was there was no water in the lungs. So we knew that she had been killed prior

to being dumped in the canal. The autopsy seemed to indicate that she had been sexually assaulted. So they were looking for a male suspect. Officers have to deliver the devastating news to Irene's parents. I was there at the house when they ultimately found her body,

remembering the cries. My mother, my aunt, just inconsolable. The community is on edge, anxious to know what had happened to Irene and who had done it. Investigators continue to search the canal where Irene's body has been found. They drain the water in the hopes of finding more evidence that could lead to her killer. Drag marks on the ground beside the canal are photographed, and as the water level in the canal lowers, a Kodak slide viewer is found.

The police are eager to trace the owner of the slide viewer, and local media outlets publish an appeal for information. A call comes in from Father John Fite, a new and visiting priest at the Sacred Heart Church. John Fite tells the McAllen PD, this slide viewer belongs to me. It's almost been two weeks since Irene was reported missing, and the police turned their focus to Father Fyde,

one of the last people to have seen Irene that night. John Fyde said he and Father O'Brien were leaving the rectory, going back to the church to continue with the confessions. John Fite answered the phone. It was Irene. She said she had some phobias and did not feel comfortable giving a confession because people could overhear her. Father Fite tells the investigators that he instructed Irene to meet him at the rectory at 7 p.m. for a private confession.

Afterwards, Fite says, she put her veil back on and left through the church. It's suspicious, but Father Fite has an alibi. He does the high mass at midnight on Holy Saturday. He does mass on Easter Sunday as well. The trusted priest in a religious community quickly fades from investigative interest, and the detectives begin to speak to others who knew Irene. For months, investigators interviewed 100 different witnesses, took their statements, and suspects were subjected to polygraph tests.

Over 50 people undergo lie detector tests, and all of them are cleared. For two years, the investigators continue to chase dead-end leads. But the case goes cold. My family, they were devastated. You had very broken people. My dad tried to pursue it, but what do you pursue when every person in a law enforcement position wants it to go away? In 1962, investigators have not solved Irene Garza's murder, and they move on to other cases. Irene's family is desperate for answers and closure, but by the mid-90s, it seems like justice will never be served. My mother always kept the memory alive. She had an amazing, large portrait of Irene in our living room.

Unfortunately, my aunt passed away. My mom was the last to pass away, and it was going to be up to the next generation to get it done. Tragically, Irene's parents pass away without any answers about their daughter's murder. But Irene's cousins are determined to find out what happened.

It was time to face my childhood monsters, time to find justice for Irene. In the early 2000s, I made the decision to pursue Irene's case with my cousin, Noemi. Noemi's father was a deputy sheriff with the McAllen Police, and he had been part of the investigation in the early stages. He felt like he knew who had killed her, and he was taken off the case by the sheriff. Vickers, at that time, just was unbelievable. It was the first time I ever saw her dad

sitting at home on the couch, just crying. Linda reaches out to the new McAllen police chief, Victor Rodriguez, to find out what her late uncle knew. But the case is even bigger than the local police department. This case had gone unsolved for years. Given advances in technology, the Texas Rangers began to have discussions about looking at the Irene Garza case from a cold case standpoint. The Texas Rangers have a litany of forensic tools at their disposal, and the chief of police passes along everything they have on Irene's case. They begin to analyze Irene's clothing, purse, and shoe for any DNA, fiber, or print evidence that could crack the case open.

Front and center for me was our DNA evidence that we could process that wasn't available back then that we might be able to do today. Texas Ranger Service ultimately processed some evidence for DNA inconclusive. And unfortunately, as we went forward, we did not get anywhere. Texas Ranger Jaramillo tries to track down new witnesses, but they are hard to come by in a 40-year-old cold case. Except for one. Before I started working the case, George Saylor was the cold case detective. George Saylor received a letter from a former monk, and that monk had told him about this priest

that had killed a young Hispanic girl on Easter. Detective Sadler calls the witness, Dale Tashney, on November 21, 2002, and asks him about the letter he wrote and how he got the information. I came about it from John Fite himself, and he was sent to this monastery for whatever, rehabilitation, or maybe even an agreement with the law authority.

I don't know. Father John Fite had been transferred to the Assumption Abbey, a Trappist monastery in southwestern Missouri in 1963, three years after Irene's murder. When he got there, our abbot, the head of the monastery at Ava, Missouri, wanted me to do the counseling with him, and he told me that he had, in fact, committed murder.

Dale Tashney had a master's degree in social work and theology, and he had been tasked with rehabilitating priests who had been sent to the monastery. During their counseling sessions, John Fite confessed his own dark sin. He told Dale that he had locked Irene in the basement of the rectory at the Sacred Heart Church

while he went and heard the rest of the confessions. He had gagged her and bound her with a long electrical cord from the Kodak slide viewer. When he finished listening to the confessions. He had gagged her and bound her with a long electrical cord from the Kodak slide viewer. When he finished listening to the confessions, Fite had asked the head priest, Father O'Brien, if he could borrow the parish car to drive to the pastoral house in San Juan. While the other priests were still busy with confession, Fite drove Irene to the pastoral house. He put her in a bathtub and also covered her with a plastic covering. When he left this place, the things he heard last was, I can't breathe, I can't breathe.

Fite made it back to the church in time to serve at the vigil mass, and when he returned to the pastoral house, Irene was dead. Dale tells the detective that Fike confessed that he had raped Irene before loading her body into the church car. Later that night, he removed the plastic from her body and dumped her in the canal. Dale had been placed in a situation where he felt compelled to shelter Fight, and he kept his oath of secrecy about Fight's confession until 2002, when he began writing a memoir about his time in the Catholic Church. This is the first time the investigators hear about Fight's confession,

and they wonder if he had been a suspect back in 1960. We started looking at every interview that was conducted back in 1960. We started reading every single statement that was given. Everything strongly suggested that John Fite had committed a crime. 42 years after Irene's murder, Texas Ranger Rudy Jaramillo looks at Fite's alibi with fresh eyes. When Fite had first been interviewed by the police, they noticed scratches on his hands. The investigators asked him about, you know, what happened to your hands. John Fite said that when he was in the confessional the day before Easter, he was playing with his glasses and that little screw had come off

and he couldn't find it. Fite had asked Father O'Brien if he could borrow the church car to drive to the pastoral house in San Juan to get another pair of glasses. It's around a five-mile drive from the church and Fite said that he didn't have a key to get in, so he had to climb the wall of the building. He said that he fell and he had scratched the back of his hands. His account matches the series of events described in the confession that Dale Tachny said he was given,

except Feit didn't tell the investigators that he had brought Irene in the car. John Feit was trying to stay two steps ahead of everybody. He told the authorities that he goes by Whataburger and starts driving aimlessly. But in reality, that was really when he was getting rid of her evidence, the purse and the shoes and also the body of Irene. That's when he placed her in the canal. The route he took matches up with the locations of evidence that was found in the days after Irene went missing. And Jaramillo tracks down John Reed,

the independent examiner who conducted Fite's polygraph in 1960. He is shocked to learn just how much the original investigators knew. He did not pass one of them. I mean, he just kept on failing the polygraphs. John Reed believed strongly that John Fite was involved in the murder of Irene Garza. The team reviewing the cold case are confused. Why didn't the original investigators

keep the heat on Father John Fite? It turned out to be even worse than we expected. We had waited 40 years. I mean, it's just unbelievable how huge the collusion was. On March 23, 1960, three weeks before Irene went missing, 20-year-old America Guerra, a student at Pan American University, went to a church in Edinburgh, about six miles from McAllen, to pray between classes. After entering the church, a man approached her from behind and placed a cloth over her mouth and attempted to suffocate her. America manages to bite her attacker's finger hard enough that he releases his grip

and she runs from the church. When investigators notice a correlation between the two cases a month after Irene's murder, they speak with America. It wasn't until they showed her photographs that America identified John Fite. She kind of had to overcome this inherent feeling that a priest could never do something like this. John Fite pleads no contest to the aggravated assault charges, and he is fined $500. Prior to him pleading guilty, the church had sent some officials down,

and they had made a decision that Fite would be sent off to a monastery and that the punishment would be far greater than what he would receive through the justice system. Included in that was an understanding that the Irene Garza case would not be pursued. So there's a reason why the case went cold. Following the conviction, Fite is transferred to the monastery in Missouri

to receive counseling from Dale Tachney. America Guerra wasn't the only woman to report a disturbing interaction with a young priest either. 20-year-old Beatriz Garcia had been walking to work in downtown McAllen when Fite pulled up beside her in a car. He asked her to take a ride and said that he liked her dress

and wanted to take pictures of her in the cemetery. Luckily, Beatrice wasn't fooled and she ran all the way home and told her father. But no one wanted to call the police on a priest. After all, it had been dealt with internally. Fight had been transferred out of Texas. Fite left the ministry in 1972 and eventually married before going on to have three children and multiple grandchildren. During the whole investigation, I had a sense that the Catholic Church knew that John Fite had committed the murder, but he was covering up to protect the church.

But then again, we couldn't prove anything. Irene's family had their suspicions all along, but they felt as though they had been met with resistance everywhere they turned. I think a lot of people knew that there had to be collusion to suppress this case. We tried to pursue it, but law enforcement was part of the cabal. Irene had spoken to a high school friend a week before her murder about the new priest. She said he was demanding

and insisted that she go to confession with him and not at the church. Being a devout Catholic, Irene obliged, but her words about fights stuck with her family. By November 2002, 42 years after the murder, Irene's family points the investigators in the direction of a key witness in the case against John Fite, a man whose silence had left them feeling weary about what he had known all along, The head priest of the Sacred Heart Church, Father O'Brien. The investigators find Father O'Brien in San Antonio in February 2003,

and the retired priest seems eager to relieve himself of the information he had kept secret for so long. Texas Ranger Rudy Jaramillo interviews him about the case. Father O'Brien, did anybody tell you Fite committed the murder? He told me. This information came from John Fite himself. Is that what you're saying? Yes. He tricked John Fite into telling me that he had killed Lailin Garza. I said, how can I help you if I don't know what happened?

And then he said he bound her and gagged her, and she died of asphyxiation. Why did you not tell anybody that he had murdered Irene Garza? Because I believe he told me in confidence, and I was trying to protect that confidence. Father O'Brien's priorities, like so many in his position in 1960, centered around protecting the church. So he covered up whatever he could. He told Jaramillo that he felt relieved to have disclosed what he said had been on his back for years as the most unhappy part of his whole life. The investigators convince O'Brien to testify if they can take the case to court, but they still have to track down John Fite. They enlist the help of Dale Tashney, who phones the man who confessed to him decades earlier.

John Fite is settled with his family in Phoenix, Arizona when he receives the call. Hello. Hello, John. Yes. This is Dale Tashney. How are you this evening? Good, good. You mentioned yesterday that you were having some health problems. Yeah, I really need to do what I need to do before I die. Okay. If your implication is that I am the man who killed Irene Garza, you are incorrect.

I am not the man who killed Irene Garza. Well, me that isn't me. You told me you killed a young woman. I have got to clear this thing up for myself before I die. Dale's son, Tom, thinks that his father felt like he had a new responsibility to Irene and her family. And so Dale agreed to testify too. But a grand jury disagrees and votes against bringing the case to trial on the grounds of insufficient evidence. It's a devastating blow to those who had worked so hard for justice. Knowing me, myself, Rudy, Chief Rodriguez, we were really disappointed.

Over the next decade, Irene's family tries in vain to convince the district attorney, Renee Guerra, to move the case forward. It's now 2015, and a new district attorney has been elected. The DA's top prosecutor, Michael Garza, is assigned to take on the case. This was my first cold case. What led me to believe that the evidence supported that John Fyde murdered Irene Garza beyond a reasonable doubt?

Well, there were witness statements. We now know, because of Dale Tashny, when he did it, where he did it, what route he took when he did it. They also have the case files that clearly state that Fite failed numerous polygraph examinations back in 1960. Assistant District Attorney Michael Garza is confident in the strength of the case, and he issues an arrest warrant for John Fite.

It was on Ash Wednesday. My mother called and said, you know, only my son would arrest a priest on Ash Wednesday. It's November 2017, 57 years after Irene Garza's murder, when 85-year-old John Fite stands trial. Dale Tashney is the star witness. One of the interesting things that we learned from Dale Tashne was why John Fite attacked these women. Did he indicate that he had a proclivity for wanting to attack women? When a woman wears high heels on a hard floor,

that click, click, click. I become anxious about that. It seems as though the sexually motivated strangulation of 25-year-old Irene Garza had been triggered by the clicking of heels on the church floor. ADA Garza has more evidence to present, something he is sure will remove any doubts in the jurors' minds. I felt the jury was going to have the same question that all of us had, which was, why wasn't anything done back in 1960? And in fact, in 2004, the case became even stronger. I felt like I needed to give them an explanation. So we started subpoenaing records from the different institutions, and amongst the documents was a letter from one of the bishops to

the sheriff of Hidalgo County. Expert witness Dr. Thomas Doyle testified about the collusion of the church and the authorities during an election year for two high-profile Catholics, local sheriff E.E. Vickers, who led the investigation, and presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. This letter explains the whole process of covering up John F. started. There are political implications to this that could make this a juicy scandal for the opposition to Kennedy after three or four months or even less if possible have this young man transferred to another part of the country the sheriff is a Catholic and he

also stands to lose materially by such a scandal here the fact that Kennedy was a Catholic and he would be the first Catholic president if this came out that might create an anti-catholic sentiment that was significantly threatened his chances of election this letter is more than a smoking gun this is a battalion of smoking guns because it is clearly a written down, well thought out, concocted process to avoid justice. There's not one word mentioned about Irene Garza or her family. It's absolutely disgusting. John Fite doesn't take the stand in his own defense. Michael Garza summarizes the case in his closing arguments.

This is a case about betrayal, murder, and a cover-up by a man named John Fite, who came to the valley a wolf in priest's clothing. After nine days of trial, the jury finds John Bernard Fite guilty of murder with malice of forethought. John Fite had gotten away with murder for 67 years, but finally he had been convicted. I don't think it really hit me until we walked outside in South Texas. It was snowing. When does it snow in Edinburgh, Texas? And I knew.

I knew that it was Irene and it was time where that snow would just clear all of this ugliness away. It was time for a new beginning, a new day. John Fite is sentenced to life in prison and died just two years into his life sentence at Huntsville Prison in February 2020. His passing gave Irene's family the sense of closure that they had been longing for for decades. In my mother's house, Irene's picture is still there.

And I visit her, so to speak, her picture. You know, it's very emotional. I was able to say, we did it, you know. We did it for you. You finally got justice. Cold Case Files is hosted by Paula Barrows. It's produced by the Law and Crime Network and written by Eileen McFarlane and Emily G. Thompson.

Our composer is Blake Maples. For A&E, our senior producer is John Thrasher and our supervising producer is McKamey Lynn. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz, Maite Cueva,

and Peter Tarshis. This podcast is based on A&E's Emmy-winning TV series, Cold Case Files. For, Cold Case Files. For more Cold Case Files, visit aetv.com.