by Mark Bowden
Noemi: “What happened that night? You’re the only one who knows besides him.”
O’Brien: “It was Easter week. We had a lot of confessions. After the Mass, we sat down and [Feit’s] hands were all scratched. He gave me two different reasons. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘okay, something is wrong here.’
“So, then, Father Busch—he’s dead now—[and I] searched the attic for her. That’s how suspicious we were.”
Noemi: “She did go to church?”
O’Brien: “Yes. She went to the rectory. I was in the church. Father Busch was in the church. [Feit] went back to answer the phone. We went and heard confessions. [Feit] goes back to the rectory. [Feit] took her to the pilgrim house in San Juan, kept her overnight.
“I’m just speculating that he hit her in the head with the candlestick.”
Noemi: “Was [the candlestick] found in the canal?”
O’Brien: “Yes.”
Noemi: “When in the world did he ever tell you about the murder?”
O’Brien: “To be honest, I sort of tricked him. I said, ‘How can I help you if you don’t tell the truth?’ I kept asking him the question, over and over. Then he came at me. I said, ‘Oh, this is great, one more step and [I’m] dead.’ Then he went back to reading the prayer book he was reading. Then he finally admitted it.”
Noemi: “When he admitted that he killed her, did he say, like, ‘Sorry’?”
O’Brien: “No. Well, I don’t know if he did later. I imagine so. We took him to Chicago to John Reid, the guy who literally wrote the book on polygraph tests. He said, ‘This man is guilty.’
“What happened is, we knew he was dangerous, okay? We shipped him off to [monasteries]. Stayed ten years. Then he got married.”
O’Brien is currently in the hospital. His health appears to be failing.
But the Texas Rangers have his complete story on tape. Now they just need a prosecutor.
MORE THAN A MILLION MEALS GO OUT to the needy each year from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s sprawling kitchen and warehouse facility in south central Phoenix.
The Society would be unable to feed the city’s disadvantaged, as well as offer them clothing, medical aid, and numerous other forms of assistance, if it was not for the charity’s six thousand volunteers in the Valley of the Sun.
From the 1980s to 2003, it was John Feit’s job to recruit and coordinate the activities of the Society’s volunteers. There are thousands.
The Society’s Steve Jenkins and Steve Zabilski were asked to talk about the John Feit they know.
“He was phenomenal at reaching out to the community and teaching volunteers what it meant to grow closer to God through charity,” says Jenkins, a longtime coworker and friend. “He is so clearly a man who has a genuine love for serving others.”
“John often went beyond what anyone would remotely imagine a man doing,” says Society executive director Zabilski. “He truly lived his beliefs. And his passion motivated many others to do more than they otherwise would have done.”
The man they described is humble, deeply charitable, wise, kind, and gentle. Their John Feit has a mind that is nimble with history, scripture, and philosophy.
Their friend is nothing like his alter ego, the lead suspect in the brutal slaying of Irene Garza.
“It’s black and white,” Jenkins says. “We knew nothing about these past issues. We’ve only seen the white.”
Feit began volunteering for the Society soon after joining the parish of St. Theresa near his home in the early 1980s. In the mid-eighties, Jenkins says, Feit was asked to join the Society’s staff to liaise with volunteers.
“He was perfect for the job,” Jenkins says. “He spoke with such passion and clarity about the mission of the Society.”
Jenkins and Feit worked countless hours together, including during a trip into Mexico to do the charity’s work. There, he says, Feit was the interpreter: “He speaks fluent Spanish.”
Zabilski, director of the Society since 1997, says Feit’s personal charity “knew no bounds.” Several years ago, Zabilski says, one of Feit’s co-workers was facing financial difficulties trying to support a family.
“So John comes to me and asks that I reduce his salary and give the other person the money,” Zabilski says. “He’s the only person in my twenty-five years of doing this who has ever done that. His only request was that I don’t tell anyone where the money came from.”
Feit also was instrumental in raising fifty-five hundred dollars to purchase and renovate a house for a poor couple trying to raise their twelve grandchildren. It was the first time the Society “got into the extreme makeover business,” Zabilski says.
Feit retired from his Society job in 2003.
Jenkins and Zabilski were asked to read through the evidence and allegations from the 1960 cases.
“This is simply not the John Feit we know,” Zabilski says. “To us, it’s like two completely different people.”
A VISITOR COMES TO JOHN FEIT’S DOOR asking for information about the JustFaith program he’s involved with at St. Theresa’s church.
Feit opens the door to the guest with a broad smile. He says he would be pleased to tell the visitor more.
Feit’s hair is no longer black, the glasses no longer horn-rimmed. His thick shoulders are somewhat hunched, but he is vibrant and expressive. He still has that south Chicago accent tinged with the Irish brogue.
On the wall of his small condo is a picture of his two daughters and his son.
His wife, Mary, is at the store. On the wall is a knitted plaque: “Dull Women Have Immaculate Homes.”
Feit shows the visitor something he wrote about JustFaith to the pastor at St. Theresa: “My experience,” Feit wrote, “has been that Stephen A. Covey’s observation—‘The enemy of the best is the good’—applies in a peculiarly perplexing way in Catholic parishes. Too often a ‘Put on your blinders, hunker down and do your own thing’ mentality divides rather than unites the community.”
Feit discusses the Catholic Church’s early history in Rome and its original concepts about charity to the poor.
Near the end of the conversation, he observes, “You know, we all [would] like to write the story of our life. And we all like happy endings.”
In Texas, investigators and the Garza family are fighting to have a special prosecutor brought in to review the murder case. They hope state and federal officials will work around the local D.A. and get all the information in the case to a grand jury for a change.
For Garza’s family and many others in south Texas, the happiest ending they could hope for would be seeing Feit sitting in court facing charges in the murder of their beloved Irene.
On a return visit, Feit implores the visitor to judge him by his last forty-five years of service to his church and community. Remember, he told that Texas Ranger two years ago that the Father John Feit who lived in south Texas in 1960 no longer exists.
“Perhaps we’re all operating with different ideas of justice,” says Noemi Ponce-Sigler. “All I know, though, is [about] the pain this has caused so many people.
“All I know is that Irene was murdered, and that nobody has seen justice.”
ROBERT NELSON has been a writer for the Phoenix New Times for six years. In that time, he has won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award from the Death Penalty Information Center, has been twice a finalist for Arizona Journalist of the Year, and has twice won the John Kolbe Award for political writing. In 2003 he won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ first-place award for political commentary. Nelson is finishing his first nonfiction novel, Bleeding Arizona, which follows a clan of violent abolitionists from the fight for a free-state Kansas to the postwar battle for the soul of the wild new territory of Arizona.
Coda
John Feit has yet to face charges in the murder of Irene Garza. But the fight for his indictment continues in southern Texas, where the Garza family and former law enforcement officials are pushing for the ouster of District Attorney
Rene Guerra, who has failed to prosecute the case in the face of compelling evidence pointing to Feit. Feit continues to live in Phoenix, Arizona, and continues to help the city’s underprivileged and elderly.
S. C. Gwynne
DR. EVIL
FROM Texas Monthly
ON JUNE 8, 2003, A FORMER POPEYES COOK from Houston named Cecil Viands died following routine spinal surgery at Vista Medical Center Hospital, in Pasadena. The cause was a massive infection. Under normal circumstances, Viands’s death might have been seen as a bit of horrifyingly bad luck, the sort of thing that happens to one unfortunate patient in a million. But luck had little or nothing to do with it. The immediate assumption in much of the local medical community was that Viands had died because of the incompetence of his doctor: an orthopedic surgeon and one-man surgery mill named Eric Heston Scheffey.
Viands’s death was only the latest episode in a long, grim tale of malpractice stretching back more than a decade. Scheffey had performed five surgeries on him since 1992. In complex and largely unjustified procedures that few orthopedists would ever have attempted, he’d methodically removed a large portion of Viands’s lower spine, taking out six vertebral disks, a good deal of bone, and alternately inserting and removing intricate arrays of screws, rods, bone-graft cages, and electronic growth stimulators. His activities went well beyond what consulting doctors had recommended or what the patient had authorized. In a single operation, he’d cut into Viands’s spine in seven different places—virtually unprecedented except in cases of severe accidents. He’d removed bone in order to decompress fourteen nerve roots—again, something most surgeons would never have even considered. According to an orthopedist who later reviewed the case for the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners, Scheffey’s surgical failure rate over those five surgeries was 100 percent. And almost all of them were entirely unnecessary. By the time the infection killed him, Viands was already facing life as a disabled person.
As disturbing as Viands’s case is, it was by no means unique or even unusual for Scheffey. There was Ed Gonzalez, for example, an auto body repairman from Humble who’d hurt his back lifting heavy equipment. Scheffey operated on him four times between 2001 and 2003, cutting out disks and bone and busily installing and removing hardware. After each surgery, Gonzalez’s back pain got worse. He is now unable to walk around the block, unable to sleep, and in pain twenty-four hours a day. He says that he might have killed himself if his father had not hidden his shotgun. A person identified only as B.P. in public records, a school custodian on whose spine Scheffey operated three times between 1998 and 2000, now has a condition called drop foot in which her foot hangs limply in a vertical position. She must wear a brace to walk. She has lost all bladder control and has to wear diapers. According to a later finding by a judge, not only did B.P. not consent to the surgeries, but they too were completely unnecessary. There is a long list of such people. Many, like B.P. and Viands’s widow, have sued Scheffey; many have not.
By almost any measure of medical performance, including the sheer number of his patients who are crippled, maimed, or in constant pain, Scheffey ranks as one of the worst doctors in American history. He is easily the most sued. Since 1982 he has had seventy-eight malpractice claims filed against him, a total that does not count what one attorney estimates to be more than 150 people who would have sued him if they had not been beyond the legal statute of limitations or if lawyers had been willing to take their cases. He has settled forty-five of those suits for more than $13 million. At least five people have died as a result of Scheffey’s surgeries, though doctors, attorneys, and former patients will tell you that the actual, unreported number is much higher. At least four of Scheffey’s patients have committed suicide because of the pain they were in or because of the depression brought on by the massive doses of narcotics the doctor prescribed or a combination of the two. One of those patients was so miserable that he committed suicide after he’d received a cash settlement from Scheffey.
Oddly, Scheffey’s litigation-stained career has been anything but anonymous or low profile. It has been splashed all over Houston newspapers, magazines, and television news reports, which have been fascinated by his spectacular cocaine bust, in 1985, and by the multiplicity of lawsuits against him. There was also Scheffey’s flamboyant lifestyle, which featured multimillion-dollar mansions in River Oaks and Shadyside; a house full of expensive, big-name art; a collection of Ferraris; a private jet; and status as a favorite son of Houston’s art community. He has been the subject of five legal actions by the state medical board to either restrict or revoke his license. Viands’s death led the board to suspend Scheffey’s license in 2003. In February 2005, after twenty-four years, it was finally revoked, and he was fined $845,000.
Scheffey did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this story, but if his own estimate in a deposition is correct—that his three thousand spinal procedures represented 20 to 30 percent of his total surgeries—then he may have performed eight thousand or more total operations on knees, ankles, hands, and shoulders, as well as spines. Yet what makes his story even more startling is that all were done with the explicit consent of a vast medical, insurance, and governmental bureaucracy, which, even after he became notorious for injuring patients, approved and funded every unnecessary surgery he did.
LIKE VIANDS, MARY TYWATER believed she was going into the hospital for a routine operation. On the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend in 1985, Scheffey operated on the forty-three-year-old Daisetta housewife to remove several disks in her back and fuse several vertebrae. He was in the midst of that surgery when he lost control of her bleeding. Some four hours into the operation, Tywater was dead. There was blood everywhere in the operating room. The anesthesiologist’s report is nearly illegible because it is smeared with Tywater’s blood. Scheffey was thirty-five at the time, and this was the first fatality to take place in his operating room. But what should have been the unique horror of watching a patient bleed to death had seemingly little effect on him. He spent the holiday with his girlfriend and another couple at his large house in Baytown on Cedar Bayou. They rode golf carts around the property and drove golf balls into the water, went waterskiing, and swam in his pool.
Scheffey was used to the good life, and his career can be understood as an ongoing, if highly unconventional, attempt to maintain it. He was born in Dallas in 1949 and grew up in an affluent family with a brother and two sisters. His father was a decorated World War II pilot and a successful lawyer who once ran for mayor of Dallas. The family was wealthy enough to buy Eric a Jaguar XKE for his sixteenth birthday. He attended W.T. White High School and then the University of Texas, graduating in 1972. He began his medical training at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston before transferring to the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio and finishing in 1976. The year before, he had married Liza Goodson, a former Highland Park High School cheerleader from a well-to-do Dallas family. The marriage ended in divorce in 1979, for undisclosed reasons. He completed an internship and a four-year residency in orthopedic surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina. In 1981 he moved to Baytown, just east of Houston, home to the blue-collar industries that line the booming Houston Ship Channel.
Baytown, and east Harris County in general, is an orthopedic surgeon’s paradise. People who do manual work for a living are frequently injured, and their most serious injuries usually involve backs, knees, shoulders, elbows, and hands—the domain of orthopedics. Most of these people also carry generous amounts of state-regulated workers’ compensation insurance, which involves a sort of bargain between the laborer and the employer: A worker gives up the right to sue if he is injured in exchange for long-term medical care and disability benefits, including partial replacement of lost wages. Each year workers’ comp in Texas covers roughly 200,000 injuries, for which 240 insurers pay out some $2 billion in benefits. The workers themselves pay nothing, and there is no limit to how much medical care they can receive
. Most of these patients have real injuries. But a small percentage engage in what is known euphemistically as symptom magnification (i.e., faking it or exaggerating pain) to take advantage of the system. It is a bitter irony that many of them ended up in the offices of Eric Scheffey, who would one day become the largest single biller in the program. In later testimony, Scheffey recalled that in Baytown his practice “took off like a rocket and continued along that vein…. A lot of work-men’s compensation patients predominated my practice and continued to do so, at least ninety percent.” Under workers’ comp rules, Scheffey was required to get a second opinion for every surgery. He always managed to find one.
He established his surgical practice at three Baytown hospitals: Humana Hospital Baytown, Gulf Coast Hospital, and San Jacinto Methodist Hospital. He was immediately popular. A strikingly handsome man, with olive skin, brown eyes, and a thick shock of dark, wavy hair swept back from a widow’s peak, Scheffey had a soft voice, a Texas accent, and a warm, engaging manner. His patients and colleagues found him friendly, charismatic, and very persuasive, particularly when talking a patient into an expensive surgery. In the words of one patient, he “could talk a monkey out of his last peanut.” He had a way of saying just the right things. According to Margaret Pieske, a former patient, Scheffey once held an X-ray up to the window, saying, “We’ll use God’s light.” “I immediately liked him,” she said, “because I thought he believed in God.”
Still, the hospitals where he worked soon started to notice his odd work habits. At San Jacinto Methodist, for example, he repeatedly canceled scheduled surgeries. He also failed to keep appointments with patients or keep accurate medical charts. Internal hospital memos from as early as 1983 show that the medical staff was worried that Scheffey’s erratic behavior might be the result of drug use. And he was not always the well-mannered and charming young doctor. In one nurse’s report from 1984, he was described as “very ugly and sarcastic toward me.” The nurse added that “his speech was very slurred and irrational.”
