CLASSIC: Did Teresita Basa avenge her own death?

Months after the murder of Teresita Basa, her former coworker began falling into trances, a voice identifying itself as Teresita issuing from her mouth. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, these statements turned out to be true, leading to the conviction of 32 year-old Allen Showers. But what's the real story? Was this justice beyond the grave or beyond the law?

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Well, we have been spending similar time with our classics,
going into political intrigue, going into true crime. This time
we wanted to go a little further off the map
and talk about ghosts, talk about specifically the ghost of

(00:20):
one Tera Cita Bossa. This one always still fascinated me.
Do you guys remember this one? I do, and I
too have always been fascinated by the idea of vengeful ghosts,
whether they're avenging a loved one or their own murder. Yeah,
especially considering this led to real consequences. This, like possible possession,

(00:43):
led to something real, actual action on the ground, like
legal stuff, because, as the Exorcist says, possession is nine
tenths of the law. I'm sorry, no, you you heard me?
Use that one. I loved it then and I love
it now. Roll that beautiful bead footage from UFOs to

(01:05):
psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events.
You can turn back now or learn the stuff they
don't grant you to know. Hello, welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt Hi, I'm Null and I'm Ben.

(01:28):
You are you and if you are listening to this show,
then hopefully you are not Tera Cita Bassa. We'll get
to it today. We're going to talk about crime. Every
once in a while we do a show about criminal behavior,

(01:49):
whether that's financial corruption, whether that's a grizzly series of
unssolved murders. Um. But we're talking today not about a
type of crime, but a very specific crime, tailed murder,
and on some level justice, perhaps justice from beyond the
grave grave. Now, how many times I have to tell

(02:09):
you I can do that in post. You don't have
to do your own effects. I know, I just like it.
So our story begins in Chicago, nineteen seventy seven with
a forty seven year old respiratory therapist named Terra Sita Bossa.
Now now, she was from the Philippines. She was well
regarded by her neighbors. Her her neighbors liked her. She

(02:31):
was fluent into glic and she was employed at a
place called the Edgewater Hospital in Chicago, which is at
this time closed. On February one, nineteen seventy seven, firefighters
arrived at Terra Cita's home, which was Apartment fifteen B
on the fifteenth floor of forty North Pine Grove Avenue,

(02:54):
where they discovered her corpse. Her corpse have been burned
and likely to file kitchen knife protruded from her chest.
It was one of the knives that she had owned
while she was alive. Someone had thrown her mattress on
top of her and you know, attempted to burn the
evidence as homicides to go with. This case was particularly horrific.

(03:15):
There were no leads, and after a few months the
case went cold. While this is unfortunate, it's also disturbingly common.
You know, guys, Let's pause for a second from this
story and and take a look at some of the
statistics involving homicides so we can get a better get
a better grasp of this. One of the things that

(03:36):
we'll find when we look at statistics for murders, you know,
identified homicides, is that there are a lot of qualifications
and members of the same government sometimes don't always agree
on the numbers. For example, the Bureau of Justice, which
is an arm of the Department of Justice here in
the US, has a nuanced definition, very ice definition of homicide,

(04:03):
and that would include murder and non negligent manslaughter, which
is the wilful killing of one human being by another right.
But the data is based solely on police investigation as
opposed to the determination of a court or a medical examiner,
a coroner, or another judicial body. So if there's a

(04:25):
suspect death and then there's a trial later and they say,
and the cops didn't think it was a murder, but
a jury does rule something that says that, then it
still doesn't count. So it also excludes some deaths, and
some of those are um deaths caused by negligence, suicide,

(04:45):
or accident. Justifiable homicide seems like a misnumber since it
actually has the word homicide, and but I digress and
attempts of murder right, and justified carries its own Yeah,
and justifiable homicides are based on law enforcement a agency reports,
and that's a whole another episode. Interesting side note here,

(05:06):
deaths from the terrorist attacks on September eleventh, two thousand
one are specifically not included in the analyzes. And that's ah.
That's just an example of the sort of definition that
will look at here. But good news because according its
not just the Bureau of Justice, but also to other

(05:27):
reporting agencies. Despite what you might hear on your local
mainstream news, uh, and and all the terrible things you'll
hear on the radio, it turns out that murder is
actually declining. Yeah, that is an extremely surprising thing to hear,
especially after these past couple of weeks of the two

(05:48):
conventions for our primary parties, and there's a lot of
scare scare stuff going on, right, And then you look
at the actual statistics and you see that the homicide
rate in the US has to lined by nearly half,
from nine point three homicides per one hundred thousand residents
in nineteen to four point seven out of one hundred

(06:11):
thousand in two thousand eleven. That's the lowest level since
nineteen sixty three. But as we said, not all of
the sources will agree. So if we look to the FBI,
we find their handibook Crime in the United States, and
they found some interesting numbers from Yeah, they found that

(06:32):
there were an estimated one million, one sixty five thousand,
three hundred and eighty three violent crimes, which would consist
of murder and non negligent homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
These statistics were called from various law enforcement agencies, and
that's that's pulling in a whole lot of different crimes right. Um,

(06:54):
So yeah, like you said, Ben, when looking at these
different sources that are trying to keep good statistics on
all of this stuff and good numbers, it gets money. Yeah,
But but there's more here. Many of these homicides that
occur do go unsolved. Sadly. We've got a great quote

(07:14):
from a article in The Economists on this. America's homicide
clearance rate. The percentage of solved crimes that lead to
arrest has fallen considerably in the past fifty years, from
around in nine to around six According to federal statistics,
this means more than two hundred and eleven thousand homicides

(07:37):
committed since nineteen eighty remain unsolved. Every year introduces nearly
five thousand more. So journey back with US Ladies and
Gentlemen to Chicago in nineteen seventy seven, according to the
sources you check, whether it's UH maybe a compilation from
the Tribune or municipal compilation, you'll find that they were

(08:00):
between eight hundred and twenty three to eleven hundred and
nine documented homicides in the city in that year alone. UH.
Turisee Devasa was by all accounts, set to remain a
tragically unsolved crime, at least that is until her ghost
returned and hunted down her murderer. But first a word

(08:23):
from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by
back Blaze. So I'm a video editor. You guys know
that I have a ton of huge files that I
have to store, and I'm constantly moving them around with backups,
making sure that I've got you know, two or three

(08:45):
versions of every single file that I have. You got
them on your machine. We also have them on our
server which is on site. But sometimes you need an
off site backup of the backup just to make sure
that you don't lose those crucial original files. Yeah. If
if f S I D comes in here and you
know reeks havoc, we gotta have it somewhere else. So no,
what about an unlimited native backup solution for Mac and PC?

(09:07):
How's that sound? That sounds like just the ticket and
it is exactly what this company, back Blaze offers. Yeah,
that's right. With Backblaze, you can have access to all
the backed up data that you wish with iOS and
Android apps. Oh, would you want to restore by mail? Perfect?
You can purchase a hard drive with all your data
overnight it with FedEx. Do you prefer a Weber store

(09:27):
for quick downloads, sure, you can do that anywhere with
an Internet connection. You can return to restore by mail
drive within thirty days for full refund. If that doesn't work.
And a lot of people are using this service already,
there two hundred petabytes of data as total stored by
back blaze. You can be part of it and there's

(09:49):
no limit how much you can put in, and it's
quite the deal. Just five bucks a month gives you unlimited,
unthrottled high speed streaming of your files from this offsite
back up. Plus, if you're a developer you need archives,
you can check out back blaze B two back blazes
Cloud storage for just half a penny per gig per month.

(10:09):
Now there's no credit card required. If you want to
try out the fifteen day trial, you can go to
back blaze dot com slash conspiracy to check this out
and go ahead and get it started. It's simple. Why
don't you try it out? Just head on over to
back blaze dot com slash conspiracy and let him know
uh that you came from us, So we left you

(10:37):
with a bit of a cliffhanger there we mentioned that
possibly the ghost of Tarasee to Bossa came back from
the grave and got a little revenge. According to the story,
several months after the murder, the detective Joe Statula, he
received a lead from the Evanston Police Department nearby and

(10:59):
they inst to him to contact Dr Jose Chua. Uh
seems random on on the detective's end, like, Okay, I
guess we'll go see this person. Well, apparently Jose Chua's wife,
Remibios Remicua, claimed to be possessed by tarase to Boss's spirit.

(11:19):
That's that's a weird call to get right sitting in
the police department, Hey, you need to go talk to
this lady. She's possessed by the spirit of your victim. So,
according to Dr Chuai's wife had actually begun entering into

(11:42):
these trances, these trance states, and while she was in them,
she would speak and claim to be the ghost of
Tarasee to Bassa. According to the original Chicago Tribune stories
that were written about this, he goes into detail about
um laying on the bed and just speaking and he
was he would just go up through her and I

(12:04):
mean you can imagine going, what are you doing as
a doctor, like, you're gonna be skeptical, right, what is
happening to my wife? Right? That's that's a reasonable thing.
That's an assumption most of us would make. We do
not naturally live in horror movies. So Dr Chua's wife

(12:24):
were arguably the ghost of terrace to Bassa named the
murderer given name to this murder, and that name was
Alan Showery or Showery, And the doctor still, you know,
of course, was not convinced these are not very specific
things us, so he still cautiously looked into it. And

(12:45):
turns out, according to the story, there was an Alan
Showy in Chicago. He was also an employee at Edgewater Hospital,
and it seemed that he had visited Terraceta, his home,
on the pretense of repairing either a television set or
an electrical problem. Additionally, the voice claimed that Showery had

(13:06):
taken jewelry from the deceased and given it to his girlfriend.
The jewelry, the voice continued, could be identified by several individuals,
and it named those individuals. Despite the extraordinarily unorthodox nature
of the lead, detectives found, Yeah, there really was this

(13:27):
Alan Showery working there. He's an orderly. He was a
thirty two year old orderly. So they visited his home
and they found that he did have a girlfriend and
he lived with her. And upon investigation they found Boss's
jewelry in the possession of this girlfriend. So Alan Showery
was arrested on August eleven. So initially Showery confessed, but

(13:52):
then he were canted his confession, saying he was coerced
into confess him because of police threats to jail his
pregnant common law wife as an accessory. And this means
that the first attempt at convention ended in a mistrial.
But eventually he was convicted and he was sentenced to
I think fourteen years for the murder itself, and then
a couple other consecutive sentences of four years for the murder,

(14:15):
arson and robbery. It was. It was nearly twenty years altogether, right,
he served less than five of that was released in
Night three, which means, Mr Showery, you may well be
listening to this podcast today, and if you are, I
would love some clarity on this because everything we've researched

(14:37):
on this, you know, it's it's images of papers from
the nineteen seventies. It's people in the nineteen nineties talking
about the unsolved mysteries. You know movie that came out.
There was an Unsolved Mysteries movie that came out about
this case. We'd love to hear directly from you if
you're listening a case of possession, if that is the

(14:57):
story is true. As Matt mentioned earlier, the original reports
come from the Chicago Tribune, which is which is a
respected paper, but the story itself has several holes. First,
remedia Chua was also an employee at the hospital and
may have used the claim of possession as sort of
a safety net to bring Showery to justice. Um, this

(15:21):
is a biggie because it's very very plausible that Chua
had other information that was not made available to law
enforcement through official channels. She also, though, like Tara Sita,
spoke to golog And in this This to me is
fairly plausible, this idea that somehow or another, MS Chua
had information about what had happened. Maybe she had been

(15:43):
speaking um with miss Bassa about who knows whatever was
going on between the two Alan Showery and Tara sa
Bassa and knew something that she wanted to get justice
but she didn't know how to do it, and she
was afraid maybe of this guy. I'm this makes a
lot of sense, not that I am poo pooing the

(16:07):
idea that she was actually possessed. I don't know. I
have no evidence either way of this, but that makes
sense to me. And there's also another option here that
the police may have assisted in fabricating this story or
at least played along with it, in order to obtain
what they needed to make the arrest. So in the
case of catching a murderer, could we blame them for

(16:29):
bending the circumstances a bit because it is quite possible. Unfortunately,
in the legal system, it's quite possible to have inadmissible
proof that someone committed a crime, and because the proof
is inadmissible, be unable to prosecute them or bring justice

(16:49):
for the family. Right knowing for sure, but you can't
do anything. And this goes into a a larger concept
here to psychic powers applied to law enforcement in itself.
It's problematic because we've always seen the tropes who have
always heard the stories of claim success right where there's
a cold case and often something grizzly if it's fiction,

(17:12):
like a child murderer or whatnot, and a medium or
a psychic is able to, based on their impressions, arrive
at information that could not be found any other way.
But are they doing this or they just confirming stuff
investigators already knew but was somehow inadmissible. You know, in

(17:35):
the case of Tersea Boss, it does seem that justice
was ultimately served at the killer was legally convicted, we
can call him mcgillar. But was this by a ghost
or was this by bending the rules of an investigation.
I'll you know, the uh, the shield or the wire

(17:57):
or any of those other crime shows. It feels like
a slippery slope to me. I haven't heard. I can't
think in my head of a case that used a
psychic to get a conviction in the recent past. And
maybe that should just because I'm not looking for it,
you know, I haven't seen it pop up on any

(18:17):
of my news threads that I subscribe to. Perhaps that's it, um,
I can't imagine that it's happening with much frequency. That's
an excellent point, and this brings us to another thing
of For those of you listening who are involved in
law enforcement, I'd like to hear your your thoughts on this.
There's a phenomenon that I've heard occurs, which is that

(18:41):
sometimes when a crime or the hunt for a criminal
gets too much recognition in the public, precincts become inundated
with people who are alleging that they have inside knowledge
of it, where that they committed the crime, or that
they have received and from san about the crime in
a dream or in a trance or some spiritual revelation.

(19:05):
And this you know, this is depicted sometimes in fiction,
but it does actually happen, maybe not all that often,
but it has happened. So we'd love to hear some
real stories about those kinds of experiences. And most importantly,
of course, if uh, there was something you couldn't explain,
if somebody really did have something that seemed to be

(19:27):
esp that assisted in the cracking of a case. And
it doesn't have to be homicide, of course, it can
be you know, stolen goods, yeah, anything, or if you
you worked with a psychic or a medium and nothing
came of it or the information was wrong. I'd love
to hear either way. And of course every time that
we ask for the best part of this show, which

(19:49):
is your stories, your emails, your ideas for future topics.
We like to show improve that it's not all just
a bunch of malarkey, which means it's almost time for
shout at corners. But first a teeny tiny little sponsor break.

(20:20):
Today's first shout out goes to ned Kelly's Revenge from Twitter.
Just listen to your political conspiracy episode, and half of
that episode is now fact. You guys have to be
psychic or nostre damist two point oh or something. This.
I love this this tweet because it's shortened all of
the letters. It's letters and numbers and not actual words

(20:41):
for most of it because you had to shorten it.
I love it. Yeah, thanks so much for writing to
us on Twitter. You know that I always initially hesitant
about that one, because, uh, talking about politics on the internet,
which I would count of podcast as as well, can
so quickly become incredibly unproductive. So I for what I'm

(21:02):
really glad that you found it worth your time, and
thanks so much for checking out the show. The next
shout out goes to Alex Willits, who wrote to us
on Facebook. Alex wants us to cover some more unsolved
crime topics. He's interested specifically in cropsy which isn't really
an unsolved crime topic. It's it's a legend. It's an
urban legend, but it's still fascinating. Yeah, there's a there's

(21:25):
a great documentary on cropsy Um that I think one
of you guys may have turned me onto. But how
how great your timing is, Alex. So we hope that
you enjoyed today's episode on Tara Cita Bassa And our
last shout out for this episode comes from Christopher Rogers,

(21:45):
who says, can you delve into the topic of water?
The local and state governments make farmers in my region
pay tax on the water that falls into their dams
and creeks. The bloody state housing authority has stopped installing
rainwater tanks onto state housing because rain water is dangerous.
Why does it seem like someone wants control over the
water supply and what authority did they have to make

(22:06):
me pay for this stuff when it falls from the sky.
You know, that's a question we've heard before and it's
still a good one. Christophers from Australia. I don't know
exactly what region he's from, but that is fascinating and
he wants us to cover water. I'm down, Yeah, I
think that's I think that's a great idea. We did
an earlier series on water wars and we also looked
at contamination there in Flint, Michigan. So this concludes our gosh,

(22:35):
we hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to
learn more about the case of tarra se to Bassa,
head on over to archives dot Chicago Tribune dot com
and you could do a search for a Tarrasee to Bassa.
You can do a search for some of the dates
that we talked about in the episode, and you can
find copies of the actual original reports, the physical papers

(22:57):
that came out in the seventies, eighties, and nineties and
really kind of follow the paper trail, which is what
we did to make this episode. I would say it's
exciting and it really gets your mind going. You can
find an article from two thousand in the Weekly World News,
which is something our coworker Josh Clark has talked about before,
a publication about some of them less than reputable things

(23:21):
you'll find in that publication, but in this story, it
talks specifically about about Remy Chua's actions while she was
at work. Uh, and you know, take them with a
grain of salt if you want. But it talks about
how she would sit at the same place at the
lunch table where where everyone would gather to have lunch
there at the hospital. She would sit in the same
place that Tara Sea Bassa used to sit, and she

(23:43):
would sing quietly to herself the way Miss Bassa would do.
And this was all leading up to the stories of
that her husband was giving about her going into trances
on their bed at home. And you know, it's fascinating
to read this stuff. It reads like a Holly would
film and you know, perhaps there's a reason for that,

(24:04):
or perhaps it's true, and it's just hard to imagine.
And I would want to also ask for people too.
Don't don't feel like you can't write to us just
because you're not you're not a member of law enforcement.
People run into allegations of psychic activity all the time,

(24:26):
and many of us listening or even creating shows like
this or investigations like this, do so because we have
found things that we cannot at this point explain. And
it may be just as presumptuous to make the mistakes
A lot of people who I guess confuse themselves for

(24:46):
skeptics make by automatically saying that you know something is
because something is strange or currently inexplicable, that it's automatically
bunk with this. With this case, there's not any There's
not any case I can find in my research of
terasea basa um or excuse me, remi chua being investigated

(25:10):
or tested for any kind of extrasensory perception or so on.
And the truth of the matter is that had that
testing occurred and presuced produced some sort of statistically significant result,
then we probably would have heard of it, and you
probably would have heard of this case before. Still, ultimately,
and this is only my opinion here, the most important

(25:32):
thing is that the killer was apprehended. And finding the
real murderer instead of someone who's falsely convicted or instead
of just someone who gets away is something that is
um extremely important. And I'm not, you know, at all

(25:52):
condoning bending the rules of the law, although I'm sure
statistically that happens as well. You know, Ben I, I
can't agree with you more. And I to kind of
give some context with this case, I'm going to read
a quote that comes from the Chicago Tribune says, we
asked detective Statue who broke the case if he believed

(26:13):
the Chiwa's he said, quote, I would not call anyone
a liar. If they had said they heard a voice
from God, I would listen. It would be wrong for
me to cut off an informant. I talked to pimps, prostitutes,
drug addicts in the Belmont area. Doctor and Mrs Chua
are educated, intelligent people who live in a ninety thousand
dollar house. It's a distinct change for me. I wanted

(26:36):
information on this murder. I listened and acted on what
they told me. We went after Alan Showery. The case
was wrapped up within three hours. End quote. Thank you
so much for listening. Everyone. We would like to hear
your stories if you have similar stories of experiences like
this in law enforcement or not in law enforcement, in
any kind of forensic investigation, uh, maybe any thing you

(26:59):
encounter ard that you thought was just beyond the bounds
of rational explanation. You can find us on Twitter and
Facebook where we are Conspiracy Stuff. You can find us
on Instagram where we are Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can
also find every other audio podcast we have ever done
in the history of stuff they don't want you to know.
On you guessed it. Stuff they Don't Want You to

(27:22):
Know dot com. I had to take a breath before
that one, and that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
std w y t K. If you don't want to
do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.

(27:44):
We are conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they
Don't Want You to Know is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.