Short Stuff: Teresita Basa

In the annals of American justice there is a 1977 case where the police were tipped off to the identity of a murderer by a woman who said she was possessed by the victim.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you're welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Still and of course this short stuff short stuff now,
So Jos, I should have a question for you. I
know that every time we go to Chicago, you're always like,
this is the creepiest place I've ever been. It feels haunted.

(00:25):
Forget New Orleans, right, forget other creepy places. This Chicago
is the scariest place on earth. I do say that.
And you know what, after listening to this story, you
might be right. Yeah, yeah, um, it is a surprising town.
Like that's kind of where the Dunes murders started, That's

(00:47):
where the Thailand all murders were. I think I just
realized this is the third one. Huh yeah, at the
very least, at the very least. Um and in fact,
part of this um this episode takes place in Edgewater Hospital, which, um,
look up abandoned Edgewater Hospital. There's like fifty pictures of
this one maybe abandoned hospital. Oh my gosh, and um,

(01:11):
I think it was abandoned maybe in the nineties. Is
like this this empty abandoned hospital in a high rise.
But it's where Hillary Clinton was born and where John
Wayne Gacy was born. Really. Yeah, but by thet I
don't know. I don't. I didn't go to the trouble
of checking out their ages to see how far apart
they were. But wouldn't that be weird? Has a right

(01:33):
linked them together? Eventually? If not, they will. Now we
just gave him a little a little piece of little shred. No,
but we'll look into it. So. Um, at this Edgewater
hospital there was a woman named Tarasee to Bassa who
worked there, and she was forty seven. She was Filipino,
and apparently she was a well to do Filipino aristocrat

(01:55):
ex pat who lived in America and worked as a
respiratory therapist nurse in at Edgewater Hospital. Uh. And she
lived in Chicago, in Chicago proper, not in the suburbs.
And one day she is discovered in her apartment under
a smoldering pile of clothing, naked with a kitchen knife

(02:15):
sticking out of her chest. She had been murdered. I
think the fire department founder and they were really surprised
with what they found. Yeah, it was a pretty routine
call for them of an apartment fire on February two
and under like you said, under the under a mattress,
a clear murder because of that kitchen knife sticking out

(02:38):
of her chest, and that would have been an accident. Sure,
you stab yourself in the chest and then set your
clothing on fire under a mattress, that, yeah, it would
have been of an accident. Right, So this is unfortunately
it just goes unsolved. There's like six months in These
detectives who are working in the case, they try out
every lead, they start doing some investigating, they find, you know,

(03:02):
maybe there were people who wanted are dead. Nobody had
the right motive or opportunity. There was no good suspect
and they reached a total dead end within six months.
That's right. So, Uh. Detective Joe Statuela of homicide came
in one day about six months later, I saw a
note on his desk that said called the Evanston Police
Department about the Terra Seda boss A case. He called

(03:24):
Evanston and they said, hey, you need to call Dr.
Jose Chiwa in Skokie. And he said, couldn't they have
just put that on the note Let save me a
phone call, And they said, we wanted you to know
it came from US so Skokie, Illinois. Uh, which always
reminds me of usual suspects. Oh, definitely does it to

(03:46):
you too, barbershop quartet, that's right, Sco Illinois. Um. They
went to see Dr Joe Jose we call him Joe Chua,
who was also a Filipino, as we'll see, and they
interviewed him and he said, a weird thing has happened here.
My wife, she's thirty eight years old. She has gone

(04:06):
into trances three different times, saying in Tagalog that she
is tarasee to bassa and she needs help solving her murder.
And here's who did it, right, which is very very
weird and and kind of something that you would probably ignore,

(04:28):
especially if you got a call from somebody saying, yeah,
my wife went into trance and said that she's a
murder victim. But there were two things going on here. One,
Statuta and his partner had reached the total dead end
in this case, and really any lead was was worth
pursuing at this point, right. And then two, not only
had them the doctor's wife, um, what is it rema

(04:54):
bossa no rembias remibius chewa uh doctor Jose to his wife,
not only had she said that she was this murder
victim she named the murderer, and she also said that
the murderer had been in Terra Seda's apartment and had
stolen things from it, and that some of that stolen

(05:16):
goods were jewelry that he had given to his girlfriend.
So the fact that like this voice from the grave
was saying that she was a murder victim and also
saying who did it and what they did with the jewelry,
that was enough, apparently to convince the detectives to follow
upon it. And not only that, before we take our

(05:37):
little break, she gave names of people who could identify
this jewelry and telephone numbers of those people, which is
pretty nuts. Yeah, Ron, Samara kin Bossa, Richard past and
Ray Kings and that's not even the murderer. So that's
a pretty good setup. I think we'll take a break

(05:58):
and we'll tell you what happened after this. As s
k as all right, So she says in these trances

(06:29):
antagalog that she is this murdered woman, Teresa Teresa to Bassa,
h huh. This guy broke into my house who works
at my hospital as a respiratory technician. He comes into
ostensibly fix a television murders me steals my jewelry that
was given to me uh in France as a gift
from my father two my mom. He stole the stuff.

(06:54):
Here's the people that can verify it. Here their phone numbers.
They decide to investigate, and it checks out. It checks out.
That's the crazy thing. The detectives start looking into this
and they're like, there is this man named Alan Showery
and he did work with Tarasee to Bassa, so let's
go visit him. And they went to because she named him.

(07:15):
We've come out across right right. She said Alan Showery
killed me. That this woman in the trance said this
man Alan Showery was my murderer. So the detective and
she gave enough information. The detectives followed up on it.
They went to visit Allan Showery and they um, they said, hey,
will you come down to the station with us, and
he went with them voluntarily, which is very important, as

(07:37):
we'll see in a minute. And they started interviewing him
about Tarasee to Bassa's murder. Apparently they read him as rights.
They did everything by the book. Uh, they didn't arrest
him or anything like that. But he started answering questions
down at the station, and the more questions he answered,
the more they started to suspect that he was lying
because they were actually catching him in lies and contradictions

(07:58):
and things like that. And eventually he admitted to having
gone to her apartment to help her fix the TV,
but that she had called and canceled before he got there,
so he went home instead. Well, the second thing they
did was they went to his apartment and talked to
his girlfriend and said, hey, has your boyfriend given you
any jewelry recently? She said, well, yeah, he gave me

(08:20):
this pendant in this ring is a late Christmas present,
and um, I love them, don't they just look divine?
The late Christmas present? And the detectives say, well, yes,
that does look very nice, but can we see these
things or take pictures of them? And if they took
him from her, um, and they had Taraceta boss's relatives
that had been named apparently by raymie Chewa to come

(08:42):
down and look at these, um this jewelry and say
yeah or nay whether it was taracetas and they said yea,
this is remarkable. So this is all plowing ahead. Uh.
He is arrested and charged. There is a trial hearing here.
Hold on, he confessed, so he confessed, So they have

(09:05):
a trial hearing on emotion from the assistant public defender,
William Swanno, and he says, you know what, there's no
probable calls here. They got a call about a trance
that I think this woman faked, and that arrest was
illegal to begin with because they liked probable calls. And
never to my knowledge quote, never to my knowledge has

(09:28):
a man been arrested because of a supernatural vision. Police
have never been informed of a criminals name by a
voice from the grave. And the judge went, except until now,
because that's exactly what happened, dude. Yeah, the judge upheld
it in this hearing to throw out the entire arrest
because again, Chuck like, we're regardless of whether this trance

(09:50):
was taraset to Bassa possessing Ramy Chewa, regardless of what
you think of that. In the Annals of American Justice,
there is a case where a man was arrested because
of strictly because of a tip that detectives received from
a woman claiming to have been possessed by the murder victim.

(10:11):
That happened, Yeah, and the judge said, I see no
reason to restrict the investigatory power of the police, whether
they believe the voices are not. They had to check
it out. And that was sort of the party line,
which is like, hey man, it doesn't matter if a
dog came out and pete out a name on the street,
Like they went to this guy's house and he did

(10:32):
it right, so like who cares? That was basically the
whole the whole thing, Like they because the police followed
proper procedure, because they advised him of his rights, because
Alan Showery went with them voluntarily and answered their questions voluntarily,
and the fact that he confessed, like all of this,
it doesn't matter as far as the law is concerned

(10:53):
whether Taraseea Bassa possessed Rami Chu or not. They they
followed procedure, and they followed up on this tip. And
so there's a trial. And during the trial, um Alan Showery,
it looked like he might get off. There was a
mistrial in fact, but then he surprised everybody. While he
was awaiting a new trial, he played guilty and didn't

(11:15):
get a second trial and instead was given something like
fourteen years for the murder and then four years each
for robbery and arson. But he's still he only served
I think something like five which in and of itself
it is crazy. But he was caught strictly because of

(11:36):
that call from from Raimi Chiwa's husband, Dr Jose Chiwa.
And so now you have to go back and say
how much of this is true? And apparently everything we've
said is true and verified that there were reports done
on it. That thing about that hearing that was from
a Washington Post article we found from I believe this

(11:59):
is all true. That no one came out later and said,
you know, my wife's actually an amateur investigator, and she
thought it'd be kind of fun to solve this case
and then present it and wrap it in the enticing
book jacket of a trance right. What what the I think?
We found some guy in a story and from Chicago
wrote a post about it, and he kind of captured

(12:20):
what I what I suspect um. One thing that gets
left out very frequently is that Raimi Chiwa was a
co worker, uh kind of friend yeah, of Tara Sea
bassa Um went to a party at her apartment, so
knew where she lived and then also knew Alan Showery
was actually scared of Alan Showery. So this historian posits

(12:41):
that she was actually so afraid of coming forward, but
so overcome by the guilt of keeping this, this this
thought to herself. It just came out like that, And
that makes sense. It would it would be more culturally
acceptable to do that than to, you know, just keep
it to herself. That that's where the trance came from.

(13:02):
That she somehow acquired all this knowledge. If that's the case,
that's still pretty interesting too. Yeah, she could have been
sleep walking and talking, sure, which appears like a trance.
But either way, it's all pretty remarkable. It is pretty remarkable.
One of the most remarkable cases in American law enforcement
and justice. And that's why we dedicated twelve minutes to it,

(13:25):
more than that man thirteen and a half baby. Uh,
that's it for this short stuff, right, That's right, Short
stuff Away. Stuff you Should Know is a production of
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