Teresita Basa: Ghost Detective

We like a bit of the old paranormal shenanigans on this channel so here’s a murder with a ghostly twist. As usual, we’ll go through the story first and then get into the weird stuff afterwards. Sometimes we manage to decode things, sometimes we don’t but it’s generally an interesting ride either way. This episode is about Teresita Basa, a woman who was murdered, and whose ghost then came back to bring her killer to justice. Did it? Didn’t it? Who knows but let’s get cracking!

The Murder of Teresita Basa

The first half of this story is pretty horrible and sad but we need to tell it in order to possibly make sense of the second half. Teresita Basa was born in the Philippines in 1929 and later migrated to the US where she completed a Masters Degree in Music. By February 1977, Teresita was living by herself and working as a respiratory therapist in a hospital near Chicago, Illinois.

She was also taking up music again, working on a doctoral thesis at Loyola University. Apart from being really brainy at music, she was just a normal person, getting on with life and giving out free piano lessons to local kids. She was not seemingly involved in any crime rings, dodgy dealings or other nefarious things.

Nope, according to all who knew her, Teresita was a decent woman and not the type of person you might think would be involved in any sort of violent event. Unfortunately for Teresita Basa, though, that was how she met her end.

On the evening of the 21st of February, 1977, Basa got a phone call from a work friend. During their chat, it came out that Basa was expecting a man to drop around later that night but she didn’t give a name or a reason why he was going to be there. The phone call lasted about half an hour. It was about an hour after that that Basa’s neighbours smelled smoke and the building’s janitor called the fire department.

When the fire fighters arrived, it became clear that the smoke was coming from Basa’s apartment. Inside the apartment they found a burning mattress and underneath that, the naked body of Teresita Basa. To make it perfectly clear that she had been murdered, there was a butcher’s knife still embedded in her chest and her clothes were in a pile beside her.

While it initially looked like a sexually motivated attack, investigators later concluded that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. The perpetrator had stabbed Basa, then tried to cover up the crime by burning her apartment down. While she had been discovered before her body and the apartment were completely destroyed, no notable evidence was found, apart from, amongst other bits and bobs, a note written by Basa saying “get theatre tickets for A.S.”

Who this “A.S” was, police didn’t have a clue and didn’t really know if it was pertinent to the crime or not. With no real suspects and no leads, the case went nowhere for almost 6 months.

Possession: Nine Tenths of the Law?

Finally, during the summer of 1977, a lead emerged from the case. And it wasn’t the usual sort of tip that police are used to getting. Detective Joe Stachula, which maybe rhymes with “Dracula”, I didn’t look it up, received a note asking him to get in touch with a Dr. Chua about the case. I’ve seen the doctor’s first name being given as “Juan”, “Jose” and “Joe” so let’s play safe and call him Dr. Chua.

When Stachula and his partner eventually met up with the Doc, he had a strange story to tell. He said that over the course of the summer, his wife, Remibias, also known as “Remy”, had been possessed multiple times by the ghost of Teresita Basa and that Basa had named her killer during these trances. According to Dr. Chua, Remy, who was also from the Phillipines, like Basa, had been having dreams and visions about the murdered woman.

One day while he was with her, she had taken a nap and then suddenly started speaking to him in a voice which wasn’t her own. She appeared to be in a trancelike state and asked the Doctor directly for his help, begging him to go to the police as her killer was still at large.

Chua said his wife spoke in Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines, with a Spanish accent that Basa had. Chua was understandably quite freaked out by this, especially after his wife snapped out of the trance and didn’t recall anything having happened. He didn’t do anything at first as the whole thing just seemed a bit weird.

Remy went into further trances over the next couple of weeks, though, with the phantom voice identifying itself as Teresita Basa. The ghost then went on to actually name her killer, saying that it was Allan Showery, someone who also worked at the hospital. Hey, he has the initials A.S.!

Why didn’t he pop up in a list of people the police might want to check out? This point seems impossible to decode! Moving on…the Chuas still didn’t want to bother the police with their paranormal visitations until eventually so much information was coming from Teresita via the mouth of Remy that they decided they had no choice.

Channeled through Remy, Basa confirmed the following details of the case:

Allan Showery was an acquaintance from work and he was supposed to go to Basa’s apartment on the fateful night to help her fix a television. Instead of helping her, he assaulted and stabbed her and hid her body under the mattress. Before lighting the mattress on fire to hide any evidence, he stole some jewellery from her room which had originally been bought in France for Basa’s mother.

Basa gave a description of a few distinctive pieces and said Showery had then given some of this jewellery to his girlfriend. Basa also gave Dr Chua the names of four people in her family who would be able to recognise and identify the pieces.

When the Chuas finally gave all this information to Detective Stachula, he thought it was worth a sniff, especially as they actually gave him the name Allan Showery, and the possibility of proving he’d been in the apartment via the stolen jewellery. The police hadn’t been able to ascertain if anything had been stolen from Basa’s apartment so here, possible possession aside, was a lead with something to back it up. Had Basa finally been able to steer the investigation towards her murderer?

Dead Women Tell True Tales

OK, so a ghost has turned up and spoken through a fellow Filipina, giving some details on a crime and actually naming the killer. If you were the police, would you follow up on this lead? Seeing as how they had had precious little to go on so far and that the initials of Allan Showery matched the previously unknown “A.S” on Basa’s note, Stachula probably thought “ah, what the hell” and he and another detective called Lee Epplen, decided to do a little checking up on this Showery character.

First off, they found that while he did work at the same hospital as Basa, it was in a different department so maybe that’s why they missed him before. Asking around, they were surprised to find out that other colleagues had heard that he was supposed to be helping Basa fix her TV on the day of the murder. Also, a background check turned up a couple of arrests for sexual assault and robbery, although no apparent convictions.

With a couple of things now lining up, Stachula and Epplen dropped in to see Allan Showery. He was home with his girlfriend who, the detectives noticed, was wearing a ring that seemed to match a description they had received from the ghost of Teresita Basa. While Showery initially denied having ever been to Basa’s apartment, he was happy to go back to the police station for a proper interview.

Well, he probably wasn’t happy about it but he went of his own accord is what I mean.

While at the police station, the detectives mentioned that they knew about the whole TV fixing thing and Showery eventually admitted that he HAD indeed been to Basa’s apartment the night of the murder, but that he hadn’t been able to fix the TV there and then and had just left. He said he’d gone straight back home because he and his girlfriend, Yanka Kumluk, had been having issues with the electricity in their apartment and he needed to go and sort that out. The detectives quickly nipped back for a chat with Kumluk who immediately threw Showery under the bus by basically going “eh?

What electrical problems? Allan fixing anything electrical, you’ve got to be kidding me!”

Taking another lead from the dead Basa’s information, the detectives asked Kumluk about any new jewellery Showery might have given her and she confirmed that in February, the month the murder was committed, he had given her a few new things, supposedly as a late Christmas present. Pressing the ghost’s tip-off even further, Stachula and Epplen contacted some of the people mentioned during Remy’s trance and they confirmed that these new pieces of jewellery did indeed belong to the Basa family.

This build up of evidence finally led to Showery cracking and confessing to the murder of Teresita Basa. Apparently Basa had been generous with money in the past, tipping him for helping out with errands and stuff as she knew he was having financial troubles. Showery said that he had intended to rob her as he was low on rent money but after the murder, which he admitted to staging to look like a sexual assault, he only found $30. He then took the jewellery too and set the place on fire.

Finally it seemed that the ghost of his victim had got her man.

The Trial

News that it was the victim herself who had identified Showery led to sensational news headlines when the trial came around in January 1979, such as “Voice from grave names murderer, begs vengeance” from the Boston Globe, “Woman in trance nails killer” from the Chronicle Telegram and “Did voice from grave finger murder suspect?”, a slightly saucy headline from the Chicago Tribune.

While the evidence seemed quite strong and Showery had confessed, he then changed his plea to not guilty, saying police had threatened him. His lawyer, William Swano, called out Remy Chua’s trances as fake and said there was no real probable cause to have gone after Showery in the first place. According to the Washington Post’s article, headlined “Voice from the Grave evokes a Murder Trial”, Swano is quoted as saying: “Never to my knowledge has a man been arrested because of a supernatural vision,(…)Police have never before been informed of a criminal’s name by a voice from the grave.”

It seems that the jury was also not convinced that Basa really did speak through Remy Chua as they deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. Don’t worry though, Showery actually did end up pleading guilty again a couple of weeks later and was sentenced to 14 years for the murder and a concurrent sentence for the robbery and arson. And then somehow he was paroled after serving just over 4 years which hardly seems right! So there you go, the case of the mysterious “voice from the grave” which put hopefully the right person in jail, even if it was for a pathetically short amount of time.

What do we make of it, hmmmm? Was Remy Chua really possessed by the ghost of Teresita Basa? If she wasn’t, how did she know all those details that led to Showery’s undoing? Let’s go into this in a bit more detail.

A Bit More Detail

Who was this Remy Chua? Yes, she also came from the Philippines, like Basa, and they did know each other a little. Chua had worked in the same hospital as Basa and therefore in the same hospital as Showery. She had been fired, however, around the time of the murder, although I couldn’t find out exactly when.

Presumably, with a personal connection and shared background with Basa, Remy Chua was affected deeply when she was murdered. Could this have made her a willing and effective vessel for the restless spirit of Basa who was probably getting a little cheesed off that the initials of her killer were literally in police hands but nothing was happening in her case?

Just imagine it: you’re Teresita Basa and you’ve just been brutally murdered. Your soul is floating about in the ether, making sure your killer is brought to justice. “Ok”, you think, “there’s a phone call I had, saying that a man was coming round.

I didn’t give a name but the police are looking for people I knew with the initials A.S. in that handy note I wrote myself. That should quickly lead them to Allan Showery and other people know he was coming round to fix my TV so at the very least he’ll be on the suspect list so I can go on to my soul’s final resting place, wherever that may be. Hang on, this is taking a bit longer than I thought.

Come on guys, ‘A.S.’ is Allan Showery! Look into him! He has previous arrests for burglary and sexual assault!

Guys? Guys???? Look, this is getting ridiculous now, drastic measures need to be taken.

I’ll just have to waft into my old pal Remy and get her to give the details to the cops. That will be believable, right?”

We only have the word of Remy and Dr. Chua about these “trances” as they didn’t happen in front of anyone else. Remy would apparently be totally unaware of what she had said and done after the messages were delivered. And they weren’t given in those frustratingly vague messages that supposed mediums or whatever get from the great beyond - I’ll let Simon go off on a rant about that here as I expect he’ll come up with something more entertaining than I can think of at the moment.

Bonus points if he does it in his Southern preacher voice!

Anyway, the messages coming from Chua explicitly stated that it was Teresita Basa talking. Chua’s voice and even her accent changed. Basa gave details that presumably Chua could have no way of knowing, such as the stolen jewellery and who to contact to confirm who it belonged to. She outright named Showery and begged Dr. Chua to take the information to the police.

How could Chua have known all this stuff? Was she really possessed by the ghost of her murdered friend? This isn’t the only time this sort of possession has happened but it’s definitely different from what would be considered a “demonic” possession.

I was looking up some general stats for exorcisms in the US and alarmingly, according to the New York Post, a Monsignor Stephen Rossetti and his team in Washington DC are currently ousting demons at the rate of up to 20 a week. Remy Chua wasn’t harmed and didn’t do any levitating or puking during her trance states and if we are to believe that it was Basa’s ghost telling the story, it seemed that she literally just used her as a vessel to get herself heard.

Some people just leave the story there, accepting that a strange and supernatural force was behind the case. But that’s not enough for us now, is it? While we cannot be 100% sure that these possessions weren’t real, or maybe just me at least, I’m sure Simon has said “ghosts aren’t real” at least a few times so far, there are definitely a few things that we can throw up as a rational defence.

Ghost Busters

When researching stuff like this story, I tend to be totally credible and just believe everything I read. Then I read an opposing view and am like “oh yeah. Duh.” So if you haven’t fathomed how this could possibly be anything other than a genuine ghost story, here are a few clues for you.

As previously mentioned, Basa, Showery and Chua all worked in the same hospital at some point. Chua’s husband proclaimed that while that was the case, Remy Chua had never actually met Basa or Showery. I’m pretty sure the Doc is mistaken on this point, though, as I read in more than one place that Chua believed Showery had complained about her and this had then led to her being fired. This must have happened not long after Basa was killed as Chua had her first vision about her just after learning she had been given the boot.

It was also alleged that Showery was harassing Chua and she believed he had prank-called her the day before her first vision. Coincidence? This does seem like suspicious timing. You believe a certain person at work has got you fired and the next day you’re having visions and naming him as a murder suspect? Hmm. Well, this is the strongest anti-possession theory we really have. Chua, whether consciously or subconsciously was channeling Basa and outing Showery as the killer.

And it seems to be a fact that these trance states actually happened. While they were not witnessed by anyone other than her husband, the Chua’s version of events never changed, even after Showery was eventually jailed. Was Chua faking the whole thing? Or was she using this as an excuse to be able to pass on important information with some sort of buffer between herself and Showery?

She was probably afraid of him and this might have been some combination of revenge for herself and genuine belief that he was the killer.

Remember that it seemed to be common knowledge that Showery had been going to see Basa to fix her TV on the night of the murder. If Basa had known he was in tight financial straits, it’s likely other people did, too. He would have been a person of interest in the workplace at least. Who knows, maybe he even told someone or alluded to it or even bragged about it and Chua overheard.

Maybe he told her direct to her face but thought she’d be too scared to tell anyone else. So, these “trances” might have actually been Chua’s subconscious at play, creating a safe space for her to get the information out to her husband but being able to hide it in her real life. This seems quite a likely explanation for how Showery was eventually found, but what about the other things like the jewellery?

The police had no idea anything had even been taken until Basa’s ghost pointed it out. Well here again we can maybe work that out. Maybe Showery had told people about his crime, or just mentioned that he had given his girlfriend some new bling and Chua put two and two together.

If you’re committing murder for $30, it’s unlikely that you’d be splashing out on unnecessary gifts at the same time. Or maybe Chua even saw the jewels in real life on Kumluk and recognised them as belonging to Basa. I really am grasping at straws here, though, as there doesn’t seem to be that much tying Chua to the amount of knowledge she had of the case.

How could she have known the names and numbers of Basa’s relatives? I suppose it’s possible that in the months following the murder she might have looked them up or got in touch with them to offer her condolences so maybe she did have prior knowledge but again, that’s me just spitballing.

Showery almost got away with the whole thing too, ironically because of this voice from the grave. Police hadn’t figured out his involvement prior to the messages from beyond and when he was eventually called in, he confessed due to the evidence found, not because a ghost had called him out. During his first trial, the Chuas were actually called as witnesses for the defence, the idea being that the whole “ghost possession” thing was so outlandish that no weight should be given to it and therefore the police had conducted their whole investigation into Showery without probable cause.

Instead of being convicted in what was otherwise an almost iron-clad case against him, all the spooky stuff muddied the waters, leading to a mistrial and the possibility of Showery walking free. It was only later that he decided to once again plead guilty, funnily enough right around the second anniversary of Teresita Basa’s death. So maybe he got a visit from the spirit world too, convincing him to finally admit what he did.

Or maybe he just did it to get a more lenient sentence which worked because he walked after four years! I’m still mad about that.

Let’s stay on the skeptical side for a bit longer. What might have made the Chuas concoct or at least stick to this story in the first place? Was there more than merely justice for Teresita Basa at stake? Mmmm, maybe.

Not long after the second trial, a book was written by Carol Mercado called “A Voice From the Grave: The Shocking True Crime Solved Through Psychic Phenomena”. She was a friend of the Chuas and they wanted to get their side of the story out. Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode featuring the case in 1990. In 1992, reporters John O’Brien and Edward Baumann published another book called “Teresita, The Voice from the Grave: The Incredible But True Story of How an Occult Vision Solved the Murder of Teresita Basa”.

In 1996, a dramatised version of the story came out as a TV movie called, guess what? “Crimes of Passion: Voice from the Grave”. Currently with an IMDb rating of 5.4, I won’t be adding it to my watchlist anytime soon. Plus, how can it really improve on the original story?

Anyway, my point was that maybe the Chuas got financial benefits from some of these things, the first book, definitely, I’m not really sure if they would earn anything from any of the other stuff. According to a book called “Sinister Chicago” by Kali Joy Cramer, the Chuas didn’t like the publicity that came with the case and kept low profiles after Showery was sentenced. This maybe points away from them wanting to make some supernatural moolah but at this point, we can’t say for sure.

Ghostly Wrap Up

Alright, so what do we think? Was Remy Chua:

1. Faking the trances and passing on information she had overheard or strongly suspected?
2. Actually going into some trancelike state due to fear and stress and passing the information on subconsciously?
3. Never going into any trances and the Chuas just made that bit up between them so they could blame the “ghost” if any of the details ended up being wrong?
4. Really possessed by a fellow countrywoman who was trying to get vengeance on her murderer?

While it doesn’t necessarily tie everything up in a nice neat bundle, I personally think the most likely answer is B, with the knowledge Chua had weighing on her so heavily that it came out in a weird way. Detective Stachula himself wasn’t sure quite what to think about it. He’s quoted as saying: “To this day, I’m not quite sure whether I believe how the information was obtained,(…) Nonetheless, everything is completely true.” So, the prevailing view seems to be that it doesn’t really matter how the information came out, what’s important is that it did eventually come out, leading to the right man being caught and Teresita Basa’s killer finally being brought to justice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Teresita Basa?

Teresita Basa was a woman born in the Philippines in 1929 who later migrated to the US. She completed a Masters Degree in Music and was working as a respiratory therapist in a hospital near Chicago, Illinois, at the time of her murder in 1977.

How was Teresita Basa murdered?

Teresita Basa was stabbed and her apartment was set on fire in an attempt to cover up the crime. She was found with a butcher’s knife embedded in her chest and her clothes in a pile beside her.

What was the initial suspicion regarding the motive for Teresita Basa’s murder?

Initially, it was suspected that the murder was sexually motivated, but investigators later concluded that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted.

How did the police get a lead in the Teresita Basa murder case?

Detective Joe Stachula received a note asking him to get in touch with Dr. Chua about the case. Dr. Chua’s wife, Remy, claimed to be possessed by Teresita Basa’s ghost, who named Allan Showery as the killer.

Who was Allan Showery and how was he connected to Teresita Basa?

Allan Showery was a coworker of Teresita Basa at the hospital. He was supposed to go to her apartment to help fix a television on the night of the murder but instead assaulted and stabbed her.

What evidence did Remy Chua provide during her trances?

Remy Chua provided details such as the stolen jewellery, the names of Basa’s family members who could identify the jewellery, and the fact that Showery had given some of the jewellery to his girlfriend.

What was the outcome of Allan Showery’s trial?

Allan Showery initially pleaded guilty but later changed his plea to not guilty, leading to a mistrial. He eventually pleaded guilty again and was sentenced to 14 years for the murder, but was paroled after serving just over 4 years.

What are some skeptical explanations for Remy Chua’s trances?

Some skeptical explanations include Chua faking the trances, using the trances as a subconscious way to pass on information she had overheard or suspected, or the Chuas making up the trances to blame a ‘ghost’ if any details were wrong.

What was the public’s reaction to the Teresita Basa case?

The case garnered sensational headlines and was featured in books and a TV movie. The Chuas reportedly did not like the publicity and kept low profiles after Showery was sentenced.

What was Detective Joe Stachula’s view on the information obtained through Remy Chua?

Detective Joe Stachula was not sure whether he believed how the information was obtained but affirmed that everything was completely true.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Teresita Basa: Ghost Detective
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.