Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Teresita Basa

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Dylan, of course. This is short stuff, short stuff, now.

So Josh, I have a question for you. Okay. 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, forget New Orleans. Right. Forget other creepy places.

This Chicago is the scariest place on earth. Right, I do say that. And you know what? After listening to this story, you might be right. Yeah, yeah, it is a surprising town. Like that's kind of where the Dunes murders started. That's where the Tylenol murders were, I think was in Chicago.

I just realized this is the third one, huh? Yeah, at the very least, at the very least. And in fact, part of this episode takes place in Edgewater Hospital, which look up abandoned Edgewater Hospital. There's like 50 pictures of this creepy abandoned hospital. Oh my gosh. God, those are the best.

And I think it was abandoned, maybe in the nineties, it's like 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-

Were they cremates? I don't know, 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 the alt-right linked them together? Eventually, if not, they will now. We just gave them a little piece, a little shred. Like no, but we'll look into it.

So at this Edgewater Hospital, there was a woman named Teresita Bassa who worked there and she was 47. She was Filipino. And apparently she was a well-to-do Filipino aristocrat, ex-pat who lived in America and worked as a respiratory therapist nurse in Edgewater Hospital.

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 sticking out of her chest. She'd been murdered. I think the fire department found her and they were really surprised with what they found.

Yeah, it was a pretty routine call for them of an apartment fire on February 2nd, 77. And under, like you said, under a mattress that was a clear murder because of that kitchen knife sticking out of her chest. Right, and plus you know. That would have been a heck of an accident. Sure, you stab yourself in the chest

and then set your clothing on fire under a mattress. Yeah, it would have been a heck of an accident, right? So this is, unfortunately, it just goes unsolved. There's like six months and these detectives who are working the case, they try out every lead, they start doing some investigating, they find, you know, maybe there were people who want her 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 Detective Joe Statula of Homicide came in one day, about six months later, saw a note on his desk that said, call the Evanston Police Department

about the Terracida Bossa case. He called Evanston and they said, hey, you need to call Dr. Jose Chua in Skokie. And he said, couldn't they have just put that on the note? Would it save me a phone call? Right. And they said, we wanted you to know it came from us. Right.

So Skokie, Illinois, which always reminds me of usual suspects. Oh, definitely. Does it to you too? Barbershop, Corten, Skokie. That's right, Skokie, Illinois. They went to see Dr. 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 38 years old. She has gone into trances three different times, saying in Taglog that she is Terracida Bossa and she needs help solving her murder. And here's who did it. Right, which is very, very weird

and kind of something that you would probably ignore, 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, Statula and his partner had reached a total dead end in this case and really any lead was worth pursuing at this point.

Right. And then two, not only had the doctor's wife, what is it, Remabasa? No, Remibius. Remibius. Remibius Chua. Dr. Jose Chua's 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 Terracida's apartment and had stolen things from it and that some of that stolen goods were jewelry that he had given to his girlfriend. So the fact that 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 up on it. And not only that, before we take our little break, she gave names of people who could identify this jewelry and telephone numbers of those people. Which is pretty nuts. Yeah, Ron Samera, Ken Bassa, Richard Pesalti,

and Ray Kings, and that's not even the murderer. So that's a pretty good setup. I think we'll take a break. Okay. And we'll tell you what happened right after this. S-Y-Y-Y-Y-S-K-S-K, S-Y-Y-Y-S-K, S-Y-Y-Y-S-K, S-Y-Y-Y-S-K, S-Y-Y-Y-S-K. S-Y-Y-Y-S-K, S-Y-Y-Y-S-K.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasscher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so she says, in these trances in Tagalog, that she is this murdered woman. Teresita Bassa.

This guy broke into my house who works at my hospital as a respiratory technician. He comes in to ostensibly fix a television, murders me, steals my jewelry that was given to me in France as a gift from my father to my mom. He stole the stuff. Here's the people that can verify it, hear their phone numbers.

They decide to investigate and it checks out. It checks out. That's the crazy thing. That's the crazy thing. The detectives start looking into this and they're like, oh, there is this man named Alan Showery. And he did work with Teresita Bassa. So let's go visit him.

And they went to- Because she named him. We've gotten that across, right? Right. She said, Alan Showery killed me. Right. That this woman in the trance said, this man, Alan Showery, was my murderer.

Yes. So the detective, and she gave enough information, the detectives followed up on it. They went to visit Alan Showery and they said, hey, will you come down to the station with us? And he went with them voluntarily, which is very important as we'll see in a minute. And they started interviewing him

about Teresita Bassa's murder. Apparently they write him as rights. They did everything by the book. 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 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 this pendant and this ring as a late Christmas present. And 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? I don't know if they took them from her. And they had Teresita Boss's relatives

that had been named apparently by Remy Chua to come down and look at this jewelry and say yay or nay, whether it was Teresita's and they said, yay. This is remarkable. So this is all plowing ahead. He is arrested and charged. There is a trial hearing.

Well, hold on, he confessed. Oh, yeah. So he confessed and is arrested. He's also got a trial. Sure, right. So they have a trial hearing on a motion from the assistant public defender, William Swanno. And he says, you know what?

There's no probable cause 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 cause. And never to my knowledge, quote, never to my knowledge has a man been arrested because of a supernatural vision.

Police have never been informed of a criminal's 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, regardless of whether this trance was Teresita Bassa possessing Remy Chua,

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. That happened. Yeah, and the judge said,

I see no reason to restrict the investigatory power of the police, whether they believe the voices or not, they had to check it out. And that was sort of the party line, which was like, hey man, it doesn't matter if a dog came out and peed out a name on the street. Like, they went to this guy's house and he did it. So like, who cares?

That was basically 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,

whether Teresita Bassa possessed Ramichurra or not, they followed procedure and they followed up on this tip. And so there's a trial. And during the trial, 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 pled guilty and didn't get a second trial and instead was given something like 14 years for the murder and then four years each for robbery and arson. But he only served, I think, something like five. Yeah, which is crazy too. In and of itself, it is crazy. But he was caught strictly because of that call from Ramichurra's husband, Dr. Jose Chua.

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 1978, I believe. Oh yeah, this is all true.

Then no one came out later and said, 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, I think we found some guy in a story and from Chicago wrote a post about it. He kind of captured what I suspect.

One thing that gets left out very frequently is that Ramichurra was a coworker. Of all three. Of all two. Yeah, of Teresita Bassa, went to a party at her apartment so knew where she lived. And then also knew Alan Showery and was actually scared of Alan Showery.

So this historian posits that she was actually so afraid of coming forward but so overcome by the guilt of keeping this thought to herself. Oh, that it came out through the, yeah. It just came out like that. And that. That makes sense. It would be more culturally acceptable to do that than to just keep it to herself.

Interesting. And that's where the trance came from. 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 12 minutes to it. More than that, man. 13 and a half, baby. That's it for this short stuff, right? That's right.

Short stuff away. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.