Episode 477: The Murder of Teresita Basa

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Hey Weirdos, I'm Ash and I'm Alayna.

And this, right here, what you're listening to in your fucking ear meat is morbid.

It is morbid. I'm unhinged today. Ash is on a space level right now. But like, I'm not Fizzity, Fizzity fucked up, I'm just Fizzity, Fizzity, fucked up on life, on life, on happiness.

On vibes, on vibes, honestly, on hydration, yeah, me and Alayna, Alayna and I are drinking a lot of water.

Yeah, we're trying to hydrate more, we're manifesting our health and wellness. Yeah, we drink a lot of coffee, so we gotta balance it out. Yeah, I know I didn't even fucking finish my coffee today. whoa, I didn't either.

And I ate a salad.

I'm gonna scare you, I know I don't know what to say about that. It was good, I mean, I put a lot of dressing on it, so it really wasn't even a salad anymore, but.

But you know what, wellness still got? The nutrients in there ate the greens.

Whether they were soaked in parmesan, peppercorn or not. That's the thing if you want to eat a salad, but you want a lot of dressing. I see a lot of girlies on TikTok being like, No, don't put the dressing on it, because that will ruin the purpose of eating salad. No, it doesn't ruin the purpose.

No, no greens in your belly. Yeah, exactly, and no, we're not nutritionists.

And no, we're not any of those things, and I realize that some of you are woo. I don't think it's fine to eat whatever you want, everybody eat what you want.

You'll be fine. We're not giving health advice, Don't worry, we're not giving medical advice, I'm not giving nutritional advice.

I just like my salads with a shit ton of dressing on them, and I think if that makes you happy, you should do it too. My people, I am a life coach, I am that, I am that.

I just wanted to make sure we are not giving actual advice, that's not medical advice, that's just happiness advice, nutritional advice. Put dressing on your salad.

It's great, but do it, you have to do it if you want to live long.

It's Friday, it's Friday, it's not when you're listening to this, I think it's probably fucking Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You could put me four or five weeks in the future.

If you told me I'm going to push you off a cliff if you don't answer that correctly when this is coming out, I could not answer you. Can I tell you, whoa?

Whoa, can I tell you why I thought of you the other day? Why I saw? Do you ever see those things on Instagram?

And it's like, if you invite this person to a party and they're late, you win like several million dollars. who do you invite? Every single time? It's like gun to your head and you have to call this person and they can't answer or anything like that. I'm like, Oh, Elena, me.

I don't.

Well, I feel like you're way better at answering. I don't think I would feel comfortable calling you. If it was they can't answer, I'd be like, I don't know.

She might answer, That's true, I'm like a toss up me, you'd be like, she will absolutely not answer.

No way she screens her motherfucking calls. When you do answer my phone call, it's jarring. Yeah, I think it's jarring for everybody involved, but I don't like phone calls, so.

Yeah, but you're reliable in a weird way. I appreciate that you're welcome. I didn't want anyone to think that I was like, full blown insulting you.

No, that's cool, yeah, it's what we do here, it's what we do. We just insult each other.

Fuck you bitch, you're the worst. I hate you. Everybody's like, What the fuck is going on? Everybody's like, Are you guys alright?

Leave it all in. Yeah, leave it in. this is the truth, mention it all.

What an intro, I know, what an intro this is. What are you bringing to the table today? You know what it is?

Sometimes I haven't even gotten to it yet. We're getting there, though.

So we're recording, recording, recording, and we're claiming our power back and we're feeling all like, well, right now. I have a unicorn ponytail, she does.

So I don't know, that's where we are, we are. The scariest thing about this is, I'm not kidding.

We are full blown. Oh, sober as a yes as a judge.

As a shoe, sober as a shoe, you know, I mean, as an alliteration.

Actually, that's honestly. Shoes are always sober. I was going to say, there's never a time where I have can say I've seen or heard of a drunk shoe. You have, Mikey, have you heard of a drunk shoe?

I your shoe when you went to that event, Oh my god, that's true. She wasn't drunk, she was just a bitch.

Yeah, my shoe. my shoe was broke. she was broke. She was. yeah, she was a broke bitch.

Literally, that's what my shoe was. You gotta send that shoe out, by the way. Yeah, I do have to send it out.

Make an appointment. I gotta get a cobbler to fix that shoe. I heard there's still cobblers. Hell yeah, there are.

Yeah, Cobblin, every day, I'm Cobblin, cobble, cobble, Cobble, Cobble, cobble, cobble.

I can't fix my shoe, I need a cobbler for that. No, honestly, I was going to say, you could fix that shoe, but no one could fix that shoe. No, no one could. We tried all over the place.

An entire event did. I was going to say, I was like at an event where we had to, like, walk out on stage. Yeah, but Alayna had long pants on and I was like, just walk out barefoot and then just don't cross your legs when we get out there. And if I do, I'd just be like, this is who I am.

I don't wear shoes, but no, she walked out there with a broken heel. It's true, but going back to the point, yeah.

What was the point? I've never seen a drunk shoe. Shoes are always pretty sober. Yeah, but judges?

I don't know their life like them to be and they should be. I mean, I don't want to lay down the law. But. But even when they go home at night, they're fallible.

Yeah, and even when they go out to dinner or like to a birthday party, they're they're a judge, but like, still, they're, but they're not on the clock. It's just like they're getting crazy. At birthday parties, no one knows what it means, but it's provocative. You ever been to a birthday party with a judge?

Can't say I have. Where are we? I don't know, but we're going to find our way back. Where do we go from here? Where we go from here is a pretty wild tale.

It's also it's a sad tale because it involves like, a really, really cool lady who lost her life in a terrible way. But then she ends up solving her own murder. Oh, shit, from beyond, beyond.

Beyond, beyond, beyond, this is beyond so.

Oh, okay, all right, let me get a little more serious. So now we're going to settle in to this tale because this is a wild one and I think this is one Dave, like, loved this one, too.

This is just such a good like. In the end, when it all comes together, you're like, Hell, yeah, cause she, like, solved her own shit. You know, that song that's on TikTok right now, where it's like, mm, mm, mm mm, mm mm. Yes, exactly, it's going to be like that at the end.

That's what it is. It's happy in the end. Okay, I like that now. Thank you for setting us up to know that.

No problem, just so you can, like, roll with me here, cause there's some really sad parts, I'll roll with you. But this is the case of Teresita Basa, the voice from Beyond the Grave.

And again, like I said, this is a case where a ghost possibly pointed to her own murderer. Now let's talk about Teresita, because Teresita lived a pretty cool life. She seemed like a really cool lady, very kind, like just somebody who you wanted to be around. Teresita Basa was born on March 13th, 1929, in Dumaguete City, Philippines, and she was the only child of Pedro and Socorro Basa.

So Teresita, right off the bat, was a very passionate child. When she liked something, she dove headfirst into it. And she took a lot of different interests, a lot of different likings to different things. Like, she was really well-rounded, but she really loved music, and she loved gardening especially. And her mother had this beautiful and lush garden in the back of their home, and she showed her everything she knew about taking care of it.

And Teresita's family was actually one of the wealthier on the island at the time. And this afforded her the tools at her disposal to learn the skills that she was interested in. She was able to dive into music, she was able to take time to learn gardening, and she wanted to learn piano at one point. I really want to learn how to play piano.

I love the piano. Yeah, I want to dive back into the piano really bad. So her family, of course, wanting to, like, nourish whatever it is she was interested in. They had imported a Steinway grand piano from Manila, and she would sit around this piano and just play for hours.

And she would learn all the classical music, like she was amazing at it, and when she wasn't learning to play classical music on the piano. She would be sitting in front of their Victrola. With a pile of 78 records, absorbing all the latest songs that had made their way to the Philippines. I love picturing this right now, yeah.

Like, it's just she sounds like a cool chick. She does, she really does right from the get go, too.

She was just like music, she was into shit. Yeah, she sounds just like a fun time, yeah.

Just sitting there, listening to records, and I'm sure it took a little while for certain songs to get to the Philippines. So like she was discovering them on a whole different wavelength, like, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, that's cool.

That is cool now. When the Japanese army invaded the Philippines in 1941, Dumaguete was used as a critical strategic point. And at this time, her parents were kind of agonizing over whether they should leave altogether or flee into the mountain regions. To just avoid everything. Because many other people had done so. And ultimately, Pedro, her father, was persuaded by those in authority to stay because the local government was, like, kind of on the verge of collapse. And quote. His counsel would be needed more than ever, so he was a very influential guy in the government.

Okay, wow. And the invasion was a profound influence on Teresita, who was a teenager at the time. She had grown up and she was very used to learning English in the classroom, but was now against her decision, being forced to learn Japanese in its place. Oh, wow, and she was comfortable learning English.

She was now like thrown over to this other thing that she didn't choose, right? And at the same time, this island paradise that she had enjoyed as a child, where, you know, she knew everybody. It was like they were in this nice little routine and.

You know, easy living thing. It was now dramatically transformed, and a lot of Filipinos were forced into service work for the soldiers. It was really bad, there was like a lot of bad stuff happening.

So very drastically different from when she had grown up. She's a teenager. That's so hard. That's such an important time in your life, yeah.

And for, like, your home to be changed so dramatically, like that, yeah. And that's, I mean, like, everything is changing in you, like as a human, every part of it. Now, everything around you is changing.

I can't imagine having to adapt to that. So, by 1947, the island had more or less kind of returned to normal, luckily. But for Teresita, it was a lot of like trauma and a lot of memories. There was a lot of violence there that had happened, a lot of oppression that had happened and PTSD going on.

Yeah, so she was like, it just wasn't the same. So she made the decision to move to Manila, and once there, she studied music at St.

Scholastica's college, and eventually, she became a very accomplished pianist. And after her graduation, she ended up moving to London and continued her studies in music. At the time at the Royal College of Music in London. Nice now. London was very different than where she had grown up.

She had grown up in a tropical climate, a very tight-knit community. Sunlight, Yeah, like that, she was very used to all that.

And it was like a whole new world for Teresita. London Culture shock. But she loved it, she loved it, and whenever she could get away from schoolwork, she would love just exploring the city.

And she loved all the outdoor concerts that would happen and all the different things that she could go to, the museums, all that fun stuff that is fun. So, after two years at the Royal College of Music, Teresita graduated with a certificate in Piano Forte, and she loved being in London.

She loved her time away, she had a good time, she met some people, she did some things, but she was missing her friends and family in her home. As we all do.

So she had hoped to return back home just for a visit. But instead, she actually was convinced by her friends to go on a tour of Europe with them. Oh, shit, and she did backpacking.

Yeah, she ended up visiting Vienna, Salzburg, Paris, other places, like all kinds of cool places. That's a dream of mine. And it was in Paris that Teresita met a Russian composer by the name of Alexander Cherepnin.

Ooh, he sounds hot. I looked up. How to say that he definitely took a liking to Teresita, but a liking in, like a mentor way, Oh, okay.

I was like, Am I going to regret my past statement? And he was very impressed by how dedicated she was to music, her skills, like just how varied she was in her musical talents. And he really believed that she could become a great composer if she continued her studies. Wow, what a fucking compliment.

I know, right, so Cherepnin and his wife actually both taught at Depaul University in Chicago. Oh, and funny that they met them in Paris, I know.

And invited Teresita to visit them anytime she was in Chicago. So it sounds like this was, like, meant to be. They really liked her. Yeah, so in the summer of 1957, she was 28 years old, and she ended up flying from the Philippines to Honolulu, Hawaii.

And from there, she traveled a pretty short distance, relatively, I suppose, to Bloomington, Indiana. Yeah, it's only like a six hour flight. Yeah, there you go.

Insider Insider And there is where she enrolled in the Foreign Exchange Visitors program at Indiana University. During her time there, she made a lot of friends, she really did well academically.

She had a good time, but she didn't end up finishing her credits completely. She was actually just a handful of credits shy of completing her graduate studies. And she ended up relocating to Washington, D.C. Like out of nowhere, all right?

And I think she was just like be-bopping, you know, like she was just hitting everything, be-bop-a-loop-a-baby. So she relocated to Washington, D..C. and that's where she took a job as a typist with a family friend. This family friend was working in the government because, remember, her parents are very influential.

Like, they are doing stuff in the Philippines. And so this was like a connection, right? And so she could do this typing job while also continuing to study music at the Library of Congress. Oh.

Yeah, she's doing everything, Teresita, teresita. So while she's working and studying in Washington, D.C. she attended a diplomatic reception.

Fancy? mm-hmm. And there is where she met Edward O'Meara, who was a Chicago lobbyist, and he took an immediate liking to Teresita. But in the romantic sense. Mm-hmm. And remember, she's like a grown adult at this point.

Yeah, she's like 28. And soon after this first meeting, they started dating and they started spending a ton of time together. And then, unfortunately, just as the relationship was kind of like taking off, her visa was set to expire. No.

And she was required to return to the Philippines before she could apply for U.

S citizenship. Oh, goddamn. So. In 1965, she was 36 at this point, and she returned home to her parents. And Edward actually came to visit a ton, like came to the Philippines to visit.

Romance? But during his final trip to Dumaguete, Pedro Basa, her father, found something out about Edward O'Meara. Of course he did, he works in the government, of course he did.

Could not get anything past. Pedro. Pedro found out that Edward had been frequenting one of the city's brothels, Bitch, and that ended Teresita and Edward's relationship. Mighty fast, good.

And Pedro was essentially like, I think it's time for you to leave bye and go home to the USA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out, yeah.

Or actually, maybe you should, yeah. So Teresita was devastated, yeah, by this.

Because one, it's like she's been duped, and then now she can also never see him again. Yeah, it's like, not only has her relationship ended in this awful way, but now her dreams of returning to the U.S. are kind of put on hold. Yeah.

And instead, now, she decided she was just going to continue pursuing her passion for music. She started teaching piano at Silliman University, and she was trying to find happiness where she was in the Philippines. But no matter how hard she tried, she really couldn't feel comfortable there. I think she had dealt with a lot of the trauma. That was still kind of like soaking into the ground there with growing up and being a teenager through all that.

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On top of that, that uncomfortability that she was feeling a little bit, she just could never feel at home again. It makes sense. She was also feeling humiliated because she had been basically duped by this slick American guy, and like, that was the talk around town, she had been duped by this stupid American.

And even so, she was excited because her visa ended up being approved. And she was like, You know what, I'm going to shake this up. Yeah, I don't need him, no.

I don't need him to go to the United States. So she was, she was able to return to the United States without that asshole, I was going to say, because there's plenty more for her in the United States than just that loser. So, on December 7th, 1971, 42-year-old Teresita Basa returned to the United States.

Okay, and she had less than $400 in her pocket and a small amount of luggage, and that's all she had to start a new life. Damn so. With help from the Philippines consulate in Chicago, she was able to find an apartment on Mozart Street, in the city's northwest side.

How fitting, yeah, right, Mozart Street, yeah.

And she decided she was going to complete her graduate studies at Indiana University, and in the meantime, she would find more work as a typist during this time. So she just went back to what she knew now. Edward O'Meara had really traumatized Teresita, and she was reluctant to even make new friends, yeah.

Because she didn't trust anyone exactly, and she spent a lot of her time just reading, kind of exploring the city alone. And she decided she loved the city of Chicago, and this is where she wanted to make her home.

Now, although she had hoped she'd be able to continue her studies and find work as a piano teacher, it didn't take long for her to figure out that. The job market for musicians was kind of small, a little tough at the time. The competition was fierce and the schedule really wasn't great for her. And she wasn't going to be able to make enough money to support herself in the meantime. So, she enrolled as a student in the respiratory therapy program at the Central Y.M.C.A. Community College in September of 1972. And in the late Spring of 1974, she graduated from that, um, that program.

And she quickly found work as a therapist at Edgewater Hospital in Chicago good for her. So she's working as like a respiratory therapist. She's just like rolling with the punches, she's a badass.

Like, she's like, Oh, this won't work, I can just excel at this other thing and I'll just get a job here. Like, she's just killing it, yeah, like nothing can deter her.

Yeah, she's just like an independent lady, she doesn't need anybody, and she's going to figure out how to make it work. So she working at Edgewater kind of opened up a whole new world of experiences for Teresita.

Her new salary meant that she could find a new apartment, a little larger, and this one could accommodate a piano. So in September of 1974, she moved into a big apartment. And this was in the Pine Grove Apartments, which was a new apartment building across from Lincoln Park. And she immediately began looking for a small piano. And now, with her success, and you know, school and the new job and moving into this bigger place, she had some new confidence and she started kind of opening up to new friends. Yeah.

And she was like, You know what, I'm working with some cool people, I can hang out with these people. Not everybody sucks. Like Edward, Yeah.

It started making her see that, like I can be, I can live my normal life. So she became very close with Ruth Loeb, who was one of the hospital administrators. She became one of her best friends. And not long after moving into the apartment, she found a very. A small, but like, very reasonably priced electric organ at a music shop nearby. And she had it put in her apartment. Now, she, she would play all the time.

And then she ended up forming a small music group with her cousin and a few coworkers. Oh, that must've been so much fun. Yeah, like, it's so cute. And they would call, and they called themselves the Mahogany Five plus one, and they had five Filipino members.

It was her cousin and a few coworkers, and then a drummer who was like, the only white guy. Oh my god, I love it. That's why they called themselves the Mahogany Five Plus one. That's incredible.

That is mahogany five plus one. So the name was like a funny play on that, yeah, and the band played like parties and events. Like, basically, whenever they had time outside of work, they would play at different things. Oh, yeah.

TERESITA Yeah, and with the new job and apartment and a really cool small group of friends, the the Like, the band happening. She finally felt like her new life was like coming together. She was feeling comfortable, but she still had a lot of feelings from that heartbreak. Oh, yeah.

I mean, of course, yeah. She was still not ready to totally like, give in to anybody romantically, she was not feeling dating, yeah.

Didn't want to get out there romantically, yeah. And um. In the fall of 1975, she got a letter from a former pen pal of hers. Robert, who was saying that he would be in Chicago for a convention and would like to take her to dinner. Okay, his name was Robert Krauth, I believe.

Uh, Krauth had intended to take her on a date. That was his intention with this. It wasn't like, I want to take you to dinner as friends. He was like, I like you, yeah.

And I want to take you to dinner. I kind of got that vibe. So he showed up at her apartment to pick her up. And she had invited two of her coworkers with her. Uh-huh, and the two coworkers said We kind of look out for her.

They were just like, We're coming that bitch moment, so he was like, all right, he's like, Okie, Dokie. So, unfortunately, the fear of getting romantically or emotionally involved with men especially would be something that she would kind of have to deal with her whole life.

She wasn't ready to move on from that. Yeah, but fortunately, Teresita never let it get to her and never let it take away anything from her life. She was happy and she was fulfilled regardless. So truly, with the exception of like, the small amount of like introvert, kind of like hiding away-ness that she had. When she first arrived in Chicago, she ended up loving spending time with friends.

She, like, loved any opportunity to throw a party. She was like a social gal, my kind of girly, so she really got over it. I also love that.

She was like, If you want to be my lover, you got to get with my coworkers, you know? So you got to get with my band. So after what would be her eventual death? Because obviously we know how this ends. I know many people would say that, although she was what they referred to as a straight person, meaning she didn't drink or use drugs.

Yeah, straight edge. She always kept beer and good Scotch whiskey on hand for whenever she was entertaining for everyone else. What a fucking dude. she's so cool. What a girl.

My girl now. One of the biggest and most memorable parties that Teresita ever threw was in the summer of 1976. Her mother had come to Chicago for a visit, and Teresita was so excited to take her mom around. The city show her all the things that had caused her to just fall in love with that city. And she also wanted her mom to meet all of her friends that she'd made, you know, and especially her coworkers. Like Ruth, Loeb and another new friend who she had been spending time with at work, named Alan Showery.

So it was like a great time. And I love how close she was to her mom. Yeah, like that, her mom, like, taught her how to garden, right?

They had that bond. And then it's like she just couldn't wait to show her mom, like the new city that she loved. That's really special now. At about 3 p..m. the evening, the afternoon of February 21st, 1977, Teresita was preparing to leave the hospital after a long day of work.

And she was putting on her coat, getting ready to leave when her friend Alan, who? I just mentioned Alan Showery, I didn't like your face when you said, Alan. Yeah. He came into the room and they just kind of chatted and they left together. They were going to catch the bus together.

They would do that often because the bus went by both their apartments, so they would just get on the bus together right now. On the ride home, Teresita had mentioned to Alan that she was her. Television was all fucked up. And he was like, Oh, I can come by tonight and take a look at it and see if I can try to fix it. I'm kind of handy.

And she was like, Oh, that's great. And then they kind of discussed the Mahogany Five Plus One's upcoming show that they had. And Teresita said that they might be losing their drummer soon. And so Alan was like, I can play the drums, like, if you need someone to sit in, like, I can do that for you.

Minus one, plus one, exactly. So Teresita was like, Oh, you know what? You can buy a ticket to see us at the show and then you can decide if you really want to, like, be a part of it, yeah.

And at the time, Alan was like, I can't really, like, I don't have a lot of extra money, so I can't really do it. And before getting off at her stop, she was like, Listen, I'm going to set a ticket aside for you and you can come pick it up later. What a sweetheart, yeah. So once she'd settled in at home, that that evening, she called her friend, who was also her bandmate, Dr.

JOHN Abella And a little after 7 p..m. They were just chatting on the phone. They discussed the upcoming show, you know, they talked about ticket sales and how they were going to market it. And Teresita had also said that her friend Alan, who he also knew might be taking, could take over the drumming seat.

And he was like, and she was like, Oh, it might be, you know, a good opportunity for you to hear him play if we can get you guys all together. They talked for about 10 minutes and then Teresita apparently excused herself and said, Someone's knocking at the door and she told she did tell him I was. She was expecting company and she said someone who might buy a ticket to the concert. So at about 7.30 p...m. Teresita got another call and she answered.

Okay, and it was her friend and coworker Ruth Loeb, and they just kind of chatted for about 20 minutes. Very casual chat, just best friends, you know, besties, besties being besties, yeah.

And Teresita mentioned that she, quote, had a male visitor, and Ruth did hear a male in the background. Just kind of chatting, like nothing crazy. But she didn't give Loeb a name before ending the call. Okay, that was the last time that Loeb or anyone else would speak to Teresita Basa.

So a little after 8.

30 p.

M.

Catherine and Mario Nazzi I believe it's how you say it. They were cleaning up after dinner, They lived on the 15th floor in the Pine Grove apartments where Teresita lived. I know that's high up, that is, they were just cleaning up.

And they, you know, not long after turning off the television, they just kind of, like, settled in for the evening. And Mario was like, What is that smell? and he suddenly smelled burning. Oh no, so they were like, What the fuck?

So they all they ran around their apartment being like, did anything burn or something left on right, and they couldn't find anything. And Mario opened the door in the hallway and was immediately overwhelmed with smoke that was like filling up the floor. So he screamed for his wife to run out with him.

And they started running down the hallway, yelling fire and banging on their neighbor's doors to try to get everybody out right. And as they made their way to the elevator, Mario got. He got out of the elevator on the seventh floor to let the building's janitor know his name was Petro Lulusa. Okay?

He was like, I'm sending my wife to the lobby. But like, there's a fire, we got to get everyone out. Yeah, which, like, badass, you also shouldn't use the elevator in a fire, right?

Probably not, yeah, but Chicago firefighters had actually made their way into the hallway at this point because the fire alarm started going off. And they told the men, please leave immediately. And they had to crawl on their hands and knees, like under the smoke.

It was really thick at this point and they were going through trying to make sure everybody was out of all the different rooms. And they entered Teresita Basa's apartment and noticed that whatever the smoke was coming from, it was coming from inside this apartment. Her apartment was the smoke, and not only that, but it was coming from the middle of her bedroom floor, like right next to the bed.

That's where it seems to be originating. That's weird. And it was still burning, so they used axes and they smashed all the windows, the balcony door in her bedroom. And they just were trying to vent out all the smoke and they were able to put the fire out.

And I think they had to use like the fire hose and two handheld extinguishers, so it was pretty big. And once they had cleared it all, the fire, lieutenant Warren Wellin began investigating, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on here. And he said, it looked like somebody had attempted to burn the mattress in that bedroom. And there was a pile of clothes on the floor and it looked like the mattress had been put on the pile of clothes and then lit on fire.

Weird, so he, like, kicked the smoldering pile and was like, what the fuck is under here? like, what's going on? And that's when he discovered the nude body of Teresita Basa, and he found a butcher knife embedded to the wooden handle in the exact center of her chest.

Oh my god, yeah, it was mayhem. Teresita's apartment appeared to have been completely ransacked. They immediately thought that this was a rape, murder, or perhaps a robbery gone wrong.

And they thought it was a rape because she was found nude, right, of course, and with the clothing and mattresses piled on the body. They thought it was basically set ablaze to get rid of any evidence. The fire caused a ton of damage to Teresita's body.

She had burns on both sides of her body and head, and little left of her jet black hair was found now. Fortunately, though, the fire hadn't made its way through the heaviest part of the clothing pile, so a lot of her face, torso and upper legs were spared from being burned. That's good now. Fire Lieutenant Whalen radioed the police because now they had found a body and it was clearly a murdered body.

Right? And so they called in the body and detectives arrived at the scene pretty quickly. Now, to the more seasoned detectives, the crime scene particularly, especially the pile of clothes in the center of the floor. It made them think of William Hirons, who is the lipstick killer? We haven't covered him yet, that's actually on my list to cover.

He murdered several women in the mid 1940s, and he would leave piles of items at the crime scene as like his signature. Oh, weird. So immediately they were like, Whoa, this is wild. But Hirons had been in prison for decades. I was just going to say it was no longer the 40s.

So they were like, but they were like, Is this a copycat? This just is a weird thing to do. Yeah, so, but they were like, I don't know what this is, but it's not good. So, from a quick search of the apartment, detectives were able to identify the victim from photos and personal papers and stuff.

And they noted that there were three locks on the door and not one of them had been damaged or broken at all. Like whoever the killer was, it was likely that they were led into the apartment by Teresita. There was no struggle in that sense. The bedroom, though, really looked like a robbery had occurred.

Jewelry boxes were open and flung on the floor, they were overturned, drawers were pulled out, the contents of everything was strewn around the room. It was a mess, and the living room was kind of in a similar state of disarray. Like plants, vases, tables were flipped over, two televisions were side by side in front of the sofa, and next to them was her organ.

I'm also like, Does she have a downstairs neighbor? I know, like, what happened here? did somebody hear anything now? Outside the bedroom? They didn't really get a lot of evidence, just like aside from the chaos out there, but they did find a note.

It was on a memo pad by the phone, and on it was written in Teresita's handwriting Get tickets for a.

S.

ALAN SHOWERy So officers and they saw that and they were like, we should collect that, I don't know who that is. So officers started going door to door, interviewing residents on each floor. Just trying to learn something about her, about anyone she knew, and what they found was that she was very private.

She was a private person, she kind of kept to herself when it came to her neighbors, but the neighbors said she was very pleasant. But I just don't know a lot about her. And the best lead they could find came from the janitor, Petro. And he told detectives that he had seen Teresita arguing with someone in the lobby a few weeks earlier.

He said he was a white guy, about 50 years old, and he seemed like he'd been drinking. That's weird. And he said, Unfortunately, he couldn't really hear what they were arguing about. Because he's like, I really shouldn't be listening to people's conversations like I wasn't trying to.

We're in the city here. Yeah, like, I'm going to leave that alone. But he said he hadn't seen the man before this, and he hadn't seen him since. Hmm.

Teresita's neighbor across the hall, Bruce Campbell, which I was like, Wow, Bruce Campbell, evil dead, ah, sorry. I was like, Yeah, I'm not picking up what you're putting down.

So Bruce Campbell, her, you know, neighbor from across the hall, yeah. He said he had seen her with a man as well, and she never told him the man's name, and she didn't hear it. She never introduced him or anything, but Campbell was, like, fairly certain that the man was a sheet metal worker.

He remembers her saying something about that, Okay, now? Catherine Nazzi, who was the one who had helped alert everybody about the fire, she gave investigators another lead. She said she didn't know too much about Teresita personally, but she did recall hearing from another neighbor a few weeks earlier that Teresita had been attacked or raped. Or something like that. What?

According to Catherine, Teresita apparently had been standing at the door trying to get her key into the lock. And a man in a ski mask grabbed her and attacked her. What? But she didn't have any more information about that, so they asked the building manager. Joyce Kaltzman and Joyce Kaltzman remembered another incident in September of 1974, where they had to have the locks changed after someone broke into Teresita's apartment and stole something. What?

Yeah, what are you telling me right now? I'm not sure what, that's the thing.

Like, no one had any real information and that was what they told them. But all that's so sinister. So two separate instances where somebody broke in, and in one of those instances she was raped. Well, they said she, the way she said it was that she had been attacked or raped, or something like that.

What we learn is she was not raped. Okay, she might've been attacked, though. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Jesus, yeah, now. The case was assigned to 40 year old homicide detective Joseph Stahula. Obsessed already, he was on the force for, like, a decade or more.

Definitely had already made a name for himself as like the guy who gets shit done. Like, he's not going to quit Stahula, he's not going to go anywhere. And so initially, he, like everyone else, believed this was a rape, murder, arson, robbery kind of thing, making it very high profile.

You would think so. Once the scene had been secured, Stahula and his partner, Lee Burley Eplin, obsessed. They headed to the apartments to kind of look over the scene. It was basically how they had been told it would be like very little leads to go on right off the bat.

But in the kitchen, Stahula found a cutting board out on the counter and there was some lettuce and half a tomato. And next to that was a small piece of meat still wrapped in butcher's paper. Okay, and now? The only thing that was very absent from this scene in the kitchen was a knife that had been used to cut the vegetables. And he assumed, and was correct, that it was the knife that was found protruding from Teresita's chest.

So she had been cooking with it earlier, Yeah, now. Other than that, the detectives discovered some, you know, personal papers. They found her address book with a lot of names and $30 in cash, and that address book had the names and numbers for like everyone she knew.

So they were like, jackpot. Now. As Stahula and Eplin made their way through this address book, they were calling people trying to get anything they could. They finally came across the numbers of Ray King and Richard Pizzotti. They were two men who had accompanied Teresita out to dinner with Robert Krauth a few years earlier. They were the two coworkers that were like, we kind of look out for her.

Oh shit, they were the ones that she brought to dinner with the guy who wanted to take her out. So these are good guys, yeah, and these two men confirmed they came, like, and were there for this.

They confirmed that Teresita didn't have a boyfriend, not to their knowledge, but that she, like, hung out with men. I think they said she liked men for their company, yeah, but they were like, No, she wasn't romantically involved with anyone, right?

And they did say in the months before her murder, she had, like, seen off and on. This man named Robert Knudsen, who was a construction worker in his early fifties. Who knows if that was the guy that they had seen, that the neighbors had seen her and the janitor had seen her arguing with, Yeah, kind of a white guy in his fifties, Yeah, right.

Now, the detective's next call was to Ruth Loeb, that was Teresita's coworker and closest friend. Yeah. Ruth confirmed that she had spoken to Teresita on the night of the murder and that the two had made plans to have lunch the following day. I can't imagine having that knowledge like that. Your friend, you got off the phone.

Ooh, yeah. And then they got murdered, like, Oh my God. And she had told her like, I have someone, like, someone knocked at the door, she's like, I heard that person come in.

Right, like, Oh? And she told detectives that while she was on the phone with her, she heard a male voice that in the background. And she said she couldn't make out what he was saying, just that it was a male voice. And the best she could tell was that Teresita was, you know, in good spirits, didn't seem to be in this man's company against her will didn't seem to be like, stressed out or anything.

Nervous at all? Very normal conversation, very normal attitude. And the information from Ruth confirmed the earlier suspicion that Teresita's killer was likely known to her and was let in voluntarily. Now, going to the autopsy on the morning of February 22nd at the morgue, pathologist Dr.

Tai Ann began his autopsy of Teresita's body while he was doing the autopsy. Stahula and Eplin, Burley, Eplin. There, they were waiting in the corner, just watching. Yeah, which pathologists love that?

I do. And among the more significant findings was that beneath the skin of her neck, which was totally charred. The doctor did find bruising on her throat and a fractured larynx. Which indicated that at some point before she died and was lit on fire, she'd been choked. How did they find out if there's bruising, if it's charred skin? Because they're able to see, like the where there's some like gathering, like pools, okay?

Okay, yeah, like underneath the skin. Oh, I see, like cause in the different layers.

Yep, now. They determined that the cause of death was a stab wound, lacerating the heart and strangulation. Wow. They also noted that Teresita's body showed that she had not been sexually assaulted. Okay?

So the findings of the autopsy pretty much completely undermined the theory that the detectives had been building since they first got there. Oh no, she hadn't been raped, she'd simply been undressed and made to look like she was raped. And throw the investigation off, wrangled.

Wrangled Yeah.

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't.

A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back.

Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, well, yeah, no, it's hysteria, it's all in your head.

It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem, or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here?

Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole and I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time. The impact on victims and what's left once the facade falls away? We've covered stories like a Shark tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills. An active lawsuit filed by Larry King. And no real product to push.

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So, while Stahula and Eplin discussed the autopsy results with the pathologist, two other detectives went to the home of Robert Knudsen. The guy that she had been seeing off and on a little bit, and the man. He confirmed that he did know Teresita and that they'd been on a few dates. But, he said on the night of the murder, he hadn't left his house except for a short trip to the grocery store. And they scheduled a polygraph test for him that day. But apparently, the officers let him take a valium before the test, which would make the results inconclusive. But still, his prints did not match the second set that was found at the scene that they ended up finding. I'm just picturing him, like, Do you guys mind if I take this valium?

And they're like, Yeah, that probably won't mess that up at all. So for months, the detectives poured over Teresita's life, that address book, they talked to everyone she knew, they chased down every single little pulling thread that they could. Unfortunately, while they initially would have these like promising leads, they would all fall apart. They'd all get ruled out with an interview or a polygraph exam.

And by the spring, all the leads had dried up and they were running out of people to interview. At this point. And in the summer after Teresita's murder, things at Edgewater Hospital had kind of just returned to normalcy. At that point, you know, all the employees just had in the respiratory unit just had to go about their lives. That's really sad because they all loved her a lot.

And yeah, and a 39 year old inhalation therapist at Edgewater named Remy Chua, she was working there. She had hardly known Teresita. They had, literally, I think, met each other at orientation when Remy was at orientation.

They had worked different shifts, like they did not hang out. They didn't know each other very well. They knew of each other. I think they called each other a nodding acquaintanceship at best. And I say this because it's strange. Because Remy's husband and co-workers said that she became kind of preoccupied with Teresita's life overnight, like out of nowhere.

One day in July, Remy was sitting alone in the hospital's break room, just all alone. And her co-workers are in the hallway. And they see her almost jump out of her chair and tear out of the room. Like, something scared the shit out of her, and when they looked to see what she had run from, there was nothing there. The other was. And so whatever it was, it scared the shit out of her so badly that she went home she wouldn't finish her shift.

Okay, and so Remy didn't say anything at the time. But later she told her husband, Dr. Jose Chua, that she said she was sitting alone in the break room. And she just kind of briefly closed her eyes, like, kind of, just like resting a little bit. And then she opened them and looked up and saw Teresita Basa standing in front of her, not moving or speaking, just staring at her, What the fuck?

And she said she jumped up and ran the fuck out of there, and she had become obsessed with her life before this happened. Yes, okay, like.

She had kind of become like, very into what had happened, and very into like her. And asking people like, you know, like, did you? And it wasn't like she was asking people like, what did she like, what was she into? Kind of thing. She was almost telling people facts about her, that people were like, how do you know that?

Oh, that's like, why do you know that? like, you don't know her? Yeah, and she was like, Yeah, I'm not really sure, cause I don't know her.

So it sounds like she's an empath now. In the days that followed Teresita's appearance to Remy, coworkers remembered that Remy's personality shifted a lot after this. They started noticing that she was very chatty when she wasn't very chatty before, and she would just quote chatter on. About the piano, about classical music, playing or partying, like throwing parties, all the things that Teresita was into, she was possessed.

And Teresita's coworkers were like, This is disturbing, like they had all been very close to Teresita, probably like, pissed them off. And it seemed like this woman was doing a strange impression of her, almost.

Yeah, so they all actually ended up reporting it to Remy's supervisor, Ted Ellis, and being like, she's being weird. And. But now Remy was feeling ganged up on and kind of harassed by her coworkers. And who were like, What the fuck, dude, stop pretending to be Teresita. So she ended up reporting to Ellis that she believed that it had become a hostile work environment, and Ellis tried to deescalate this whole situation.

He's probably just like, what is going on? cause he's like, what? But it was just making Remy angrier when he was trying to deescalate it. She was like, I'm not doing anything like, I don't understand.

She ended up being terminated that day for gross insubordination. Oh man, so it was, it was rough, like, obviously getting terminated out of nowhere. But it was kind of a relief for Remy. Because she said she was very confused and anxious at work, like something was different, and she wasn't feeling comfortable there. And she said, You know, like people making comments about the Teresita thing and like claiming that she was impersonating this woman that she hardly knew. Like, it was just getting weird there.

So she said, like she was kind of relieved that she was like, out of there, cause she felt like something some weird energy. Okay, and I'm sitting here, like, what the fuck is going on? That evening as she and her husband, Dr. Jose Chua, were relaxing in their living room. And she's just kind of like, Fuck, I got fired.

Remy kind of drifted off to sleep in a chair. And then a few minutes later, she stood up very abruptly, didn't say anything to her husband and just walked into the bedroom. That wasn't like her. Yeah, and when she didn't come back a few minutes later, like, just stayed in the bedroom, Jose was like, Okay, I'm going to check on her.

So he went in there and checked and she was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. And so he was like, Hey, what's wrong, you? Okay? But she wouldn't say anything, so he was like, What the fuck?

Like, are you okay? And then she started speaking in Tagalog, I believe, is how you say it, which is, um, like, their native language. And she was saying, Mama, mama, are you there, Mama, what?

And Jose was very confused and he was like, what the fuck? Cause? The Chua's also, they came from the Philippines, and they spoke Tagalog at home when you just said that, they also came through the Philippines, from the Philippines. My whole body did the like. They're like, Oh, I have, I'm covered in chills.

Because this is the language they spoke at home, and this is the language that Teresita would also know. And he said the voice coming from his wife was not like her normal speaking voice, so he said she was speaking a language. I understood that we speak at home, but this was not her voice.

And then he said to Jose's ear, It sounded like there was a slight Spanish accent here, and then, he said. Remi had her eyes fixed on the ceiling and she said, I am Teresita Basa, Holy Shit and Dr.

Chua was like, Oh, fuck, and he was like, I was very alarmed. And she kept rambling on in this language about the dead woman, whom she barely knew. And he tried to get her to snap out of it and just explain what the fuck was going on. And then she looked at him and said, Dr.

Chua, I would like to ask for your help. And he was like, Why are you calling me Dr. Chua? like, I'm your husband? And he said, So he was like, What kind of help?

Yeah, and she responded to stop the person who killed me, what the fuck? And he was like, what, Oh my god, stop, stop.

Now stop in this moment, holy fucking shit. Jose was like, Okay, this has been a tough week for Remy, my wife.

She's having a break, she's gone through some shit. She saw who she thought was Teresita Basa in the break room. People have been shitty to her, she kind of got ganged up on.

She was like, fired from work. Maybe she's just really stressed and under a lot of anxiety. And this is like some kind of hallucination. Or like, she's having a bad dream. She's like, maybe having a night terror right now. So he started walking towards the bathroom because he was going to get something like a cool cloth to, like, calm her.

And like, he sounds so sweet, he does sound like a sweetie. Yeah, Drew would be like, I have to leave immediately, right?

And this is, and Jose, Dr. Chua is like, I'm going to take care of you, like, I'm going to get you something to calm you down. I promise you. Drew would be running down the fucking street at this point, and he said. As he was walking towards the bathroom. She lifted her arm and gestured to the telephone and said, Call the police. Please, doctor, call the police and tell them who killed me.

I cannot rest until they know.

And Jose was kind of starting to panic at this point. Because he's like, I can't call the police right now. And he was like, I don't know what to tell them. I don't know what you're saying, like, I don't know what's happening right now. And then Remy suddenly abruptly came to and was very confused why she was in bed and what the fuck was wrong with her husband.

Why he was so alarmed? This is real, this happened, this happened, and he explained to her what happened.

He was like, Um, this is what just happened, and she was like, What? Like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh my God, she must have been so scared, and he must have been so scared.

And they're like, what, like they had not nothing like this had happened to them before. Usually it doesn't. In your life, it's not like.

These people are people that are like, trying to do this all the time, like this was a very random thing. And the next day, Jose had driven his wife to Edgewater to get her belongings from work and they, you know, they came back.

They were in the living room and Remy was talking on the phone. And suddenly, she hands him the phone abruptly and says, Teresita wants to come back. Nope, nope, nope. Oh my God, what? And then she walked out of the room in the middle of a phone call.

She literally stopped, handed him the phone, said Teresita wants to come back and walked into the bedroom.

And so Jose was like, I'm sorry, my wife has to call you back, and ended the phone call and followed her into the bedroom. And she was laying just as she was the day before on the bed. Interesting that, like, she kept going back to her bedroom to lay in the middle of her bed. Yep, what?

And again, she said, I am Teresita Basa, I'd be like, I believe you. And she said she was murdered by a man named Alan Showery. Yeah, I already knew that, and she said, and she spouted this to him.

She said He came to fix my television, he stabbed me, he choked me and he stole some of my jewelry. And she said, And then she just urgently requested him, Please go to the police, please go to the police with this. And she was. He was so confused and he was like, I can't go to the police.

I don't have any proof of this. Like, I can't call them and say that you are just telling me this ghost of this woman. Yeah, he's like, I can't tell them that you're telling me this beyond the grave.

Like, they will think I, he was, like, they will think I'm losing it, I will get in trouble. And the voice just kept pleading for him to help and insisting that they could provide proof, and then they provided proof. Tell me right now.

They explained every piece of jewelry that he had stolen, and they said it was a ring that my mother had given me. It was like another piece of, and I'll explain those in a little bit, but that ring that her mother had given her a year before. Oh my god. Also. Sorry. Didn't he work at the hospital with her?

Yeah, so this fucker like, do Remy and um, Dr. Allen, and they know him, yeah, what?

Yup, now, as they provided this proof of this is what he took from me. Remy came to and was again completely confused, what just happened? And this happened again the following day. The exact same thing, over and over, with the voice saying, I know, like, please call, please provide this proof, please tell them that this is what's happening.

So Remy was like, when she came to, and he told her again that this is your, you keep doing this. This is the third day. Yeah, Remy was like, we got to do something. It's just going to keep happening.

Otherwise, so, Remy called a friend and told the friend the story, and this friend, who, I guess, was kind of, like, connected to the consulate. They placed a call to the Evanston police and, using their connections, were like, This is what I've heard is happening, right? They didn't give him the full rundown, I guess.

They didn't give them the rundown from the grave, the whole thing. So the tip about the Chuhas was assigned to Detective Floyd McKinney at the Evanston Police. Okay, and he drove to the Chuhas home to interview them.

This is absolutely wild. So they were worried that the detective was not going to take the story of Teresita's spirit possessing Remy's body and telling them. I feel like most people would feel that way now. Remember, if they were looking to get something out of this and they were looking to, like, get attention, they would have just said it, yeah.

They would have been like, Wow, she got possessed like this, would have been like that thing. No, they didn't. They just told McKinney that Remy had received a threatening phone call from a former coworker, Alan Showery. And that she believed that he could have played part in Teresita's murder because of how aggressive he was and that he had mentioned something that made her think, Guys, this is wild.

So they were like, we have to get Alan's name out there. Because Teresita is telling us, yeah, but we can't tell that Teresita told us this because then they will lock us up. So they made up a story.

Right, which it's like, why would they have done that? No, no, they would have just said it if they were trying to get attention.

God, I'm like losing it right now. So there's no actual evidence to support this at the moment. And McKinney, the detective, just kind of took the statement, left the house like.

I'll write it down, I guess, yeah. He was like, Wow, that's wild. And back at the station, he reported it to his supervisor, like, you know, they have this name. They got a threatening phone call, they think it could be connected. So his supervisor was like, pass this on to Chicago, where the jurisdiction is.

So, you know, they would have to be the ones to conduct this, so they did so. Detective McKinney and Evanston was the one who received the tip. Okay, and they hadn't had any leads in the case since the end of April.

So he was like, awesome, like, we'll just go with this, and he was not aware of all the specifics. Obviously he got that, he got that story from it, yeah. But he explained to the people in Chicago that he had received a tip from this couple in Evanston about a man named Alan Showery being involved possibly in the Basa murder.

And it was Stuhula, obviously, who heard this tip, and he got the tip. And he placed a call to the Chuhuas the next day, so now this is Stuhula in Chicago who is now having to contact the Chuhuas. Where did, sorry? Where did the Chuhuas live? They lived in Evanston.

Oh, okay, which is just another jurisdiction. Okay, okay. That's why they had to like. And apparently they had lived about a half hour outside of Chicago.

So Stuhula had to go, you know, to their address. He had to go sit down and talk to them and he was like, What do you guys know right now? At first, they stayed with the story. They heard they received a harassing phone call from a man that Remy believed was Alan Showery.

Yeah, and she explained that Showery worked as what she thought was an orderly at Edgewater. She was like, I'm not really sure what he does. There's different reports that he was an orderly or he was like a respiratory therapist, okay?

But, she said, he likes to pretend he's a doctor. He even gets mail addressed to Dr. Showery. That's something, something about.

The story seemed a little strange to Stuhula. He just had like his feeling. Yeah, his radar was going off. Spidey senses are tingling.

Yeah, yeah. And he said the Chuhuas were being a little cagey and they seemed a little reluctant to talk, uh, huh, which he thought was weird, right?

And he was like, This seems kind of just like a prank phone call, like, I don't know about this. And he said, every time that Showery's name was brought up, he could see Jose tense up and become uncomfortable. Really. So he was like, What's going on?

And he kind of pressed on them a little bit and was like, What, what do you know, like, what's happening here? And finally, Jose leaned towards him and said, Tell me, Mr. Detective, do you believe in the occult or an exorcism? Uh, huh?

And so he was like, I'm open minded, okay, and so. Chuhuas explained the events of the previous week, the real events. They told the detective Jose had asked the voice who killed Teresita, and she had said Alan Showery, and he said she kept repeating his name over and over and over.

And Joseph said, Or excuse me, Jose said. He said, He killed me, he killed me, he killed me over and over and over. Then he added credibility to the story because Jose explained that the voice had said that Showery had taken her jewelry. And so Chuhuas said, Okay, and he was like, So he didn't even give him the specifics of that.

Yet he was like, he took her jewelry and he was like, all right. We don't know that yet because people said they didn't think anything was missing from the scene, right? But then he was like, I'm going to test this, so he goes. Did the voice indicate to you that her killer raped her?

And Jose said, Oh no, no, she did not. she only said that she had been stabbed. Oh wow, and Jose also. Then, right after this, went into the description of the jewelry and said that it was a pendant from the Philippines that was taken. A cocktail ring with a pearl inlay given to Teresita by her mother a couple of years earlier. And also that the I guess that the voice insisted that this was going to be how they would know the truth.

Like, I guess the voice was literally like, you tell the police this and they'll know they are going to find these things in Showery's possession. Yeah, I promise you this.

Holy shit. So he was like, this is pretty wild, but like, how are we going to get a search warrant off of this, this, this, whatever? And he was like, Okay, it's weird. Because in the press they had said this was possibly a rape, murder, robbery, it was not in the press that she had not been sexually assaulted.

So that was a strange one. And when he went back to the stations, Tehula considered the whole thing. He didn't know what to make of it. And, like I said, no one had reported that any jewelry was missing from Teresita's apartment. And he said they had interviewed most, but not all, of the coworkers that she worked with.

And no one ever really talked about a man named Alan Showery. And then he's flipping through the case file and he comes across the memo pad next to the telephone that was next to the telephone, and it said On that memo pad. Get tickets for A.S. And he was like, Huh, Alan Showery?

The fact that she was going to get him free tickets and this is what he fucking did to her, yeah, now. Fortunately, it turned out that whoever received the call from the Evanston police earlier in the day like to take that tip and pass it on to the detectives. They had already run Showery's name for them, which I was like, badass, yeah.

Like, ahead of things. So they had already pulled his full report, his full case file for Tehula. So he was like, Yeah, you're an MVP, you're the real one. Alan Showery was 30 years old when he started working at the Edgewater's Hospital.

Yeah. He was born and raised in New York City. He'd studied sociology and psychology at New York University and Utah State before settling in Chicago around 1969. So, like I said, there's varying reports whether what his job at the hospital was, but he did work with Teresita alongside her. They didn't seem like they would be likely friends because on paper they are very different.

Yeah, he had an arrest record that was like, very long, but she probably didn't know that. That included arrests for burglary in 1967, stolen mail in 1966, theft in 1971, two arrests for rape in 1972. What the fuck was he doing, working at a hospital?

Yep, and both of those rapes were done on Chicago's north side, where Teresita lived now. They were, but they were both friendly with each other, They had very outgoing personalities, the two of them, they bonded together.

They both loved music. He was about to be in her band. I guess they really got along like the two of them were like friends.

Yeah, it sounded like it. They used to ride the bus together. In the mid-1970s, he had been living with his German-born girlfriend, Janka Kaumach. They lived on the city's north side, which was opposite the Chicago Transit Authority.

So investigators were like, he was not outwardly obviously a guy that would have rape or murder on his rap sheet, they said. He was the sort of person that, like, you could easily come to like, he had a face that projected, I want to be your friend. That's scary and it took some time to actually track him down.

But once they got him at his apartment and knocked on the door, he seemed perfectly fine. With going down to the station and talking to the detectives. And before they'd even arrived at the station, he asked if whatever they wanted to talk about had to do with Teresita Basa. They didn't respond. They just brought him into the interrogation room and immediately read him his rights. And the detectives explained that they'd been speaking with a lot of his co-workers at the hospital. And there were some things that were said that kind of led them to want to talk to Alan.

That's what they let out. Yeah, they didn't say that, Teresita told us. You did it. I hope he did find that out eventually.

So Showery claimed that he and Teresita were very good friends, but he said it was platonic. He explained They would talk during work, they would ride the bus home together, They ate lunch together. It was a very normal co-worker friendship.

Wow, now. Initially, he said that he hadn't seen Teresita outside of work for about six months. But the detectives decided to bluff a little and they told them that they'd found his fingerprints at the apartment they had not. Yeah, and he said there was no way that those were six months old.

So he was like, Okay, and then he revised his story. And that's when he told the detectives that not only had he not seen her in six months outside of work, he had ridden the bus home with Teresita on the day that she was murdered. Right? That's going to look a little weird, dude.

Yeah, and he told them he'd promised to go to her apartment later that night to fix her television. But he said he'd forgotten and instead had gone home. And he had fixed wiring in his own apartment lies. And he assured them that his girlfriend would verify this alibi. I bet she would.

Now they were like, Huh, okay? and they were like, you have a girlfriend? I wonder if she has new jewelry.

So they said, Hmm, I wouldn't have even thought of that, yep. And now that they have brought him in for questioning, they could now search his apartment. So they went and Yanka was there so they could question her.

And when they told her about the alibi, she was very confused and said, We don't have any problems with the wiring in here. He never did any work on it. She was just like, Fuck that. No, he didn't. And so they were like, Can we look in your jewelry box?

And she was like, Absolutely, you can, good for her. And they didn't really know what they were like looking for quite yet, but they, you know, they were just like, I don't know at this point.

They were like, maybe it's in here, maybe it's not, and they. Eventually, they were able to find someone like one of her friends, who could actually look in the jewelry box, too, and point to see if anything was recognizable. One of Teresita's friends, exactly. And so they found who they found was Richard Pizzotti, who was one of the two men that went on the date with her.

And he said he didn't see anything that he believed belonged to Teresita. And they had him come down where Yanka was and look into this thing, and he was like, Yeah, I don't see anything, that's hers. And then he was leaving the room and he looked over at Yanka and he said, That ring on her finger is Teresita's. And Yanka told detectives that Alan had given her the ring as a belated Christmas gift sometime around the end of February. What the actual fuck?

So she said, Here you go, take it. And it was later identified by Teresita's cousin to be the cocktail ring given to her by her mother. Oh my god, that's disgusting that he gave that to his girlfriend as a late Christmas gift. Yep, and the cousin also looked in, was able to look in the box and identified a jade pendant that was Teresita's.

Just like she said, and remember Remy had said, there's a jade pendant, there's a pendant, she said. She said, a pendant, a ring, a cocktail ring that belongs to, and a cocktail ring that belongs to my mother, yeah.

That was my mother, right, right, right, and he said. The cousin said there was also two other items in there that he believed belonged to Teresita as well. This is so horrific now. After he heard about the jewelry and about his girlfriend denying the alibi, Showery tried to spin a story about how he bought that jewelry from some guy on the street.

Yeah, buddy. Both detectives just kind of looked at him and were like, Really, is that really the fucking story you want to go with? He immediately dropped it and he said, I murdered her, just confessed.

Why like boom?

According to Alan, he said he did go to Teresita's that evening to look at the television set to fix it for her. But he realized that he needed to get his tools in order to fix it. So he went back to his apartment a few hours later, around 7.30 p.m. That's when he was going back to her apartment and he said he just decided he was going to rob her. What so? He said. The reason was, he said, he had been helping Teresita obtain citizenship papers and had on several occasions driven her to the naturalization office.

And after he would do this, she would always give him a cash tip of $5 or $10 just for helping her out. So he decided to rob her, so he assumed that she had money in her apartment. This is why you shouldn't be kind to people. No, you shouldn't.

Because also, she didn't, she had $30 in her apartment, right? She didn't like she was just doing that out of the goodness of her heart.

She just did that to help you. And yeah, he broke. So he said at the time of the murder, he was very broke. He was behind on all his bills, He was very desperate. Well, get another job, asshole.

And as soon as Teresita closed the door after letting him in, he grabbed her from behind and gave her a chokehold. She lost consciousness very quickly, and he said he laid her down on the floor and just started ransacking the place for money. All he found was $30 in cash and what he thought was expensive-looking jewelry.

So once he'd ransacked the place, he went back to the living room. He picked her up off the floor, carried her into the bedroom, and he said he didn't know what to do. So he decided to make it look like rape. So he took her clothing off, went to the kitchen and got that knife off the counter that she'd used to. Cut up the lettuce and the tomato. And he stabbed her into her sternum, holy shit. According to Allen, he described Teresita as being subconscious at the time, which I was, like, nope, incorrect, you work at a fucking hospital.

And he said, she didn't feel anything. Who the fuck are you to say that? Yeah, like you don't even know the difference between unconscious and subconscious. So, he said, he piled some clothes on top of her body, dragged the mattress over to her and set fire to a paper bag that he put on top of the clothing. And once that was all on fire, he fled the apartment and went back to his.

What a piece of human garbage now. During this questioning, Stahula put in a bunch of control questions to see if he was telling the truth or if he was just repeating things he had heard in the media. Because he wanted to be sure this was an accurate confession and not somebody going to claim that they were forced into it.

So Allen accurately described the scene in the apartment, which wasn't released to the press. He described what Teresita was wearing, He said what he'd stolen, none of that was in the newspapers. And he also said that he wanted to quote make it look like a sex crime, and that he had not sexually assaulted her.

And none of that had been released to the media. Wow, so the confession was very genuine, and, you know, just to be sure. They had him go through it a second time, and they said he never wavered from that confession. And so they took him out of the room, and they said. As he went by Ianka, who was standing out there, he told her that he probably wouldn't be seeing her again for a long time.

I can't even imagine what she said to him. Yeah, now everything had worked out, it seemed, and the detectives were really confident that they had enough to give the district attorney for prosecution. I mean, they had everything, the stuff.

The only issue is that they weren't sure how to explain how they'd even made their way to Alan Showery, right? But there was no way around it. They had to tell the judge and the jury that the ghost of Teresita Basa spoke through Remy Chua and led them to their killer. I mean, and the thing is, they may not have been able to explain what happened, but they were right about every detail.

Right, so it's like this is going to sound kind of kooky, but everything is right. This is what happened and it led us here. So the case was assigned to Thomas Organ of the Cook County District Attorney's Office, who would be representing the state. Yeah.

And at first, Organ was skeptical of the voice from the grave story. I think so. And he had no idea how he was going to present this case to a jury, he said. In my five years as a prosecutor handling 70 or so felony cases, I've never run into anything like this. Also, sorry.

Is his last name organ? Yeah, wow, yeah right.

But he dove into it and he researched it, investigated it, and he said, they're telling the truth. Everything in this case, just like lines up, it does like spiritually, physically. And he said he was like, I believe the Chua's.

How can I not? Yeah, because they didn't even want to tell us to begin with, that's the thing like that.

And I feel like that gives more credibility. Yeah, they didn't run out to tell this to anyone, right, exactly.

So, a pretrial hearing was held in the Circuit Court of Cook County on September 7th, 1978. And this is when Allen's defense attorney, William Swannow, he tried to have the charges dismissed because of the unusual circumstances that preceded his arrest. It's like, Yeah, sure, but like, why does your client have everything and know everything about her?

Well, and he's claiming that Remy Chua had faked the episodes because she'd been fired. She was dressed out, she was trying to get attention. And prosecutor Thomas Organ argued that the detectives had pursued a viable lead and found probable cause to arrest Allen Showery. So the paranormal thing that preceded it was unusual, but ultimately irrelevant, because it led to the truth.

And the judge agreed Wow, and Allen. Yeah, and Allen. Showery was ordered to stand trial for the first degree murder of Teresita Batha because he planned it on the way over.

Yeah, because he had planned the whole thing. Damn Allen. Showery went on trial January 8th, 1979, and the media went nuts about this.

Thomas Organ knew he was fighting a very uphill battle with the, you know, a lot of his case was resting on a tip from a ghost. Yeah, you know, that'll be difficult, but he he fought through, he was undeterred. In the months since the case had come to him, he had interviewed the CHUA's again and again.

And he said, it was mostly, you know, I was trying to get. I knew they were going to be on the stand. And he said also, I was looking for holes in the story, right? And he found nothing. And he said in front of the jury. Organ tried to minimize the supernatural claims. And just kind of focus on the facts of the case, which was a case of murder and robbery, and not ghosts and possession.

So he was like, the reality of the case is that there is evidence in his possession to say he murdered her. Yeah, and he was like, I don't want the jury to forget that, that there's facts here. Regardless of how we got here, we got here. So, for the most part, his argument remained much as it had during the pre-trial hearing with Alan.

Showery had been confronted with undeniable proof of his involvement and with the jewelry. Yeah, and on that he had given an oral and written confession to murdering her, so that is the facts, yeah.

And the defense argued that Showery had been arrested on nothing more than the Chua's unbelievable story of possession. And that Alan had only confessed to spare his girlfriend from being arrested along with him and giving birth to their children in jail, because apparently, she was pregnant. Oh my god, that's horrific now. Remy Chua was in the process, they said, was in the process of being fired from her job. She had personal problems.

They didn't release what those personal problems were, they probably didn't exist, but they told the story, the jury, that he. She had just made up this possession thing, this whole act, to get attention.

And sure, anybody hearing that would be like, under normal circumstances, sure, tell me that. She's stressed out. She lost her job, there was all this weird shit going on, maybe she wants attention.

Sure, why not? Except that from the start that she was didn't want to report the whole thing. Even they were reluctant reporters and reluctant witnesses, they didn't want to talk about any of it.

They were stressed out talking about it, but they were very reluctant and also like, Cool, she got fired from her job, she has all these personal problems. She made this up.

It's real. And why was the jewelry in the girlfriend's possession, why did it pan out? And why did he know the apartment scene if he hadn't been there? And how did he know that she hadn't been raped if he wasn't the one to not rape her?

Exactly, and at no time had the CHUA's tried to make money off of or capitalize on this story. No time, right? never.

So like they had nothing to gain here. In fact, everyone who knew them and anytime anyone talked to them, they were like, we really just want to go away. Like, we don't want to be part of this story anymore. We don't want to, we don't want to be in the spotlight, we just want to leave this for you to fix.

And that's it, because realistically, I just said, they have nothing to gain, really. they have everything to lose. Yeah, they at least. I mean, he's a fucking doctor.

Yeah, like, people will doubt him if he, like, made this up and you know, and she's a respiratory therapist. Like, they have, like, you know, do they have good jobs? They have reputations like this wouldn't be a good thing.

They're not trying to be like, you know, they're not running around to all the media outlets being like, let me tell you my story of possession. They're like, please don't talk to me, right? Exactly so.

In their closing arguments, both sides tried to hammer home those arguments that they've been making the whole time. The defense kind of focused on the paranormal part, being like, this is crazy, trying to put in the jury's mind. This is wild. Also propping up Showery's claim that he had been coerced into confessing by because the detectives had threatened to arrest his girlfriend as an accessory.

Okay, now. Thomas Organ dismissed any claims of coercion, saying to the jury that his story might be believable if it came from a 16 year old boy who might be easily intimidated. Yeah, exactly. But they said Alan Showery is an adult, educated man with an extensive criminal history. That's the other thing.

He's literally done shit like this before. And as for the supernatural part about the Chuhas, he told them it doesn't matter as to guilt or innocence. What does matter is that the information furnished to police checked out. And after 13 hours of deliberation, the jury sent a note to the judge on the afternoon of Friday, January 26th, saying that they were hopelessly deadlocked. I would think, because can you imagine that 13 hours and them going back and forth?

And the judge dismissed the jury and a new trial was set for February 14th. They needed Ronald, so February 14th came and went and the judge had to order a continuance. Which got the defense really feeling good because they started getting confident that they could get an acquittal the second time around. But on the evening of February 21st. Only a few days later, Alan Showery called his lawyer and asked him to arrange a meeting with the judge and the district attorney. Huh?

The next day, Showery and lawyers from both sides stood in front of the judge, and Alan Showery, against the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to the murder of Teresita Basa. Do you think Teresita was like appearing to him? At this point? I wonder if she was like, You, fucker, I'm going to haunt your ass, right? And he was like, I'm just going to admit this.

Yeah, the district attorney's office confirmed that they had no plea deal, they had not offered a deal for this. Wow, I felt like he had to have been being haunted.

And honestly, I hope that even after he pled guilty, he continued to be haunted. That's what I think, and Showery would not give an explanation for why he decided to do this. That's what makes me think we already know.

Yup, and his lawyer asked the judge for leniency. Fuck that, that's all they could do, and the judge considered everything and the request for leniency. And sentenced Alan Showery to concurrent terms of four to 12 years on armed robbery and arson charges.

What about the murder? He was never convicted of the murder, from what I can tell, what he was convicted of, armed robbery and arson. That's why he got that sentence.

What? So, I wonder if there was some kind of plea deal that happened behind the scenes? There has to have been, because it's very confusing. That doesn't make any fucking sense that they were just like, Yeah, I guess we'll just throw the murder off the table for no fucking reason.

Just no big deal. But he admitted to it, which is so wild to me. I wonder if he had information on, like another case, something is out there that we don't know about, that doesn't make any sense.

And also that pisses me the fuck off because he served the minimum four years of his sentence and was paroled in 1983. What the actual fuck are you kidding me? Yep.

Oh my God, Teresita baby, if you didn't haunt him.

And that is the story of Teresita Baza. Four years he served, four years he served for that.

Like, no, he did not work on wiring that night. Like, good for Yanka, but like, damn, but what do we not know? Because that doesn't make any sense.

That, like, in my opinion, it really sucks because justice wasn't served. No, it really wasn't at all. Four years is not a sentence for that, and she, like nobody, ever went to prison for her murder.

Yeah, I'm so angry, I am, I was too, I was very angry.

Fuck, there's something that happened in that trial that we that is not public, that we don't know about. That definitely is hidden somewhere in the annals of that record. I, I just had, like a gut feeling that he had information on another, there had to have been something, something like that.

Because that's nothing like, because he had to have helped them in some big way. Yeah, and that's, Dave said, the same thing. He was like, there had to have been some kind of deal that happened that we don't know about.

Off the books, yeah, that is infuriating. What the fuck? He only got the arson and robbery charge.

Honestly, I not only hope that he gets haunted for the rest of his life, I hope everybody in that deal, right involved in that deal also got haunted. Get them Teresita, Teresita.

You know what? but no, you know what? If that's what you want to do, go ahead. But like, live your afterlife, yeah.

Cause, you know what? She said, I can't move on. Until they know that he did it, they know, hopefully she just got him to admit it, yeah.

And then was like, Now I can move on, see you later. I hope she is like playing piano shows in the afterlife, strumming on her organ. Hell yeah, I hope that, like men, treated her better in the afterlife.

Yeah, I hope she's hanging out with her parents, I hope she's just like having fun. I hope the best. I hope she's she's going to London sometimes to hang out and have some fun.

I hope she, like, quickly dropped by Edward's house. Just to be like, just to scare the shit out of him. I hope so too. I would do that. Yeah, hell yeah.

Wow, Teresita. What a wild story. Yeah, what an infuriating story.

Cause the fact that she invited him into her home and was in, invited him into her band. Like, thought he was a friend, and that's what he did. That's how much of a friend she considered him. She was going to have him be in the band. She trusted him coming into her house to fix this TV, she was going to comp him tickets.

Like, she tipped him every time he drove her somewhere and she didn't actually really have that much money. And telling, like, her friends in the band that like, Oh, I have this friend, you know, Alan is going to be in the band, Yeah, like, right, like.

I want you guys to like, hear him. Yeah, wow, I'm really well. I'm so angry right now.

Me too. Great story, though, wild story, wild story, um. And with that being said, we hope you keep listening, and we hope you keep it.

Weird, but not as weird as the beginning of the show, because we were like, wilding. Yeah, keep it as weird as Teresita, though. keep it as weird as Teresita, for sure.

And maybe do keep it so weird that you're just like wilding out in a fun, goofy, silly way. Be silly, goofy. But like, 4-1-0 for Teresita, yeah, she's better.