Ghost Story (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

[0] In mid -July, 1977, a 38 -year -old woman named Rami Chua was sitting in her living room talking to her husband when suddenly, mid -sentence, she stood up and said very robotically that she was going to go lie down for a while.

[1] Then she turned and walked away into a nearby bedroom.

[2] Sensing something was off with his wife, the husband got up and followed her.

[3] What he would see and hear in that bedroom over the next 30 minutes would not only scar him for life, but would also become some of the most infamous evidence ever used by police in a real murder investigation.

[4] But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

[5] So, if that's of interest to you, please ask the five -star review button to play a game of Call of Duty with you, but just camp the entire time.

[6] Also, please subscribe to the Mr. Ballin podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads.

[7] Okay, let's get into today's story.

[8] I'm Dan Tibersky.

[9] In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York.

[10] A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast.

[11] What's the answer?

[12] And what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

[13] Hysterical.

[14] A new podcast from Wondry and Pineapple Street Studios.

[15] Binge all episodes of Hesterical early and ad -free on Wondry Plus.

[16] It was 3 p .m. on Monday, February 21st, 1977, and Terracita Bassa was feeling happy that her shift at North Chicago's Edgewater Hospital was over.

[17] She smiled and said goodbye to a couple of her co -workers as she closed her locker and shrugged into her winter coat.

[18] It was winter in Chicago, which meant the days were very cold and very short.

[19] That day, the sunset was barely after 5 p .m. But with her shift ending at 3 p .m., she'd be home by 4 p .m. which meant she'd still have a full hour of daylight before darkness fell over her adopted city.

[20] Already looking forward to that magical hour inside of her cozy four -bedroom apartment, the slender 47 -year -old woman from the Philippines made her way out onto the street and walked to the nearby elevated train station.

[21] A few minutes later, a train arrived and Terracita climbed on board.

[22] It wasn't rush hour, so there were plenty of seats to choose from.

[23] She found one she liked and she sat down right as the train began pulling out at the station.

[24] After putting her bag on the seat next to her, she turned around in her seat and put her fingertips against the window behind her.

[25] And even through her glove, she could feel how cold the glass was.

[26] Despite having lived in the United States for almost 15 years, there were times, especially in the winter, when she still felt surprised by how completely different Chicago was when compared to her hometown of Dumaget, a city located 8 ,000 miles away on Negros Island in the southern Philippines.

[27] Here in Chicago, Terracita was surrounded by towering skyscrapers, and the average temperature in February hovered right around freezing.

[28] Back in Dumaget, nicknamed the city of gentle people, the temperature in February was hot, and the landscape was green and lush with lots of graceful Spanish -style architecture.

[29] But much as Terracita sometimes missed the Philippines and her family who still lived there, she was sure that if she had not come to the U .S., she never would have had a chance to achieve her dream.

[30] A dream that right now, Terracita felt was almost within her grasp.

[31] Much as she liked it, her current job as a respiratory therapist at the hospital was really just a means to an end, a way to pay her rent and to afford her beautiful piano that waited for her in her living room at home.

[32] She liked working with the patients, diagnosing and analyzing lung function, and then helping the doctors create treatment plans and prescribe interventions and medications, but this job was not why Terracita had left her home in the Philippines and come to America.

[33] She had come to America to pursue her lifelong passion, music.

[34] As a young child, Terracita begged her parents for piano lessons, and when they relented and let her have piano lessons, she was over the moon and played piano basically.

[35] all the time.

[36] And when she wasn't playing the piano, she was marching around her home, humming along to the notes of the music in her head.

[37] Once Teresita had finished high school, she had been among the very small percent of women in her town at that time, it was the late 1940s, early 1950s, to go on to university in the Philippines capital city of Manila.

[38] And after graduating from there, Terracita became part of an even smaller percentage of women who went on to get their master's degree.

[39] This time, Terracita would leave the Philippines to attend Indiana University in the United States.

[40] By the time she was enrolled at Indiana University, Terracita had decided that she would become a music teacher, not a concert pianist, which had been her original intended career path in music.

[41] Although when she got to Chicago, she would become a member of a very serious musical band called the Five Mahogany's Plus One that performed for large paying crowds.

[42] After getting her master's degree in Indiana, Terracita had moved north to Chicago, where she got her job at the hospital, and she enrolled at Chicago's Loyola University to get her doctorate in music.

[43] Her hope was that afterward she would be hired by Loyola University and would become a professor of music, thereby fulfilling her dream.

[44] As the train she was on rattled down the tracks, inside her gloved hand pressing against the window, Terracita could feel the beautiful pearl cocktail ring her mother had given her the last time she had come to visit in Chicago.

[45] The ring had been a gift to Terracita's mother from Terracita's father, a wealthy judge, who had bought the jewelry for his wife while visiting France.

[46] Before returning to Dumaget, after that last visit, Terracita's mother had pressed the ring along with a heavy jade pendant and a few other pieces of jewelry into her daughter's hands, telling Terracita to wear them, and when she did, to think of her parents and how much they loved her.

[47] Terracita was an only child, and she knew full well just how much her mother and father had hoped she would return to the Philippines.

[48] Terracita understood that this gift of jewelry was her mother's way of telling her that her parents had finally accepted Terracita's decision to stay in the United States.

[49] Even though her mother's eyes had been filled with tears when she gave the jewelry to her daughter, Terracita knew how proud her parents were of her accomplishments and her determination to be self -sufficient and in her.

[50] As the train finally came to a stop at the station, located just four blocks from her apartment building, Terracita grabbed her bag and then pulled her coat tight around her.

[51] She stood up and then headed out the train doors into the cold.

[52] By the time she reached her apartment building, Terracita had already planned out how she would spend her evening.

[53] She would practice piano, and then she would spend some time on her doctoral thesis, and on the book she was writing about music composition and theory.

[54] She was also hoping to call a few people who might be interested in buying tickets to the next performance of her band, the Five Mahogonies Plus One, and maybe should give her cousin a call too.

[55] Her cousin had actually also immigrated to the Chicago area from the Philippines, and so the two often chatted on the phone, enjoying a rare chance to speak in their native tongue, Tagalog.

[56] After getting off the elevator on the 15th floor, Teresita turned and began walking down the hallway toward her apartment, which was number 15B.

[57] Once she reached her door, she unlocked it with her key, she stepped inside, and she closed the door behind her.

[58] She took off her winter coat and hung it neatly in her closet.

[59] Then she took off her mother's pearl ring and carefully placed it next to her mother's jade necklace, which was on top of the dresser in her bedroom.

[60] After freshening up in the bathroom, Terracita went into her living room and she sat down at her beloved piano.

[61] As she ran her fingers across the keys, she looked out the nearby window and was happy to still see sunlight.

[62] With a smile on her face, she turned back to her piano, she closed her eyes, and she began to play.

[63] A few hours later, at around 8 p .m. that evening, Terracita heard a quiet knock on her front door.

[64] She set aside the work she had been doing on her doctoral thesis and walked toward the front of her apartment.

[65] When she reached the door, she called out, who's there?

[66] When she got the answer, Terracita smiled, undid the lock in Deadbolt, and then invited her guest inside.

[67] One hour later, at 9 p .m., the first fire engine screeched to a halt in front of Terraceeta's apartment building.

[68] The crowd of residents and curious bystanders gathered in front of the building scattered as firefighters jumped down from the truck and headed inside up the stairs to the 15th floor.

[69] 20 minutes earlier, the building's janitor had called 911 to report that residents had smelled and seen smoke coming out from under the door of Apartment 15B.

[70] And sure enough, when firefighters arrived on the 15th floor, they saw thick curls of smoke pouring out from under that apartment door into the hallway.

[71] The janitor ran up and used his key to unlock 15B's door before turning and running back down the hall to the stairwell.

[72] With the door unlocked, the firefighters made entry.

[73] Inside apartment 15B, firefighters quickly saw and extinguished the source of the fire.

[74] It was a burning mattress on the floor of the bedroom, and near it was a pile of burning clothes.

[75] Once a thorough search revealed that the apartment was empty of any people, a fire department lieutenant used his boot to kick aside the smoldering pile of clothes trying to see what might have caused the fire.

[76] Crowding in behind the lieutenant were a couple of uniformed police officers who had also arrived at the scene.

[77] And when those police officers and the lieutenant saw what was under those smoldering clothes, they instantly stepped back and turned their faces aside.

[78] Then, one of the police officers grabbed his radio and called for medical personnel, homicide detectives, and a crime scene unit.

[79] The first thing Chicago detective Joe Stachula and his partner Lee Eppin noticed when they stepped inside of TerraCita's apartment was the mess.

[80] Looking into the kitchen, they could see drawers had been pulled out and cupboards were open, and in the living room, lamps had been knocked over and a coffee table overturned.

[81] But even though they were preparing for something much worse when they stepped into Terracita's bedroom, what they actually saw still stunned them.

[82] In front of them, lying on her back on the floor next to the bed, was the body of a woman.

[83] The fire had burned most of the dark wavy hair from her head, along with most of the skin on the right side of her face.

[84] She was naked.

[85] Her knees were spread wide apart, but her feet were almost touching each other.

[86] Her arms were out to either side, bent upwards at the elbows, so her hands were near her head.

[87] and in the very center of her chest was a large kitchen knife, buried into her torso right up to the wooden hilt.

[88] It did not take detectives long to confirm that the body in 15B was that of Terracita Bassa.

[89] And based on the condition of her body and the disorder inside of her apartment, it also didn't take investigators long to come up with a working theory of what happened to her.

[90] Since the door to her apartment was not deadbolted from the inside, Police assumed that Terracita had opened the door for her killer, and once the killer, who they believed was male, was inside, he overpowered Terracita, he sexually assaulted her, and then he murdered her.

[91] After she was dead, he ransacked her apartment looking for valuables, and then before leaving, he tried to burn her body to destroy any incriminating evidence.

[92] But when the autopsy report came back a few days later, this working theory fell apart.

[93] According to the medical examiner, not only was there no evidence of sexual assault, it turned out that Terracita was actually a virgin.

[94] So, with this new information, the police now knew that Terracita's body had been staged to look like a sexual assault had taken place.

[95] The killer, who they now knew could easily have been a man or a woman, likely was just trying to confuse police.

[96] As for the robbery angle, the police had no way of knowing if anything was actually taken from Apartment 15B, because Terracita lived there alone, and so only Terracita would have known if something was missing.

[97] And while the fire had been relatively small and mostly contained to just Terracita's bedroom, it had been big enough that it completely destroyed any evidence of fingerprints on the murder weapon.

[98] Additionally, interviews with Terracita's neighbors, co -workers, family, friends, university professors, supervisors, and possible love interests, all led to one dead end after another.

[99] While Terracita occasionally entertained male visitors and went out on a few dates, there did not appear to be any serious boyfriends in her life.

[100] Ten years earlier, Terracita had fallen in love with a man from Chicago, but on a trip home to the Philippines to meet her family, the man had turned up drunk and naked in the city's Red Light District with a teenage girl on his lap.

[101] Ever since then, Terracita had become much more interested in friendship than in romance.

[102] As a result, there was no sign of some of the more obvious murder motives, like jealousy, affairs, marital problems, or sexual entanglements.

[103] And when it came to identifying possible suspects at Edgewood Medical Center, the hospital itself was so big with hundreds of employees working various schedules in dozens of different departments and hundreds more visitors in visiting medical personnel that detectives had to narrow their interviews to just coworkers whose shifts and responsibilities overlapped with Terracitas.

[104] And the verdict among that small group was unanimous.

[105] Everybody loved Terracita.

[106] She was kind, she was quiet but friendly, she was great with her patience, she was good at her job, she was reliable, punctual, hardworking, and at lunch in the cafeteria, she liked to eat alone, always sitting in the same place humming bars of music in between bites of her food.

[107] Terracita's neighbors on the 15th floor of her apartment building didn't have anything to add either.

[108] They said Terracita did periodically have guests at her apartment, but on the night of her murder, no one on the floor had seen anyone enter or leave Terracita's apartment.

[109] By the end of April, six weeks after Terracita's murder, Detective Stachula and Epin had gotten virtually nowhere on the case.

[110] However, they did have two viable leads.

[111] The first lead had to do with a phone call Terracita received on the night of her murder.

[112] Terracita's friend, Ruth Loeb called her around 7 .30 p .m. and the two women chatted for about 20 minutes.

[113] Ruth would tell the detectives that on this call, Terracita mentioned that she was going to have a visitor over that night, and Ruth would recall actually hearing a man's voice in the background of Terracita's apartment toward the end of their phone call.

[114] However, Terracita didn't say who this male visitor was, and Ruth didn't recognize the voice.

[115] One hour after Ruth and Terracita hung up their phones, authorities would discover Terracita's body.

[116] This meant Terracita had been killed right after her call with Ruth.

[117] This also meant that Terracita's unknown male visitor that night had most likely been her killer.

[118] The second lead detectives had was a cryptic note that Terracita had written in her personal diary.

[119] It just said, buy tickets for A period S period.

[120] But to that point, police had not come across anyone or heard of any friend or acquaintance of Terracitas with the initials AS, so they had no idea who this AS person was.

[121] But despite these promising leads, detectives continued to hit dead end after dead end in their investigation, and so by the summer of 1977, Terracita's murder seemed destined to go unsolved.

[122] However, that would not be the case, because something incredibly unusual and downright disturbing was about to happen that would lead the detectives to the killer.

[123] Not long after Terracita's murder, one of the other respiratory therapists at Edgewater Hospital began to act very strangely.

[124] Her name was Remy Chua, she was 38 years old, and like Terracita, she was from the Philippines.

[125] Remy didn't work the same shift as Terracita, and so she had very little interaction with her and didn't know her well.

[126] But, according to Remy's co -workers, following Following Terracita's death, Remy began using Terracita's locker at work, and she also began to sit in the exact same seat in the cafeteria that Teresita would always sit at.

[127] Remy even began to hum as she sat there alone and ate her lunch, just like Teresita had.

[128] Remy also began to talk at length about a brand new interest she had, music.

[129] Unsettled by what they considered to be Remy's obvious impersonation of a murdered colleague, Remy's co -workers eventually asked her why she was doing what she was doing.

[130] But Remy just looked at them confused and then waved them off dismissively and said she was not acting like Terracita.

[131] She was acting like herself.

[132] Eventually, when Remy's behavior didn't stop, a few of her coworkers complained to their supervisor.

[133] And when the supervisor approached Remy and told her about her co -workers' complaints, Remy became furious and aggressive.

[134] And in fact, her outburst got so out of hand that the supervisor wound up firing her.

[135] When Remy arrived home that day, she was still very upset.

[136] Her husband, Dr. Jose Chua, who was a surgeon in Chicago, not at Edgewater, but at another hospital, instantly noticed that his wife looked distraught, so he asked her to come sit down with him and tell him what was wrong.

[137] So Remy walked into the living room, she sat down in a chair, and then she began to tell her husband a sort of distorted version of what had happened.

[138] She told her husband, not that she was just fired, but rather that her job had just been canceled, and so now she was out of work.

[139] Remy didn't mention anything about her mimicry of Terracita Basa and how that had actually led to her job loss.

[140] Now, at this point in the story, you need to understand that Dr. Chua had no idea that there were any strange things happening with his wife.

[141] She seemed totally normal to him up until she had come home upset.

[142] Also, at this point, Dr. Chua had never heard the name Terracita Bassa before.

[143] He had no idea who she was, or that she had worked with his wife at the hospital, or that she had recently been killed.

[144] So, when Dr. Chua's wife suddenly stood up from her chair in the living room mid -sentence and just said kind of robotically that she was going to go lie down for a while, Dr. Chua had no idea that he and his wife were about to get drawn into one of the most bizarre and unlikely murder investigations in American history.

[145] Hey, all you fans of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious.

[146] It's me, Mr. Ballin, and today I have some big news.

[147] It's something I'm holding in my hands right now, and so obviously you can't see it, but this is something you're really going to want to see.

[148] It's the first ever official Mr. Ballin publication.

[149] It's a graphic novel, and it's called Mr. Ballin Presents, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious, the Graphic Stories.

[150] It's an anthology of both classic and brand new, terrifying stories that we've never covered on any of my other platforms because we created them specifically for this first book.

[151] Each of these stories in the book are feature length, Mr. Ballin's stories that really needed to be told visually.

[152] And the artwork in this book is, I mean, I'm looking at it, and it's just absolutely stunning.

[153] So the book is not actually coming out until my birthday this year, October 1st, but you can pre -order it right now at book.

[154] Bollin Studios .com.

[155] Again, that's book .bollin Studios .com.

[156] If you're listening to this podcast, then chances are good, you are a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious.

[157] And if that's the case, then I've got some good news.

[158] We just launched a brand new Strange Dark and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Bollin's Medical Mysteries.

[159] And as the name suggests, it's a show about medical mysteries, a genre that many fans have been asking us to dive into for years, and we finally decided to take the plunge and the show is awesome.

[160] In this free weekly show, we explore bizarre, unheard of diseases, strange medical mishaps, unexplainable deaths, and everything in between.

[161] Each story is totally true and totally terrifying.

[162] Go follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're a prime member, you can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[163] After Remy stood up and left for her bedroom, her mother, who was visiting the couple would say that the look on her daughter's face was so strange that she turned and asked Dr. Chua to follow her and make sure his wife was okay.

[164] Dr. Chua did just that, and he arrived in the bedroom to find his wife lying on top of the bed, staring blankly up at the ceiling.

[165] Startled by the fixed look on his wife's face, Dr. Chua sat down next to her on the edge of the bed and asked her, is anything wrong?

[166] But the voice that answered him did not belong to his wife.

[167] was instead a voice he had never heard before.

[168] It spoke in the native Philippine language of Tagalog, which he and his wife both knew but rarely used, and the voice spoke with a distinct Spanish accent that he had never heard his wife used before.

[169] Doctor, the voice coming out of his wife's mouth said, You must help me. Dr. Chua was so caught off guard by this alien -sounding voice that he immediately defaulted to his medical training.

[170] He decided he needed to check to see if his wife was actually coherent or not.

[171] So he asked her a simple question, what is your name?

[172] But instead of his wife saying, Remy, in her normal voice, she said, still speaking in Tagalog with a Spanish accent, I am Terracita Basa.

[173] Dr. Chua felt chills go all over his body.

[174] Then after a pause, he said that he didn't know anyone by that name.

[175] When his wife just lay there motionless, still staring up at the ceiling, Dr. Chua broke the silence and said, well, what do you want?

[176] The voice responded immediately.

[177] She said she had been murdered and she wanted to tell the doctor the name of her killer.

[178] Dr. Chua was at a complete loss.

[179] Nothing in his medical training had prepared him for what he was experiencing.

[180] And so he just started stroking his wife's arm and telling her that everything was okay and to relax and that she needed to wake up now and come back to him.

[181] But as he tried to kind of calm his wife down, the voice coming out of her mouth only became more insistent.

[182] It told Dr. Chua the first and last name of her killer.

[183] Then the voice gave very specific details of her own murder.

[184] The voice said that her killer had arrived alone at her apartment around 8 p .m. on the night of Monday, February 21st, and that she, Terracita, had let him in because he was a friend.

[185] But this friend, once inside of her apartment, had stabbed Terracita and killed her.

[186] In all, Remy's apparent trance lasted for about 30 minutes.

[187] When she came to, she began glancing around the room wildly, when she saw her husband sitting on the bed next to her looking gravely concerned, and her mother standing in the corner looking horrified, Remy asked what's going on?

[188] Dr. Chua gently asked his wife if she remembered anything that had just happened.

[189] Puzzled, Remy shook her head no, and said that the last thing she remembered was sitting in the chair in the living room and that she had no idea how she got to this bedroom.

[190] Dr. Chua, who was very rattled by what he had just experienced, took a deep breath and then tried to explain to his wife everything that had just happened in that bedroom.

[191] When Dr. Chua asked Remy if she knew this woman, Terracita Bassa, Rami, who was now visibly shaking, told her husband that she did.

[192] Terracita was a woman she worked with at the hospital and that she had just been killed.

[193] But Remy said she barely knew her.

[194] They were just acquaintances.

[195] However, as she told her husband, this, Remy suddenly remembered something that happened to her two weeks earlier that she had tried to forget about, but now she couldn't help but bring it up.

[196] Remy said two weeks earlier, she had gone into the break room at the hospital after a long shift to take a nap.

[197] And just seconds after closing her eyes, she felt a presence in the room with her, thinking one of her co -workers must have silently stepped into the room.

[198] She was horrified when she opened her eyes and there, standing right in front of her, staring down at her, was the recently murdered Terracita Bassa.

[199] Remy was so instantly terrified that without making a sound, she just leapt to her feet and ran out of the room and down the hallway.

[200] After a few seconds, she stopped running and she turned around, but Terracita wasn't there anymore.

[201] With her heart still pounding, Remy told herself that she must have just imagined seeing Terracita, that that was all just a dream.

[202] But she couldn't shake the image of Terracita standing there, staring at her, it felt so real.

[203] Terrified and embarrassed, she had decided not to tell anyone about seeing the ghost of Terracita until now.

[204] After hearing this story, Dr. Chua told his wife that, of course, that must have just been a dream.

[205] You know, don't worry about that.

[206] I'm sure that's nothing.

[207] But deep down, he was frightened too and couldn't understand how that could have happened just two weeks ago.

[208] And now they're in this bedroom dealing with this trance scenario that involves Terracita.

[209] Shifting the conversation back to reality, Dr. Chua asked his wife if she recognized the name of Terracita's killer.

[210] The voice had repeated the name several times, and Remy would say, yes, she did know who that person was.

[211] But ultimately, the Chua's decided that they could not possibly go to the police with any of this information.

[212] How could they explain to police how they got it?

[213] They'd look foolish or crazy or even suspicious.

[214] So, the couple just kind of went on with their day and acted like Remy's trance had never happened.

[215] Then, that night, Remy got a telephone call.

[216] Dr. Chua, who was standing nearby when his wife answered, could hear a man's voice on the other end of the line.

[217] His wife only managed to say a few words before hanging up the receiver, but when she turned back to her husband, her face was pale.

[218] She told him that it was someone from work whose voice she didn't recognize, but the man had just threatened her and told her that he was, quote, going to get her next.

[219] Again, out of fear, the Chu has decided not to go to police.

[220] Two days later, while Remy was on the phone talking to a real estate agent standing near where her husband was sitting, Remy suddenly dropped the telephone receiver and stood awkwardly still and went into another trance.

[221] Again, the voice that came out of Remi's mouth was not her own.

[222] It was the voice that claimed to be Tarasita.

[223] And this time, the voice was even more insistent.

[224] You must help me, doctor, she pleaded.

[225] You are the only one who can help find my killer.

[226] You must go to the police with everything I've told you.

[227] The voice went on to tell Dr. Chua not to be afraid, that he would not get in trouble for coming forward with this information, that Terracita would protect him and his family.

[228] However, However, once Remy snapped out of this second trance, the Chua's, again, did not go to the police.

[229] Even though they were starting to believe that these trances might actually be real, that Terracita really was communicating with them from beyond the grave, they felt like they didn't have any real evidence to back up what this voice was claiming, and so they still just could not go to police.

[230] No one would believe them.

[231] A few days later, Remy would fall into yet another trance.

[232] While Remy and her husband were asleep in bed, Remy suddenly opened her eyes, and while remaining stiff as a board on her back, she began speaking to Dr. Chua in the now familiar Tagalog with the Spanish inflection.

[233] When Dr. Chua woke up and saw what was happening right next to him, he was ready.

[234] He demanded that the voice provide real proof that could confirm her claim about the killer's identity.

[235] And the voice would do just that.

[236] According to the voice, After Terracita had let her killer inside of her apartment, the killer had knocked her unconscious, and after stabbing her, he had rifled through her apartment and taken several pieces of jewelry that had been given to her by her mother.

[237] Her killer had disposed of some of the pieces, but he had kept a jade and gold necklace and a pearl cocktail ring that he had given to his longtime girlfriend with whom he lived.

[238] Not only did the voice describe every detail of the ring and the necklace, but also, the voice told Dr. Chua the names and the phone numbers of Terracita's relatives who lived in the Chicago area who could actually identify this jewelry as belonging to Terracita.

[239] The voice ended the trance by telling Dr. Chua that once police found this jewelry, they would find the killer.

[240] After this third visitation from what appeared to be the spirit of Terracita, Dr. Chua and Remy felt like they had to share this information with authorities.

[241] But the Chua's were still nervous about going public with their story, so instead of contacting the Chicago police, they contacted their own local police department in Evanston, Illinois, which was north of Chicago.

[242] And instead of saying that they had got all this information from the voice of a dead woman, they told the police that Remy had received that threatening phone call from a former co -worker at Edgewater Hospital, and they identified this co -worker using the name of the man that the voice Terracita had said was her murderer.

[243] The Chua's then surprised the Evanston police by suggesting that this threatening phone call could be related to the murder of Terracita Basa.

[244] It should be noted that we don't know if Remy and Dr. Chua concocted this story in order to more discreetly tell police what they had learned from the voice, or if they actually came to believe that the person who called Remy and threatened her was the same person who the voice identified as the killer.

[245] So, in early August, 1977, five months after Terracita's death, Chicago Detective Joe Stachula was notified by Evanston Police about a possible tip in the Terracita murder case.

[246] A few days later, when Detective Stachula followed up directly with the Evanston Police for more details on this tip, The Evanston police officer told Stachula the name the Chua's had given them of the man who had apparently made this harassing phone call and who the Chua's thought was connected to the murder of Tarasida Basa.

[247] And when Detective Stachula heard this person's name, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up straight.

[248] A few days after that, Detective Stachula found himself sitting in the Chua's living room, staring at a highly educated and articulate couple who seemed incredibly reluctant, to elaborate in any way on the tip they had called in to the Evanston Police Station.

[249] After a brief description from Remy about the threatening call she had received almost three weeks earlier, Detective Stachula could no longer ignore Dr. Chua's obvious distress as the doctor sat there shifting in his seat and wringing his hands while his wife was speaking.

[250] When Detective Stichula turned towards the doctor and asked him point blank, is there something about this murder investigation that you want to tell me?

[251] Dr. Chua looked extremely embarrassed, but instead of answering the detective's question, the surgeon leaned forward and looked intently at the detective's face before asking a question of his own.

[252] Do you believe in the occult or in possession and exorcism?

[253] Detective Stachula worded his answer carefully, telling Dr. Chua that as a homicide investigator, he always tried to keep an open mind and follow up on any information that could help solve a murder case.

[254] Dr. Chua nodded silently, then took a deep breath, and he told the detective the whole story of how, starting back in mid -July, the spirit of Terracita Bassa had begun temporarily possessing his wife's body.

[255] And during these possessions, Terracita would give them very specific information, like about the exact type of jewelry that was taken from her apartment, that Teresita insisted would help police catch her killer, a man named Alan Showery.

[256] When Detective Stachula had first heard the Evanston police officer say this name, Alan Showery, it had caused the hairs on his neck to stand up because Alan's initials were A -S.

[257] Just like the initials written in that cryptic note, Terracita had left in her personal diary before she was killed.

[258] The note had just said, buy tickets for A -period S -period.

[259] When Detective Stichula asked the couple if they knew anything about this Alan Showery person, Remy said Alan was a 31 -year -old respiratory technician at Edgewater Hospital, and he was friends with Terracita.

[260] However, it would turn out, he was one of the employees at the hospital who was not originally interviewed by police because his shifts did not overlap with Terracitas.

[261] While the information that Dr. Chua and Remy had just told him sounded very promising, the fact that it was apparently delivered by the murder victim herself after she was dead seemed so unbelievable to Detective Stachula that instead of writing up a formal police report about his interview with the Chua's, he instead just described the interview in a confidential memo that he sent only to his commanding officer.

[262] Following the Chua interview, police would rule out Remy and her husband, Dr. Chua, as suspects in Terracidas murder because both of them had rock -solid alibis.

[263] The police would also run a background check on Alan Chowry, and it would show that he had a lengthy rap sheet, which included being arrested for, but not convicted of, theft, burglary, and rape.

[264] Through new interviews with Terracita's co -workers, police confirmed that Alan and Terracita were friends and that on the night of her murder, Alan may have gone to Terracita's apartment to fix her broken TV set, because apparently someone had overheard him say that.

[265] And if that was true, that would place him right at the scene of the crime.

[266] So, on the afternoon of August 11th, 11th, 1977, almost six months after Terracita was killed, Detective Stachula and Eppin arrived at the apartment of Alan and his girlfriend Yonka and asked to speak with Alan down at the police station about Terracita's murder.

[267] While Allen immediately agreed to the request and chatted to detectives on the ride to the station about what a wonderful person and good friend Terracita had been, he also insisted to police that the last time he had seen Terracita was six months before her death.

[268] But when investigators bluffed, telling him they'd found his fingerprints at Terracita's apartment, Alan reconsidered, saying that on second thought, he had been at Terracita's apartment on the night of her murder to fix her TV, but that he had left at 6 .30 p .m. because he didn't have the right tools with him to fix the TV.

[269] At that point, police went back to Allen's apartment to see if Yonka could confirm her husband's alibi.

[270] But it wasn't what Yonka had to say that grabbed officers' attention.

[271] It was what she was wearing.

[272] There, on one of her fingers, officers saw a large, distinctive pearl cocktail ring.

[273] It was exactly like the one that the Chua said belonged to Tarasita and had been taken from her apartment by the killer.

[274] When investigators asked Yanka where she had gotten the ring, she told them it was a late Christmas present, along with some other pieces of jewelry, that Allen had given her in late February, which would have been right around the time that Terracita was murdered.

[275] Detectives immediately asked Yanka to join her husband at the police station and to bring her jewelry collection with her.

[276] Yanka agreed, and then police, using the list of names and phone numbers that Dr. Chua had given them, contacted some of Terracidas relatives who lived in the area, and they came to the police station as well.

[277] And those relatives, including Terracita's cousin, immediately identified the ring Yanka was wearing and the jade pendant in her jewelry box as the jewelry that Terracita's father had bought in France for Terracita's mother and that Terracita's mother had then given the jewelry to Terracita during her last visit to Chicago.

[278] When police confronted Alan with the ring, along with the information provided by Terracita's relatives, Alan abandoned his claim that he was innocent of any involvement in Terracita's murder, and by early the next morning, on August 12, 1977, police had a 13 -page signed confession from Alan.

[279] According to that confession and additional interviews from Terracita's co -workers, this is what happened to Terracita on the night of her murder.

[280] Alan arrived at Terracita's apartment at about 6 .30 p .m. to fix her TV.

[281] But after realizing he did not have the right tools to fix it, he told Terracita that he would just have to come back another time, and he left her apartment shortly after 7 .30 p .m. to walk back to his own apartment, which was only a block away.

[282] On that walk home, Alan did a lot of thinking.

[283] He had some serious money problems.

[284] He was currently behind on rent, and if he couldn't get his hands on a lot of cash very soon, his landlord was going to evict him and Yonka, who was several months pregnant.

[285] And when Alan wondered where and how he could come up with that kind of money, he thought of Tarasita.

[286] He knew she came from a wealthy family in the Philippines, and it seemed to him that she must have a lot of cash on hand.

[287] So, when Yonka went out shopping at about 8 p .m. night, Alan decided to go back to Tarasita's and rob her.

[288] When Terracita heard that knock on her front door at about 8 p .m., she was sitting at her table busy working on her doctoral thesis.

[289] When she heard Alan's voice on the other side of the door, saying he'd come back with the right repair tools, she quickly undid the deadbolt to welcome him inside.

[290] As she turned back to close the door behind him, Alan lunged at Terracita, using his arm to encircle her neck from behind, in a vicious chokehold.

[291] as he dragged her into her bedroom.

[292] He continued to squeeze her neck until she was unconscious.

[293] Then, Alan lay Tarasita down on the bedroom floor on her back, he stripped off all of her clothes, and arranged her body to look like she had been sexually assaulted.

[294] Then he walked into the kitchen, and he grabbed a large knife that was laying on a cutting board nearby.

[295] He walked back into the bedroom with the knife in hand, and he stood over Tarasita, who was still on the ground unconscious, and then he raised the knife into the air, and then drove it straight down into the center, of her chest.

[296] After pausing to catch his breath and to make sure that Terracita was dead, Alan got back onto his feet and began searching the apartment for the small fortune in cash that he was sure he would find.

[297] In the end, though, after pulling out drawers, opening cupboards, and turning over small pieces of furniture, all Alan would find was just $30.

[298] Glancing at his watch, Alan knew Yonka would be back soon and he needed to hurry.

[299] So he stepped to Terracita's bed, He pulled the mattress down on top of her to hide her body, and then he piled her clothes up on top of and next to the mattress and set it all on fire.

[300] On his way out of her bedroom, he gathered up the jewelry that he found on top of her bedroom dresser and inside her small jewelry box.

[301] Then he let himself out the front door and slipped down the hallway to the elevator and then back out to the street where he breathed in fresh, cold, winter air.

[302] In his confession, Alan was convinced that Terracita never felt a thing after she lost consciousness.

[303] meaning she did not feel the knife being plunged into her chest that killed her.

[304] However, we have no way of knowing if that's actually true.

[305] 17 months after Terracita's murder, on Friday, January 27, 1979, the judge overseeing the Allen Showery murder trial declared a mistrial when the jury of eight men and four women reported that they were hopelessly deadlocked and unable to reach a unanimous verdict of either guilty or not guilty.

[306] The trial itself, dubbed The Voice from the Grave Trial, had been an eight -day -long national media sensation, with Allen's defense team calling into question any charge that was based on information delivered to police by Terracita's ghost.

[307] The prosecution argued that the source of the information that police got from the Chua's was immaterial.

[308] The only thing that mattered was whether the information was accurate, and even though Alan would later recant both his oral and written confession, police said that the hard evidence they had collected proved that he was, in fact, Terracita's killer.

[309] Alan's lawyers were ecstatic when the judge declared a mistrial.

[310] They had poked so many holes in the voice from the dead story that they told Alan that he was sure to get a not guilty verdict in his new trial.

[311] They had also proved that Remy was an unreliable witness, that she had in fact known Terracita much better than she had originally told detectives, maybe even well enough to know details about what jewelry Terracita owned and the names of Terracita's relatives.

[312] But three weeks later, on February 22nd, 1979, almost two years to the day that Terracita was killed, Alan Showery surprised the world by changing his story yet again.

[313] This time, against the advice of his legal team, Alan changed his plea to guilty in the murder of Teresita Basa.

[314] Alan Showery was sentenced to 14 years in prison, the minimum mandatory sentence for murder.

[315] But just four and a half years into Allen's sentence, he was released from prison on parole for good behavior.

[316] His whereabouts today are unknown.

[317] 45 years later, the case of Terracita Bossa's murder remains one of the strangest investigations in police history.

[318] But whether or not you believe the story Dr. Jose Chua and his wife Remy told Chicago police, the fact remains that the information they provided to investigators turned out to be the key to finding and convicting the man who eventually confessed to being Terracita's killer.

[319] Also, as a final piece of information to think about, buried in the interview notes amongst the dozens and dozens of interviews police conducted with Edgewater Hospital employees, there are three different accounts from employees who all claim the same thing, that they came face to face with an apparition that looked like Terracita, who pleaded with them to help bring her killer to justice.

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[336] She struck him with her motor vehicle.

[337] She had been under the influence that she left him there.

[338] In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O 'Keefe.

[339] It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location.

[340] What happens next?

[341] Depends on who you ask.

[342] Was it a crime of passion?

[343] If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling.

[344] This was clearly an intentional act.

[345] And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia.

[346] Or a corrupt police cover -up.

[347] If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover -up to prevent one of their own from going down.

[348] Everyone had an opinion.

[349] And after the 10 -week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision.

[350] To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is.

[351] Law and crime presents the most in -depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen.

[352] You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus.

[353] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.