On 21 February 1977, firefighters broke into Teresita Basa’s Chicago flat to find her body ablaze beneath a burning mattress. A butcher knife was buried in her chest…
The scene was staged to look like a sexual assault. It wasn’t. The autopsy confirmed she hadn’t been raped. For five months, detectives had nothing. No witnesses. No motive. No leads.
Then a voice from beyond allegedly cracked the case wide open…
The ‘Possession’ That Named A Killer
Six months after the murder, Dr Jose Chua contacted Chicago police with a claim that sounded absurd: his wife Remy had been possessed by Teresita Basa’s spirit on three separate occasions.
During trance states, Remy spoke in Tagalog with a Spanish accent – the exact speech pattern Teresita had used. The voice identified Allan Showery as the killer and claimed he’d given Teresita’s stolen jewellery to his girlfriend.
When Remy woke, she remembered nothing.
Detective Joseph Stachula later admitted: “To this day, I’m not quite sure whether I believe how the information was obtained.” But the Chuas were educated, intelligent people with no apparent motive to lie. He decided to follow the lead.
The Evidence That Couldn’t Be Dismissed
Detectives visited Showery’s girlfriend. She confirmed he’d given her jewellery as a “late Christmas gift” in February 1977 – the month of the murder. A pearl ring. A jade pendant.
Teresita’s family and friends identified both pieces as hers.
There was something else. In Teresita’s burnt flat, investigators had found a cryptic note: “Get tickets for A.S.” They couldn’t identify who “A.S.” was at the time.
When the Chuas named Allan Showery, the initials suddenly aligned. Confronted with the physical evidence, Showery confessed. He admitted attacking Teresita when she turned to lock the door after letting him back into her flat.
The Workplace Connection That Raises Questions
Remy Chua and Allan Showery both worked in the same department at Edgewater Hospital. Defence lawyers argued that Chua suspected Showery of filing complaints about her work quality. Her “psychic symptoms” began within hours of discovering she’d lost her job – just one day after she believed Showery made a prank phone call to her.
The possession may have been supernatural. Or it may have been a psychologically safe way to share knowledge that weighed on her conscience. The mechanism remains unclear.
The Trial That Made History
The case became known worldwide as the “Voice From The Grave” trial.
The first trial ended in a hung jury. Jurors were divided, solving a murder because a friend of the victim was possessed is quite out of the ordinary. During his second trial, Showery pleaded guilty on 23 February 1979. He received only 14 years and was released on parole in 1983.
Rumours circulated that Teresita’s ghost had visited him in prison…
The case remains extraordinarily rare. It’s cited as one of the only cases in the United States where evidence from a “ghost” led to a successful conviction.
Why Memory Makes Terrible Evidence
Courts have never ruled that ghosts exist. But belief in the supernatural has still influenced legal outcomes. Eyewitness testimony is powerful and convincing to jurors. It’s also not particularly reliable.
Faulty eyewitness testimony has been implicated in at least 75% of DNA exoneration cases – more than any other cause. Memory isn’t a recording. It’s a reconstructive process susceptible to distortion, suggestion, and completely fabricated details.
People are more likely to misremember events in which they were personally victimised. Emotionally charged cases are particularly vulnerable to memory errors.
The Teresita Basa case sits at the intersection of belief, memory evidence and vengeance. Whether supernatural, psychological or plain devious, the mechanism that led to Showery’s conviction remains unexplained with the case solved, the conviction secured but the truth behind it all still uncertain…
