Ghost Story (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

In mid-July 1977, a 38-year-old woman named Remy 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.

Then she turned and walked away into a nearby bedroom.

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

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.

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.

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Okay, let's get into today's story.

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1988.

A small New Jersey town is shaken by horror.

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It was 3 p.m.

on Monday, February 21st, 1977, and Tara Sitabasa was feeling happy that her shift at North Chicago's Edgewater Hospital was over.

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

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

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.

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.

A few minutes later, a train arrived and Terra Sita climbed on board.

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

She found one she liked and she sat down right as the train began pulling out of the station.

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.

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

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 Dumaguete, a city located 8,000 miles away on Negros Island in the southern Philippines.

Here in Chicago, Terraceda was surrounded by towering skyscrapers, and the average temperature in February hovered right around freezing.

Back in Dumaguete, 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.

But much as Terecita 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.

A dream that right now, Teresita felt was almost within her grasp.

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.

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 Terra Sita had left her home in the Philippines and come to America.

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

As a young child, Terra Sita 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 all the time.

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.

Once Terra 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.

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

This time, Teresita would leave the Philippines to attend Indiana University in the United States.

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

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

After getting her master's degree in Indiana, Teresita 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.

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

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

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

Before returning to Dumaguete after that last visit, Teresita'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 Teresita to wear them, and when she did, to think of her parents and how much they loved her.

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

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

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

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

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

By the time she reached her apartment building, Teresita had already planned out how she would spend her evening.

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.

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 Mahoganies Plus One, and maybe she'd give her cousin a call too.

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.

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

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

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

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.

After freshening up in the bathroom, Terra Sita went into her living room and she sat down at her beloved piano.

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

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

A few hours later, at around 8 p.m.

that evening, Teresita heard a quiet knock on her front door.

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

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

When she got the answer, Teresita smiled, undid the lock and deadbolt, and then invited her guest inside.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

With the door unlocked, the firefighters made entry.

Inside Apartment 15B, firefighters quickly saw and extinguished the source of the fire.

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

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.

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

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

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

The first thing Chicago detective Joe Stachula and his partner Lee Eppen noticed when they stepped inside of Terraceda's apartment was the mess.

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.

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

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

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.

She was naked, her knees were spread wide apart, but her feet were almost touching each other.

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

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

It did not take detectives long to confirm that the body in 15B was that of Terraceda Basa.

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.

Since the door to her apartment was not deadbolted from the inside, police assumed that Teresita had opened the door for her killer.

And once the killer, who they believed was male, was inside, he overpowered Teresita, he sexually assaulted her, and then he murdered her.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten years earlier, Terraceda 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.

Ever since then, Terraceda had become much more interested in friendship than in romance.

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

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 and visiting medical personnel that detectives had to narrow their interviews to just co-workers whose shifts and responsibilities overlapped with Teresita's.

And the verdict among that small group was unanimous.

Everybody loved Terraceda.

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.

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

They said Terraceda 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 Teresita's apartment.

By the end of April, six weeks after Terracita's murder, detectives Stachula and Eppen had gotten virtually nowhere on the case.

However, they did have two viable leads.

The first lead had to do with a phone call Teresita received on the night of her murder.

Teresita's friend, Ruth Loeb, called her around 7.30 p.m.

and the two women chatted for about 20 minutes.

Ruth would tell the detectives that on this call, Terraceda 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 Teresita's apartment toward the end of their phone call.

However, Teresita didn't say who this male visitor was, and Ruth didn't recognize the voice.

One hour after Ruth and Terra Sita hung up their phones, authorities would discover Teresita's body.

This meant Teresita had been killed right after her call with Ruth.

This also meant that Teresita's unknown male visitor that night had most likely been her killer.

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

It just said, buy tickets for A period, S period.

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

But despite these promising leads, detectives continued to hit dead end after dead end in their investigation.

And so by the summer of 1977, Teresita's murder seemed destined to go unsolved.

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.

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

Her name was Remy Chua, she was 38 years old, and like Teresita, she was from the Philippines.

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

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

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

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

Unsettled by what they considered to be Remy's obvious impersonation of a murdered colleague, Remy's coworkers eventually asked her why she was doing what she was doing.

But Remy just looked at them confused and then waved them off dismissively and said she was not acting like Terraceda.

She was acting like herself.

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

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

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

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

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.

So Remy walked into 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.

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

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

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.

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

Also, at this point, Dr.

Chua had never heard the name Terra Sita Basa before.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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

It was instead a voice he had never heard before.

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 use before.

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.

He decided he needed to check to see if his wife was actually coherent or not, so he asked her a simple question, what is your name?

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.

Dr.

Chua felt chills go all over his body.

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

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?

The voice responded immediately.

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

Dr.

Chua was at a complete loss.

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

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.

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

It told Dr.

Chua the first and last name of her killer.

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

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, Teresita, had let him in because he was a friend.

But this friend, once inside of her apartment, had stabbed Teresita and killed her.

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

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?

Dr.

Chua gently asked his wife if she remembered anything that had just happened.

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.

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.

When Dr.

Chua asked Remy if she knew this woman, Teresita Basa, Remy, who was now visibly shaking, told her husband that she did.

Teresita was a woman she worked with at the hospital and that she had just been killed.

But Remy said she barely knew her, they were just acquaintances.

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.

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

She was horrified when she opened her eyes eyes and there, standing right in front of her, staring down at her, was the recently murdered Terraceda Basa.

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.

After a few seconds, she stopped running and she turned around, but Terraceda wasn't there anymore.

With her heart still pounding, Remy told herself that she must have just imagined seeing Terra Sita, that that was all just a dream.

But she couldn't shake the image of Terra Sita standing there staring at her.

It felt so real.

Terrified and embarrassed, she had decided not to tell anyone about seeing the ghost of Terra Ceda until now.

After hearing this story, Dr.

Chua told his wife that, of course, that must have just been a dream.

You know, don't worry about that.

I'm sure that's nothing.

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

And now they're in this bedroom dealing with this trance scenario that involves Terra Ceda.

Shifting the conversation back to reality, Dr.

Chua asked his wife if she recognized the name of Terra Ceda's killer.

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

But ultimately, the Chuas decided that they could not possibly go to the police with any of this information.

How could they explain to police how they got it?

They'd look foolish or crazy or even suspicious.

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

Then, that night, Remy got a telephone call.

Dr.

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

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.

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.

Again, out of fear, the Chuas decided not to go to police.

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.

Again, the voice that came out of Remy's mouth was not her own.

It was the voice that claimed to be Terra Sita.

And this time, the voice was even more insistent.

You must help me, Doctor, she pleaded.

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

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

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 Terra Sita would protect him and his family.

However, once Remy snapped out of this second trance, the Chuas again did not go to the police.

Even though they were starting to believe that these trances might actually be real, that Terra Sita 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.

No one would believe them.

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

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.

When Dr.

Chua woke up and saw what was happening right next to him, he was ready.

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

And the voice would do just that.

According to the voice, after Terraceda 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.

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.

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 Terra Sita's relatives who lived in the Chicago area who could actually identify this jewelry as belonging to Terra Sita.

The voice ended the trance by telling Dr.

Chua that once police found this jewelry, they would find the killer.

After this third visitation from what appeared to be the spirit of Terra Sita, Dr.

Chua and Remy felt like they had to share this information with authorities.

But the Chuas 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.

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, Terra Sita, had said was her murderer.

The Chuas then surprised the Evanston police by suggesting that this threatening phone call could be related to the murder of Terra Sita Basa.

It should be noted that we don't know if Remy and Dr.

Chua concocted this story in order to more discreetly tell 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.

So, in early August 1977, five months after Teresita's death, Chicago detective Joe Stachula was notified by Evanston police about a possible tip in the Terra Cita murder case.

A few days later, when Detective Stachula followed up directly with the Evanston police for more details on on this tip, the Evanston police officer told Stachula the name the Chuas had given them of the man who had apparently made this harassing phone call and who the Chuas thought was connected to the murder of Tara Sita Basa.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Do you believe in the occult or in possession and exorcism?

Detective Stachulo 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.

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 Terraceda Basa had begun temporarily possessing his wife's body.

And during these possessions, Terraceda would give them very specific information, like about the exact type of jewelry that was taken from her apartment, that Terraceda insisted would help police catch her killer.

a man named Alan Showery.

When Detective Stachula had first heard the Evanston police officer say say this name, Alan Showery, it had caused the hairs on his neck to stand up because Alan's initials were AS, just like the initials written in that cryptic note Terra Sita had left in her personal diary before she was killed.

The note had just said, buy tickets for A period S period.

When Detective Stachula 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 Terra Ceda.

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 Terraceda's.

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 Chuas, he instead just described the interview in a confidential memo that he sent only to his commanding officer.

Following the Chua interview, police would rule out Remy and her husband, Dr.

Chua, as suspects in Terraceda's murder because both of them had rock-solid alibis.

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

Through new interviews with Teresita's co-workers, police confirmed that Alan and Teresita 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.

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

So, on the afternoon of August 11th, 1977, almost six months after Terraceda was killed, Detectives Stachula and Eppen arrived at the apartment of Alan and his girlfriend Yanka and asked to speak with Alan down at the police station about Teresita's murder.

While Alan 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 Teresita was six months before her death.

But when investigators bluffed, telling him they'd found his fingerprints at Teresita's apartment, Alan reconsidered, saying that on second thought, he had been at Teresita'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.

At that point, police went back to Alan's apartment to see if Yanka could confirm her husband's alibi.

But it wasn't what Yanka had to say that grabbed officers' attention.

It was what she was wearing.

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

It was exactly like the one that the Chuas said belonged to Teresita Sita and had been taken from her apartment by the killer.

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 Alan had given her in late February, which would have been right around the time that Terra Sita was murdered.

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

Yanka agreed, and then police, using the list of names and phone numbers that Dr.

Chua had given them, contacted some of of Teresita's relatives who lived in the area, and they came to the police station as well.

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 Terraceda's mother, and that Teresita's mother had then given the jewelry to Terraceda during her last visit to Chicago.

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

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

Alan arrived at Terraceda's apartment at about 6.30 p.m.

to fix her TV.

But after realizing he did not have the right tools to fix it, he told Teresita 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.

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

He had some serious money problems.

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 Yanka, who was several months pregnant.

And when Alan wondered where and how he could come up with that kind of money, he thought of Teresita.

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.

So when Yanka went out shopping at about 8 p.m.

that night, Alan decided to go back to Terraceda's and rob her.

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

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.

As she turned back to close the door behind him, Alan lunged at Terraceda, using his arm to encircle her neck from behind in a vicious chokehold as he dragged her into her bedroom.

He continued to squeeze her neck until she was unconscious.

Then, Alan lay Terraceda 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.

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

He walked back into the bedroom with the knife in hand and he stood over Teresita 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.

After pausing to catch his breath and to make sure that Terraceda 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.

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

Glancing at his watch, Alan knew Yanka would be back soon and he needed to hurry.

So he stepped to Terra Sita'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.

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.

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.

In his confession, Alan was convinced that Terra Sita never felt a thing after she lost consciousness, meaning she did not feel the knife being plunged into her chest that killed her.

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

17 months after Terra Sita's murder, on Friday, January 27, 1979, the judge overseeing the Alan 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.

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

The prosecution argued that the source of the information that police got from the Chuas was immaterial.

The only thing that mattered was whether the information was accurate.

And even though Alan would later recant both his oral and written confessions, police said that the hard evidence they had collected proved that he was, in fact, Terra Ceda's killer.

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

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.

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

But, three weeks later, on February 22, 1979, almost two years to the day that Teresita was killed, Alan Showry surprised the world by changing his story yet again.

This time, against the advice of his legal team, Alan changed his plea to guilty in the murder of Teresita Basso.

Basa.

Alan Shauri was sentenced to 14 years in prison, the minimum mandatory sentence for murder.

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

His whereabouts today are unknown.

45 years later, the case of Teresita Basso's murder remains one of the strangest investigations in police history.

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 Terraceda's killer.

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 Terra Ceda, who pleaded with them to help bring her killer to justice.

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