Teresita Basa, the "Voice from the Grave" (Chicago, 1977)

Teresita Basa was born in the Philippines. In Chicago she worked as a respiratory therapist at Edgewater Hospital. She also taught piano and was working toward a music doctorate. She lived on the 15th floor of 2740 N. Pine Grove Ave., in Lincoln Park.

On the evening of February 21, 1977, smoke was noticed from her apartment. Firefighters found her naked beneath a smouldering mattress and a pile of burning clothes. A butcher knife was in her chest. The case went cold.

About six months later, something began in Evanston. Remibias "Remy" Chua, a Filipina who had worked with Basa at the hospital, started falling into trances at home. Some came while she napped. They lasted about 30 minutes. When she woke, she remembered nothing.

Her husband, Dr. José Chua, was beside her. The voice was not his wife's, he said. The rhythm and cadence were different. It spoke Tagalog with what he recognised as Teresita's Spanish accent. Asked who it was, it answered: "Ako si Teresita Basa." Then it said: "Doctor, I would like to ask for your help. The man who murdered me is still at large."

Over what accounts describe as three episodes, the voice named a hospital co-worker, Allan Showery. It said he stabbed her after she let him in to fix her television. It said he took a pearl ring, something the police did not know. It gave the names and phone numbers of relatives who could identify her belongings. José wrote them down. A third episode pushed the couple to the police.

The tip reached Chicago detectives Joseph Stachula and Lee Epplen through the Evanston police. A note already in the file read "Get theatre tickets for A.S." Showery first denied visiting the apartment. Then he said he had gone to fix the TV and left for lack of tools. His partner, Yanka Kamluk, was wearing a pearl cocktail ring. Basa's relatives identified it. Showery confessed. Stachula himself remained unsure. "To this day, I'm not quite sure whether I believe how the information was obtained," he said. "Nonetheless, everything is completely true."

The press called it the "Voice from the Grave" trial. Defence attorney William Swano said: "Police have never before been informed of a criminal's name by a voice from the grave." Showery told the court the police had fed him the details. In January 1979 the jury deadlocked. Mistrial. On February 23, 1979, Showery pleaded guilty to murder, armed robbery and arson. He received 14 years and was paroled in July 1983.

Skeptics look to the hospital. Remy Chua and Showery worked in the same department. She suspected him of complaining about her work, which allegedly cost her the job, and her symptoms began within hours of learning she had lost it. To doubters, this was suspicion and gossip resurfacing in a dissociative state. Others reply that "everything she shared was true." No source reports any finding of fraud.

"All of us want to believe in life after death," José Chua said after the trial. The case became books by Carol Mercado and by John O'Brien and Edward Baumann, an entry in Colin Wilson's The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved, a 1990 segment of Unsolved Mysteries and a 1996 NBC film, Voice from the Grave.