Thursday, February 12, 2009

Teresita Basa: The Dead Do Talk-Conclusion


When Allan Showery was faced with this evidence he broke down and confessed. Earlier I had mentioned the two trials. At the first trial in January 1979 when the defense had asked that the case be dismissed because the evidence had apparently been provided by a ghost, Judge Frank W. Barbero overruled the objection. The jury however, had its doubts and said they were hopelessly deadlocked. During the second trial a month later, Allan Showery changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. To me -this is one of the reasons I hate plea bargaining-fourteen years for taking the life of someone out of pure greed seems far too little a time for me!

We are left to wonder about some questions in this fascinating case. With most of the parties concerned in the case working at the same hospital, maybe Remy Chua already suspected Allan Showery and used this highly original way ot pointing out her suspicions. Maybe Remy Chua had extrasensory perception and was able to 'pick' Allan Showery's mind in a way that led to her knowledge of his guilt. However, even if this is what happened and Remy Chua gleaned all her information about the jewellery, the television 'repair' motive and the girlfriend from Showery's mind, how could she have possibly obtained the telephone number of the cousins who identified the jewellery from his mind? Even though Remy and Teresita often spoke with each other when their shifts coincided they were not close friends, and she had no reason to know the telephone number, only Teresita could have provided it.

A case in England in 1922 had some curious parallels with the Teresita Basa case. A man named Eric Tombe was shot in the back of the head by his business partner, Ernest Dyer, at the racing stable they ran together at Kenley, Surrey. Dyer had hidden the body in a cesspit and promptly moved to another part of England. Shortly after the murder, Tombe's mother, the wife of the Reverend Gordon Tombe, began having dreams he was dead, and that his body was in a well with a stone slab placed over its opening. Tombe's mother had never been to the stable and did not even know it existed. It was her husband who had finally found it while trying to locate his son. Eric's mother continued to have dreams about her son's corpse and the police apparently decided to search the stud farm, as the case was going nowhere. The police didn't find any wells, but they found four cesspits, each one covered with a heavy stone slab. Eric Tombe's body was found in one of these, hidden in a recess. Ernest Dyer, the murderer, of whose existence the Tombe's had been completely unaware of, had moved to Scarborough, where he continued his unlawful ways by passing bad checks. In an ironic twist to the case, when the police came around to question Dyer about one of the bad checks, he killed himself with a revolver, in all probablility believing they had come to question him about the homicide.

Eric Tombe had been killed from behind, with the back of his head blown off with a shotgun, so there is no possible way he could have provided knowledge of his murder by telepathy. His death was instantaneous and there is a great possibility he didn't even know Dyer had killed him. It is hard to get around the facts of this case taken at face value, that Eric Tombe 'survived' his death and was able somehow to send messages to his mother in dreams of where he was buried. In a very real sense both the Teresita Basa case and that of Eric Tombe are cases of mediumship. Remy Chua first became aware of Teresita Basa when she was napping and felt that Teresita was trying to communicate with her in dreams or trance states that she herself was unware of. She had already given her 'OK' for Teresita to come to her in a dream. Teresita did indeed start coming to Remy Chua not only in dreams, but appeared to take over her person in a trancelike state. Eric Tombe's mother also learned of her son's murder while dreaming. In this twilight state of consciousness both of these women appeared to become mediums. Another thing I think is very interesting, comparing the two cases, is that although we can be sure Remy Chua didn't want to see harm come to Teresita, there was nowhere near the mother-child connection that there was in the case of Eric Tombe. Yet perhaps both of these women had mediumistic abilities-OR-the 'souls' of the two murder victims were strong enough to get their message to the world of the living---maybe because of outrage at the manner of their deaths?
Maybe these cases can best be explained by a connection between the abilites of both the 'alive' and 'dead' parties in combination? I would be interested to know what anyone reading these posts thinks. Thanks again everyone for all of the fantastic comments! The idea for this set of posts came from Colin Wilson's 1988 book, Beyond the Occult-although I had first learned ot the Teresita Basa case in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries long ago-the cases are discussed on pages 261-263 of the book. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I read the story (a long time ago) of a child kidnapping where the Mom was a christian and she prayed so hard about her daughters fate that she was given visions of what had happened to her daughter - in all it's heartbreaking graphic details. The Mom reckoned it was the Holy Spirit that showed her and afterwards the girls body was found and the details the Mom learned were accurate. She knew the name/face of her daughters killer and he was eventually caught when trying to kidnap another child. So, there is definitely some power beyond our own knowing involved.

Devin said...

wow Aggie-that is a very sad story-yet also empowering in a way that the man was eventually caught-I had never heard about this story and really appreciate you telling it here! I keep on having these weird -I do not know if you would call them synchroncities or coincidences-but I have noticed after being off the computer for hours to do research-of a sudden i will decide to get back on and either catch a personal email or a comment-always great to see you here and really appreciate your commenting all this time at MFM!! Best to you as always and I do hope the heat and humidity go away very soon and you can find some relief-thanks also for your posts about the horrible Aussie fires!

Devin said...

Once again relating to these sad stories Aggie-I bet there are thousands if not millions of them over the ages-probably a lot of them never told due to fear of ridicule! best as always to you!

Julie said...

Devin I agree that it sucked that he was able to plea his way to fourteen years in jail instead of life for killing Teresita. I'm sure you have heard about the St. Johns eight year old that supposed to have killed his father and roommate, he is also taking a plea of either guilty or no contest. I'm mixed on this: on one hand he is eight years old and how much does he really comprehend; on the other hand if he did kill these two men, then he should be punished for the crime. What do you think?

Thanks for stopping by mine and Mike's Above the Norm blog. We always love your comments.

Alex Robinson said...

Hi Devin
Amazing stories, although I'll bet there are wiser societies that would laugh at us for being amazed because they understand the 'wider' nature of reality - I just hope that's the direction we're going in too (& swiftly!)

If the newspapers covered stories like this every day what a different & more open-minded world we would have.

MFM could be "My Favorite Media" :)

Devin said...

Julie-thanks so much for stopping by my blog too-I also love your comments! and this was very interesting as I had not heard of this case-I will have to look into it -I have never been more disconnected from news as I have been in the last 2 months due to work for blogs and other things-still havent figured out if this is a good thing or not:-) I am kinda pressed for time tonight-altho as with everything that may change-I do hope to be online tomorrow and view friends blogs who have updated -best to you and mike as always and thanks so much for stopping by!

Devin said...

wise -I am always so happy to see you here -cant wait to read your newest article when it is posted! agree completely with your thoughts-we are so disconnected from our intuitions and inner life in modern society-loved the bit about My Favorite Media:-) I also hope we are going in directions that will end up being a benefit to us all-best to you as always!

X. Dell said...

After reading part 1, I decided to Google this case to see what I could find out.

His confession would seem to put a lock on the case. Problem is, from what I can tell, the confession and the ghostly revelations were the only evidence against him (I would think there were probably other pieces of evidence, but I can't seem to find what they were).

Problem is, people sometimes confess to crimes they didn't commit, for a whole host of reasons--e.g., they're kept awake for days on end, and given no food or water, and/or browbeaten, tricked, etc.; some even sense a societal need for justice, and in a misguided way ofer to take the rap just so that someone does.

That leaves only the ghostly evidence. Problem is, how do you get an oath from a ghost? How do you punish a ghost for perjury? And that's assuming that Chua actually had otherwordly contact, which I have no evidence that she did.

The problem as I see this is that ina society that relies more heavily upon magical thinking, "paranormal evidence" might be persuasive, but not subject to scrutiny or testing. Now I can understand using a psychic revelations to find hard evidence, which apparently happens. But I don't see why that would be admissable in court. While Showery might very well have murdered Basa, the evidence to state this as fact is quite unclear.

That's underscored by the fact that the first jury was hung, and the sentence was only fourteen years. To me that signals that the prosecution and judge were unsure about the validity of the conviction, and didn't want the defendant to have more incentive to overturn the verdict upon appeal.

Devin said...

Great thoughts and examination as always Xdell! I was very interested on your comments on magical thinking and society-I wish it was not so long ago that I had seen the Unsolved Mysteries version of the show-if I remember correctly there was more evidence than the jewellery-the jewellery to me though was a very huge part in this case-altho of course unless you have other evidence that someone murdered someone-you cant convict for homocide-I was also interested in your thoughts on falso confessions-there was a case (one of many) that have interested me -I think it involved a 14 year old boy who was accused of murdering his younger sister -what the police did to him was really horrible-almost inhuman to get a confession-as it turned out there was no evidence against the brother-but a lot that it had been a stranger breaking in the home-if I could just think of the fellows name-maybe if I google young people and forced confessions-it might indeed be hard to come up with more on the net about the showery/basa case-I tried to -even to see if Showery was still alive-and other things-I had tried to find images from the time to of Basa, Chua Showery in newspapers-anything and came up empty handed-if I remember the unsolved mysteries show there was fingerprint evidence-you are very right tho-people do confess to crimes that they didnt do after going through ordeals like what you mentioned and the case I thought of-best to you as always and thanks so much for stopping by! I wonder if anyone else is having probs with blogger -it took over 30 minutes yesterday just to publish to comments and I did a post to history blog yesterday -and it gave the post time totally wrong and didnt update on this page-forgot to look when I started comment -but it had the latest two posts I have done over there as 1211 am on the 13th-and the second one was done in the early eve yesterday-maybe its just my puter-thanks again for stopping by!