Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

And I'm Brett.

And the story I have for you today is about a woman who was murdered inside her Chicago

high rise. There were no witnesses and her killer left behind no trace.

The case seemed destined to remain unsolved until a tip came in from a source that still,

over 40 years later, is almost possible to believe, but also impossible not to. This is the

story of Teresita Bassa.

It's just before 9 p.m. on the night of February 21, 1977. And firefighters are racing

to the scene of a fire in a high rise building on Chicago's north side, not far from Lincoln

Park. The building's janitor, who called in the fire, had said that one of the building's

15th floor residents had reported smelling smoke. So when they arrived to the scene, the

janitor takes them straight up to 15, and there's smoke all right. According to John O'Brien's

reporting for the Chicago Tribune, the entire hallway is full of heavy smoke. It doesn't

take long to identify where exactly the fire is coming from. They can see the smoke

billowing out from around the door of apartment 15b. The door to that unit is locked, but thankfully

the janitor is right there with a key to let them in. Two firefighters crawl along the floor

to the bedroom where they find the source of the blaze, a mattress, and not on the bed,

but on the floor at the foot of the bed.

That's weird, and I'm assuming there's no one in the apartment.

Well they can't hear anyone, and based on their initial pass through the apartment, they

don't think that there's anyone home, so they're focusing all their energy on getting

the fire under control. According to Colin Wilson's book The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved,

...