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Raw Blame History

Bucks County and the Philadelphia Studios

Horsch was born in the Pocono Mountains near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a farm before his family moved to Chalfont, Pennsylvania in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His father, Raymond C. Hoersch, whose name he carried with the suffix Jr., flew cargo gliders for the United States Army Air Forces in the World War II and in 1979 was state commander of an association of former glider pilots. His mother, Clara Hoersch, was a daughter of Eugene D. Hagerty and Cecilia T. Hagerty of Stroudsburg. His paternal grandparents, Albert Hoersch and Helen E. Hoersch, lived at 417 West Chew Street in Olney from at least 1968; Helen died there in August 1968 and Albert in July 1972. He said that he had two sisters and that his father was a mechanical engineer. His father died on November 20, 1991, the day after being struck by a car while walking home along Main Street in Chalfont.⁴ Horsch graduated from Central Bucks High School in 1961 as a National Merit Scholar and editor of the school magazine. A psychologist who examined him in 1985 measured his IQ at 140 and recorded that he had been expelled from two colleges.¹³⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹¹² In 2026 the current owners of the family's Chalfont house showed WPVI its rebuilt basement, where a large safe built into the foundation, which previous owners said dated from Horsch's time there, had been sealed behind drywall.¹³

He said that at about 14 he began running errands at a film studio on Sansom Street in Center City, Philadelphia during the production of The Burglar with Jayne Mansfield. By the late 1960s he ran the animation camera department at a Philadelphia studio, directed small children in television commercials, and worked as a sideline cameraman for NFL Films, which he said dismissed him for filming cheerleaders. In the 1985 account of his sentencing the Philadelphia Daily News described him as having worked in the 1960s and 1970s as a mechanical draftsman, a photographer, a freelance film animator, and a producer of television commercials; in a 1970 request to the National Guard to wear his hair long he gave his occupation as motion picture producer.³¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

In October 1969 he opened Underground Cinema 16 at 2021 Sansom Street, a 16-millimeter theater in the former premises of the Pocket Playhouse, with a double bill of Lenny Bruce and Relativity. He had torn out the stage, installed blue seats taken from a preview theater, hung his own photographs in the lobby, and built a projection booth, and said the films would come from the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. On October 29, 1969, Leo Goldstein, deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, closed the theater for lack of licenses and posted police to keep it empty. Horsch, then 26, called the failure a "simple confusion" over the city's requirements and said he had started the theater in part to finance an 80,000-dollar feature of his own. He later ran it as the Roxy. He said he then commuted to New York to make short live-action films for the Children's Television Workshop, the producer of Sesame Street.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁷

Wackenhut

Asked in a recorded interview what he did after high school, Horsch said he went to work for "an outfit called Wackenhut, which was a brand new company at the time, a security firm staffed by FBI agents." He described himself as a freelancer who was called in for individual jobs, briefed, and introduced to a client. "I bugged telephones and committed burglaries for them," he said, adding that he was 21 at the time. "The burglaries were mostly to install electronics or bug telephones or just things like burglarizing a potential client to demonstrate that their security was not up to par."⁶

He said a frequent client was introduced to him as "Mr. Smith." The man "was, in fact, H.L. Hunt [sic; Howard Hunt], who was at the time with the Central Intelligence Agency." Hunt was later convicted in the Watergate burglary. Asked whether he had dealt with him directly, Horsch said: "I met him all the time. He was the customer." He added: "At the time, he was introduced as this private customer. When it later turned out, he was a very active CIA agent, which means that at the time, I must have been working for the CIA, although I didn't realize it." He called Wackenhut "a CIA front organization" that used him "to do things that they didn't want to get caught doing, that they could deny."⁶

Horsch described three jobs. At the Fairchild Hiller aircraft plant in Hagerstown, Maryland, he said, he "backed a truck up and stole 30 cabinets of top-secret documents" and towed the company aircraft across the airfield to hide it in another hangar. In Trenton, New Jersey, he said, a man he described as the head of the American Nazi Party, whose name he could not recall, hired the firm to tap his own telephones because he suspected his employees of theft, and Horsch's employers had him install a second tap on the same line to listen to the client. In Philadelphia he said he was installing an infinity transmitter in the kitchen telephone of a girlfriend of "a Philadelphia politician named Crumlish" when she came home; he told her he was from the telephone company, and she made him coffee while he finished. He said he quit around 1965, "when they passed a law making wiretapping a federal crime." When he was arrested for counterfeiting in December 1974, authorities described him as unemployed and quoted him as saying that he "hadn't worked for 11 years."⁶¹⁸

George R. Wackenhut, the company's founder, was a former FBI agent. A CIA memorandum of March 26, 1963, lists the company's offices, Philadelphia among them, and quotes its brochure on an Industrial Security Division serving companies "seeking or handling government classified contracts" and a Scientific Services Division that performed electronic "sweeps"; it records that Wackenhut "trades on the reputation of the FBI" by publicizing the 21 former agents in his management.¹⁹ A CIA memorandum for the record dated July 28, 1975, states that the agency opened files on Wackenhut and his company in May 1960 "for the purpose of obtaining cover support for Western Hemisphere Agency employees assigned to Florida," that a Covert Security Approval for his use was granted on November 21, 1961, and that "subsequently, his company provided cover backstopping to Western Hemisphere employees stationed in the Miami, Florida, area." The approval was rescinded in April 1967 "due to the notoriety that Mr. Wackenhut had received in connection with his activities in Florida." The memorandum adds that in November 1974 the company was found to be guarding Global Marine Development of Los Angeles, "a firm that the Agency office of DDS&T was dealing with," and that the agency "made no attempt to persuade GMDI to terminate their contract." The passages describing the cover relationship were withheld until March 2025.²⁰ In May 1962 Charles B. Flack Jr., a former FBI agent, merged his investigative firm into Wackenhut and became district manager of its Philadelphia office at 2 Penn Center Plaza, with responsibility, as he wrote to the FBI, "for the operation in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey area." From April 24, 1962, to January 5, 1965, FBI headquarters barred its offices from any contact with the company, on the ground that it had used misleading advertisements and traded on the former FBI affiliation of its staff, and that its officials had "reportedly engaged in personal misconduct and questionable business activities." The company's prospectus of March 1966 listed among its ten largest customers of 1965 the "Republic Aviation Division of Fairchild Hiller Corporation," whose plant was at Farmingdale, New York on Long Island, and described a service guiding industrial concerns through United States Department of Defense security regulations; it stated that the company "does not engage in business espionage."²¹ On May 18, 1967, George Wackenhut told the Senate subcommittee of Edward V. Long under oath: "as a private investigating concern the Wackenhut Corp. has never in its entire history tapped a telephone wire. I am under oath, sir. So help me God, we never tapped a telephone wire." Asked about miniature transmitters, he said: "We have used them. We used the radio transmitters until the ban against them last year by the Federal Communications Commission." He also denied under oath that a 1957 report of his on corruption in Miami Beach, Florida drew on wiretaps; in a letter to the subcommittee of June 5, 1967, he wrote that "there were a few references to information in the Miami Beach report which had been obtained by others from the tapping of a telephone line."²² The interception of telephone communications had been prohibited by section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934; the federal wiretap statute with criminal penalties for private interception, Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, was enacted in June 1968.²³ No document located names a Hoersch or Horsch in connection with Wackenhut.

Desertion

Horsch received a draft notice at 18 and obtained a series of occupational deferments, then a marriage deferment when he married his 19-year-old high school girlfriend in 1964. They lived on Rittenhouse Square, where he took commercial film and photography work and she taught in the public schools; she left him in 1970, and told the Inquirer in 2026, speaking on condition of anonymity, that he had never been violent but was an "emotionally abusive" philanderer.²⁴ He enlisted in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard on October 17, 1965. After unexcused absences from unit training in late 1969 and early 1970, one of them after he reported with a dirty uniform and long hair, he was ordered to active duty as an Army reservist, reporting on July 19, 1970. He did not report, and on July 29, 1970, his wife was told that he was absent without leave from Fort Dix. He continued to live and work in Philadelphia. He said a New Jersey State Police who found him asleep at a turnpike rest stop ran his name and delivered him to the provost marshal at Fort Dix; the court record shows that he returned to military control there on April 5, 1972, and left again the next day. In December 1972, giving his address as 523 North Main Street, Chalfont, his parents' house, he sued Secretary of the Army Robert F. Froehlke in federal court, seeking a declaration that his involuntary call to active duty was invalid. He surrendered to the United States Marshals Service on May 10, 1974, and was released on 500 dollars bond, and Judge John B. Hannum ruled against him on October 11, 1974. Horsch said he held two dishonorable discharges and was later pardoned under President Jimmy Carter's amnesty.³⁶¹⁸

He said that in the early 1970s he taught himself to fly in a Cessna 152 bought for 5,700 dollars and flew marijuana from Mexico through the mountain passes south of El Paso, Texas, dropping loads to trucks waiting in the desert of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona without landing. He said he knew the smuggler George Jung before Jung moved into cocaine, that federal agents dismantled two of his aircraft without finding anything, and that he stopped when a man with an M16 rifle motioned him down from a pursuing helicopter.⁶ The Federal Aviation Administration's file of deregistered aircraft lists one aircraft under the family name, a Cessna 210A, registration N1437J, registered on August 20, 1973, to Raymond C. Hoersch at 523 North Main Street, Chalfont, and cancelled on July 11, 1984. On July 26, 1981, while Horsch was in New Zealand, the aircraft lost power on its initial climb from Doylestown Airport and made a wheels-up landing; the National Transportation Safety Board recorded the pilot as 62 years old, an engineer holding a commercial certificate. No airman certificate under the names Hoersch, Horsch, or Stokowski appears in the agency's releasable airmen file.²⁵²⁶²⁷ His later online biography called him an "air show pilot" and stated that during his years as a fugitive he "somehow managed to fly a BD5-J micro-jet aircraft in various U.S. air shows, boldly (and foolishly) appearing on ABC's 'Wide World of Sports' during the 1980 Reno Air Races."¹²⁸ The official program of the 1980 Reno Air Races listed the daily BD-5J demonstration as flown by George Marshall.²⁹

Times Square and the 1973 Film

Horsch said he and a girlfriend, a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, performed on weekends in a live sex show above Times Square, in an act built around simulated rape. He began appearing in pornographic loops in 1969 for 100 dollars a job.¹⁴ In April 1971 the Philadelphia Daily News described him as "the underground 35mm filmmaker," shooting two reels with a model and a live snake in the Renaissance Studio, a loft at 752 South 2nd Street that also held the stored photographic equipment of John Butterworth.³⁰

In February 1973 he and Butterworth, a news cameraman for KYW-TV, shot The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig in Philadelphia with the New York performers Georgina Spelvin, Tina Russell, Darby Lloyd Rains, and Helen Madigan. The film depicts rape, bondage, urination, and sex with a character presented as a schoolgirl. Horsch said 60 to 70 percent of the roughly 20,000 dollar budget came from Salvatore La Russa, who ran the Bag of Nails bar at 13th and Locust Streets, from "money that he had laying around in a shoebox behind the bar. We're talking about organized crime." A hospital scene was shot in the emergency room of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania under permission obtained for a student film. Horsch said his girlfriend at the time was the wife of a Philadelphia assistant district attorney, that the film was shot in her house, and that staff of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office attended the premiere at the 1812 Theater on Chestnut Street, which had a searchlight outside. Horsch said theater chains were controlled by "certain political groups," that La Russa arranged distribution through Philadelphia organized crime, and that the film was sold to the distributor Sam Lake for 50,000 dollars. Al Goldstein wrote in Screw (magazine) that the sex in it was disgusting. La Russa died of a heart attack in 1996.¹⁴¹⁵³¹

In February 1975, eleven weeks after the counterfeiting arrest, "Chestnut Hill filmmaker Ray Hoersch" was to show his film Black Mass (1975 film) at midnight at the Arcadia Theatre (Philadelphia); the showing was cancelled after what the Philadelphia Inquirer called reported pressure from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, and Art Carduner of the Bandbox Theater in Germantown, Philadelphia gave it a midnight screening instead, as a benefit for the Friends of the Bandbox, with Horsch attending. A joint statement signed by sixteen Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders of Philadelphia and led by Cardinal John Krol called the film, which it described as depicting "an authentic satanic rite," "a blasphemous attack on the religious rites held in sacred reverence by millions of Christian believers" and urged "believers of every religious conviction to use every moral force to discourage the showing of this film"; the Greater Philadelphia Board of Rabbis added that it saw "no redeeming social or aesthetic value whatever in 'Black Mass.'" The Religious News Service reported that Horsch had tried to film an actual ceremony and, failing that, had obtained transcripts of the rite. "The Satanic Mass is the exact inverse of the Catholic ceremony," he said. "Every part of it is reversed in blasphemy, for its intention is a deliberate corruption, a parody of the Mass."³²³³

Forgery and Counterfeiting

In December 1972 "Raymond C. Hoersch Jr., Philadelphia, Pa." was listed for trial in Mecklenburg County Superior Court in Charlotte, North Carolina, on a charge of uttering a forged check; the conviction for forging checks in North Carolina dates from 1972.¹⁶³⁴ On December 10, 1974, the Hatboro Card Shop on Old York Road in Hatboro, Pennsylvania reported a suspicious ten-dollar bill, and Hatboro police detained Horsch, then 31. United States Secret Service agents under James D'Amelio found 630 dollars in counterfeit ten-dollar notes in his car and a counterfeit driver's license and vehicle registration in his name, and seized the printing equipment in a small building on Taylor Street in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where they arrested Charles Griffith, 39, of Wallingford, Pennsylvania. The operation had also been printing counterfeit operator's cards and vehicle registration certificates. Authorities described Horsch as unemployed and quoted him as saying that he "hadn't worked for 11 years" and "traveled consistently"; the Chalfont address he gave was his parents' house. Both men were committed to the Philadelphia Detention Center in default of bail. Accounts of the face value seized range from 180,000 dollars to more than one million dollars. He served two years.¹¹⁸³⁵

Methamphetamine and New Zealand

On February 4, 1977, agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested Horsch, then 32, in Philadelphia and charged him with manufacturing and conspiring to distribute methamphetamine, seizing laboratory equipment. He posted bail and went first to California with Myroslawa "Anna" Ferkuniak, whom he had met after her arrest in an LSD raid on a house near Temple University, and took the identity of Stanley Eugene Stokowski, a chemist with a doctorate from Stanford University. In 1980 he married Myroslawa Ferkuniak in Nevada under that name, and they left for New Zealand.¹¹⁶³⁶ The Christchurch lawyer John Rutherford (New Zealand lawyer), who told The Press in 1984 that he had contacted Horsch "after reading American advertisements about new technology," set up Chemical Technology Limited with him at Clandeboye, New Zealand, near Timaru, a company working on byproducts of milk; Horsch launched its plant for converting whey into ethanol, having obtained the work with a forged Stanford transcript in Stokowski's name. His son Eugene was born in 1981.¹³⁷ The Philadelphia Daily News reported in 1985 that while he was a fugitive he had "operated three successful businesses, wrote and published a book on producing alcohol fuel for homes and farms, and helped design and build an ethanol plant for the New Zealand government."¹⁶ A New Zealand government investigation later found that his immigration papers, in the stolen name, included a university transcript, that the New Zealand Department of Immigration had been "under some pressure" from his "proposed employer" to "make an early decision," and that no checks had been made with the New Zealand Ministry of Energy or other departments; the real Stokowski confirmed that the transcript was his. He was also named in a civil case in the High Court of New Zealand at Wellington over a credit card debt of about 18,000 dollars.³⁷

In March 1984, returning from a trip to the United States, he was found to be carrying several passports, five according to later accounts. He left New Zealand on March 17 on another passport, which police believed had been stolen in a burglary of a house at Temuka, leaving his wife and son behind, and the New Zealand police, American authorities, and Interpol searched for him. Rumors circulated in New Zealand that he was a Soviet or Bulgarian spy or was wanted by the CIA. Rutherford told The Press that his partner was "a particularly smart fellow, a real toiler and an excellent family man," that he might have had trouble in the United States on the scale of draft evasion, and dismissed the suggestion that he was a spy.¹³⁷ The Inquirer reported in 2026 that after New Zealand he returned to California and used the name Richard Harris.³⁸ The FBI arrested him in Orlando, Florida; the Associated Press reported in April 1985 that he had left New Zealand in June 1984 and was arrested in Florida that October.¹¹⁶³⁷

From the Philadelphia Detention Center he wrote letters to the Philadelphia Daily News in January 1985 as public relations officer of the Inmate Betterment Committee, one reporting that inmates had raised money for 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia, and on April 2, 1985, the paper published his guest opinion column arguing that harsher sentences did not reduce crime.³⁹⁴⁰⁴¹ Before his sentencing on the drug-manufacturing charge, the psychologist Don Seraydarian examined him for four hours at the request of his lawyers and wrote that he was "grandiose, mistrustful, suspicious, and excessively controlling," was "consumed by anger," and had "great concern about 'losing control' over himself." Horsch told him: "I go from job to job because once I learn something, I want to go to something else." He listed his occupations as chemist, computer analyst, and photographer.⁵ A sentencing memorandum filed by the federal defender Sally A. Kocher described "deep-rooted emotional problems" and quoted a psychologist's finding that he had "a very superior intellect exceeding that of 99 percent of the people" but was "severely limited emotionally and is driven by unconscious destructive patterns." Judge Joseph L. McGlynn Jr. sentenced him to three years for manufacturing methamphetamine, saying that "anybody who has a speed lab ought to know he's going to jail," and Judge Donald W. Van Artsdalen added a year and a day for bail-jumping, saying that fugitives must be punished "no matter how exemplary a life they may have lived" while at large. He was released in 1987 and became the information technology director of a company in Northeast Philadelphia.¹⁵¹⁶ "I loved being a fugitive," he later said. "It was always exciting, always thinking, 'Who am I going to be today?'"¹

New Britain Township

Ferkuniak died at their house at 1101 Devereaux Avenue, Philadelphia, on July 28, 1989, at 39; her obituary in The Morning Call gave the cause as "a lengthy illness," and the Inquirer reported in 2026 that she died of an accidental overdose of glutethimide and codeine. The following month Horsch bought a house at 520 Airy Avenue in New Britain Township, Pennsylvania for 137,500 dollars. In 1991 he and John R. Butterworth registered the trade name Butterworth's Hickory Pit, a barbecue restaurant in North Wales, Pennsylvania, and on August 27, 1993, he filed a Chapter 13 petition in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, No. 93-22545, listing the restaurant as a trade name; his 60-month plan was confirmed, and he was discharged in December 1998.⁴² In 1997 township police charged him with cashing 187.19 dollars in paychecks made out to his dead nephew. Around 1999 he was briefly engaged to a teenage housekeeper. In the 1990s and 2000s he produced a series of pornographic videos with amateur couples and then films of staged violence against women, many of whom he recruited with cash and drugs on the streets of Kensington, Philadelphia. In September 2004 he married Amy McHale, thirty years his junior, beside a greenhouse behind his Chalfont house; they divorced in 2008, and she continued to visit him after he moved to Olney.¹²⁴³¹⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶

In 2009 a woman at the house called township police to report noises. Officers under Chief Robert Scafidi found marijuana plants in the basement, 455 by one press account and "nearly 200" by Scafidi's recollection in 2026, firearms including an M1 carbine, 25 pounds of gunpowder, bondage devices, pornography showing women who appeared to be bleeding, and identification cards belonging to several different women. Horsch ran into the surrounding fields and was caught. Scafidi said the district attorney's office took the identification cards for follow-up. "I really don't know what happened after that," he said. "He always got light sentences for some reason," Scafidi said in 2026. "He was a person who worked at being evil."¹³ On March 20, 2009, on Ontario Street in Kensington, Horsch slowed his green Jeep beside a nine-year-old girl, called to her, got out and approached her; she ran home, and police found him nearby with binoculars, a camera with a telephoto lens, an eye patch and condoms in the Jeep. In 2010 he was convicted in Municipal Court of luring a child into a motor vehicle and corrupting the morals of a minor, and Judge Roger Gordon sentenced him to two and a half to five years, a conviction that would have required registration under Megan's Law. The prosecutor, Jill Fertel, had asked for the maximum after learning what the New Britain police had found. Horsch appealed for a new trial in the Common Pleas Court; the girl and her mother were too afraid to testify again, the charges were dropped, the conviction was vacated, and in 2015 a Common Pleas judge granted his petition to expunge the case. In September 2026 a court clerk refused The Philadelphia Inquirer access to the file on the ground that expunged records should have been destroyed. "No one was getting arrested for what Raymond Horsch was doing," Fertel said.⁴⁷ The federal case, United States v. Horsch, No. 2:09-cr-00794 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, was filed on December 15, 2009, before Judge Richard Barclay Surrick, charging him with manufacturing 100 or more marijuana plants; a bench warrant issued the same day, and Jerome Brown, later counsel to his son, entered his appearance for the defense in January 2010.⁴⁸ The prosecutor was Assistant United States Attorney Elizabeth F. Abrams, and the government filed notice of his prior drug convictions to enhance the sentence. On January 10, 2011, he pleaded guilty to possessing 100 or more marijuana plants with intent to distribute, possessing a short-barreled shotgun in furtherance of drug trafficking, and possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. Surrick sentenced him on June 28, 2012, and resentenced him on July 3 to 53 months on the drug and felon-in-possession counts and one consecutive month on the shotgun count, a total of 54 months, with credit for time served in the Bucks County jail, and ordered the Airy Avenue house forfeited; the final order of forfeiture was entered on October 22, 2012.⁴⁹ He was released in June 2013. The bank repossessed the New Britain, Pennsylvania house the same year.¹³¹⁵⁴³⁵⁰

The Olney House

Eugene Horsch, then a Drexel University student, caused a drunk-driving crash in 2003 that left the other driver in a vegetative state until his death sixteen years later. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was released in 2006. His great-aunt Helen M. Hoersch, the last of Albert Hoersch's children, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a senior editor at the American Society for Testing and Materials, died on April 5, 2004, at 83, "at the home of her nephew," Ray Horsch.⁵¹ The Inquirer reported in 2026 that Horsch acquired the Chew Avenue house after her death and in 2007 used a power of attorney to transfer it to his son for one dollar; the city's deed index records a deed executed on October 1, 2007, with "Hoersch Helen M" as grantor and Eugene A. Horsch as grantee. Horsch moved into the house with his son.⁵²⁵³⁵⁴ In 2013 police found about 1.9 million dollars' worth of marijuana in the house, and Eugene was sentenced to four to eight years.¹⁵⁵

From about 2017 to 2021 Horsch's website, rchorsch.com, advertised an escort service whose client reviews describe visits to the Olney house. Its motto was "I fear what I love." In 2014 he self-published Empathy: The Memoir of an Empathetic Serial Killer, in which the narrator strangles a woman named Krista and dissolves her body with sodium hydroxide in a basement bathtub; the publisher's description calls the book fiction. In 2016 he released Deleted Scenes: A Serial Killer's Video Journal, filmed over twelve years under the name Ich Bin Niemand, about a man who selects victims among addicts, prostitutes, and runaways. A woman named Krista Killen lived in the house for years and appeared in his films. His online biography described him as an "artist, filmmaker, composer, writer, porn performer, drug smuggler, some-time political activist, art forger, counterfeiter, pot grower, air show pilot, army deserter, fugitive, sociopath, ex-convict and all-out villain." In 2014 a Wikipedia user named "S.E. Stokowski" created an article about him and made more than 150 edits to it over the following years. Amazon (company) sold his books until the third week of September 2026.¹⁵³¹⁴³⁵⁶

The Kensington Crematorium

At a 2014 exhibition in a Kensington gallery, Horsch showed what appeared to be autopsy photographs of an unidentified woman, ending with video of her body being loaded into an incinerator. He said the footage was shot at "a Kensington warehouse where the city morgue would send unidentified remains." His release for the show read: "The Medical Examiner totally botched the autopsy and didn't even bother to sew her up properly. My horrible photograph is all that is left of her, the only trace of her short, sad existence. She has nothing else, not even a name." He later posted a series that intercut women acting out their own deaths with images of people dead of overdoses, which he described as made in "unknowing collaboration with the Philadelphia Medical Examiner" and city paramedics.⁵⁷

A law enforcement official and people who knew Horsch in the period have said he paid an employee in drugs and cash for access to the crematorium attached to the Garzone Funeral Home in Kensington. The brothers Louis Garzone and Gerald Garzone, who operated it as Liberty Cremations, pleaded guilty in 2008 to selling more than 240 corpses to a New York tissue-recovery company whose cutters removed bone, tendon, and organs for resale to hospitals. Some of the tissue was diseased and was implanted in patients who were not told of its origin. The business closed in 2007. A woman who worked on Horsch's films from 2003 said he told her his contact was an employee named George. Four people identified the man as George Newsome, who lived on Ruth Street a block from the crematorium, was arrested for heroin possession in 2011 and cocaine possession in 2013, and died in 2014. Gerald Garzone said he had never heard of Horsch. He acknowledged knowing a man named George from the neighborhood and declined to say whether he had employed him. The Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office declined to say whether the city sent unclaimed bodies to the Garzones. Horsch was not named in the 2007 case.⁵⁷

The 2026 Investigation

In May 2025 a fire at the Chew Avenue house brought narcotics officers, who found marijuana plants, firearms, and containers of chemicals. Horsch died the same month and was cremated. Killen died of drug intoxication some months later.³¹⁵⁶

On June 19, 2026, a federal park ranger stopped Eugene Horsch's car beside Independence National Historical Park. His passenger carried an identification card in the name of Blair Tonzelli, who was reported missing in February 2023. A photograph of Tonzelli, nude, with an apparent black eye and blood near her mouth, had been in rotation as the lead image on Horsch's website from about 2020 until at least September 2023, seven months after the missing-person report. The search of the Olney house that followed, and its results, are set out under Olney House Investigation.⁴³⁵⁵

On September 16, 2026, Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore said that investigators had reviewed about 30 percent of more than 600,000 images and 70,000 videos from the house, had identified 58 people in them, and believed five of the women shown to be dead. He described a video in which Horsch gives a woman drugs and money, handcuffs her to a bed, and tightens a zip tie around her neck with pliers until she stops moving. Her family identified her as Nicole Fusaro, 27, last seen in Kensington on July 19, 2018. Amy McHale, last seen at the house in 2016, and Tonzelli remain missing. "We did never recover a body here," Vanore said.²⁵⁶⁵⁷⁵⁸

J.J. Klaver, a retired FBI agent with no role in the case, told Newsweek: "Obviously, this guy's a serial killer." Michael Yoder, a retired FBI profiler who reviewed the 1985 evaluation, said it described "a potential serial killer." The police department has not used the term. Horsch was never charged with a homicide.⁵⁵⁹

Footnotes

"How a pornographer's violent fantasies blurred fact and fiction as cops searched Olney house for missing women," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/news/a/raymond-eugene-horsch-olney-philadelphia-missing-women-history-20260802.html ↩︎
"At least 5 women dead, more missing in connection to Olney home, Philly police say," WHYY, September 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/olney-home-investigation-abuse/ ↩︎
Hoersch v. Froehlke, 382 F. Supp. 1235 (E.D. Pa. 1974), Civ. A. No. 72-1759, decided October 11, 1974 (plaintiff styled "Raymond C. Hoersch, Jr."; enlistment October 17, 1965; notice to his wife July 29, 1970; return to Fort Dix April 5, 1972; surrender May 10, 1974; his request to wear long hair "as required for his employment as a motion picture producer"). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2596970/hoersch-v-froehlke/ ↩︎
"Chalfont man, 73, struck by auto, dies in hospital," The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 21, 1991, p. 19. https://www.newspapers.com/image/176160072/ ↩︎
Marin, Max, Ryan W. Briggs, and Ellie Rushing. "'Consumed by anger': Inside the 1985 psych profile of Raymond Horsch," The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 3, 2026 (the Wikipedia account "S.E. Stokowski" is described in the same article). https://www.inquirer.com/news/raymond-horsch-olney-missing-women-psych-exam-20260903.html ↩︎
West, Ashley. "Unknowing Ray Horsch, Episode 1: Youth," The Rialto Report, Podcast 171, September 13, 2026, audio at 08:30 to 31:00 (republishing interviews recorded in 2013, before his death in 2025; the interviews were recorded in 2013 (Podcast 27); the 2013 audio survives in a Wayback Machine capture of March 31, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190331064614/http://traffic.libsyn.com/therialtoreport/27_Rialto_Report_027_-_Ray_Horsch__Sociopathic_Villain.mp3; Wackenhut passage at 18:34 to 22:49; the name spoken at 19:17 is "H.L. Hunt"; the Cessna passage at 27:19 to 28:06). https://www.therialtoreport.com/2026/09/13/ray-horsch-2/ ↩︎
"Cecilia T. Hagerty," obituary, The Morning Call, October 26, 1991, p. 115 (survivors include "Daughter, Clara Hoersch of Chalfont, Bucks County"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/283774999/ ↩︎
[Notice seeking former World War II glider pilots, giving the address of "State Commander Raymond Hoersch, 523 N. Main St., Chalfont"], The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre), January 29, 1979, p. 36. https://www.newspapers.com/image/407620980/ ↩︎
[Report of the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Hagerty], Pocono Record (Stroudsburg), September 26, 1969, p. 6 (guests include "Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Hoersch and daughter Helen, of Doylestown" and "Mrs. Ramond [sic] Hoersch Jr., Philadelphia"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/40464241/ ↩︎
"Hoersch, Helen E. Wissman," death notice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 29, 1968, p. 32 ("wife of Albert Hoersch, of 417 W. Chew st., Aug. 27, 1968"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/182120759/ ↩︎
"Hoersch, Albert," death notice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1972, p. 10 (the 1968 and 1972 notices print the address as "417 W. Chew st."; "aged 81 years ... father of Albert Jr., Raymond C., Helen M Hoersch, 417 W. Chew st., July 1, 1972"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/180006503/ ↩︎
In January 1962 an Allentown alderman fined a "Raymond Hoersch, 18, of Fox Chase R. 2," 25 dollars and costs for shoplifting at Hess's department store; the identification with Horsch rests on the name and age alone. [Report of two shoplifting fines], The Morning Call, January 20, 1962, p. 7. https://www.newspapers.com/image/275247683/ ↩︎
"Former police chief recalls 2009 arrest of R.C. Horsch, man linked to investigation in Philadelphia's Olney section," 6abc Action News, 2026. https://6abc.com/post/former-police-chief-recalls-2009-arrest-rc-horsch/19841495/ ↩︎
West, Ashley. "Unknowing Ray Horsch, Episode 2: Performance," The Rialto Report, Podcast 172, September 20, 2026, audio (republishing interviews recorded in 2013). https://www.therialtoreport.com/2026/09/20/ray-horsch-3/ ↩︎
West, Ashley. "Ray Horsch: Sociopathic Villain," The Rialto Report, Podcast 27, December 15, 2013 (the accompanying text states that the 1973 film was "shot in the house of people working in the local District Attorney office" and that Horsch had "been working for Sesame Street"; the 101-minute audio is no longer hosted). Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20260520094947/https://www.therialtoreport.com/2013/12/15/ray-horsch/ ↩︎
Smith, Jim. "Fugitive's Luck Runs Out With 4-Year Jail Sentence," Philadelphia Daily News, April 27, 1985, p. 8 (the article says he was captured by the FBI in Florida "last year"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/185948055/ ↩︎
"Police to Inspect Building: Cinema 16 Shut Down In License Dispute; Owner Is 'Confused'," The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 1969, p. 19. https://www.newspapers.com/image/169186622/ ↩︎
"[...] bogus $180,000 in Bucks raid," The Morning Call (Allentown), December 11, 1974, p. 5. https://www.newspapers.com/image/275702319/ The Associated Press version, "Phony Bill Suspects Held," ran the same day, for example in the Gloucester County Times (Woodbury, N.J.), December 11, 1974, p. 2. https://www.newspapers.com/image/1105967385/ ↩︎
Central Intelligence Agency, "The Wackenhut Corporation, 3280 Ponce de Leon Boulevard, Coral Gables, Florida," memorandum for the record, March 26, 1963, signed by Fred R. Youngblood. JFK Assassination Records Collection, record 104-10130-10472. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10130-10472.pdf ↩︎
Central Intelligence Agency, "Wackenhut Corporation, SF# 493 364," memorandum for the record, July 28, 1975. JFK Assassination Records Collection, record 104-10130-10454, released in full March 18, 2025. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/0318/104-10130-10454.pdf ↩︎
Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Wackenhut Corporation," headquarters file, section 1: SAC Newark to Director, May 4, 1962, enclosing Charles B. Flack Jr. to SA James Oakley, May 1, 1962; Miami report quoting a local newspaper of May 2, 1962; J. B. Adams to Mr. Callahan, 1966, on the company's public offering; and the Preliminary Prospectus of March 25, 1966. https://archive.org/stream/WackenhutCorporation/Wackenhut%20Corp.-HQ-1_djvu.txt ↩︎
United States Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure, Right of Privacy Act of 1967: Hearings, 90th Congress, 1st session, part 2 (1967), testimony of George R. Wackenhut and his letter to the subcommittee of June 5, 1967. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-90shrg77600p2/pdf/CHRG-90shrg77600p2.pdf ↩︎
Communications Act of 1934, sec. 605, 48 Stat. 1103; Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Title III, Pub. L. 90-351, 82 Stat. 197, approved June 19, 1968. ↩︎
"How a pornographer's violent fantasies blurred fact and fiction as cops searched Olney house for missing women," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/news/a/raymond-eugene-horsch-olney-philadelphia-missing-women-history-20260802.html ↩︎
Federal Aviation Administration, Aircraft Registry, releasable database, Aircraft Deregistered File, record for N1437J (Cessna 210A, serial 21057754; registrant "HOERSCH RAYMOND C," 523 N Main St, Chalfont; certificate issued 1973-08-20; administratively cancelled 1984-07-11), downloaded September 23, 2026. https://registry.faa.gov/database/ReleasableAircraft.zip ↩︎
National Transportation Safety Board, pre-1982 aviation accident database, record for N1437J, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, July 26, 1981 (engine failure or malfunction in the initial climb; wheels-up landing; pilot in command age 62, commercial certificate, occupation engineer; one minor injury). https://data.ntsb.gov/avdata ↩︎
Federal Aviation Administration, Airmen Certification releasable database, September 2026 (no pilot or non-pilot record under Hoersch, Horsch, or Stokowski matching him; the file lists current certificate holders only). https://registry.faa.gov/database/CS092026.zip ↩︎
Horsch, R.C. "Biography," eroto.com, archived November 5, 2016. http://web.archive.org/web/20161105021502/http://eroto.com:80/commentary/3-biography ↩︎
"Official Air Races schedule," Reno Gazette-Journal, September 12, 1980, p. 74 ("2:55 p.m. George Marshall...BD5J...Demonstration"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/149117327/ ↩︎
Hamilton, Fred. [Feature on a film shoot at the Renaissance Studio], Philadelphia Daily News, April 26, 1971, p. 22. https://www.newspapers.com/image/184959243/ ↩︎
"Five takeaways from Philly missing women mystery connected to Raymond and Eugene Horsch," The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/news/raymond-eugene-horsch-olney-missing-women-20260804.html ↩︎
"Offensive Material: Leaders Condemn Black Mass Film," Religious News Service, Lake Shore Visitor (Erie), March 7, 1975, p. 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/951794835/ ↩︎
[Society and nightlife column], The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 28, 1975, p. 21. https://www.newspapers.com/image/173366667/ ↩︎
[Superior Court trial calendar for the week of December 4], The Charlotte News, December 1, 1972, p. 33. https://www.newspapers.com/image/621947721/ ↩︎
The Inquirer of August 2, 2026, gives the value seized as the equivalent of over one million dollars; the Associated Press and The Morning Call in December 1974 gave 180,000 dollars. ↩︎
"A Philadelphia man is arrested on drug charges," The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 1977, p. 10. https://www.newspapers.com/image/172176774/ ↩︎
Leask, Anna. "Man linked to multiple missing women in US had fled NZ 40 years ago after posing as scientist," The New Zealand Herald, September 23, 2026 (quoting The Press of 1984, the New Zealand immigration investigation report, and a 1985 Associated Press report). The Press reported in 1984 that he arrived in Canterbury in 1980 with his "wife Anna and 18-month-old son," which does not agree with the 1981 New Zealand birth of Eugene given by the Inquirer; the Associated Press gave June 1984 as the month he left New Zealand, against the March 17 date reported in New Zealand. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/raymond-horsch-man-linked-to-philadelphia-house-of-horrors-lived-near-timaru-under-stolen-name/BVQSWBL3LZDL3GIXFEHHBFY6RY/ ↩︎
"Olney investigation: What we know about Eugene Horsch, missing women, and the search," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/olney-investigation-eugene-horsch-missing-women-20260627.html ↩︎
Hoersch, Raymond C. "Detention Center Deserves Praise, Not Rebuke," letter, Philadelphia Daily News, January 8, 1985, p. 32. https://www.newspapers.com/image/185932354/ ↩︎
Hoersch, Raymond C. "Inmates Aid Ethiopians," letter, Philadelphia Daily News, January 14, 1985, p. 24. https://www.newspapers.com/image/185937892/ ↩︎
Hoersch, Raymond C. "...And Throw Away the Key? It Doesn't Work," guest opinion, Philadelphia Daily News, April 2, 1985, p. 34. https://www.newspapers.com/image/185922416/ ↩︎
In re Horsch, No. 93-22545 (Bankr. E.D. Pa.), filed August 27, 1993, closed December 22, 1998, docket via CourtListener. https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=Horsch&type=r ↩︎
"Bucks County connection with Philly 'house of horror' case," Yahoo News (syndicated), 2026. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/bucks-county-connection-philly-house-091634860.html ↩︎
"Anna M. Horsch," obituary, The Morning Call, August 1, 1989, p. 18. https://www.newspapers.com/image/283766965/ ↩︎
[Bucks County real-estate transfers], The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 29, 1989, p. 480 ("520 Airy Ave. ... to Raymond C. Horsch"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/177531276/ ↩︎
[Fictitious name registrations], The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 1991, p. 28 ("Butterworth's Hickory Pit, North Wales; Raymond C. Horsch ... Butterworth"). https://www.newspapers.com/image/175247169/ ↩︎
Rushing, Ellie, Barbara Laker, Ryan W. Briggs, and Max Marin. "Raymond Horsch was convicted of luring a 9-year-old girl to his car in 2009. Now those court records could be destroyed." The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 22, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/crime/raymond-horsch-child-luring-kensington-records-expunged-20260922.html ↩︎
United States v. Horsch, No. 2:09-cr-00794-RBS (E.D. Pa.), filed December 15, 2009, terminated July 5, 2012; indictment (Doc. 1), motion and order for bench warrant signed by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth T. Hey (Doc. 2), notices of appearance of Jerome M. Brown (Docs. 5 and 7), docket via CourtListener RECAP. https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=Horsch&type=r&court=paed ↩︎
United States v. Horsch, No. 2:09-cr-00794-RBS (E.D. Pa.), superseding indictment of January 26, 2010, information under 21 U.S.C. sec. 851 of December 23, 2010, change of plea of January 10, 2011, judgments of June 28 and July 3, 2012, and final order of forfeiture of October 22, 2012, docket via CourtListener RECAP. https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=Horsch&type=r&court=paed ↩︎
The Inquirer article of September 22, 2026, and WPVI both give the federal sentence as 54 months; earlier sources give 53 months. The docket entries were not examined. ↩︎
"Hoersch, Helen M.," death notice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 7, 2004, p. B12. https://www.newspapers.com/image/201102740/ ↩︎
"A woman missing since 2016 had close ties to the Olney house that's now the target of a massive investigation," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/news/olney-raid-missing-women-mystery-drugs-20260627.html ↩︎
"What we know about the Olney investigation into missing women," The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 2026 (which calls Helen M. Hoersch his sister; her 1991 and 2004 notices make her his aunt). https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/olney-investigation-eugene-horsch-missing-women-20260627.html ↩︎
City of Philadelphia, Department of Records, real estate transfer index, 417 W. Chew Ave., deed document 51798675, executed October 1, 2007, recorded October 26, 2007, grantor "Hoersch Helen M," grantee "Horsch Eugene A"; later mortgages of 2007 and 2009 and satisfaction of 2025, via the city's open data (rtt_summary). https://phl.carto.com/api/v2/sql?q=SELECT%20*%20FROM%20rtt_summary%20WHERE%20street_address%20=%20%27417%20W%20CHEW%20AVE%27 ↩︎
"Who is Eugene Horsch? Man at Center of Philadelphia 'House of Horrors,'" Newsweek, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/who-is-eugene-horsch-man-at-center-of-philadelphia-house-of-horrors-12459693 ↩︎
Cuffe, Davis. "Philadelphia's 'house of horrors' investigation: All that we know," Billy Penn, September 18, 2026. https://billypenn.com/2026/09/18/philadelphia-house-of-horrors-police-investigation-olney-update/ ↩︎
Briggs, Ryan W., Max Marin, Barbara Laker, and Ellie Rushing. "Raymond Horsch had access to a Kensington crematorium linked to illegal body parts sales, years before missing persons investigation," The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 21, 2026. https://www.inquirer.com/news/raymond-horsch-missing-women-kensington-bodies-crematorium-20260921.html ↩︎
"Philadelphia police identify 58 people in images from investigation into Olney house," CBS News Philadelphia, September 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/horsch-investigation-chew-avenue-olney-philadelphia/ ↩︎
"Eugene Horsch Denies He's a Serial Killer as Philadelphia Cops Hunt for Missing Women," Newsweek, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/philadelphia-obviously-serial-killer-former-fbi-agent-12457175 ↩︎

52 KiB Raw Blame History