Hazmat Crew Removes Glass Vials, Vacuum From Home in Missing Women Probe

PHILADELPHIA — Investigators have returned to a home in the city’s Olney neighborhood, where photographs show them removing glass vials, a vacuum cleaner, workout equipment and other items.

The latest search follows Philadelphia police disclosures that more than 1 million pieces of digital evidence were recovered from the property, which some reports have described as a “house of horrors.”

The home was formerly owned by pornographer Raymond “RC” Horsch, who died last year at age 82.

A photograph showed an evidence bag bearing a partly readable label. The contents were listed as “glass vials” and a “board,” along with references to a bin and drawers.

Among the boxes and sealed evidence bags removed Monday were a rowing machine and a vacuum cleaner, according to photographs.

“The investigation remains active and ongoing,” a Philadelphia police spokesperson told News Media on Tuesday. “Additional information will be released as it becomes available and is appropriate for public release.”

Horsch’s work focused on sadistic themes. Investigators are now examining whether some of that material could reflect real events, after evidence from the home was linked to seven separate cases involving missing women.

Philadelphia police have returned to the property several times since June, when they arrested Horsch’s 44-year-old son, Eugene, on drug, firearms and forgery charges.

Police searching the residence after the arrest allegedly discovered “snuff” videos that investigators believe depict multiple missing women. They also reported finding a drum of chemicals connected to the home’s water system and five urns containing material that could be human ashes.

Authorities say four of the seven missing women believed to be connected to the property have been identified in the images.

Only some of those women have been publicly named. Philadelphia police identified 26-year-old Maribel Fresses, who disappeared in 2018, and 27-year-old Gabrielle Aramando earlier in the investigation.

Police told News Media in September that, when Eugene Horsch was arrested, the woman accompanying him possessed identification belonging to Blair Tonzelli, who was 38 and was last seen in Philadelphia in February 2023.

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Local reports identified two additional women. Both remain listed as missing in the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, known as NamUs.

One of them is Horsch’s former wife, Amy McHale, who was 54 when the Philadelphia Inquirer reported her disappearance in June. McHale was 44 when she was last seen on June 13, 2016.

The other is Nicole “Nikki” Fusaro, 34, according to CBS’s Philadelphia affiliate, citing local police sources.

She was 27 when she vanished near the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny Avenue in July 2019.

Investigators said they have also identified dozens of other people from the images.

Excavation crews have previously been seen searching outside and under the home, including the sewers.

The younger Horsch has not been charged in connection with any of the missing women. But at the time of his unrelated arrest in a BMW at the city’s Independence Mall, authorities allege that the woman with him was carrying one of their IDs.

Dr. Kris Mohandie, a board-certified forensic psychologist, has warned that the elder Horsch may have been part of a wider network centered on the production and distribution of “snuff films.”

“The fact that the father was involved in the pornographic industry indicates that there may have been, in addition to the sadistic motives that we usually see in serial murders, that there may have been profit in distribution of so-called snuff films,” he told News Media previously.

The older Horsch was a convicted producer of methamphetamines and an author of sexually explicit and violent books. In one, 2014’s “Empathy,” there is a chapter about dissolving a murdered woman’s body with boiling chemicals.