Olney House Investigation

The Olney House Investigation is a joint inquiry by the Philadelphia Police Department and the FBI into the disappearance of at least seven women connected to 417 West Chew Avenue in the Olney section of Philadelphia, the home of the pornographic filmmaker R.C. Horsch, who died in May 2025, and of his son Eugene Horsch. It began with a parking stop on June 19, 2026. Police have said that video and photographs taken from the house show five women who appear to be dead. No body has been recovered and no one has been charged with a homicide.¹²

The House

The house at 417 West Chew Avenue was the home of Raymond Horsch's paternal grandparents, Albert Hoersch and Helen E. Hoersch, by 1968; Helen died there in August 1968 and Albert in July 1972, and both were buried from the Schneider Funeral Home on West Olney Avenue. Their son Raymond C. Hoersch was Raymond Horsch's father. Their daughter Helen M. Hoersch lived in Philadelphia all her life and died on April 5, 2004. The Inquirer reported that Raymond Horsch acquired the 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, from "Hoersch Helen M" to Eugene A. Horsch. Father and son then lived there together.^3456789 In June the Inquirer reported that urns found in the search held remains, "one set of which was apparently his father's," and Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said homicide investigators had been brought in partly because "several urns, possibly from deceased family members, were found"; in September police said they believed three of the five urns held the ashes of Raymond Horsch, his sister, and a friend.⁷⁸¹⁰

Earlier Police Contact

Police entered Horsch properties three times before 2026. In 2009 officers in New Britain Township, Pennsylvania, searching Raymond Horsch's house after a woman there reported noises, found 455 marijuana plants, firearms, pornography showing women who appeared to be bleeding, and identification cards belonging to several women. The former chief, Robert Scafidi, said the district attorney's office took the cards. "I really don't know what happened after that," he said. In 2013 Philadelphia police found about 1.9 million dollars' worth of marijuana in the Chew Avenue house, and Eugene Horsch was sentenced to four to eight years. In May 2025, the month Raymond Horsch died, a fire at the house brought narcotics officers, who recorded marijuana plants, firearms, and containers of chemicals. Eugene Horsch received three years of probation on drug counts.^11121314 Firefighters had answered a small fire on the second floor on May 18, 2025, and a fire marshal and a patrolman found a marijuana grow, an AR-15 pattern rifle modified to fire automatically, a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, and a 9mm pistol, all with destroyed serial numbers, and more than a hundred rounds of ammunition. According to a spokesperson for District Attorney Larry Krasner, Jerome Brown told the court that the guns had belonged to Raymond Horsch, who had died three days before the raid, and that Eugene Horsch had planned to dispose of them properly. The Inquirer reported that Eugene Horsch pleaded guilty to manufacturing drugs and that prosecutors withdrew the gun charges.¹⁵

Gabrielle Amarando disappeared in 2012 at 22. Amy McHale, Raymond Horsch's third wife, married to him from 2004 to 2008, was last seen at the house in 2016, at 44, according to her family.¹⁶ Nicole Fusaro, 27, was last seen in Kensington on July 19, 2018, and Maribel Fresses disappeared the same year. Blair Tonzelli, 35, was reported missing in February 2023. A photograph of Tonzelli, nude, with an apparent black eye and blood near her mouth, ran as a lead image on Raymond Horsch's website from about 2020 until at least September 2023. From about 2017 to 2021 the same website advertised an escort service whose client reviews describe visits to the house.^1141718

The Stop at Independence Mall

At about eight in the morning on June 19, 2026, a federal park ranger approached a black BMW parked at a fire hydrant beside Independence National Historical Park. The woman in the passenger seat said the driver was going to hurt her. She carried an identification card bearing her own photograph and Tonzelli's name. She told officers that she did not know Tonzelli. Officers found scissors, a switchblade, a second knife, a baton, a cattle prod, a glass pipe, crack cocaine in a dashboard compartment, a .38 revolver and a .40 caliber Taurus pistol with obliterated serial numbers hidden in the car, and Drug Enforcement Administration credentials in the name Eugene Frederick Steiner carrying Horsch's photograph. Both occupants were treated at a hospital for hyperventilation and then taken to the agency's Philadelphia headquarters. The criminal complaint filed on June 26 was sworn by DEA Special Agent Curtis A. McRoy.^12192021

The Search

About fifteen FBI agents, some in hazardous-materials suits, began searching the house on June 26. They found a third handgun, forged FBI credentials and the desktop computer used to make them, a marijuana grow, hidden compartments, five urns, vats of chemicals, and a 55-gallon drum plumbed into the basement sewer line. They also found handwritten pages that refer to Ted Bundy and describe the pleasure of hurting a woman with a zip tie. Raymond Horsch's self-published 2014 book Empathy describes strangling a woman and dissolving her body with sodium hydroxide in a basement bathtub. The liquids were sent to a laboratory in Chicago. Krista Killen, who lived in the house for years, had died of drug intoxication some months after Raymond Horsch. Eugene Horsch was held on 500,000 dollars bail at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.^12131822

The hard drives held more than 600,000 images, 70,000 videos, and 10,000 pages of documents. On August 28 the Inquirer reported, citing unnamed sources, that investigators believed one video showed Raymond Horsch killing a woman.¹³²³

The September 16 Briefing

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore, and FBI Special Agent Wayne Jacobs said on September 16 that about 30 percent of the files had been reviewed and 58 people identified in them. Five women shown appear to be dead, they said: Gabrielle Amarando and Maribel Fresses, identified on August 12 by Inspector Raymond Evers as shown alive and then apparently dead; Nicole Fusaro; a 25-year-old whose relatives asked that her name be withheld; and a woman in her mid-twenties not yet identified. Amy McHale and Blair Tonzelli remain missing.²⁴²⁵ Vanore described a video in which Raymond Horsch, naked and holding a camera with a second camera fixed in a corner of the room, 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. The department withheld her name. Her cousin, Jonathan Halloran-Koren, identified her as Nicole Fusaro and wrote to Mayor Cherelle Parker and the City Council that the department had described her death to reporters in detail it had not given the family. A department spokesman, Sergeant Eric Gripp, said detectives had traveled to northern New Jersey to brief the family before the announcement.¹²²⁶ Ten people seen in the material had since died of overdoses elsewhere, sixteen living people had been interviewed and twenty-five were still being sought; Ryan Gallagher, the department's assistant director of forensics, also spoke.²⁷

Police said they believed three of the five urns held the ashes of Raymond Horsch, his sister, and a friend. Two are unidentified. "We did never recover a body here," Vanore said. Bethel said: "We're going to dictate the pace." Jacobs said further search warrants were planned.¹

The Crematorium

Police are examining Raymond Horsch's access, in the years before 2007, to the Kensington crematorium of the Garzone Funeral Home, whose operators pleaded guilty in 2008 to selling more than 240 corpses to a New York tissue-recovery company. The man identified as his contact there, George Newsome, died in 2014. The five women believed dead disappeared between 2012 and 2023. The Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office has declined to say whether the city sent unclaimed bodies to the crematorium.¹⁷

Charges

At a preliminary hearing on August 6, 2026, Assistant District Attorney Alyssa Amoroso of the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office withdrew all five state counts of illegal gun and drug possession against Eugene Horsch, telling a city judge that the United States Attorney's Office would handle the case; neither Horsch nor Brown attended the hearing.²⁸ A federal grand jury had indicted him on July 9 on two counts, possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of a fraudulent federal identification document. United States v. Horsch, No. 2:26-cr-00296, is assigned to Judge John Milton Younge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The government moved for pretrial detention on June 30, and the defense has obtained three extensions of the motions deadline, the latest filed September 18. He has not been accused of any offense against the missing women. NBC10 reported that, according to court documents, detectives learned during the investigation that he "allegedly made a statement suggesting Tonzelli would 'never be seen again.'" Law enforcement sources told NBC10 that investigators had found what appeared to be fake blood but no human remains in the initial search and had excavated pipes at the property in August without finding anything substantial.²⁹ His lawyer, Jerome Brown, called the search "much ado about nothing" and said: "We categorically deny that Eugene Horsch is a serial killer."^220212230 In September 2026 the trial was postponed at the defense's request to begin no earlier than March 22.³¹