R.C. Horsch

Raymond Charles "R.C." Horsch (born Raymond Charles Hoersch Jr., 1943, died May 2025) was a Philadelphia filmmaker, photographer, and self-published author who directed the 1973 pornographic feature The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig and was convicted over four decades of check forgery, counterfeiting, drug manufacturing, passport fraud, and marijuana cultivation. From 1977 to 1984 he was a fugitive, and from about 1980 he lived in New Zealand as Dr. Stanley Edward Stokowski, the name of a real California chemist, helping to build a plant that turned whey into ethanol. In recorded interviews he said that he had worked in the early 1960s as a freelance wiretapper and burglar for the Wackenhut Corporation. He died of a lung condition in May 2025. Thirteen months later a traffic stop involving his son, Eugene Horsch, led the Philadelphia Police Department and the FBI to the family house at 417 West Chew Avenue in the Olney neighborhood, which had belonged to his grandparents, where investigators recovered more than one million image and video files. Police have said the material shows five women who appear to be dead, and that two other women connected to the house are missing. No body has been recovered and no homicide charge has been filed against anyone.¹²³

Bucks County and the Philadelphia Studios

Horsch was born in the Poconos near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a farm before his family moved to Chalfont in Bucks County. His father, Raymond C. Hoersch, whose name he carried with the suffix Jr., flew cargo gliders for the Army Air Forces in the Second World War 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 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 Filmmakers 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; E. Howard Hunt], who was at the time with the CIA." 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 on Long Island, and described a service guiding industrial concerns through 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 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 trooper 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 U.S. Marshal 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, 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 matching him appears in the agency's releasable airmen files of October 2004, September 2024, or September 2026, and its file of deregistered aircraft holds no other aircraft ever registered under those names.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. The races ran from Friday, September 12, to Sunday, September 14, 1980, and on the opening day Horsch was married in Reno under the name Stanley E. Stokowski.²⁹³⁰ He said in 2013 that at the end of the 1970s he delivered much of his methamphetamine himself, "because I used to just love flying back and forth over the country, about 50 or 100 feet off the ground, waving to the farmers," and he counted "flying and risky occupations" among the pursuits of "a total adrenaline junkie."³¹³² In New Zealand, the Christchurch lawyer John Rutherford told The Press in June 1984, Horsch had the use of an amphibian aircraft that Rutherford had transferred to their company to increase its assets; Rutherford had flown with him once to Tekapo, "but the man did not have a licence rating that allowed him to make solo landings on water. 'He didn't have enough hours.'"³³ The aircraft was a Lake LA-4-200 Buccaneer amphibian, construction number 469, registration ZK-EDK, formerly the American N5012L, which had been assembled at Christchurch and registered in New Zealand in December 1974; it was registered to Chemical Technology Ltd on October 30, 1981, passed to Rutherford personally on June 19, 1989, and was cancelled from the register as exported in September 2009. A local aviation historian recalled it standing for years in "a very tired state" at the Simon Spencer-Bower airfield, where he photographed it in September 1988.³⁴³⁵

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.³⁶

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 "Sam the Barber" 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 that the sex in it was disgusting. La Russa died of a heart attack in 1996.¹⁴¹⁵³⁷

In February 1975, eleven weeks after the counterfeiting arrest, "Chestnut Hill filmmaker Ray Hoersch" was to show his film Black Mass at midnight at the Arcadia; the showing was cancelled after what the Philadelphia Inquirer called reported pressure from the Philadelphia Archdiocese, and Art Carduner of the Bandbox Theater in Germantown 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."³⁸³⁹

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 1972.¹⁶⁴⁰ On December 10, 1974, the Hatboro Card Shop on Old York Road in Hatboro reported a suspicious ten-dollar bill, and Hatboro police detained Horsch, then 31. 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, where they arrested Charles Griffith, 39, of Wallingford. 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.¹¹⁸⁴¹

In his 2013 account Horsch said that before the counterfeiting he had spent about a year in deep depression editing a pennysaver magazine called Wisdom's Child. He said he reproduced automobile titles and registrations that he sold "through local organized crime outlet," which used them to ship stolen cars "to South America or wherever they were going," and forged Picasso etchings that he took to Christie's, Sotheby's, and Freeman Fine Arts in Philadelphia, saying he had found them in "my grandmother's attic or something like that"; the auction houses, he said, "were the ones who authenticated them and declared them to be genuine and sold them." He described his arrest as a traffic stop with about 10,000 dollars in the car, after which Secret Service agents questioned him overnight in Center City and offered immunity if he gave up the printer; a judge was woken "at three o'clock in the morning" to sign the agreement, "and I said, I'm the printer." He said he received a 24-month sentence and served 18 months, partly at Allenwood and partly at the prison camp on Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, where, he said, "One of the inmates was H.L. Hunt" [sic; E. Howard Hunt], the Mr. Smith of his Wackenhut years, "sitting in the back, writing spy novels." Horsch said he smuggled liquor to him from a job on the base, and that when he described their earlier dealings Hunt "gave me a blank look and said something about never having worked for the CIA." Hunt had served nine months and 13 days at Danbury and Allenwood before his release on appeal bond in January 1974; he returned to custody at the Eglin prison camp on April 25, 1975, four and a half months after Horsch's arrest, and was paroled from Eglin on February 23, 1977.^42434445

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 Edward Stokowski, a physicist and chemist from Lewiston, Maine, with a 1963 degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a 1968 doctorate in physics from Stanford University.⁴⁶ He said in 2013 that the 1977 charge arose from an attempt to make an unscheduled analog of amphetamine, of which his process had produced some of the real drug as a side reaction, and that he had been out of prison "four or five months" when he was arrested. "I became a fugitive in 76, actually on my birthday," he said; the arrest on which he jumped bail was in February 1977, and public records indexes give his month of birth as May.⁴⁷ He said that between 1979 and early 1980 he supplied "well over half of all the amphetamine" in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland area, subcontracting parts of the process to legitimate chemical companies and selling to two men only, one "connected with the mafia in Philadelphia" and one "who had an in with the Pagans and the Warlocks," that he was paid in paper grocery sacks at a family dinner in Voorhees, that he produced the drug at a house he built "on top of a mountain in the Sierra foothills," and that "I bought a jet aircraft." He said FBI agents obtained his father's telephone records once a year to trace calls to him, and that "a couple other sources, not exactly from within the FBI itself, but along the edges," told him at the end of 1979 that agents were getting close.³¹ On September 12, 1980, he married Ferkuniak in Reno as Stanley E. Stokowski, before a religious celebrant; the marriage was recorded on September 16, and both parties gave their residence as Florida.^1163048 They married, he said, "specifically because we needed a marriage license to get into New Zealand," and he chose the country because its cheese industry produced whey, from which he proposed to distill alcohol, having written in 1977 or 1978 a book on alcohol fuel production that he sold by mail order "through ads in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics." The Minister of Immigration, Kerry Burke, said in October 1984 that Hoersch "entered New Zealand in 1980"; Horsch put his stay at "just about exactly four years."⁴⁹⁵⁰ The Christchurch lawyer John Rutherford, 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, 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 1981.¹⁵¹ The company was "formed earlier this year," The Press reported in July 1981; the companies register records its incorporation on May 26, 1981. On July 14, 1981, the Minister of Customs, Hugh Templeton, and the Minister of Energy, Bill Birch, announced a licence for its distillery at Temuka, the first commercial one in the South Island, to make industrial ethanol mainly from whey and beet crops. "Dr Stanly Stokowski, the director," said the 1.5 million dollar plant would produce one million litres a year from 22 to 27 million litres of whey from the neighbouring dairy factory, and that gasohol fuels were being studied. Two regional development suspensory loans totalling 120,235 dollars were approved for the company in 1981 on the recommendation of the South Canterbury Regional Development Council, and the Development Finance Corporation reported favourably on the project. The Minister of Science and Technology, Ian Shearer, opened the plant in April 1982. In December 1981 Rutherford, as a director, asked the Canterbury United Council to back ethanol in place of tetraethyl lead as an octane booster.^5052535455 Horsch lived at Hadlow, near Timaru, and ran a mail-order computer software exchange at Washdyke; the March 1984 issue of the Christchurch microcomputer magazine Bits & Bytes carried an article by him, and its partners recalled that "He said at least five times in two minutes that he had a doctorate." He trained unskilled local men as welders and in other trades, and about eight jobs were created.³³⁵⁶ 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 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 Ministry of Energy or other departments; the real Stokowski confirmed that the transcript was his. The Press's San Francisco correspondent, John Hutchison, reached the chemist, whom the paper named as Dr Stanley Edward Stokowski, 42, a 1968 Stanford doctorate working at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory; he said he was unaware that anyone had used his name and had never lost his passport.³³⁵⁰ He was also named in a civil case in the High Court at Wellington over a credit card debt of about 18,000 dollars.⁵¹

In March 1984, returning from a trip to the United States, he was held up by Customs over a microcomputer he had with him and was found to be carrying several passports, five according to later accounts. Customs, he said in 2013, "took my passport to examine it and didn't give it back," and he reckoned he had "about three or four days before the proverbial shit hit the fan."³³⁴⁹ 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.¹⁵¹ Detective Superintendent R.N. MacDonald, director of drug enforcement and intelligence at police headquarters, said police were liaising with overseas agencies, and the director of the Security Intelligence Service, Brigadier Lindsay Smith, said only that it was "a matter for the police and for customs." Police searched properties at Clandeboye and Hadlow, and at their request the Fire Service drained a well at the ethanol plant; MacDonald would not comment on reports that firearms and drugs had been found in it. Westpac put the company into receivership on May 22, 1984, with K.N. Curnow of Deloitte Haskins & Sells as receiver, and Rutherford arranged to pay the bank about 170,000 dollars. Horsch said he had owned 80 percent of the distillery and signed his share over. In October 1984 Rutherford told The Press that business at the plant was booming and that Horsch "had trained everybody up before he left ... he did everything he said he was going to accomplish."⁵⁷ The plant was still turning whey into alcohol in 1986.^3349565859 The Inquirer reported in 2026 that after New Zealand he returned to California and used the name Richard Harris.⁶⁰ He said he settled in Orlando, started a computer business, programmed computer games, and arranged through a Philadelphia lawyer to surrender, and that FBI agents arrested him at 4 a.m. on the Monday he was to do so; he said he served about 33 months.⁴⁹ The FBI arrested him in Orlando; the Associated Press reported in April 1985 that he had left New Zealand in June 1984 and was arrested in Florida that October.¹¹⁶⁵¹ Reporting the sentence, The Press quoted Joanne Epps, identified as a Philadelphia assistant district attorney, as saying he had pleaded guilty to two counts of possessing methamphetamine for supply and to running a methamphetamine laboratory, and New Zealand police said extradition had been unlikely because they "did not normally extradite persons for passport offences."⁶¹

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 famine relief in Ethiopia, and on April 2, 1985, the paper published his guest opinion column arguing that harsher sentences did not reduce crime.⁶²⁶³⁶⁴ 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 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, and on August 27, 1993, he filed a Chapter 13 petition in the federal bankruptcy court in Philadelphia, No. 93-22545, listing the restaurant as a trade name; his 60-month plan was confirmed, and he was discharged in December 1998.⁶⁵ 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. He registered an unpublished 285-page manuscript, "Brains, cockroaches, computers, and the meaning of life: an introduction to metaphilosophy," with the Copyright Office under the name Raymond Charles Horsch on October 19, 1987.⁶⁶ As "RC Hürsch" he directed Lovers (1993) and Lovers 2 (1994) for Candida Royalle's Femme Productions, and in 1996 he appeared in Streets of New York 7, directed by Neville Chambers.⁶⁷ 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. 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.^{1243768697071}

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. Horsch said in 2013 that the operation had been discovered by "a fluke" when a young woman living in the house, who knew nothing of the basement, called police about a prowler; he said he grew marijuana to support his art and that most of it "went through two oncology groups to cancer patients, although I made a comfortable living from it."³² 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.⁷² In his 2013 interview Horsch said the girl had stepped out from between parked cars, that the story "was made up and augmented by her mother" because the girl was not allowed to cross the street, and that "the charges were dropped, expunged, and I was exonerated."³² The federal case, United States v. Horsch, No. 2:09-cr-00794 in 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 2010.⁷³ 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, 2012.⁷⁴ He was released in June 2013. He said he had written four or five books in prison, among them a memoir written with one of his former wives about her adolescence, including stripping at 14, which, he said, was banned for its content.³² The bank repossessed the New Britain house the same year.^13156875

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.⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷⁷⁸⁷⁹ In 2013 police found about 1.9 million dollars' worth of marijuana in the house, and Eugene was sentenced to four to eight years.¹⁸⁰

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 sold his books until the third week of September 2026.^15376881

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.⁸²

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 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.⁸²

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.³⁷⁸¹

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.⁶⁸⁸⁰

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.^2818283

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.⁵⁸⁴