Hazmat Team Removes Vials, Vacuum in Missing Women Probe

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

The latest search follows 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 once belonged to Raymond “RC” Horsch, a pornographer who died last year at age 82.

One evidence bag bore a partially readable label listing “glass vials,” a “board,” a bin and drawers.

Among the boxes and bags of packaged evidence removed Monday were a rowing machine and a vacuum cleaner.

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

Horsch specialized in sadistic themes, some of which investigators say could ultimately prove to have been based on real events. Evidence recovered from the home has been linked to seven separate cases involving missing women.

Philadelphia police have repeatedly searched the property since the June arrest of Horsch’s 44-year-old son, Eugene Horsch, on drug, firearms and forgery charges.

After that arrest, police searching the home allegedly discovered “snuff” videos believed to depict multiple missing women, a drum of chemicals connected to the water system and five urns containing what authorities said 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 Outlet in September that, when Eugene Horsch was arrested, the woman accompanying him had identification belonging to Blair Tonzelli, who was 38 and was last seen in Philadelphia in February 2023.

Two other women were identified in local news reports. Both remain listed as missing in the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, known as NamUs.

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

The other is Nicole “Nikki” Fusaro, 34, according to CBS’ 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 Outlet 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.