Category: News

Philadelphia police this week acknowledged that the sprawling missing persons investigation in Olney has evolved into something even more complex — a death investigation without any dead bodies.

Adding to the challenge is that there are now at least four missing women linked to a crumbling house on West Chew Avenue, where for decades, Raymond “R.C.” Horsch had lured drug-addicted women to shoot pornographic photos and movies depicting graphic violence.

On Wednesday, Police Inspector Raymond Evers said a hard drive recovered from the family home of Raymond and his son Eugene Albert Horsch contained “images and video of what appeared to be two deceased females” taken inside — and that police believed the women had really died there, even though they have found no human remains.

“Usually when we have a homicide investigation, we have a body, we have body parts,” Evers said. “This time we do not.”

Police said they have not yet determined when Gabrielle Amarando and Maribel “Bella” Fresses died. Without a body, the medical examiner, too, cannot determine a cause or manner of death, and officials did not share publicly, or with the women’s families, the extent of their injuries.

Law enforcement sources said the images showed women with ashen skin, posed in ways that would be nearly impossible for someone who was still alive. Authorities are still working to identify dozens more people featured in the materials to determine where they are today — and if they’re still alive, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing probe.

The images are further complicated by the fact that Raymond Horsch spent decades using women struggling with addiction as models in apparent snuff films and pornographic photos that featured bondage, sexual violence, and death. Some appeared to be staged or digitally altered.

Michael Yoder, a retired FBI agent who has advised on over 45 no-body homicide cases, said he had never seen a case of this nature, as the typical such case involves a missing spouse or relative.

“This is a no-body homicide and a potential serial homicide case,” Yoder said. “The fact that you also have these videos of simulated deaths or assaults, I’ve never seen that in a no-body homicide case.”

Detectives have so far reviewed around 5% of hundreds of thousands of photos, videos, and written materials recovered in the home. Yet despite the trove of digital files, police say they have found not a trace of human remains or DNA from any missing women.

Police say they have evidence that some works likely went beyond make-believe.

The two women police said died at the house were last seen about a decade ago.

Evers said Wednesday that “if the images and the video are real and not altered in any way,” the women are dead. That leaves police facing the unusual prospect of seeking formal death declarations for both women in the city’s Orphans’ Court without a body, which adjudicates the rights of persons unable to handle their own affairs.

Police were first led to the home after Eugene Horsch, 44, was arrested during a June 19 car stop that uncovered illegal weapons and the phony ID in the name of another woman, Blair Tonzelli, who was reported missing in 2023 and last seen at the Olney home. A fourth missing woman, Amy McHale, Raymond’s ex-wife, was also last seen at this house in June 2016.

Inside the crumbling twin, investigators found chemical vats, dozens of computers and hard drives, and a cryptic handwritten note that referenced harming people and alluded to serial killer Ted Bundy.

Raymond Horsch died last year. Eugene has not been accused of any violent crimes. He was incarcerated at the time of at least one disappearance. An attorney for Horsch has declined comment.

After years of silence from their daughters, the Fresses and Amarando families said they were devastated to learn from police that the women are dead. But their relatives still don’t have all the answers they seek.

“I hate to say it, but I don’t have an actual body to say, ‘OK, this is my daughter,’” said Patricia Fresses, Maribel’s mom. “I need to see it.”

A rise of no-body homicides

Bodiless murder cases have become more common in recent decades, thanks to advances in forensic technology that have enabled prosecutors to bring charges in cases with limited physical evidence.

Some past cases locally have ended in successful convictions.

In 1997, the FBI arrested former Delaware prosecutor Thomas J. Capano, who was a suspect in the 1996 disappearance of congressional aide Anne Marie Fahey in Philadelphia.

To this day, Fahey’s remains have never been found. However, the pair were known to be having an affair, and they were last seen together dining in Center City. Letters written by Capano pointed to an increasingly controlling romantic relationship, and a search of his car and home later revealed traces of Fahey’s blood.

The former prosecutor was later arrested and convicted in 1999 of murder.

But that outcome is not always certain.

In Chester County, in 2025, Malvern resident Allen Gould was charged with homicide following the 2017 disappearance of his wife, Anna Maciejewska, who has also never been found. Prosecutors alleged that Gould demonstrated little concern about this vanishing, reporting it to law enforcement only under pressure from family and friends.

Yet without a body or murder weapon, Gould’s lawyers have argued the prosecution is built on circumstantial evidence.

That case is expected to proceed to trial later this year.

A former U.S. Attorney told The Inquirer in 2013 that, nationwide, 88% of the 400 no-body homicide cases that had gone to trial ended in convictions. Yet this figure only accounts for the cases that are actually brought before a court.

In the Capano matter, investigators were able to charge the former prosecutor because of additional forensic evidence, and the suspect’s own inconsistent testimony about their final moments together.

But investigators in the Horsch case face three steep challenges: There are no bodies, no other human remains, and one potential suspect — Raymond Horsch — died last year from a lung condition at the age of 82.

Yoder, the retired FBI profiler, said a no-body homicide prosecution would require evidence that clearly shows someone else was responsible for the deaths, and said additional forensic details like metadata taken from the photographs could establish a compelling timeline. Raymond’s graphic fantasies, he reasoned, would be irrelevant to the prosecution of another suspect.

“If you say he videoed women in fake death or fake assaults on video, it’ll throw a jury through a loop,” he said. “You’re getting the point of, if they don’t believe something, they won’t believe everything.”

No bodies, no closure

Regardless of the possibilities for justice in court, death declarations also generally mark the end of any hope that an individual or their remains will ever be found or properly interred.

In a 1980s article on the Orphans’ Court, a judge told The Inquirer they handled about a half dozen bodiless death declarations annually, but could not recall any in which a missing person was later found.

“Most of them just disappear,” the judge said.

Last year, Gabrielle’s mom, Karen Amarando Riley, talked to a psychic in a desperate attempt to get answers about her missing daughter.

Riley said the psychic described Gabrielle’s descent into addiction, and that she couldn’t see Gabrielle alive past the age of 27, which would have been in 2017.

The mother was shaken.

“She nailed everything … the time she started doing drugs and what drugs she did and everything in her life,” she said. “The last image she could get was Gabrielle standing in front of a brick building in a city.”

“I just wanted closure,” she said. “And she couldn’t give it to me either.”

The families of the Fresses and Amarandos — and potentially others seeking loved ones who vanished in Kensington — now face the possibility of closure without the recovery of a body or, possibly, a homicide conviction.

Riley, of Ocala, Fla., last heard from her daughter Gabrielle when she called from a Philadelphia prison on Christmas Day in 2012.

“I thought maybe she overdosed because she would have been in touch with somebody, if not me, somebody,” Riley said.

She is tormented by the thought that her child was reduced from the beautiful aspiring model she once knew, falling into addiction and, police say, ultimately being lured into the home on Chew Avenue.

“It tears me up. I don’t know what he did to her before he killed her,” she said. “I always wanted closure, but I didn’t want this.”