Tag: Big Read

Update: On Aug. 12, Philadelphia police announced that investigators believe at least two women were killed inside the Horsch property.

NOTE: This article covers sensitive topics, including drug use and violence against women. Some people spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss illegal activity or out of fear of reputational harm. Quotes attributed to Raymond Horsch are drawn from a 2013 interview on the Rialto Report, a podcast about the adult film industry; a Q&A in 2014 during his art exhibit at the Papermill in Philadelphia; and undated profiles that were published on his now-defunct erotic website.

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Fentanyl and crack cocaine held Krista Killen hostage, and she did whatever she could to stave off withdrawal. Sometimes that required satisfying the whims of dangerous men prowling Kensington Avenue, who looked to take advantage of women like her in the heart of Philadelphia’s notorious open-air drug market.

Raymond “R.C.” Horsch seemed different. He had a three-story brick twin in Olney, a working-class neighborhood about three miles north of Kensington. There, he gave Killen a roof over her head. A sense of stability. And drugs.

In exchange, she agreed to pose nude for Raymond’s erotic photos and videos, some simulating brutality or death. Raymond had made similar arrangements with dozens of other women in his decades-long career as an artistic provocateur.

For Killen, who was estranged from her family, the Olney house was a sanctuary from the buckled sidewalks under Kensington’s rumbling El. Yes, Raymond was exploiting her addiction. But she told friends that he was never violent and that she cared deeply about him. She viewed him as her protector.

His son, Eugene, was a different story.

Eugene scared her.

She told friends he was prone to drug-fueled bouts of rage, and he carried around knives and guns.

One night, about two years ago, she was asleep in the dark, dank basement of the Olney home. Beside her slept her beloved tabby, BabyCat.

She awoke to an earsplitting crash as Eugene shattered the lock on her door. He burst into the room, armed with a gun, screaming that he was going to kill her, according to two of Killen’s friends. Raymond, then feeble and 80 years old, had to pull his son away.

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The Horsch home had long been a curious spectacle on West Chew Avenue. A steady stream of women came and went, sometimes in the company of an elderly man wearing an eye patch. The house had caught fire, leaving a hole in the roof and boarded-up windows on the top two floors. Police had raided the place for drugs.

Now, the three-story property has become the center of a sprawling, macabre investigation into the disappearance of at least two women.

The quiet residential street in Olney has been cordoned off, as hazmat teams and excavation crews scour the house and dig up the property for clues. Federal and local investigators are interviewing people who knew the missing women and delving into their dealings with Raymond and Eugene Horsch.

The investigation began in June, after Eugene was arrested near Independence Hall in a black BMW containing weapons, drugs, and a phony drug enforcement officer badge. With him was a frightened, seemingly drug-addled woman flashing an ID in the name of Blair Tonzelli.

Police discovered that it was a fake. The real Tonzelli had been missing for three years and was reportedly last seen at the Horsch home in Olney. The revelation renewed old questions about Raymond’s ex-wife, Amy McHale, who was reported missing in 2016 and was also last seen at the same address.

Eugene remains in jail on illegal gun and drug charges. He has not been accused of any violent crimes connected to the missing women and had been incarcerated at the time of McHale’s disappearance. Raymond died from a lung condition last year at the age of 82.

Detectives initially said they might have found a “significant amount” of blood inside the Olney house. But forensic tests determined it was not blood, and neither Tonzelli’s nor McHale’s DNA was found on the items tested, according to law enforcement sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing probe.

But other developments have raised concern about the fates of the missing women.

An early search of the house uncovered a handwritten note that describes hurting people and makes references to serial killer Ted Bundy. And one woman told investigators that Eugene claimed to know how to dispose of human bodies with chemicals.

Raymond’s body of work as a shock-seeking pornographer has clouded the significance of those findings.

In a dozen films, novels, and photo books, Raymond used women suffering from addiction as props for his violent fantasies, subjecting them to simulated strangulation and drowning. He adopted the persona of an “empathetic” serial killer who murdered addicts to end their pain. And he claimed his writings were autobiographical, yet laced with threads of fiction — toying with his audiences by leaving them to discern what was real.

Meanwhile, Raymond’s sensationalistic art is overshadowed by his almost implausible life story.

An Inquirer review of hundreds of pages of police and court records, newspaper clippings, Raymond’s artistic portfolio, and interviews with more than 30 people has uncovered the saga of a thrill-seeking criminal artist and his troubled son.

Raymond’s humble beginnings in rural Pennsylvania gave way to a career as a drug manufacturer, an identity thief, and an international fugitive in seaside New Zealand. He returned to Pennsylvania to raise Eugene and continue pursuing his dreams as a pornographic artist, luring heroin-addicted sex workers off the streets of Kensington.

At least five women connected to Raymond ultimately died of accidental drug overdoses. Among them is Killen, who overdosed last year at the age of 47, according to the city medical examiner. Eugene would later tell people close to Killen that she had died just outside his Olney house, or shortly after he took her to the hospital.

Those close to McHale and Tonzelli remain tormented by the lack of any such closure. McHale’s mom, Gloria McHale, said she always suspected that Raymond was somehow involved.

“A long time ago, before she even married him, she told me if anything ever happens to her, that he was the one,” McHale said.

Raymond Horsch was born in 1943, the son of a World War II glider pilot, and grew up on a farm in East Stroudsburg, Pa. His parents relocated to Chalfont, in Bucks County, where he graduated in 1961 from Central Bucks High School as editor of a school magazine and a National Merit Scholar.

In yearbook photos, his dark hair is cut short, and he wears a tie and glasses with a thick black frame. He would later call his younger self a “totally asexual nerd.”

He married his 19-year-old high school sweetheart in 1964, and the couple moved to Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Raymond worked commercial film and photo jobs while his wife taught public school.

He was ill-suited for domestic life, someone who, when he watched Westerns as a kid, did not identify with heroes in white hats.

“I came out of the theater wanting to be the villain,” he said. “I certainly became a villain later in life.”

As the 1960s counterculture movement swept the city, Raymond ran the avant-garde Underground Cinema 16 — later the Roxy — on Sansom Street, then a beatnik mecca. He joined the Pennsylvania National Guard but deserted after he was moved toward active service in Vietnam. Instead of going to war, he traveled to New York City to work in film and showcase his own hyper-sexualized photography in Greenwich Village, alongside contemporaries like Robert Mapplethorpe.

His wife left him in 1970 after finding a women’s nightgown on their bed. In an interview with The Inquirer, in which she agreed to be quoted on the condition of anonymity, she said Raymond was never violent but was an “emotionally abusive” philanderer with an oppressive ego.

“Raymond really thought he was smarter than anybody,” said the 81-year-old Pennsylvania resident. “And he thought that he could get away with anything.”

During the so-called Golden Age of Porn in the early 1970s, when movies like Deep Throat crossed into the mainstream, Raymond worked odd jobs as a crewman on porn shoots. But he dreamed of making his own erotic movies.

He got his chance after befriending the Philly tavern owner and mob associate Salvatore “Sam the Barber” La Russa at his long-gone Bag of Nails bar at 13th and Locust. La Russa, who died of a heart attack in 1996, helped Raymond produce The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, which featured Georgina Spelvin, the star of the well-known erotic film The Devil in Miss Jones.

Raymond’s film premiered in 1973 at the 1812 Theater on Chestnut Street. It was a low-budget effort that depicted rape, bondage, underage sex, and the titular character’s violent relationship with a drug-addicted woman — a “sweet comedy,” Raymond later joked.

Raymond’s movie did not experience the same cultural, critical, and financial success of the better-known erotic films of that era. But his mob-backed dream of becoming an auteur was soon interrupted by his other passion: crime.

In 1974, the U.S. Secret Service busted the homegrown counterfeiting operation Raymond ran in Doylestown, seizing the equivalent of over $1 million in phony $10 bills. He served two years in prison.

After he got out, authorities busted him again in 1977 for operating a methamphetamine lab in Philadelphia.

Facing more prison time, Raymond skipped bail and went on the run.

Raymond fled to the West Coast with his longtime girlfriend, Myroslawa Anna Ferkuniak, whom he met sometime after she was arrested in an LSD raid at a house near Temple University. He assumed the identity of Dr. Stanley Eugene Stokowski, a real-life chemist in California with a doctorate from Stanford University.

In 1980, Raymond married Ferkuniak in Nevada using the Stokowski alias. They boarded a plane for New Zealand to evade federal investigators.

They settled in the sleepy port city of Timaru. Raymond, whose years as an illicit drug maker had made him a skilled chemist, boasted that he had a doctorate and got a job with an alternative fuels company with a fraudulent academic transcript under Stokowski’s name. He launched a facility that converted whey into ethanol fuel.

In 1981, Eugene was born, entering the world against the backdrop of his father’s deceit.

Raymond traveled back to the United States multiple times using different aliases. But in 1984, he was caught reentering New Zealand with five fake passports, according to news reports. The incident sparked national inquiries in New Zealand into how a fugitive impostor had managed to get work as a prominent chemist.

Raymond did not stick around for more questioning. He allegedly broke into a house, stole another passport, and fled to America before he could be charged. He left Anna and Eugene behind, and they returned to America later.

The FBI caught up with him in Orlando and extradited him to Philadelphia in 1985. A psychologist, in a court-ordered exam, noted that Raymond had an IQ of 140 but suffered from “deep-rooted emotional problems.”

A federal judge sentenced him to four years. Raymond expressed no regrets.

“I loved being a fugitive,” he would later say. “It was always exciting, always thinking, ‘Who am I going to be today?’”

After an early release from prison in 1987, Raymond moved his family to Northeast Philadelphia and got a job as an IT director. His wife, Anna, found work cleaning houses.

Although Raymond claimed he never took drugs, he watched Anna fall into addiction.

She died in 1989, at the age of 39. She was sitting in their living room and accidentally overdosed on glutethimide and codeine, a dangerous heroin alternative prone to abuse when combined. Eugene, then just 7 years old, was in the room at the time.

Raymond, in a later interview, expressed resentment about his wife “killing herself.”

“All the while things were bad, she held it together,” he said. “Then when things were good, she fell apart. My basic reaction was anger, because she bailed out and left me with a kid to raise.”

Raymond and Eugene moved to a three-bedroom home in Chalfont, close to family. He opened a barbecue restaurant with a colleague from the adult film industry, pursued his art, and raised Eugene as a single father.

In 1994, he directed and starred in Lovers, which was produced by Femme Distribution Co., a feminist porn studio. One reviewer described it as a moody feature that intercut scenes of rape and bondage with “thought-provoking dialogue.”

But Raymond was facing the reality that his attempt to blend pornography and cinema was a commercial failure.

Now well into his 50s, he wallowed in an artistic gutter. He performed in at least eight pornographic films, primarily low-budget exhibitionist features called Streets of New York that were shot in the dumpster-packed alleys of Manhattan.

He also began photographing sex workers, using Kensington Avenue as his casting room. He would shoot photos of women working corners, often without permission, and earned a reputation under the El tracks as a lurker who offered cash or drugs in exchange for nude film shoots.

He launched a now-defunct personal website, Eroto.com, in the late ’90s. Paid subscribers could access his photos and videos depicting sexual violence and women who appeared to be shooting heroin.

Raymond saw himself as a feminist and critic of modern society, but he was unapologetic about exploiting drug-addicted women. He likened himself to the snake in a parable about a woman who cares for a serpent, only to be bitten once it reaches maturity.

“The woman asks, ‘Why?’ And the snake says, ‘Because it’s my nature.’”

Although he had a young son, Raymond didn’t let that stop him from bringing his work home.

In the early ’90s, Raymond placed an ad for a housekeeper and hired a teenage girl, 33 years younger than he was and addicted to heroin. She “looked like a child,” her mother, Charlotte Ring, said. “I think he just wanted to use her for porn.”

They applied for a marriage license in June 1999 but never tied the knot. Ring said she could not persuade her daughter to return to their nearby home in Chalfont until she eventually went into rehab.

Eugene, meanwhile, was a straight-A student, just like his dad had been, at Central Bucks West High School. But his father’s career was a source of embarrassment, according to Eugene’s former classmates, who found Raymond “creepy.”

It was no secret that Eugene’s dad worked in porn. Hanging on a wall of their home was a huge photograph of Raymond — with thinning hair and a ponytail — receiving oral sex from a woman while she held a knife to his head.

Yet friends said Eugene shared many of his father’s other interests: chemistry, forgery, and eluding capture. He once swiped a lawnmower from Home Depot and wheeled it home. When his dad gave him money to go buy groceries at Giant, Eugene preferred to steal them.

“It was like a thrill for him,” one friend recalled.

Eugene’s friends called him “Gizza,” after the Wu-Tang Clan rapper “GZA.” In a trailer in Eugene’s backyard, they smoked weed lifted from Raymond’s grow operation, listened to Wu-Tang, and skateboarded on a halfpipe. According to two former classmates, Eugene sometimes smoked crack cocaine and “wet” — marijuana laced with PCP.

He had an older cousin who was a role model and one of his best friends. But when Eugene was in high school, his cousin, at age 19, crashed a convertible and died.

The loss devastated Eugene.

“When his mother died and his cousin died, he had no moral anchor,” said one relative, who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns. Eugene “didn’t stand a chance.”

Despite their conflicted relationship, Eugene acknowledged the role his father had played in his life. In a 1999 yearbook graduation photo, Eugene eulogized his cousin and ended with a note to his father: “Thank you Dad, for all you have done for me.”

Eugene never officially graduated from Central Bucks West, according to school administrators. A friend said he forged his diploma, showing off the fake document in his bedroom. It is not clear if he completed his high school education elsewhere, but Drexel University confirmed Eugene enrolled there between 1999 and 2003.

His academic career ended in 2003, following a night of drinking at a Northeast Philly bar. Eugene blew a red light and T-boned another car. The driver suffered a catastrophic brain injury and spent 16 years in a vegetative state before dying.

In 2004, Eugene pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and aggravated assault. He was sentenced to two to four years in prison.

Raymond was always looking for new women — particularly those who resembled his deceased wife, Anna.

He once asked one of Eugene’s high school friends, who was working at a car wash, if she wanted to star in his films. Another woman heard about him from a cellmate when she was locked up in a Bucks County jail on a drug charge. She later agreed to be photographed nude at his studio for money and drugs. He said she reminded him of Anna and asked her to star in Slaves, a 2003 film he was producing.

Raymond met Amy McHale in Kensington. She was struggling with mental health issues and drug and alcohol addiction, and she came to view Raymond as her savior after he got her off the streets. She costarred with him in a pornographic film.

McHale, 30 years Raymond’s junior, later married him beside a greenhouse in the backyard of his Chalfont home in September 2004, not long after Eugene pleaded guilty to DUI.

That same year, Raymond inherited the Olney house from his aunt. In two self-published photo books — featuring women recruited from Kensington in sexual bondage — a few pictures appear to be staged there.

Eugene got out of prison in 2006. Raymond remained in Chalfont, and he transferred the Olney property into his son’s name.

Three years later, a “highly intoxicated” 21-year-old woman called 911 to report a burglar in Raymond’s Chalfont residence. Responding officers found no evidence of an intruder, but they did find 455 marijuana plants in the basement and two shotguns.

The feds seized the Chalfont home.

After pleading guilty to three felonies and receiving a 54-month sentence, Raymond spent his time in prison writing a series of novels about serial killers and sexual deviants that he later self-published.

In 2013, when he was released from prison at the age of 70, Raymond and Eugene were together again in Olney, living in the aging family home-turned-porn studio.

Raymond described himself as a frustrated, aging porn star.

“I walk down the street seeing all these beautiful, breathtaking women who are now totally inaccessible to me. Totally off-limits now,” he said. “If I stay away from mirrors, I can still convince myself that I’m 18 years old.”

Raymond started wearing an eye patch, although friends were unsure if it was for medical reasons or simply to bolster his villainous persona. His art found a few admirers, including in Europe, and some of his photos appeared in an anthology of erotic art in New York City, prefaced by the prominent critic Camille Paglia.

But Raymond seemed resigned to obscurity, noting that few galleries wanted photographs of “wasted emaciated heroin junkies.”

He landed a 2014 show at the Papermill artist studios in Kensington. Raymond set up a slideshow photo gallery in a warehouse surrounded by needle-littered railroad tracks. The series began with photos of naked women, who became more gaunt and sickly as heroin took its toll. Several shots showed syringes dangling from arms pocked with bruises and sores.

As a finale, Raymond played a video showing the body of a naked woman. Raymond claimed she had died of a drug overdose after he had paid her for sex. The video shows her body being loaded into an oven and cremated.

Some of the attendees were shocked and disgusted. One of them, local audio-visual technician Justin Roman, recalled that Raymond was “totally shameless” when confronted.

“He was doing it all because he wants to have sex with women who are addicted to heroin,” Roman said. “And he seemed very self-aware that he could not stop this compulsion.”

McHale and Raymond divorced in 2008, but she kept returning to visit after he moved to Olney.

She was at the Chew Avenue home on June 13, 2016, when she called her mom to tell her she was coming home. She sounded drunk, so her mother told her to stay.

Early the next morning, McHale — a strawberry blond 44-year-old grandmother of three — left a voicemail with her daughter saying she was OK.

She was never heard from again.

McHale would sometimes be gone for a couple of days, but never much longer. Her daughter, Amanda Stofer, said McHale had been looking forward to Stofer’s forthcoming wedding.

“My mom had her struggles with addiction,” said Stofer, 38. “But my mom would not want to disappear in my life.”

Raymond told police and the McHale family the same story: She was drinking vodka and he went to bed. When he woke up, she was gone.

At the time, Eugene was back in prison for drugs and would not be released until a month after McHale’s reported disappearance.

Detectives were suspicious of Raymond, McHale and Stofer said, but they did not have probable cause to obtain a search warrant. Eventually, Raymond stopped reaching out to her family.

“When she would disappear before, Raymond would always keep calling me,” McHale said. “After this, I never heard from him.”

Years later, Raymond, now in his late 70s, frequented a onetime crackhouse on Wensley Street in Kensington.

He would come there to “pick up [drugs] and grab the girls” for video shoots, said Anna Marie Reveron, 58, who was something akin to a grandmother for the drug-addicted women who lived there.

One of the women Raymond picked up was Blair Tonzelli. She was estranged from her family in Northeast Philadelphia and had been in and out of prison. Friends recalled her as loyal, someone who would “literally give you her last $2.”

It was not unusual for Tonzelli to stay for long stretches at the house in Olney, where Raymond claimed she worked as his home health aide.

David McCarty, 72, said he stopped hearing from Tonzelli entirely in August 2022. The last time she posted on her Facebook account was Aug. 17 of that year.

Fearing the worst, two of Tonzelli’s friends reported her missing in February 2023. One told police she was last seen at Raymond’s house on Chew Avenue.

Another woman who spent time at the home described overdose deaths as a grim reality — but not mysterious cases where bodies vanish.

“I’ve lost probably six to seven friends who overdosed — on the street, in abandoned houses, in cars,” said the woman, a 37 year-old friend of Krista Killen’s who lived at the Olney house last year. “And their bodies are always found. Always.”

While an array of different women cycled through the Olney property, often for brief stretches, Killen was an old-timer.

She first appeared in Raymond’s 2003 movie Slaves and watched him eat a raw steak and drink prop blood out of a wine glass for one scene.

Years later, in Raymond’s 2017 documentary, Whore!, he filmed Killen using drugs and describing her own behavior as “slow suicide.” Killen reflected back on her scene with Raymond in Slaves and said she had wondered: “Is he gonna f— kill me?”

“This is a movie,” he reassured her. “I don’t want you to be scared.”

Killen lived off and on in the Olney house while continuing to perform risky sex work. She ran errands for Raymond when his eyesight deteriorated, driving him around in an aging Chrysler luxury sedan.

He would get upset when she left. He once posted on Facebook a photo of Killen in withdrawal, doubled over on a toilet — just to “get back” at her, according to a friend.

Killen never feared Raymond would harm her. But she worried about what might happen if she was left alone in the house with Eugene.

“Krista was always fearful that if something happened to Ray or he passed away, Eugene would not know what to do and not know how to control himself,” said Danielle Wynne, 46, a longtime friend of Killen’s.

In late 2024, after a yearslong infection in Killen’s leg, doctors had to amputate it above the knee. A month later, BabyCat died of a brain tumor. Raymond’s health was also in decline, and after he died in May 2025, Killen was suddenly alone in the house with Eugene.

Three days after Raymond’s death, a lit cigarette sparked a fire in Killen’s second-floor bedroom, where she had moved after losing part of her leg. The blaze destroyed most of her belongings, leaving charred bricks and boarded-up windows.

The fire led to police finding guns and a marijuana grow operation inside the property. Eugene was jailed again.

The fire had torn a gash in the roof, and rain pelted into the kitchen, the dining room, and Killen’s bedroom. On Aug. 16, 2025, three months after Raymond passed, she died of a drug overdose.

Eugene announced Killen’s death on her own Facebook page.

“Please let everyone know we were in love and we were going to get married,” Eugene wrote.

Her friends said neither of those things was true.

Eugene’s life continued to unravel in the wake of his father’s death.

Neighbors said they saw him outside, quiet and jittery, often obsessively washing his black BMW. He would be dressed in a nice shirt, as if he were heading to an office, although his only means of income appeared to be selling drugs.

He was arrested again this year in March after he stabbed a man in the stomach during an apparent dispute over a woman at Eighth and Market Streets. The case was withdrawn when the victim failed to appear in court, and Eugene was released from jail in May.

Just a few weeks later, on the morning of June 19, a U.S. Park Police ranger approached Eugene’s BMW parked near Sixth and Market. A woman inside sounded distraught.

As the ranger got closer, the woman in the back seat said to Eugene, “You’re going to hurt me.”

Inside the car, officers found narcotics, two firearms with obliterated serial numbers, and other weapons — along with a fake U.S. Drug Enforcement badge with Eugene’s photograph under the name “Eugene Frederick Steiner.”

Police called real DEA agents to the scene, who turned their attention to the woman in the car.

The 39-year-old woman told police her name was Blair Tonzelli. She showed officers an ID card bearing her photo, but with Tonzelli’s name. It did not take long to determine she was lying.

She told investigators that she did not know Tonzelli and was not aware that she was missing.

“But I think something bad may have happened to her,” she said.

She said she was afraid to enter the basement of the Olney house because Eugene told her he had hurt people there. He had never been violent toward her, she said, but he was obsessive and would sometimes sit for 24 hours outside her house. She said he had told her he knew which chemicals are needed to reduce a human body so it could be flushed down a toilet.

Authorities, including FBI forensic experts in hazmat suits, searched Eugene’s home. They found bank cards in Tonzelli’s name, Killen’s death certificate, and five urns containing plastic bags of unidentifiable cremains. One bore the name Raymond Charles Horsch.

Other findings only deepened the mystery of what had been happening at the house: hidden compartments, including one in a hollowed-out stair; vats filled with chemicals; and a 55-gallon drum with connections to water lines leading into a hole in the ground.

The note mentioning Ted Bundy included confessions for acts of violence, such as having “a 2ft zip tie in my pocket and a drum set up.”

“I had been ready and waiting and I damn sure showed no hesitation,” the note states. “And it was fun.”

Investigators are reviewing Raymond’s films and reading his novels for clues — giving his work the attention in death that he always hoped to achieve in life.

His books describe ways to murder women. One scene depicts a body being dissolved with chemicals in a bathtub.

That same book includes tales of Raymond’s bizarre life story, interspersed with passages that he concedes are complete fiction.

But he leaves the reader guessing.

“Would it surprise you,” he wrote, “to learn that I’m lying?”

Staff writer Michelle Myers contributed to this article.