A Parking Ticket Led Police to a Million Images. Then They Found the Missing Women.

417 West Chew Avenue: A Million Images and Seven Names

In June 2026, outside Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a BMW was parked in a no-parking zone. A federal park ranger walked over. In the car sat 44-year-old Eugene Horsch and a woman. The woman had an ID belonging to Blair Tonzelli. Tonzelli was 35 and had been missing since 2023. The car also contained about $8,000 worth of drugs, two handguns, and a forged federal law enforcement credential. The ranger detained Eugene. Police then obtained a search warrant and went to 417 West Chew Avenue in the Olney neighborhood.

The house was home to Eugene and his father, Raymond "R.C." Horsch. Raymond died in 2025 at age 82. He worked as a pornographic film producer and photographer. On a podcast, he said: "Playing a twisted serial killer isn't much of a challenge for me." He published erotic novels with sadomasochistic themes, in which he wrote about how to hunt women in Kensington. He called himself a sociopath. The quotes come from recordings and writings he left behind.

During the first search, police found fake IDs, drugs, guns, unidentified chemicals, and five urns. Three of the urns are believed to belong to Raymond himself, a relative, and a friend. The other two remain unidentified. Extracting DNA from cremated remains is difficult. Cremation furnaces usually burn between 1,400 and 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, destroying almost all biological material that could be used for identification.

During the second search, police took away more than 1 million digital images, involving 58 people. The FBI began reviewing them frame by frame. So far, it has viewed only about 30 percent.

In the images, police identified seven missing women. Five of them are presumed dead.

Blair Tonzelli, 35, missing since 2023. Her ID was in Eugene's car. She is where the trail starts.

Amy McHale, 44, missing since June 2016. She was Raymond's ex-wife. Her daughter said that before McHale disappeared, she told a friend she was "very afraid" of her ex-husband. She was last seen at 417 West Chew Avenue.

Gabrielle Amarando, 27, missing since 2012. The images show her in the house going from conscious to "unconscious and injured." Her mother told investigators that police showed her video of her daughter alive, and later footage in which she appeared dead. She said her daughter was "gray-faced, and the position of her body was wrong."

Maribel Fresses, 26, missing since 2018. Like Amarando, she went from alive to apparently dead in the images.

Nicole Fusaro, 27, missing since July 2018. She was last seen in Kensington. Her cousin Jonathan Halloran-Corren learned from police about a video: Fusaro was nude, used drugs, took money from Raymond's hand, and was then handcuffed to a bed. Raymond used a pliers-like tool to put a zip tie around her neck. She lost consciousness. Halloran-Corren said Fusaro was "kind-hearted, loved animals, loved being with friends," but her addiction was "completely out of control." Fusaro's mother died in 2020. Before her death, she handed out flyers and sandwiches on the streets of Kensington, trying to trade them for any news about her daughter.

Two other women appear in the images, injured and unconscious. One has been identified, but police did not release her name at her family's request. The other, a woman around 25, remains unidentified and is listed as "Jane Doe."

At a September 16 news conference, Philadelphia Police Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said: "Some of it is acting, and some of it we believe may be real." That sentence marks the line the case keeps returning to. Raymond's profession was pornographic film producer, and his work itself carried themes of violence and sadism. The harm in the images may have been done under the guise of "filming." The defense can seize on that. But some footage is hard to explain as performance. In one video, Raymond puts a zip tie around Fusaro's neck until she loses consciousness. In another, Amarando and Fresses are recorded going from alive to "appearing dead." The filming spans 2012 to 2018. If these are real crimes, Raymond's conduct lasted at least six years. For six years, 417 West Chew Avenue remained an address with neighbors, a house number, and a location in a residential part of the city.

The investigation faces one problem: no bodies have been found.

Police found no human remains in the residence. They found something else: more than 20 containers of unidentified chemicals in the basement, a 55-gallon drum connected to water lines, and a space described as a "makeshift laboratory." The substances were sent to a federal laboratory in Chicago. Forensic death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan said that if lye is used to dispose of a dismembered body, human tissue gradually breaks down into a liquid or sludge that can eventually be poured into a storm drain. "If you can degrade it into a sludge, you just walk to the sewer and pour it into the storm drain." Investigators removed pipes from the house.

Eugene is currently in federal custody. The charges he faces are unrelated to the missing women: illegal possession of firearms, possession of an unserialized weapon, forgery of federal law enforcement credentials, and drug-related offenses. His next court date is set for November 3, 2026. Police are not yet certain whether he took part in making the images. Raymond appears in many of the key videos. Of the two camera setups used in the footage, one was controlled by Raymond, and the other was fixed somewhere in the bedroom. Eugene lived in the house with his father until Raymond died in 2025.

The images involve 58 people in total. Twenty-five others are cooperating with the investigation. Sixteen, after being found, refused to cooperate with police. Vanore said: "They don't really want to talk about what happened in that house." Another 10 died of drug overdoses at some point after the images were filmed. Their remains were found elsewhere in Philadelphia and are not directly linked to West Chew Avenue.

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, 58 women over the age of 14 are currently listed as missing in Philadelphia. Several of them (Fresses, Fusaro, McHale, and Tonzelli) appear on the list. Doug Black, an administrator of a Facebook group called "Found in Kensington," said requests for help finding missing people appear almost every day, many involving "women struggling with addiction, homelessness, and other hardships."

When a person is simultaneously a woman, poor, addicted, and surviving on the street, her disappearance often does not trigger a large-scale search. It does not become a news headline. It is not even seriously treated as a "case." Raymond Horsch hunted such women for years with almost no interference. He did not need to be clever. In the lowest corners of this society, their disappearances were too easy to ignore.

The FBI has completed only about 30 percent of its review of the image material. Investigators plan to return to 417 West Chew Avenue later this month with a search warrant. The test results on the chemicals have not been released. The identities of the two urns remain undetermined. The unidentified woman, around 25, is still waiting for a name.

Speaking about his cousin Fusaro, Jonathan Halloran-Corren said: "We will never get closure. We will get an answer about what happened to her, but we will never get closure."

For seven families, the answer itself is already an ending. For the streets, shelters, and rehab centers of Kensington, and for the Facebook posts that ask for help finding people day after day, this case leaves open the question of whose disappearance gets noticed. In Kensington, that answer is already known.

The image files remain in the evidence vault, arranged by timestamp.