R.C. Horsch

Raymond Charles "R.C." Horsch (born Hoersch, 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. 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, 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, of the same name, flew cargo gliders for the Army Air Forces in the Second World War. 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.¹⁴⁵

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. He operated the Underground Cinema 16, later the Roxy, on Sansom Street. He said he then commuted to New York City to make short live-action films for the Children's Television Workshop, the producer of Sesame Street.¹⁶⁷

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. "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."⁵

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."⁵

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."⁵

George R. Wackenhut, the company's founder, was a former FBI agent. 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 2025.⁸

Desertion

Horsch received a draft notice at 18 and obtained a series of occupational deferments, then a marriage deferment when he married his high school girlfriend in 1964. He joined the Pennsylvania National Guard on a six-year commitment, failed to report when ordered to active duty, and 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. In December 1972, giving his address as 523 North Main Street, Chalfont, he sued Secretary of the Army Robert F. Froehlke in federal court, seeking a declaration that his involuntary call to active duty was invalid. Judge 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.³⁵

He said that in the early 1970s he taught himself to fly in a Cessna 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.⁵

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.⁶

In February 1973 he and John 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 1996.⁶⁷⁹

Counterfeiting, Methamphetamine, and New Zealand

Horsch was convicted of forging checks in North Carolina in 1972. In December 1974 a card shop in Hatboro reported a suspicious ten-dollar bill, and the United States Secret Service raided his Chalfont home, arrested Charles Griffith of Wallingford as an accomplice, and seized counterfeit ten-dollar notes along with false driver's licenses and vehicle registrations. Accounts of the face value seized range from 180,000 dollars to more than one million dollars. He served two years.¹¹⁰

In 1977 he was arrested for operating a methamphetamine laboratory in Philadelphia, posted bail, and disappeared. In 1980 he married Myroslawa "Anna" Ferkuniak in Nevada under the name Dr. Stanley Eugene Stokowski, the name of a real California chemist. With a forged Stanford University transcript he obtained work as a chemist at a plant producing ethanol from whey in Timaru, New Zealand, where his son Eugene was born in 1981. He was caught re-entering New Zealand with five false passports in 1984, fled, and was arrested by the FBI in Orlando, Florida, in 1985.¹

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. He was sentenced to four years, was released in 1987, and became the information technology director of a company in Northeast Philadelphia.¹⁴

New Britain Township

Ferkuniak died of an overdose in 1989 at 39. The following month Horsch bought a house on Airey Avenue in New Britain Township for 137,500 dollars. He filed for bankruptcy in 1993, listing a barbecue restaurant, Butterworth's Hickory Pit, as a trade name. 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. 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. He married Amy McHale in 2004, and they divorced in 2008.¹¹⁰¹¹

In 2009 a woman at the house called township police to report noises. Officers under Chief Robert Scafidi found 455 marijuana plants in the basement, 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. 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. In 2010 Horsch was charged with attempting to lure a nine-year-old girl into his car, and city prosecutors dismissed the charge. He pleaded guilty to federal drug and weapons counts in January 2011, was sentenced to 53 months, and was released in June 2013. The bank repossessed the New Britain house the same year.⁷¹⁰¹²

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, was released in 2006, and acquired the house at 417 West Chew Avenue from his father the same year. In 2013 police found about 1.9 million dollars' worth of marijuana in the house, and Eugene was sentenced to four to eight years.¹¹³

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." Amazon sold his books until the third week of September 2026.¹⁹¹¹¹⁴

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.¹⁵

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.¹⁵

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.⁹¹⁴

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.¹¹¹³

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.^2141516

J.J. Klaver, a retired FBI agent with no role in the case, said of Horsch on television, "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.⁴¹⁷