Forensic teams recovered bones from the backyard of a dilapidated Philadelphia home linked to seven missing women, while investigators also uncovered a hidden safe beneath the floorboards.
On Thursday, October 15, forensic crews pulled bones from the backyard of the West Chew Avenue property in Philadelphia’s Olney section and called in the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, the Daily Mail reported. Officials have not yet determined whether the remains are human or animal.
The same rundown house once occupied by Raymond “R.C.” Horsch and his son Eugene has become the focus of a widening search tied to multiple missing women. Investigators also found a hidden safe concealed under floorboards as they tore into walls and flooring.
No one has been charged in connection with the disappearances or any suspected deaths. Eugene Albert Horsch, 44, remains in federal custody on a firearms charge only.
Search teams keep digging through the Olney property
Police and FBI Evidence Response Team agents had already excavated portions of the site in July. On July 22 they removed pipes and debris. The next day they returned for a second dig.
After the October 15 bone recovery, crews were expected to push the search toward the front of the property. FBI agents collected soil samples from different spots and depths, looking for chemical traces.
Retired NYPD sergeant Joseph Giacalone, who is not part of the case, described what the sampling can show.
"Right now, it looks like soil samples. We saw them going in and taking some samples. And what they’ll do is, they’ll do it in different places, and they’ll do it at different depths to see if there’s any chemicals in there."
Earlier recoveries at the home already included five urns believed to hold cremated remains, unidentified substances sent for lab analysis, and a vast digital archive. Authorities have not announced any conclusive link between those materials and the missing women.
Cases built on recovered remains often turn on patient lab work, as other missing-person investigations have shown when skeletal evidence finally surfaces near related items.
Seven women vanished after contact with the house
The property is linked to seven missing or unidentified women. Several named in the investigation left a clear trail back to the address.
Amy McHale, Horsch’s former wife and film collaborator, was last seen at the Olney house in 2016. Her family said that was her last known location.
Gabrielle Amarando disappeared in September 2012 at age 22. Maribel Fresses was last seen in February 2018 at age 27. Police have said both women appear in recovered footage alive and later seemingly dead. Investigators believe both are dead, but their bodies have not been found. The medical examiner has been unable to establish time, place, or manner of death without remains.
Blair Tonzelli, 35, vanished in 2022 and was reported missing in February 2023. Friends said she was last seen at Horsch’s Philadelphia home the previous summer. She had met him while struggling with addiction in the Kensington neighborhood and living at a known drug house.
Archived records showed a photograph of Tonzelli still displayed on Horsch’s erotic website in September 2023, seven months after she was reported missing. The image appeared to show her nude, with what looked like a black eye and blood at her lower lip. Horsch is said to have uploaded an image of her around 2020.
Identification work on unnamed remains has closed other long-running files, including cases in which DNA finally named victims pulled from remote sites.
Krista Killen, Horsch’s longtime companion who appeared in some of his productions, died in 2025 of an overdose. Several other women who lived at or passed through the property later died the same way.
Massive archive and a June arrest raised the stakes
Raymond Horsch died in May 2025 at age 82. He had been a convicted methamphetamine producer and an erotic photographer and filmmaker whose work frequently depicted violence against women. He maintained the scenes were staged and consensual. He openly acknowledged recruiting women struggling with addiction by offering drugs or money, and he wrote about a serial killer who murdered people battling addiction.
Philadelphia police said they first discovered more than a million digital images and videos at the property, material that allegedly depicted sex, drug use, and at least one film police have treated as possible snuff content. Investigators have not established that any woman shown was one of the missing or that the footage documents an actual killing.
In an August briefing, Philadelphia Police Inspector Raymond Evers said detectives had recovered roughly 600,000 images, 70,000 videos, and more than 10,000 pages of written material. At that point they had reviewed only about five to seven percent of it.
Evers described the material in blunt terms.
"graphic and dark"
The volume of digital evidence is the kind of haul that can sit unexamined for months while families wait. Similar pressure has defined other probes in which remains and digital trails eventually forced movement, including cases that ended with murder charges after a body was located.
Eugene Horsch was arrested June 19 near Independence Hall. Officers found him inside a black BMW with a woman who presented a fraudulent identification card bearing Blair Tonzelli’s name. The woman later told investigators that Eugene had created the ID and told her to use it if she got into trouble, according to police records cited in local reporting. Two illegal handguns, knives, drugs, and a fraudulent Drug Enforcement Administration badge bearing Eugene’s photograph were recovered. Additional fake IDs and a bank card turned up after the arrest.
Investigators have not publicly said whether Eugene took part in his father’s pornography business. He has not been charged with harming any of the missing women.
The New York Post reported that the hidden safe and backyard bones add to earlier finds that included chemical vats, writings on serial killers, and images of deceased missing women.
Cold-case units elsewhere have shown how soil, bone, and old digital files can still yield names years later, the way DNA has cracked decades-old disappearances once remains finally reach a lab.
What still has no answer
Officials still do not know whether the October 15 bones are human. Contents of the hidden safe have not been publicly detailed. Lab results on soil, pipes, substances, and the urns have not been announced as matches to any missing woman.
Police believe Amarando and Fresses are dead, yet without remains the medical examiner cannot fix how or when they died. No one faces charges tied to the disappearances themselves. The full list of all seven missing women has not been laid out in public briefings beyond the names already tied to the house.
Horsch’s website was taken offline. The property keeps yielding material that Inspector Evers already labeled graphic and dark, while detectives work through a digital mountain that was barely touched by late summer.
When unidentified remains finally receive a name, families sometimes get the only closure left, as DNA has done for victims long carried as Jane Does.
Vulnerable women struggling with addiction were drawn into that house for years. The public record now shows bones in the yard, a safe under the floor, a million-file archive still mostly unreviewed, and zero charges for the harm done to the missing. That gap is the story investigators still have to close.
