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For three months, police have been investigating a residence in Philadelphia where drugs, firearms, and thousands of videos and photos of sexual acts and torture have been found, featuring at least seven women who had been missing for years and are feared to have been murdered in this 'house of horrors'.
It all started with what seemed like a routine arrest in the city's historic center on June 19, when Eugene Horsch, a 44-year-old man previously convicted of drug possession, presented a police officer with fake federal agent badges.
Firearms and drugs were also found in the car where he was parked, and the woman accompanying Horsch presented an identity card that was not her own, which turned out to be that of a woman who went missing in Philadelphia in 2023, Blair Tonzelli.
When the man's home—a two-story brick house in Olney, a working-class neighborhood in the north of the city—was first searched, ammunition, more drugs, and a huge quantity of potentially dangerous chemicals were found, leading the police to investigate further and choose to keep Horsch in custody.
Authorities spent the following weeks exhaustively examining the property amid the growing curiosity of neighbors and local media. They brought in dogs and excavated the pipes under the dwelling to take samples.
In August, it was reported that more drugs and weapons were found, as well as hard drives containing some 600,000 photos and 70,000 videos that include images taken inside the house.
Philadelphia Police Inspector Ray Evers reported at the time that some of these audiovisual materials correspond to scenes of torture and that, while some appear to have been staged, others seem real.
Two apparent deaths
Evers adds that, in the coroner's opinion, two of the women appearing in the images appear to have died from strangulation. Those two women are identified as Gabrielle Amarando and Maribel Fresses, who went missing in 2012 and 2018.
The police, who have not clarified if Eugene Horsch appears in that material, later stated that they identified his father, Raymond Horsch, who died in 2025, in the images.
According to the agents, Raymond Horsch is seen strangling a woman they identified as Nicole Fusaro, who went missing in 2018.
Last Wednesday, the Philadelphia Police reported that they have identified five women in the confiscated materials, and that there are two others, also missing, linked to the case, one of whom is Amy Mchale, the wife of the now-deceased Raymond Horsch, who has not been heard from since 2016.
It was also explained that a total of about 60 people have been identified in the videos found in the Olney house, that some have been located and questioned, and that a dozen of them died of overdoses after the images were recorded.
The city's Police Department has asked for the public's cooperation in the case while trying to contact more people appearing in the seized content and also searching for possible human remains in the home, something that has not been confirmed so far.
It has also stated that it plans to carry out another thorough search of the home at the end of September based on a new court order.
[Publicidad]