Raymond\u2019s 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\u2019s violent relationship with a drug-addicted woman \u2014 a \u201csweet comedy,\u201d Raymond later joked.<\/p>\n
Raymond\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
After he got out, authorities busted him again in 1977 for operating a methamphetamine lab in Philadelphia. <\/p>\n
Facing more prison time, Raymond skipped bail and went on the run.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
In 1980, Raymond married Ferkuniak in Nevada using the Stokowski alias. They boarded a plane for New Zealand to evade federal investigators.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s name. He launched a facility that converted whey into ethanol fuel.<\/p>\n
In 1981, Eugene was born, entering the world against the backdrop of his father\u2019s deceit.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cdeep-rooted emotional problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
A federal judge sentenced him to four years. Raymond expressed no regrets. <\/p>\n
\u201cI loved being a fugitive,\u201d he would later say. \u201cIt was always exciting, always thinking, \u2018Who am I going to be today?\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Although Raymond claimed he never took drugs, he watched Anna fall into addiction.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> prone to abuse when combined. Eugene, then just 7 years old, was in the room at the time.<\/p>\n Raymond, in a later interview, expressed resentment about his wife \u201ckilling herself.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAll the while things were bad, she held it together,\u201d he said. \u201cThen when things were good, she fell apart. My basic reaction was anger, because she bailed out and left me with a kid to raise.\u201d<\/p>\n My basic reaction was anger, because she bailed out and left me with a kid to raise.<\/p>\n Raymond Horsch, on his wife’s overdose death in 1989<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthought-provoking dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n But Raymond was facing the reality that his attempt to blend pornography and cinema was a commercial failure. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n He launched a now-defunct personal website, Eroto.com, in the late \u201990s. Paid subscribers could access his photos and videos depicting sexual violence and women who appeared to be shooting heroin.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n \u201cThe woman asks, \u2018Why?\u2019 And the snake says, \u2018Because it\u2019s my nature.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n Although he had a young son, Raymond didn\u2019t let that stop him from bringing his work home.<\/p>\n In the early \u201990s, Raymond placed an ad for a housekeeper and hired a teenage girl, 33 years younger than he was and addicted to heroin. She \u201clooked like a child,\u201d her mother, Charlotte Ring, said. \u201cI think he just wanted to use her for porn.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Eugene, meanwhile, was a straight-A student, just like his dad had been, at Central Bucks West High School. But his father\u2019s career was a source of embarrassment, according to Eugene\u2019s former classmates, who found Raymond \u201ccreepy.\u201d<\/p>\n I think he just wanted to use her for porn.<\/p>\n Charlotte Ring, whose teenage daughter was hired by Horsch.<\/p>\n It was no secret that Eugene\u2019s dad worked in porn. Hanging on a wall of their home was a huge photograph of Raymond \u2014 with thinning hair and a ponytail \u2014 receiving oral sex from a woman while she held a knife to his head.<\/p>\n Yet friends said Eugene shared many of his father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was like a thrill for him,\u201d one friend recalled.<\/p>\n Eugene\u2019s friends called him \u201cGizza,\u201d after the Wu-Tang Clan rapper \u201cGZA.\u201d In a trailer in Eugene\u2019s backyard, they smoked weed lifted from Raymond\u2019s grow operation, listened to Wu-Tang, and skateboarded on a halfpipe. According to two former classmates, Eugene sometimes smoked crack cocaine and \u201cwet\u201d \u2014 marijuana laced with PCP.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n The loss devastated Eugene.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen his mother died and his cousin died, he had no moral anchor,\u201d said one relative, who asked not to be identified out of privacy concerns. Eugene \u201cdidn\u2019t stand a chance.\u201d <\/p>\n 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: \u201cThank you Dad, for all you have done for me.\u201d <\/p>\n When his mother died and his cousin died, he had no moral anchor.<\/p>\n A relative of Eugene Horsch, recalling his teenage years.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In 2004, Eugene pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and aggravated assault. He was sentenced to two to four years in prison.<\/p>\n Raymond was always looking for new women \u2014 particularly those who resembled his deceased wife, Anna.<\/p>\n He once asked one of Eugene\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n McHale, 30 years Raymond\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n That same year, Raymond inherited the Olney house from his aunt. In two self-published photo books \u2014 featuring women recruited from Kensington in sexual bondage \u2014 a few pictures appear to be staged there.<\/p>\n Eugene got out of prison in 2006. Raymond remained in Chalfont, and he transferred the Olney property into his son\u2019s name.<\/p>\n Three years later, a \u201chighly intoxicated\u201d 21-year-old woman called 911 to report a burglar in Raymond\u2019s Chalfont residence. Responding officers found no evidence of an intruder, but they did find 455 marijuana plants in the basement and two shotguns. <\/p>\n The feds seized the Chalfont home.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Raymond described himself as a frustrated, aging porn star.<\/p>\n \u201cI walk down the street seeing all these beautiful, breathtaking women who are now totally inaccessible to me. Totally off-limits now,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I stay away from mirrors, I can still convince myself that I\u2019m 18 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But Raymond seemed resigned to obscurity, noting that few galleries wanted photographs of \u201cwasted emaciated heroin junkies.\u201d <\/p>\n He landed a 2014 show at the Papermill artist studios in Kensington. Raymond set up a slideshow photo gallery<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Some of the attendees were shocked and disgusted. One of them, local audio-visual technician Justin Roman, recalled that Raymond was \u201ctotally shameless\u201d when confronted.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was doing it all because he wants to have sex with women who are addicted to heroin,\u201d Roman said. \u201cAnd he seemed very self-aware that he could not stop this compulsion.\u201d<\/p>\n McHale and Raymond divorced in 2008, but she kept returning to visit after he moved to Olney.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Early the next morning, McHale \u2014 a strawberry blond 44-year-old grandmother of three \u2014 left a voicemail with her daughter saying she was OK.<\/p>\n She was never heard from again.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s forthcoming wedding.<\/p>\n My mom had her struggles with addiction. But my mom would not want to disappear in my life.<\/p>\n Amanda Stofer, Amy McHale’s daughter.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mom had her struggles with addiction,\u201d said Stofer, 38. \u201cBut my mom would not want to disappear in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At the time, Eugene was back in prison for drugs and would not be released until a month after McHale\u2019s reported disappearance. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen she would disappear before, Raymond would always keep calling me,\u201d McHale said. \u201cAfter this, I never heard from him.\u201d<\/p>\n Years later, Raymond, now in his late 70s, frequented a onetime crackhouse on Wensley Street in Kensington. <\/p>\n He would come there to \u201cpick up [drugs] and grab the girls\u201d for video shoots, said Anna Marie Reveron, 58, who was something akin to a grandmother for the drug-addicted women who lived there.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cliterally give you her last $2.\u201d <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Fearing the worst, two of Tonzelli\u2019s friends reported her missing in February 2023. One told police she was last seen at Raymond\u2019s house on Chew Avenue.<\/p>\n Another woman who spent time at the home described overdose deaths as a grim reality \u2014 but not mysterious cases where bodies vanish. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve lost probably six to seven friends who overdosed \u2014 on the street, in abandoned houses, in cars,\u201d said the woman, a 37 year-old friend of Krista Killen\u2019s who lived at the Olney house last year. \u201cAnd their bodies are always found. Always.\u201d <\/p>\n While an array of different women cycled through the Olney property, often for brief stretches, Killen was an old-timer. <\/p>\n She first appeared in Raymond\u2019s 2003 movie Slaves and watched him eat a raw steak and drink prop blood out of a wine glass for one scene. <\/p>\n Years later, in Raymond\u2019s 2017 documentary, Whore!, he filmed Killen using drugs and describing her own behavior as \u201cslow suicide.\u201d Killen reflected back on her scene with Raymond in Slaves and said she had wondered: \u201cIs he gonna f\u2014 kill me?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a movie,\u201d he reassured her. \u201cI don\u2019t want you to be scared.\u201d <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He would get upset when she left. He once posted on Facebook a photo of Killen in withdrawal, doubled over on a toilet \u2014 just to \u201cget back\u201d at her, according to a friend.<\/p>\n Killen never feared Raymond would harm her. But she worried about what might happen if she was left alone in the house with Eugene.<\/p>\n \u201cKrista 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,\u201d said Danielle Wynne, 46, a longtime friend of Killen\u2019s.<\/p>\n In late 2024, after a yearslong infection in Killen\u2019s leg, doctors had to amputate it above the knee. A month later, BabyCat died of a brain tumor. Raymond\u2019s health was also in decline, and after he died in May 2025, Killen was suddenly alone in the house with Eugene. <\/p>\n Three days after Raymond\u2019s death, a lit cigarette sparked a fire in Killen\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n The fire led to police finding guns and a marijuana grow operation inside the property. Eugene was jailed again.<\/p>\n The fire had torn a gash in the roof, and rain pelted into the kitchen, the dining room, and Killen\u2019s bedroom. On Aug. 16, 2025, three months after Raymond passed, she died of a drug overdose.<\/p>\n Eugene announced Killen\u2019s death on her own Facebook page.<\/p>\n \u201cPlease let everyone know we were in love and we were going to get married,\u201d Eugene wrote. <\/p>\n Her friends said neither of those things was true.<\/p>\n Eugene\u2019s life continued to unravel in the wake of his father\u2019s death.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Just a few weeks later, on the morning of June 19, a U.S. Park Police ranger approached Eugene\u2019s BMW parked near Sixth and Market. A woman inside sounded distraught.<\/p>\n As the ranger got closer, the woman in the back seat said to Eugene, \u201cYou\u2019re going to hurt me.\u201d<\/p>\n Inside the car, officers found narcotics, two firearms with obliterated serial numbers, and other weapons \u2014 along with a fake U.S. Drug Enforcement badge with Eugene\u2019s photograph under the name \u201cEugene Frederick Steiner.\u201d <\/p>\n Police called real DEA agents to the scene, who turned their attention to the woman in the car.<\/p>\n The 39-year-old woman told police her name was Blair Tonzelli. She showed officers an ID card bearing her photo, but with Tonzelli\u2019s name. It did not take long to determine she was lying.<\/p>\n She told investigators that she did not know Tonzelli and was not aware that she was missing.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I think something bad may have happened to her,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Authorities, including FBI forensic experts in hazmat suits, searched Eugene\u2019s home. They found bank cards in Tonzelli\u2019s name, Killen\u2019s death certificate, and five urns containing plastic bags of unidentifiable cremains. One bore the name Raymond Charles Horsch.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The note mentioning Ted Bundy included confessions for acts of violence, such as having \u201ca 2ft zip tie in my pocket and a drum set up.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI had been ready and waiting and I damn sure showed no hesitation,\u201d the note states. \u201cAnd it was fun.\u201d<\/p>\n Investigators are reviewing Raymond\u2019s films and reading his novels for clues \u2014 giving his work the attention in death that he always hoped to achieve in life.<\/p>\n His books describe ways to murder women. One scene depicts a body being dissolved with chemicals in a bathtub.<\/p>\n That same book includes tales of Raymond\u2019s bizarre life story, interspersed with passages that he concedes are complete fiction.<\/p>\n But he leaves the reader guessing.<\/p>\n \u201cWould it surprise you,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto learn that I\u2019m lying?\u201d<\/p>\n Staff writer Michelle Myers contributed to this article.<\/p>\n Acknowledgment<\/p>\n The Inquirer\u2019s journalism is supported, in part, by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and readers like you. News and editorial content are created independently of The Inquirer\u2019s donors. Gifts to support The Inquirer\u2019s high-impact journalism can be made at inquirer.com\/donate<\/a>. A list of Lenfest Institute donors can be found at lenfestinstitute.org\/supporters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min NOTE: This article covers sensitive topics, including drug use and violence against women.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70,109469],"class_list":["post-257678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-raymond-eugene-horsch-olney-philadelphia-missing-women-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/circle_outline_footer_light_theme.png\"\/)
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