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Amy McHale and Raymond “R.C.” Horsch met on the streets when she was battling pneumonia and needed medical care.

She had long struggled with mental health issues and drug and alcohol addiction. She saw Horsch, an erotic photographer and filmmaker 30 years her senior, as her rock, said her mother, Gloria McHale.

“He was like her savior.”

They held their wedding reception beside a greenhouse in the sprawling, serene backyard of his Chalfont home in September 2004. The marriage lasted only a few years, but Amy McHale kept going back to Horsch after he moved to a house on West Chew Avenue in the Olney section of Philadelphia with his son, Eugene Albert Horsch.

She was staying there on June 14, 2016, when she left a voicemail message for her daughter, Amanda Stofer, saying all was OK. At the time, Amy McHale was a 44-year-old mom and grandmother of three.

She has been missing ever since.

“She would never leave her daughter and grandchildren,” Gloria McHale, 79, said by phone after news broke this week that authorities had been combing through that house for days. “She loved them, adored them.”

For more than a week, Philadelphia police and federal authorities have been searching the crumbling Horsch twin home to determine if there is any connection to the disappearance of Amy McHale and one other woman.

R.C. Horsch was a controversial figure who had been convicted of forgery and drug manufacturing when he died in May 2025 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at age 82. Police have not named him as a person of interest in a missing-person investigation.

His son, Eugene Albert Horsch, is being held on $500,000 bail at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility on charges of illegal gun possession and drug crimes. He had a criminal history that included at least 10 other arrests for drug possession, dealing, assault, and drunken driving when he was arrested earlier this month near Independence Hall after his actions drew the attention of U.S. Park Police.

“This is much ado about nothing,” said Eugene Horsch’s attorney, Jerome Brown, of his client’s connection to any missing-person investigation. “They’re barking up the wrong tree.”

When the news broke, McHale’s mother and daughter thought they might finally discover what happened.

“But I don’t feel much closure, and today is an emotional low,” McHale’s daughter, Amanda Stofer, said Saturday. “I was hoping for some answers about my mother from the home, but I’m doubtful that will happen.

“It just feels heavy and sad.”

The case came to light under bizarre circumstances. U.S. Park Police stopped Horsch, 44, near Sixth and Market streets on June 19. In his black BMW, officers recovered two firearms with obliterated serial numbers and a phony drug enforcement badge with Horsch’s photograph under the name “Eugene Frederick Steiner.” He also had large amounts of cocaine, fentanyl, and marijuana, according to an affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

A woman with Horsch gave officers a false name, one that belonged to a 38-year-old woman who had been reported missing in Kensington in February 2023. Horsch’s passenger told investigators that he had made her fake ID cards with that name before and advised that if she was ever stopped by police, she could use them.

In Horsch’s dilapidated home, investigators found another handgun, hidden compartments, a 55-gallon drum with connections to water lines leading to a hole in the ground, and chemicals and bottles of liquid that forensics investigators are working to identify. There were also what appeared to be urns holding remains, one set of which was apparently his father’s. The basement resembled some sort of chemical lab.

Federal investigators also found a unsigned and handwritten letter that referenced hurting unspecified people and the serial killer Ted Bundy, according to an affidavit of probable cause obtained by The Inquirer.

Investigators are working to verify the authenticity of the letter, and whether it was meant to serve as a portion of a novel or screenplay.

Under a gloomy sky Saturday, about 15 FBI agents, some wearing hazmat suits, streamed in and out of the boarded-up twin home. “They’ve begun processing the scene,” Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore said. Forensic experts were determining what evidence had to be sent away for scientific analysis, he said. “It’s going to take some time.”

Art and weed

R.C. Horsch, who was born in East Stroudsburg, Monroe County, in 1943, is described in an author’s biography as “an artist, filmmaker, composer, writer, porn performer, drug smuggler, sometime political activist, art forger, counterfeiter, pot grower, air show pilot, army deserter, fugitive, sociopath, ex-convict and all-out villain.”

Throughout his life, R.C. Horsch worked on avant-garde artwork and erotica, often focused on scantily clad women in sadomasochistic settings, including a book described as an “autobiographical memoir of a caring, empathetic serial killer.” He directed his first film, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, in 1973.

A 1968 news report identified Horsch, then in his mid-20s, as the operator of a theater on the 2000 block of Sansom Street known as “Underground Cinema 16” — later the Roxy — which screened avant-garde films, including his own, but was shut down for operating without a license.

Horsch was married at least three times. He married Anna Ferkuniak, a native of Nant-y-moel, Wales, who was Eugene Horsch’s mother. She died in 1989 at age 39 after a lengthy illness, according to her obituary.

R.C. Horsch also had an extensive criminal history.

He pleaded guilty to passing bad checks in North Carolina in 1973, and the following year the Secret Service charged him and another man in Doylestown with passing nearly $180,000 in fake 10-dollar bills and possessing phony driver’s licenses.

In 1977, federal authorities raided what was described as his home laboratory, seizing equipment they alleged was meant to make methamphetamine. But Horsch left for New Zealand, later returning to California, according to court records, and operating under the alias “Richard Harris.”

Eugene Horsch was born in 1981, while his father was still a fugitive.

Authorities captured R.C. Horsch in Florida in 1985. A psychologist hired by his defense attorney claimed Horsch had a 140 IQ, according to court records, but had “deep rooted emotional problems.”

He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, plus probation. He later settled in Chalfont but acquired the Chew Avenue house after his aunt died in 2004. In 2007, he used power of attorney to legally transfer ownership to his son for $1.

In 2009, R.C. Horsch was indicted in Chalfont for growing “455 marijuana plants.” Investigators also confiscated two shotguns. The feds seized his suburban home and he was sentenced to 54 months in prison.

Federal inmate records show he was released from prison in 2013, and later moved into the Chew Avenue property, where he would reside until his death. He authored several erotic novels in the 2010s, often focused on women battling substance abuse or mental health issues.

Krista Marie Killen is credited as appearing in multiple erotic films that he directed, including one released as recently as 2021, and at times listed the Chew Avenue house as her residence.

In 2025, a motorist sued R.C. Horsch, Killen, and an unidentified man, claiming the trio crashed their Chrysler 300 into her SUV near Adams Avenue and Montour Street in 2023. Court papers list Killen’s occupation as “caregiver” and the “adult in charge of residence.”

She died the next month, according to an obituary, three months after Horsch.

In searching the home recently, investigators found a death certificate for Killen. According to the affidavit of probable cause, the cause of death was drug intoxication.

‘People don’t vanish’

R.C. Horsch and Amy McHale had become a couple in the 1990s.

“I was a young kid when they started dating, and I want to say he had been around for at least 10 years by the time they got married,” Stofer recalled.

They divorced after a few years and McHale moved in with her mother on South Hutchinson Street in Philadelphia. She went to Peirce College, became a paralegal, and was trying to get her life back on track, said Gloria McHale, 79.

But she could not kick her drug and alcohol addiction, she said. She would periodically return to Horsch’s home on Chew Avenue.

“They stayed friendly with each other,” Stofer said. “I’m sure it had something to do with the drugs and alcohol. I think he enabled her with things that weren’t really permitted in my grandmother’s house.”

On June 13, 2016, she went to Horsch’s. She called her mom that night to tell her she was on her way home. “She was obviously very drunk and I told her to stay where she was, because to get home she would have to take the subway, and she was in no shape to take the subway.”

The next day, she called Stofer and left a message. “She told me she was at Ray’s house and she was OK.”

That’s the last they heard from her.

Amy McHale would sometimes be gone for a couple of days, but never for much longer, they said. Stofer had three children, and her mother doted on them. Stofer was planning her September wedding.

“My mom had her struggles with addiction,” said Stofer, 38. “But my mom would not want to disappear in my life. She would never do that. She always came back around. She never missed big things like my kid’s kindergarten graduation.”

Gloria McHale searched all over for her daughter. “I put signs up all over Kensington,” she said.

Detectives interviewed Horsch. He told police and the McHale family that she was drinking vodka and he went to bed. “He said when he woke up, she was gone,” McHale said.

And Horsch stopped reaching out to her family.

“When she would disappear before, Raymond would always keep calling me. ‘Did you hear from her?’ And after this I never heard from him.”

McHale is hoping someone will come forward now with new information.

“Somebody has to know something,” she said.

“People don’t vanish into thin air.”

Staff writers Brett Sholtis, Michelle Myers, and Isabel Maney contributed to this article.