The Last Thing He Forged Was a Confession

No one can prove yet whether Eugene Hörsch or his father, R.C. Hörsch, wrote it.

On the morning of June 19, 2026, a U.S. Park Police ranger named Paul Scholtz walked up to a black BMW parked beside a fire hydrant near Independence Hall, in a spot reserved for law enforcement.

The woman in the back seat said the man with her was going to hurt her.

Scholtz looked at the driver. He had sores on his arms and face. He was holding a pair of tweezers, a butane lighter was in plain view, and scissors were scattered around the front seat. The woman had sores too, and she was moving in a way the ranger recognized. He asked them both for identification.

The car was registered to Eugene Albert Hörsch, forty-four.

Under the front seat were two loaded guns, a .38 Special revolver with the serial number ground off and a Taurus .40-caliber pistol. Crack cocaine, fentanyl, marijuana. A switchblade in Hörsch’s pocket and another in the car. A glass pipe. A collapsible baton. A cattle prod. Handcuffs. In a canvas bag in the trunk, a federal badge and identification cards carrying Hörsch’s photograph and the name Eugene Frederick Steiner, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who does not exist.

Asked about the guns, Hörsch told the officers the guns weren’t the woman’s. “She’s a good girl.” He said he had a crack in the car. He said he was a felon.

Then there was the ID the woman had handed over. Her photograph. Someone else’s name.

The name was Blair Tonzelli. She was thirty-five when she disappeared from Kensington in 2023, and the woman holding her identity that morning had never met her.

She told investigators she used the name because she had open warrants. Hörsch had made her the card, she said, and told her to show it if police ever stopped her. She did not know who Blair Tonzelli was. But the way Hörsch talked about her, and about other women, had made her think something bad had happened.

Two women are missing in Philadelphia, one since 2016 and one since 2023. The search for both began at that car.

Two men lived in that house. One is dead. One is charged with almost nothing. Nobody has decided which one this story is actually about.

The Book He Signed With Her Name

Where does a man learn to build a woman a false identity and hand it to her in a car? Eugene Hörsch learned it at home.

In 2014, his father published a book called Empathy: The Memoir of an Empathetic Serial Killer. It is written in the voice of a man who kills people and would like to be understood.

The book does not try to horrify. It tries to shame the reader for being horrified. Its opening pages describe a woman dying in pain while her husband stands at her deathbed, demanding she get up and make his breakfast, and a family that turns against the older man for it. The narrator alone refuses. He sees the cruelty as a kind of love, and he says the family was wrong to condemn him. The killer in the title asks for no forgiveness. He has already decided that the people judging him are the ones who lack compassion.

R.C. Hörsch made a career out of that move. By trade, he was a pornographer and a drug manufacturer, with convictions for forgery and for making drugs. In 1973, he pleaded guilty to passing bad checks. The next year, the Secret Service charged him with passing nearly a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in counterfeit ten-dollar bills and holding a stack of phony driver’s licenses.

In 1977, federal agents raided what they called his home laboratory and seized equipment they said was meant to make methamphetamine. He fled to New Zealand, then to California, and lived under the name Richard Harris until they caught him in Florida in 1985.

For fifteen years, his photographs and films came back to the same subjects, heroin-addicted women, many of them from Kensington, shown at their lowest, and critics argued in print over whether it was art or exploitation. In his own author bio, he listed himself as an art forger, a counterfeiter, a fugitive, a sociopath, and an all-out villain. He wrote it the way other men list their hobbies.

He did it to his wife, too. Anna Ferkuniak was a Welsh coal-town girl, born in a mining village in the south of Wales, whose name first reached a newspaper in March 1969, when Philadelphia police raided an apartment and charged five people, her among them, after seizing roughly two thousand doses of LSD. She was nineteen.

She married Hörsch. In 1981 she had his son, while he was a fugitive living under another man’s name. She died in 1989, at thirty-nine, after a long illness. Her name would reach a newspaper only once more, in the obituary.

Twenty-five years later, he published her diary.

He called it Annie, credited it to R.C. Hörsch and Anna M. Ferkuniak, and presented it as the intimate journal of a troubled young woman wrestling with addiction, bulimia, and her own destruction. He wrote her author bio himself. It runs in the present tense. It says she completed her science degree at nineteen and her master’s in psychology at twenty-one, that she is working on her doctorate, and that she still strips under an assumed name while writing a book about her life. Every word of it describes a living woman. She had been dead a quarter of a century when he printed it.

That was the work. To strangers, to the women he photographed, and at the end to the mother of his child, R.C. Hörsch put the words in and signed his name next to theirs. No one outside that family can say whose voice is in any of it.

He died in the spring of 2025, an older man with ruined lungs, in a crumbling brick twin at 417 West Chew Avenue in the Olney section of Philadelphia. He was eighty-two.

Thirteen months later, a park ranger walked up to his son’s car.

The Basement at 417 West Chew

That was June 19. Within days, the twin on West Chew Avenue filled with people in white hazmat suits.

The house had boarded-up windows and security cameras mounted between them. A fire had burned the upper floors months earlier, and plywood covered the openings. Inside, on an upper floor, investigators found another handgun and a marijuana grow, tents, lights, plants, wires running down through the floors. They had found a grow in this house before. They would keep finding them.

The basement was arranged like a laboratory. Drums and bottles of chemicals that the forensic team could not immediately name, enough of them that the FBI sent its Major Case unit from Quantico to catalog what was there and decide whether any of it was meant to be an explosive.

A fifty-five-gallon drum stood plumbed to the water lines, the pipe running down into a hole in the ground. Zip ties. More counterfeit federal credentials. Fake IDs and a bank card in Blair Tonzelli’s name. What appeared to be urns holding cremated remains; one set was said to be his father’s.

And a significant amount of blood. As of this writing, it has not been tested. No one can yet say whose it is, or whether it is human.

Then there was the letter.

Investigators found it handwritten, unsigned, several pages long, an account of hurting people that mentioned Ted Bundy. According to the affidavit of probable cause obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer, it reads in part: “Acting on emotion is where problems occur. What I don’t think I told you was that the first time it was planned ahead of time. The threat was made before you-know-who came over, and I already had a 2ft zip tie in my pocket and a drum set up.” It goes on: “I had been ready and waiting, and I damn sure showed no hesitation. And it was fun.”

The writer described a zip tie and a drum. Investigators were standing among zip ties and a drum.

They could not say who wrote it. R.C. Hörsch had written pages like it for a living, in the voice of a man who does harm and asks to be understood, and published them as art. Law enforcement sources said they were working out whether this one was a piece of a novel or a screenplay. The father had spent fifty years making that exact question impossible to answer. When detectives lifted an unsigned account of violence out of his house, they were left with the two people who had lived there: the dead father, who published such pages under his own name, and the living son, now in a cell.

There was one more document in the basement—a death certificate for a woman who had died the year before.

The Trade He Inherited

Eugene Albert Hörsch was born in 1981, while his father was a fugitive living under another man’s name. By the time Eugene was eight, R.C. had been caught, sent to federal prison, and Anna was dead. The father came home to a house he would later sign over to the boy for a dollar.

That was 2007. R.C. had picked up the Chew Avenue twin after his sister died in 2004, and he used a power of attorney to put it in Eugene’s name. Two years later, he was indicted for growing four hundred and fifty-five marijuana plants at his own place in Chalfont. He moved into the Olney house after that and lived there with his son until he died. The marijuana grows kept coming the whole time, whoever was there to tend them.

Eugene’s adult record runs long and low—at least ten arrests before this one, for drugs, for assault, for drunk driving. In 2013, police pulled nearly two million dollars in cannabis out of the Chew Avenue house, and he went to prison for running it. When he got out, the grow came back.

It was still there in the spring of 2025. On May 18, three days after R.C. died, a small fire on the second floor brought firefighters to the house. A fire marshal found the grow on the third floor and in the basement, and narcotics officers came and took it apart.

They seized twenty-six pounds of marijuana, dried mushrooms, methamphetamine, cash, gold and silver coins in a safe, and three guns with the serial numbers destroyed: a rifle modified to fire fully automatic, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off, and a pistol. Eugene had felony drug convictions and could not legally hold a gun.

His lawyer told the judge the guns were the father’s and that Eugene meant only to get rid of them. He was frail by then and could barely walk into court. He pleaded guilty to the drugs; the gun charges fell away, and he left on three years’ probation.

Within months, he was back in a cell. In March 2026, police charged him with stabbing a man in the stomach at Eighth and Market Streets. The case fell apart when the witness did not appear, and he walked out in May, three weeks before Paul Scholtz looked into the BMW.

The two men shared a trade. The father forged checks and driver’s licenses and lived for years under another man’s name; the son carried a federal badge for a DEA agent who does not exist and built the woman beside him an identity out of a missing woman’s name. On July 9, a federal grand jury indicted him for it: felon in possession of two loaded guns and possession of forged DEA and FBI credentials, made, prosecutors say, on a desktop computer in his father’s house.

For the first time, one of the Hörsch men is facing a federal charge for the family trade. It is the son. The father is past charging.

They Both Said Raymond

Amy McHale had a mother and a daughter who never stopped looking.

Amy McHale

She met R.C. Hörsch in the 1990s, when she was in her twenties and he was in his fifties and she was homeless and sick with pneumonia. Her mother said Amy saw him as her rock. They married in 2004, at a reception beside a greenhouse in the backyard of his Chalfont home.

The marriage lasted a few years. She moved in with her mother on South Hutchinson Street, enrolled at Peirce College, became a paralegal, and worked at getting free of the thing that kept pulling her back to Chew Avenue.

On the night of June 13, 2016, she called her mother, drunk, and said she was coming home. Her mother told her to stay put; she was in no shape for the subway. The next day, she left her daughter a voicemail. She was at Ray’s. She was fine. She was forty-four, a mother and a grandmother of three. Her family has not heard from her since.

When the detectives came, R.C. told them she had been drinking vodka, that he went to bed, and she was gone by morning. He told her mother and her daughter the same thing. He was questioned more than once over the years and never charged. What her mother remembered was the phone. Whenever Amy had gone quiet before, Raymond would call and call, asking if she’d turned up. After the summer of 2016, he never called again. “She was more than just an addict,” her daughter said. She was preyed upon.

Everything in Amy McHale’s file runs to the father. The last voicemail names him. The last address is his. The man who called every time she vanished stopped calling the one time she didn’t come back. Her mother and her daughter told all of it to the police for ten years. He died in May 2025, and the file stops there.

Blair Tonzelli said Raymond, too.

She was thirty-five when she disappeared. She had gone to Archbishop Ryan High School, and her mother had died when she was eighteen. In the years before she vanished, she was in and out of jail in Kensington on drug and prostitution charges, and she had friends from Philadelphia to Florida who thought highly of her. David McCarty, seventy-two, who lived with her for a while on Wensley Street, told the Inquirer about the day she threw herself in front of a tow truck to stop it from taking his car. She was estranged from her family, he said, but she talked all the time about a son.

She would go quiet for stretches, McCarty said, usually with a man from Olney who sold marijuana. She called him Raymond. She always came back. Then, after August 2022, she didn’t. When enough months had passed, McCarty pushed a friend to file the report because he did not think anyone else would. The friend told police Tonzelli was last seen at the Olney home of a “sketchy” man who scared her, at 417 West Chew Avenue. Joseph Gunkel made that call in February 2023. He did not hear from the police about Blair Tonzelli again until this June.

The name, she said, was the father’s. But the paper in her name belongs to the son. He made the fake IDs. He had access to a Cash App account in her name. She had worked in the house as a home health aide, and a woman told detectives that she and Eugene had fallen out over money. Three years after she stopped answering, Eugene Hörsch was still handing her identity to women in his car.

That woman was not the only one who talked to the police in 2023. After Tonzelli disappeared, detectives questioned two women who knew the house. One of them called Eugene Hörsch a sociopath. She said he had talked about the chemicals it would take to reduce a body until it was small enough to flush down a toilet. He had not hurt her, she said, but he said things that made her believe he had hurt other people. That statement is in the affidavit the police used, three years later, to search the house. In 2023, it was filed.

In May 2025, Philadelphia narcotics officers stood in the basement of 417 West Chew Avenue, among the drums and the chemicals, and carried out a drug case. The report they wrote makes no mention of either missing woman.

Krista Marie Killen was the one who kept the house running. She had appeared in R.C.’s films, one as recently as 2021, and at times gave Chew Avenue as her address. A lawsuit over a 2023 car crash lists her as a caregiver and the adult in charge of the residence.

She was his longtime companion, and in his last years, she was the one holding the place together. She was living there in May 2025 when the fire brought the police. She died on August 16, 2025, three months after Hörsch, at forty-seven. The certificate gives the cause as drug intoxication. Her services were private.

Ten months later, a copy of that certificate was in the basement, among the chemicals and the zip ties and the drum. No one has explained why it was kept, or who kept it. Krista Killen is not a missing woman. She is the third woman to pass through that house, and the only one whose paperwork is still in it.

No One Has Been Charged

No one has been charged in the disappearance of Amy McHale or Blair Tonzelli. No remains have been found. The blood in the basement has not been tested, and no one can yet say whether it is human. The yards have not been dug.

That is coming. Investigators have said they intend to excavate the property, and the FBI’s Major Case unit has already been through the basement once. What the ground holds, if it holds anything, is not yet known.

What is known is that the hardest things in that house have been laid at the feet of the man who died in it. The letter. The chemicals. The drum. Eugene’s lawyer, Jerome Brown, has said his client is not guilty of anything beyond the guns and the drugs, and that the rest belonged to a father who wrote about killing women for a living.

It is a reasonable defense. It may even be true. R.C. Hörsch spent fifty years putting his own words in other people’s mouths, and he was in that house through every year the women came and went. He cannot be questioned, charged, or contradicted. Whatever he knew went into the ground with him in May 2025.

But the record does not divide as cleanly as the defense needs it to. The letter describes a zip tie and a drum, and the basement held both. A witness told police in 2023 that it was Eugene who spoke about dissolving a body, Eugene, whom she called a sociopath, Eugene, who frightened her. The fake IDs were his craft. The badge was in his trunk. The identity handed to a stranger in a parked car was one he had built. The father wrote about violence. The son was the one the living women were afraid of.

Two women are gone. A third kept the house running and is dead. The last voice in Amy McHale’s life said Ray’s name. The last papers in Blair Tonzelli’s life came from Eugene’s hand. The man both of them named is beyond the reach of any court. The man whose hands were on their paper sits in a federal cell, charged with guns and forged badges and nothing yet to do with the women at all.

The entanglement of these two men in one boarded-up house is the reason no one has been held to account for the women who passed through it. That was true while the father was alive to absorb suspicion, and it is true now that he is dead and still able to absorb it. A son could not have asked for a better shield, and this one did not have to. His father spent a lifetime building it, page by forged page, and then left it to him along with the house.

The Last Forgery

R.C. Hörsch built a life out of authorship without consent. He forged another man’s currency and another man’s name. He photographed women at their lowest and sold the images as art. He took a serial killer’s voice and wrote a memoir in it. He took his dead wife’s silence and printed a diary over it, in the present tense, as though she were still alive to have written it.

Every one of those acts is the same act: put your words in a mouth that cannot answer, and sign your name beside theirs.

He died, and detectives found an unsigned account of killing a woman in his house, and there is no longer anyone who can say whose hand held the pen. The man who spent fifty years making authorship unprovable made this one unprovable too. It is the last forgery, and it may be the only one that ever mattered, and it is working exactly as designed, protecting the person still alive to be protected.

Two women went to that house and did not come back. A grandmother who had climbed out of addiction and become a paralegal. A woman who once threw herself in front of a moving truck to save a friend’s car. Somewhere in a boarded-up twin in Olney, or in the ground behind it, is the answer to what happened to them. The men who know are one dead and one silent. The house is still standing. The digging has not started yet.

Thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you found it interesting, please pass it along to a true-crime-following friend. See you next week!

Sources

This account is drawn from the reporting of the Philadelphia Inquirer (June and July 2026), including its profile of R.C. Hörsch and its coverage of the federal affidavit of probable cause; the federal indictment returned July 9, 2026, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania court and property records; and Anna Ferkuniak’s 1969 arrest report and 1989 obituary. The description of Empathy: The Memoir of an Empathetic Serial Killer and of Annie is drawn from the books themselves. The full contents of the search-warrant affidavit remain under seal; where its contents are described, they reach the public through the Inquirer’s reporting. The family name is Hörsch and appears in some official records without the diacritic, as Horsch.

References

Egger, S. A. (2002). The killers among us: An examination of serial murder and its investigation (2nd ed.). Prentice Hall.

Stark, E., & Hester, M. (2019). Coercive control: Update and review. Violence Against Women, 25(1), 81–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801218816191

Woodworth, M., & Porter, S. (2002). In cold blood: Characteristics of criminal homicides as a function of psychopathy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111(3), 436–445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.111.3.436