Eight years after a woman disappeared, a Philadelphia house holds possible clues to her fate and a wider mystery

By Danny Freeman, CNN

Philadelphia (CNN) — The summer Nicole Fusaro went missing, her mother walked up and down Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood until her feet ached.

Diane Fusaro and her friends would go deep into the often drug-plagued neighborhood where Nicole — Nikki to her friends and family — lived and was last seen, handing out fliers with the 27-year-old’s photo attached to sandwiches, hoping someone, anyone, might know something.

“Please help me find my daughter she has been missing for over 8 days with no one seeing or hearing from her,” she posted on Facebook on July 26, 2018, along with a selfie of Nicole with long, dark hair and blue eyes. Dozens of people shared the post, with promises to keep an eye out.

Diane died in 2020, never knowing what happened to her daughter.

“She spent every waking moment of her life from the time that Nicole went missing to the time of her passing, trying to find Nicole,” Diane’s nephew, Jonathan Halloran-Koren, said.

Eight years after Nicole vanished, her cousin believes he knows, to some degree, what happened to her. Police told him and his mother last month that she had been strangled, he said, and he believes she is the woman police described that day in a video recovered from a house in the city’s Olney neighborhood.

Police said the video appears to show Raymond “RC” Horsch strangling a woman with a zip tie until she “appeared to be lifeless.” Raymond Horsch, who once lived in the house and died last year, was an erotic filmmaker whose work depicted violent themes, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Nicole is among seven women tied to the house, five of whom police fear are dead, based on photos and videos found inside over the past several months. Police have yet to find bodies, DNA or other physical evidence of a killing, however.

Raymond Horsch’s son, Eugene Horsch, whose arrest in June led police to the house, has not been charged in any of the women’s disappearances or deaths, and police said in September that, so far, detectives had not reported seeing him in any of the videos.

This month, Philadelphia police and FBI investigators returned to the Horsch house, searching for any physical evidence that could confirm what the horrific images appear to show.

‘A kind-hearted spirit’

Nicole grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, her cousin said.

She was a “kind-hearted spirit,” he told CNN.

He recalled a family trip to Disney World and said Nicole loved volunteering with animals. She especially loved a Shih Tzu she inherited from her grandparents.

“She took that thing everywhere with her,” Halloran-Koren said, with a smile.

Nicole’s father died in 2009. Later, after Nicole and her mother moved to other parts of the city, Nicole began spending time in Kensington, and Diane eventually moved there to be near her, Halloran-Koren said.

Halloran-Koren said Nicole struggled with drugs — as so many have in Kensington.

“I know my aunt tried getting her into rehab a couple times, but it just … once you get into that lifestyle it’s really hard,” he said.

Nicole was last seen around 9 p.m. on July 19, 2018, near Kensington and Allegheny avenues, according to her missing person report.

“There was talk about her possibly getting into a car, but that was never” confirmed, Halloran-Koren said. “It was just rumors at that point.”

Horsch, the house and the women

Police first notified relatives on Nicole’s father’s side, Halloran-Koren said. Then, on the morning of September 16, police came to him and his mother.

“They advised both myself and my mother that Nicole was, in fact, a victim, that she had been strangled,” Halloran-Koren said.

He said he learned more graphic details only later that day, along with the public, at a police news conference.

“It was a wide range of emotions of sadness and anger,” he said. “(It was) beyond infuriating.”

Police said the metadata on the video of the apparent strangulation was dated 2017, the year before Nicole was last seen. Police have not publicly identified the woman in the video.

Halloran-Koren said he decided to make his cousin’s identity public in part so that the friends who helped his aunt search for Nicole would know what happened to her.

At the same news conference, law enforcement officials reiterated that so far in the Olney house they’d found unidentified chemicals, a “homemade laboratory of some kind,” five urns believed to contain human remains, and a trove of digital images and videos.

In all, police said, five women appear dead in images found in the house: Maribel Fresses, 26, and Gabrielle Amarando, 27, whom police named; two women police identified but would not name at their families’ request; and one woman police could not identify.

FBI officials said by mid-September they’d gotten through about 30% of more than 1 million digital pieces of evidence recovered from the home.

Two other missing women are also tied to the investigation: Blair Tonzelli, who was reported missing in 2023 and whose name, CNN has previously reported, was on the ID the woman in Eugene Horsch’s car gave officers when he was detained in June, and Amy McHale, whose family says she was once married to the elder Horsch.

Yet police have stressed the central problem in the case: There is still no physical evidence of a killing.

“Let’s remember, he was making movies,” Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore said in September. “Some of his movies are there on this digital evidence. So, that’s the part, where, you know, some of this is play acting, and some of it we believe could be real.”

“We need to corroborate what we see; we need to find evidence to prove what we think, and the FBI is here to help us,” he said.

An illegally parked car was just the beginning

However many questions surround what happened inside the house, how investigators got there is well documented.

Around 8 a.m. on June 19, a federal park ranger noticed a black BMW parked without a police placard beside a fire hydrant near Sixth and Market streets, in Independence National Historical Park, according to a federal criminal complaint. As the ranger approached, he heard a woman in the back seat say, “You’re going to hurt me!”

The driver was 44-year-old Eugene Horsch. Officers found a switchblade and a glass drug pipe in his pants pockets, according to the complaint. In the car, they found two loaded guns, suspected crack cocaine, a cattle prod, police handcuffs and, in the trunk, a second switchblade and DEA badges with ID cards bearing Eugene Horsch’s photo and the name “Eugene Fredrick Steiner.” Eugene Horsch “is not employed by the DEA and never has been,” the complaint says.

The woman in the back seat gave officers an ID bearing her photo but the name of a missing Philadelphia woman, police said.

Eugene Horsch, who has prior drug and assault convictions, was charged with illegally possessing a firearm as a felon and remains in federal custody.

His attorney, Jerry Brown, did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment. Brown previously told CNN he planned to enter pleas of not guilty.

Police then searched his home on West Chew Avenue. That’s when the case grew into something far larger. Investigators turned their attention to Eugene’s late father, Raymond Horsch, and to missing women who might be connected to the home.

“The scope of this investigation is significant,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said at a news conference in September.

A major law enforcement push

There has been some form of police presence at the Olney home since June, but local and federal law enforcement officials began a new effort this week.

Philadelphia police have not released details about the renewed work. “The investigation remains active and ongoing,” a police spokesperson told CNN in a statement. “Additional information will be released as it becomes available and is appropriate for public release.”

The FBI’s Evidence Response Team “continues to assist the Philadelphia Police Department,” a bureau spokesperson told CNN, referring further questions to police as “the leading investigative agency.”

Still, the change in the neighborhood is clear.

Crime scene tape is back up, and police signs bar parking on the blocks surrounding the home from October 5 to 16. Police officers and FBI agents have been seen by CNN and its affiliates going in and out of the house, removing everything from junk and debris to big-screen televisions and full plastic bags.

The sound of jackhammering in the Horsches’ backyard pierced the otherwise quiet street Wednesday afternoon.

The search for physical evidence of the missing women continues.

Halloran-Koren hopes investigators keep pushing for any answers they can get, even as he understands the reality ahead.

“I don’t think they’ll ever find remains that we can turn around and end up laying to rest,” Halloran-Koren said.

The only comfort, he said, is that “at least I knew what happened to her to a degree.”

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