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‘Dark’ Discovery of Missing Women Busts Creepy Case Wide Open · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Picture yourself walking down a typical city street. You know,
• 0:04
  you are on your way to work, maybe grabbing a coffee,
• 0:07
  just navigating the morning.
• 0:08
  Speaker 2: Commute, right, something totally routine.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Exactly, And you walk past a house that looks well,
• 0:13
  just a little bit run down. The paint is peeling,
• 0:17
  the windows are covered with heavy blinds, or maybe they're
• 0:19
  even boarded up from the inside.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you might see a few security cameras tucked under.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: The eaves right with their little red lights blinking in
• 0:26
  the shadows. It just blends right into the urban decay
• 0:29
  that we all pass by every single day. I mean,
• 0:32
  you probably do not even break your stride.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: No, because you train yourself to ignore it.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I want you to stop and consider, just
• 0:39
  for a moment, how many secrets a single structure like
• 0:42
  that can hold behind its locked doors.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Because the physical proximity of danger is it's something we
• 0:49
  build psychological walls against just to get through the day.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: We absolutely do.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: And we are unpacking a reality today that completely tears
• 0:57
  those walls down. I mean, we are looking at it
• 1:00
  house that was hiding in plain sight in a major
• 1:02
  American city, holding secrets that stretch back over a.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Decade so welcome to this deep dive. Our mission today
• 1:10
  is to untangle a massive, ongoing criminal investigation unfolding right
• 1:15
  now in Philadelphia.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the material we have is incredibly dense.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: It is. We have our hands on a highly detailed
• 1:21
  transcript from the Long Crime Network, and we are talking
• 1:24
  about fake federal agents, a fortified at home chemical lab,
• 1:29
  a digital archive that honestly defies belief, and missing persons
• 1:32
  cases that have gone unsolved for fourteen years.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: The source material lays out a really dark, highly complex scenario.
• 1:39
  But our goal here is to understand the mechanics of
• 1:41
  the investigation.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Itself, right, the how and the why exactly.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: We are going to examine the procedural realities of modern
• 1:46
  law enforcement. You know how forensic specialists, homicide detectives, and
• 1:50
  digital analysts take a completely routine, everyday occurrence and use
• 1:54
  it to dismantle a potential house of whoors.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Let's get right into the catalyst, because the thing that
• 1:59
  really stands out to me in these sprawling, multi agency
• 2:02
  investigations is that they well, they rarely start with a
• 2:05
  cinematic raid, no, almost never, right, they start with a
• 2:09
  mundane thread being pulled. A patrol officer just noticing something
• 2:13
  slightly off. And in this case, the thread was a
• 2:15
  morning traffic stop.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: And the location is really what makes the start of
• 2:19
  this investigation so surreal. It was Center City Philadelphia, specifically
• 2:25
  right around sixth and Market Streets, which is.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: I mean that's right by the Liberty Bell, isn't it.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the immediate vicinity of the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: It's June nineteenth, right around eight zero zero am. So
• 2:35
  it is an incredibly public, tourist, heavy, bustling location, right
• 2:39
  as the morning commute is peaking. And a United States
• 2:42
  Park Police officer approaches a parked BMW, and.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: The source transcript notes this began as a standard pedestrian
• 2:49
  or traffic investigation, So a completely ordinary interaction, right, an
• 2:53
  officer checking a car and a busy tourist.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Spot, just writing a ticket, essentially exactly.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: But the environment inside that BMW shifts the reality of
• 3:00
  the situation in a matter of seconds.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: It does. The officer approaches the vehicle, driven by a
• 3:05
  forty four year old man named Eugene Horsch, and immediately
• 3:08
  the officer hears a female passenger inside the car crying out,
• 3:12
  oh wow. Yeah. The transcript quotes are as saying you're
• 3:15
  gonna hurt me.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Just that one sentence instantly evaporates any illusion of a
• 3:20
  routine traffic stop. You go from checking a registration to
• 3:23
  potentially interrupting an active hostage situation or a domestic assault.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: Right, and the officer have to rapidly assess the physical
• 3:31
  state of the occupants. Both Horsh and the unidentified woman
• 3:35
  appear to be heavily under the influence, and the police
• 3:38
  report specifically notes Hoorsch had visible open sores on his skin.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Which is a very specific physical marker with.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: The hallmark of chronic heavy narcotic use, like from scratching.
• 3:50
  Exactly when individuals inject substances like heroin or use methamphetamines,
• 3:55
  they often develop formication, which is the tactile hallucination of
• 3:58
  insects crawling under the skin.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Oh man, So that leads to the obsessive picking.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Alternatively, you see this with substances cut with agents
• 4:06
  like lafamosol or xylazine, which is incredibly prevalent in the
• 4:11
  Philadelphia drug supply right now, and that causes actual necrotic
• 4:15
  skin ulcerations.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So an experienced officer sees those sores and immediately knows
• 4:21
  they dealing with high level addiction.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: Right and very likely they realize there are narcotics in
• 4:26
  the vehicle right then and there.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Which gives the officer the legal groundwork to escalate the stop.
• 4:31
  I mean, they have probable cause based on the distress
• 4:33
  call from the passenger, the visible intoxication, and the physical
• 4:37
  signs of drug use. So they get into the vehicle.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: And the inventory of what they pull out of that
• 4:42
  BMW is just staggering. They recover roughly eight thousand dollars
• 4:45
  worth of illegal narcotics.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Wow, what kind of drugs were they?
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: The breakdown includes crack, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. But alongside
• 4:55
  the drugs they find two handguns.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, drugs and guns. That's a major escalation.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: It gets worse. The critical detail here is that the
• 5:01
  serial numbers on both firearms were physically defaced.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the mechanics of that for a second,
• 5:07
  because people here defaced serial number and might just picture
• 5:11
  someone scratching at it with a key. But is usually
• 5:14
  a much more deliberate process, isn't it.
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Erasing a stamp serial number requires significant effort.
• 5:21
  Criminals will use heavy metal files gwinding wheels, or even
• 5:24
  concentrated acids to obliterate the metal where the number.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Is stamped to make it untraceable.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: Exactly. They want to sever the gun's physical tie to
• 5:33
  its legal purchase history. So when an officer finds a
• 5:36
  gun with a filed off number, it signals they're dealing
• 5:39
  with the black market. It indicates the weapon was likely
• 5:42
  stolen or used in a previous crime.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: So the firearms and the drugs are major felonies right
• 5:48
  off the bat. But the officers find something else in
• 5:51
  the car that completely changes the jurisdiction of the crime, right.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, amidst all that contraband, the officer discovers a dea badge. Wait,
• 5:59
  real one, it's not a legitimate credential. It is a
• 6:02
  fabricated badge, and it features a photograph of Eugene Horsche
• 6:05
  right on the front.
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Attempting to impersonate a federal narcotics agent while sitting in
• 6:10
  a car full of heroin and defaced weapons. I mean,
• 6:15
  the audacity is hard to wrap your head around, it
• 6:17
  really is. But then the situation with the passenger takes
• 6:20
  an even darker turn.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: Right, because the officers need to identify the distressed woman
• 6:25
  in the passenger seat. She hands over an identification card
• 6:29
  and the ID bears the name Blair tan Sally.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: Okay, so they run the name.
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they run that name through their system and it
• 6:36
  immediately hits the name used database.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Name means, for those who don't know, that's the National
• 6:40
  Missing and Unidentified Person's System. Correct.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is a centralized repository funded by the Department
• 6:47
  of Justice. It bridges the gap between law enforcement agencies,
• 6:50
  medical examiners, and the public. So when the officer runs
• 6:54
  the name Blair tan Sally, the system alerts them that
• 6:57
  Blair Tanzelli is a real woman who is reported missing
• 7:00
  in twenty twenty three.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: And this is the wild part. The officers on the
• 7:04
  scene can look at the woman in the passenger seat
• 7:06
  and realize she is not the woman in the missing
• 7:08
  person's file exactly.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: They know almost immediately they're dealing with a stolen identity.
• 7:14
  The passenger is carrying the identification of a woman who
• 7:17
  vanished a year prior.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: So you have a patrol officer standing in the bright
• 7:20
  morning sun at a national landmark. They walked up to
• 7:23
  write a ticket, and within minutes they are holding untraceable
• 7:26
  weapons forge, federal credentials and the idea of a missing woman.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: It's an explosive situation.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: How does a local police department even begin to process
• 7:35
  a scene with that many overlapping federal and state crimes.
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Well, the fake DEA badge is the crucial pivot point here.
• 7:42
  Finding street level drugs is a local issue, but impersonating
• 7:46
  a federal agent elevates the threat matrix entirely because.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: It implies a whole different level of organized crime Exactly.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Law enforcement has to assume they are dealing with someone
• 7:56
  who uses that badge to commit home invasions, to rob
• 8:00
  rival dealers under the guise of a raid, or to
• 8:02
  intimidate victims. It triggers the immediate mobilization of federal task forces.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: So they call them the big Guns.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the Park Police coordinate with the Philadelphia Police and
• 8:11
  the DEA. The fake badge gives them the legal leverage
• 8:15
  they need to figure out where Eugene Horsch actually came from.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Right, They need to find his base of operations. That
• 8:21
  fake credential is essentially the skeleton key for a search warrant,
• 8:27
  and that leads us to a specific address in Philadelphia.
• 8:30
  Four to seventeen to Chew Avenue.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Correct. Between June nineteenth and the twentieth, a joint federal
• 8:35
  task force executes a search warrant at Horse's residence, and.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: The source transcript details the exterior of this house. It
• 8:42
  is the exact kind of building we talked about earlier.
• 8:44
  It looks a little neglected, but it fits into the neighborhood.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: But as the tactical teams approach, the fortifications become really obvious.
• 8:51
  The windows are entirely barricaded.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there is an array of surveillance cameras monitoring
• 8:56
  every angle of the street and the alley. The house
• 8:59
  is physical designed to repel entry and monitor anyone getting close.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: Right, So the tactical approach to a house like that
• 9:05
  requires specialized breaching equipment. Yeah, You're not just kicking the
• 9:09
  door in on a whim. And once the task force
• 9:11
  makes entry, the sheer volume of contraband they discover explains
• 9:16
  the intense security.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: The inventory reads like a cartel supply depot.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: It does. The first floor houses a massive marijuana cultivation operation.
• 9:26
  The authorities estimate the street value of the plants at
• 9:28
  over two hundred eighty thousand dollars.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: I want to focus on that phrase for a second
• 9:32
  marijuana grow operation because people hear that and they might picture,
• 9:36
  you know, a few potted plants under a heat lamp
• 9:39
  in a closet, or they think of a local spot
• 9:41
  where people hang out and get high.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like a casual setup.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Right, But a quarter million dollars in product implies a
• 9:47
  massive logistical undertaking, doesn't it.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, a grow of that scale requires industrial grade infrastructure.
• 9:54
  It means the house has likely been gutted to install
• 9:56
  high intensity discharge lighting, intricate hydropondic here againation systems, and
• 10:01
  heavy duty ventilation just.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: To manage the heat and the smell right right exactly.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: And the electrical demands are so high that operators usually
• 10:08
  bypass the municipal meter illegally, which creates a massive fire hazard.
• 10:13
  So this is not a shooting gallery where addicts conjugate
• 10:16
  to use drugs. It is a fortified manufacturing hub.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: And the manufacturing wasn't just agricultural, because they found more
• 10:23
  weapons parts scattered around. They found a second forged federal
• 10:27
  credential and FBI badge, this time again with Horse's photo.
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: And then they get to the basement.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the basement.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: The basement forces the tactical teams to completely halt their
• 10:37
  search and change their protocol because they discover an active
• 10:41
  home chemical lab.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Which is terrifying.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: The police locate over twenty containers of an unknown, highly
• 10:48
  volatile oily substance, and.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: The transcript notes they couldn't even test this substance on site.
• 10:53
  They had to package these twenty containers and physically ship
• 10:56
  them to a specialized laboratory in Chicago. They had to,
• 11:00
  But why go through that immense logistical hurdle? Don't local
• 11:03
  police departments have crime labs that can test drugs right
• 11:06
  there in Philadelphia?
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: They do, but clandestine chemistry introduces a terrifying level of danger.
• 11:13
  If this lab was synthesizing methamphetamines, for example, the precursors
• 11:18
  and the byproducts are exceptionally.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Hazardous, so they don't know what they're dealing with exactly.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: The oily substance could be P two P phenal to propanone,
• 11:26
  which is a core precursor in modern meth production. These
• 11:30
  chemicals are corrosive, highly toxic, and prone to rapid thermal.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Expansion, meaning they explode.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: With devastating force. A clandestine lab is essentially an unexploded bomb.
• 11:40
  Sitting in a residential neighborhood. Wow, the atmosphere inside can
• 11:44
  become so saturated with flammable vapors that a static shock
• 11:47
  from an officer's uniform or simply flicking a light switch
• 11:50
  could ignite a thermobaric explosion.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: That is insane. So just walking into the room could
• 11:55
  be lethal.
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: Exactly, So, removing twenty containers of unknown regions require specialized
• 12:00
  forensic chemists wearing self contained breathing apparatuses.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Has matte suits. Basically, yeah, they have.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: To package each container and specialize shock proof, chemically inert
• 12:10
  overpacked drums just to transport them safely across state lines
• 12:14
  to a facility equipped to handle high level chemical ordinance.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, So while the bomb squad and the chemists are
• 12:19
  dealing with the basement, investigators are continuing to sweep the
• 12:22
  rest of the house and they find something that shifts
• 12:26
  the tone of the search from a narcotics ray to
• 12:28
  something profoundly darker.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: Right among the drugs and the weapons, officers secure five
• 12:34
  urns and they believe these urns contain cremated human remains.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Five urns sitting inside a heavily fortified, camera rigged house
• 12:43
  with a chemical lab in the basement. It is an
• 12:45
  incredibly ominous discovery, but it was the technological footprint in
• 12:49
  the house that ultimately cracked the case wide open, wasn't it.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, the physical evidence was overwhelming, but the digital evidence
• 12:56
  was a labyrinth. Investigators seized over fifty electronic devices from
• 13:00
  the Chew Avenue property, computers, external hard drives, thumb drives, laptops.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: I want to make sure you, the listener, understand the
• 13:07
  sheer scale of the data we are talking about here, because,
• 13:10
  according to the police press conference in the transcript, investigators
• 13:14
  found six hundred thousand individual images.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: It's unbelievable.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: They found seventy thousand videos. They found over ten thousand
• 13:23
  pages of manuscripts, writings, and drawings.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: To put that in perspective, reviewing that amount of media
• 13:29
  is not a matter of scrolling through a camera roll
• 13:31
  on your phone. It requires a massive deployment of digital
• 13:35
  forensic resources.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Right because if you were taking a few photos a
• 13:39
  day on your phone, you would have to live multiple
• 13:41
  lifetimes to hit six hundred thousand images. That is an
• 13:44
  archive of a life's work. Absolutely, what did the detectives
• 13:47
  find when they actually started looking at the files.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Well, the breakthrough happened on the very first hard drive
• 13:52
  they processed. Homicide detectives discovered incredibly graphic, disturbing images and
• 13:57
  video files, and the imagery depicted two women who appeared to.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Be deceased, and the police were actually able to identify
• 14:04
  the victims in these files, which is incredible given the
• 14:07
  circumstances they did.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: They identified one of the women as Marabel Frisis. She
• 14:12
  has been listed as a missing person since February of
• 14:15
  twenty eighteen, and the second woman was identified as Gabrielle Almirando.
• 14:20
  She vanished over a decade ago in twenty twelve.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: The quote from the lead investigator during the presser is
• 14:25
  one of the most chilling things I've read in a
• 14:27
  long time. He stood at the podium and said, and
• 14:29
  I'm quoting here, it's dark, It's real dark. But what
• 14:33
  we saw is these two girls alive. There's a period
• 14:35
  of time and what appears to us that they're deceased.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Terrific.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: The police aren't just looking at a static photo of
• 14:41
  a crime scene. They are watching a chronological timeline of
• 14:45
  death unfold on video.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: They're viewing the documentation of a transition from life to death.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: How does a police department even begin to process seventy
• 14:53
  thousand videos of potentially lethal violence. The transcript notes that
• 14:58
  after a month of searching, the detect does have only
• 15:00
  managed to get through seven percent of the data.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just seven percent.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Seven percent. What is the actual mechanic of pulling evidence
• 15:08
  from a haul like that?
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: Well, the physical processing is grueling and it relies heavily
• 15:12
  on specialized units, often the regional computer forensic lab or our.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Cfl Okay, so a dedicated tech unit.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: Right when the vice is seized, the very first rule
• 15:23
  is that you never boot up the original drive.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: Wait, really, why not?
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: Because turning a computer on alters the data. Operating systems
• 15:31
  constantly write temporary files just by running in the background,
• 15:35
  So if an investigator accidentally changes a last access data
• 15:38
  on a file, a defense attorney will use that to
• 15:40
  claim the evidence was tampered with, potentially getting it thrown
• 15:43
  out of court entirely.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Oh, I see, So they have to clone the drive exactly.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: They use a hardware device called a right blocker, which
• 15:50
  physically prevents the computer from sending any data altern commands
• 15:53
  to the seas.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Drive, so it's basically read only right through.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: The right blocker. They create what's called a bitstream copy.
• 16:00
  It is an exact, perfect duplicate of the drive, down
• 16:03
  to the empty space where deleted files might still be hiding.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: That's fascinating, but how do they prove it's an exact
• 16:10
  copy to a judge.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: To prove the copy is identical to the original, they
• 16:15
  generate a cryptographic hash, usually an MD five or SAHA
• 16:19
  two fifty six algorithm. It creates a unique string of
• 16:23
  letters and numbers that acts as a digital fingerprint for
• 16:25
  the drive. Okay, if even a single pixel in one
• 16:29
  image changes, the hash value changes entirely.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: They are essentially preserving the digital crime scene and amber
• 16:35
  before they even look at it. But once they have
• 16:38
  that secure copy, how do they find the needle in
• 16:40
  a haystack of six hundred thousand images.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: They use forensic software suites like Celebrate or in Case
• 16:47
  to extract the metadata, because the actual visual content of
• 16:50
  the photo is only half.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: The story, and the metadata is where the real clues are.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the exif data embedded invisibly in the file is
• 16:56
  the gold mine. It records the make and model of
• 16:58
  the camera used. It records the exact date and time
• 17:01
  the shutter clicked, the location right. Crucially, yes, if the
• 17:04
  device was a smartphone or a GPS enabled camera, it
• 17:07
  records the exact longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of where the
• 17:10
  photographer was standing.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: So the detectives aren't just looking at a terrible video
• 17:14
  of Gabrielle Amrando. They are extracting a data point that
• 17:17
  proves the video was recorded on a specific iPhone at
• 17:20
  the exact GPS coordinates of four to seventeen to two
• 17:23
  Avenue at two point one four am on a specific
• 17:27
  Tuesday in twenty twelve.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: That is how they build the timeline. They cross reference
• 17:31
  the digital metadata with the physical timeline of when these
• 17:34
  women were reported missing.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: But the human element of this processing cannot be overstated.
• 17:39
  Analysts have to sit in a dark room for eight
• 17:41
  ten hours a day, watching thousands of videos to find
• 17:44
  the evidentiary frames. The psychological toll of viewing that much
• 17:48
  trauma is immense.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: I can't even imagine. And here is the truly agonizing
• 17:53
  part for those detectives. They sit through the trauma of
• 17:55
  watching these videos, they identify Marabella and Gabrielle, they pull
• 17:59
  the XIF data proving it was filmed in the suspect's house.
• 18:02
  They have Eugene Horsee and custody. It seems like an
• 18:04
  open and shut murder case, right, Yeah, think so, But
• 18:06
  they hit a massive legal brick wall.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: They encounter one of the most difficult hurdles in criminal
• 18:10
  law because, in the eyes of the justice system, a
• 18:14
  video depicting a death is not legally equivalent to a
• 18:17
  physical body.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Which completely handcuffs the medical examiner.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: It does. The Medical Examiner's office was brought in to
• 18:24
  review the digital imagery and based on their medical expertise,
• 18:29
  they stated they believe the individuals in the videos are deceased,
• 18:33
  but there's a ketch. However, they cannot officially declare them dead,
• 18:36
  issue a death certificate, or determine the official cause of
• 18:40
  death without physical remains to examine.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people assume that if you
• 18:43
  have a video of a crime, that's it. You know,
• 18:47
  you have the ultimate proof. But how do you prosecute
• 18:49
  a homicide when the bureaucracy of the legal system won't
• 18:53
  even officially certify that a death has occurred.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: You are touching on the legal doctrine of corpus delecti,
• 18:59
  which translates to the body of the crime.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, I've heard that term.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Historically, courts require independent evidence that a crime occurred before
• 19:07
  a confession or even a video can be used to
• 19:10
  convict someone. A nobody murder case is notoriously difficult for
• 19:15
  a prosecutor to win. Why is it so hard because
• 19:17
  you have to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt
• 19:21
  not just that the person is missing, but that they
• 19:23
  are definitively dead and that the defendant is the one
• 19:25
  who intentionally killed them.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: So to get around the emmy's limitations, the police have
• 19:29
  to take a highly unusual legal route. The transcript mentions
• 19:34
  they are petitioning the Philadelphia Orphans Court. Yes, and the
• 19:37
  name alone sounds archaic. What is the Orphans Court doing
• 19:41
  in a murder investigation?
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: The Orphans Court is a specialized division of the Pennsylvania
• 19:46
  court system. It handles the administration of the states wills trusts,
• 19:51
  and the guardianships of miners. But crucially, it is also
• 19:54
  the only legal entity with the jurisdiction to officially declare
• 19:58
  a missing person legally dead in the absence of a body, So.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: The police are essentially asking a probate judge to step
• 20:05
  in and do the job. The medical examiner isn't allowed
• 20:08
  to do.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Right, Families and authorities can petition this court to establish
• 20:12
  a presumption of death. Typically, this requires a person to
• 20:16
  be missing for a specific number of years, often.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Seven, and it's been more than that for Gabrielle.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah, since twenty twelve. However, if the missing
• 20:24
  person was exposed to a specific documented peril, the court
• 20:28
  can expedite that timeline. So the police are bringing the
• 20:31
  digital metadata and the videos to the Orphans Court to
• 20:34
  legally certify these women are dead.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: But even if the Orphans Court signs the paveper and
• 20:39
  says yes, they are legally deceased, that still doesn't give
• 20:42
  the police a cause of death. And without a cause
• 20:44
  of death, proving a murder charge is incredibly precarious.
• 20:48
  Speaker 2: Isn't It's almost impossible. Cause of death is the lynch
• 20:50
  pin of a homicide prosecution. Yeah, it pres intent and method.
• 20:54
  It separates a premeditated murder from manslaughter or from a complete.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: Accident, Which brings us to the defense attorneys playbook. If
• 21:00
  I'm the defense and you bring me a video of
• 21:02
  a death, but no body, I am going to look
• 21:05
  at the environment where this video was filmed exactly. We
• 21:08
  know four to seventeen shoe avenue was filled with narcotics,
• 21:11
  a quarter million dollars in marijuana, bags of heroin, crack cocaine,
• 21:15
  a chemical lab in the basement.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: So the defense would argue that the victims tragically overdosed.
• 21:20
  They would pause it that the individuals who may have
• 21:23
  been struggling with severe addiction consumed a lethal amount of
• 21:26
  narcotics in the house.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: Oh I see.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: They would argue that horshe perhaps under the influence himself, panicked,
• 21:33
  he recorded the tragic event, or simply disposed of the
• 21:36
  bodies out of fear of the drug charges.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: So the defense is, my client is guilty of hiding
• 21:41
  a body, may be guilty of possessing drugs, but he
• 21:44
  is not a murderer. It was an accidental overdose. That
• 21:47
  is a brutal defense to overcome.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Because without a liver to test for toxicology, without lungs
• 21:53
  to check for chemical inhalation, without a hyoid bone to
• 21:56
  check for manual strangulation, the prosecution cannot definite rule out
• 22:00
  an accidental overdose.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: So they are stuck.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Because of this monumental evidentiary gap, Eugene Hors is
• 22:07
  currently not facing any murder charges. He's being held strictly
• 22:11
  on the federal offenses related to the forge badges and
• 22:13
  the defaced firearms.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: And just when you think the legal complexities of this
• 22:17
  case of peaked, the source transcript reveals a piece of
• 22:20
  family history that turns the entire investigation completely upside down.
• 22:25
  It introduces a variable that makes the defense's job almost
• 22:28
  terrifyingly easy.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: It really does. The history of the Chew Avenue property
• 22:33
  is intrinsically tied to Eugene Horse's father, RC hoorsche Okay.
• 22:38
  RC owned and lived in that house for decades before
• 22:41
  he passed away from a lung condition in twenty twenty.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Five, and RC Horse was not an ordinary resident. The
• 22:46
  transcript details that he was a highly prolific, infamous pornographic artist.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: Yes, with a fifty year career, a fifty.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Year career specifically dedicated to creating explicit satamasochistic art. We
• 22:58
  are talking about BDSM fotography and video. He was well
• 23:02
  known enough in underground circles to have a detailed Wikipedia
• 23:05
  page chronicling his work, which heavily featured stage scenes of
• 23:09
  extreme pain, humiliation, and highly graphic theatrical violence.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: And to compound the disturbing nature of this revelation. There
• 23:16
  is a third missing woman tied directly to the Horse family.
• 23:19
  A third woman, yeah Rcihorse's wife, a woman named Amy McHale,
• 23:23
  has been missing since twenty sixteen. She was last seen
• 23:26
  alive approximately one mile away from the barricaded house on
• 23:29
  Chew Avenue.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: The layers of this are sickening. Put yourself back in
• 23:33
  the digital for Wi fix lab. You are an investigator
• 23:36
  staring at a hard drive. You are watching horrific violent
• 23:40
  video files of women in extreme distress. Right, but you
• 23:43
  now know that the suspect's father spent half a century
• 23:46
  living in that exact same house, utilizing those exact same
• 23:50
  rooms to direct, stage and photograph elaborate violent satamasochistic art
• 23:56
  involving willing participants and special effects.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: It creates a catastrophic evidentiary blur. I mean, how do
• 24:03
  you distinguish a snuff film from transgressive art.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: It is the equivalent of searching a famous horror movie
• 24:08
  director's basement, finding a bloody knife and trying to prove
• 24:12
  it's a murder weapon instead of a prop from his
• 24:14
  last movie.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: The defense strategy writes itself here. If prosecutors bring murder charges,
• 24:18
  based on the digital files. The defense will argue that
• 24:21
  the imagery is not documentary evidence of a crime.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: They'll say it staged.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: They will claim it is historical archival art created by
• 24:29
  the laid father. They will argue the women in the
• 24:32
  videos were paid, consenting participants in a theatrical production utilizing
• 24:37
  makeup and practical effects to simulate distress or death.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: Your honor, this isn't a murder. It's my dad's avant
• 24:43
  garde art project from twenty twelve. It is a chillingly
• 24:47
  plausible defense. How does a forensic expert combat that on
• 24:52
  the stand?
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: The medical examiner would have to rely entirely on visual
• 24:55
  forensic pathology. They would examine the high resolution video frames
• 24:59
  for physialize reactions that cannot be easily faked with makeup,
• 25:02
  like what well. They are looking for pateechual hemorrhaging, which
• 25:06
  is the bursting of tiny blood vessels in the eyes
• 25:08
  and face that occurs during strangulation.
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's hard to fake, right.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: They're also looking for liver mortise, the pooling of blood
• 25:14
  in the lowest parts of the body after the heart
• 25:16
  stops pumping, which causes a specific purplish discoloration of the skin.
• 25:21
  If they can point to those specific biological phenomena in
• 25:24
  the video, they can argue it is genuine death.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: But again, it all relies on the quality of the
• 25:29
  video and the metadata.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: Exactly the timeline becomes the prosecution's strongest weapon. Investigators have
• 25:35
  to meticulously cross reference the digital EXIF data with the
• 25:40
  missing person's.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: Reports, so matching the dates perfectly.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: Gabriela Morando vanished in twenty twelve, Amy McHale vanished in
• 25:47
  twenty sixteen, Marabell Freis had vanished in twenty eighteen. They
• 25:52
  must extract the exact dates the files were created and
• 25:55
  prove that arc Horde was not the one holding the camera,
• 25:58
  or that the specific dates of the courtings align perfectly
• 26:01
  with the days the women disappeared from the streets.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: They are facing an unimaginable mountain of data, a built
• 26:07
  in alibi regarding the father's art career and the total
• 26:10
  absence of a physical body. If the police rush this
• 26:13
  and formally charge Eugene with murder and a jury buys
• 26:16
  the staged art defense, double jeopardy attaches.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: They can never try him for it again.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: Anytime.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: The authorities recognize they are walking a tightrope here, and
• 26:24
  this is where the tactical utility the federal justice system
• 26:26
  becomes apparent. The federal charges for the fake DEA and
• 26:30
  FBI badges, along with the defaced firearms, serve a critical
• 26:34
  strategic purpose, because if.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: This was just a local traffic stop where they found
• 26:38
  some drugs, he might have made bail by the end
• 26:40
  of the week.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, state level drug possession and weapons charges, particularly in
• 26:45
  overwhelmed urban court systems, frequently result in the suspect posting
• 26:49
  bail and returning to the community pending trial right, but
• 26:53
  federal charges operate under entirely different bail statutes. Impersonating a
• 26:58
  federal officer and possessing firearms with obliterated serial numbers are
• 27:03
  severe federal felonies. Federal magistrates are far more likely to
• 27:07
  deny bail or set it prohibitively high, especially given the
• 27:10
  scope of the contraband found at the residents.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: So it is a legal holding pattern. The federal lockup
• 27:16
  keeps Eugene Hoorsche off the street and secure while the
• 27:18
  local homicide detectives do the agonizingly slow work of untangling
• 27:23
  seventy thousand videos.
• 27:24
  Speaker 2: It affords the investigators the luxury of time to build
• 27:27
  an air tight case, and they are using every minute
• 27:30
  of it. The transcript notes that law enforcement has executed
• 27:34
  over ninety five separate search warrants in connection to this
• 27:36
  single investigation.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Ninety five warrants. They are pulling phone records, bank statements,
• 27:41
  Internet service provider logs, pulling data from cloud servers. But
• 27:46
  they aren't just searching the digital realm anymore. They realize
• 27:49
  they have to go back to the physical epicenter.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: In late July, the tactical and forensic teams return to
• 27:55
  four seventeen to Chew Avenue and they transition from a
• 27:58
  search operation to an excavation.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: The source material details that they brought in heavy equipment.
• 28:04
  They began ripping up the concrete and the plumbing. They
• 28:07
  focused specifically on the sewer line, the lateral pipe that
• 28:11
  connects the house to the municipal sewer main and the
• 28:14
  traps beneath the drainage systems.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: Excavating a residential sewer line is an extreme forensic measure.
• 28:20
  It indicates the investigators are operating under a very grim assumption. Yeah,
• 28:24
  they are desperately hunting for the physical evidence the medical
• 28:27
  examiner needs to bypass the Orphan's Court entirely.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: My mind goes straight to the basement. We know they
• 28:32
  found twenty containers of an explosive, unknown chemical substance. We
• 28:37
  know they found five urns of ashes on the first floor.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: Right. The setup is suspicious.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: If forensic teams are tearing out the plumbing of a
• 28:44
  house with that specific inventory, they have to be assuming
• 28:47
  the lack of physical bodies isn't a coincidence. They are
• 28:50
  operating under the theory that the victims were chemically dissolved
• 28:53
  and washed down the drain.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: The mechanics of chemical dissolution are horrific, but they are
• 28:58
  not always perfect. When forensic teams excavate a sewer lateral,
• 29:02
  they pay special attention to the P trap.
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: The P trap that's the curve section of the pipe
• 29:07
  under a drain right exactly.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: It is designed to hold a small amount of water
• 29:11
  to prevent toxic sewer gases from backing up into the house,
• 29:15
  but because of its shape, it acts as a collection
• 29:17
  point for dense, heavy materials that do not easily wash away.
• 29:21
  Forensic scientists are sifting the sludge inside those traps for
• 29:25
  specific biological or synthetic markers that resist chemical breakdown.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: But if someone uses a highly corrosive agent like a
• 29:33
  strong acid or lye, wouldn't it just destroy everything.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Highly concentrated corrosives will rapidly liquefy soft tissue and dissolve
• 29:41
  the calcium carbonate in human bones. However, the human body
• 29:45
  has components that are incredibly resilient, like what investigators are
• 29:49
  sifting the sewer sludge. Primarily for teeth. Tooth enamel is
• 29:53
  made of hydroxy appetite, which is the hardest substance in
• 29:56
  the human body. It is significantly more resistant to acids
• 30:00
  and bases than regular bone.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: So they're literally looking for a single tooth caught in
• 30:04
  a bend in the pipe, a.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: Single tooth, a piece of dental work like an amalgam filling,
• 30:09
  or a synthetic item a metal zipper, a button, a
• 30:13
  piece of jewelry, or surgical implant with a microscopic serial number.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: Finding just one of those durable items in the plumbing
• 30:19
  of Eugene Horse's residence could provide the definitive physical link
• 30:23
  to Marabelle, Gabrielle or Amy. It would give the medical
• 30:27
  examiner the biological anchor they need to issue a death certificate,
• 30:30
  and potentially determine a.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: Cause of death, filtering toxic sewer sludge through a fine
• 30:34
  mesh screen, hoping to find a fragment of enamel, extracting
• 30:38
  GPS coordinates from a hard drive buried under a quarter
• 30:41
  million dollars in marijuana, tracing the origin of a forged
• 30:44
  dea badge found during a traffic stop. The sheer scale
• 30:48
  of the forensic labor required to bring this case together
• 30:50
  a staggering.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: It is a labyrinth of overlapping jurisdictions and scientific disciplines.
• 30:56
  You have park police, federal drug agents, digital hashing algorithms,
• 31:01
  chemical transport protocols, the orphans court and sewer excavations, all
• 31:05
  colliding to solve a mystery hidden.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: In plain sight, and they're still barely scratching the surface.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Run and nine. The police have openly stated they've only
• 31:12
  processed roughly seven percent of the digital evidence. The vast
• 31:16
  majority of what is on those drives remains unknown.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: We really have to step back and look at the
• 31:21
  trajectory of this entire narrative. I mean, it started with
• 31:24
  a woman crying out, you're going to hurt me from
• 31:26
  the passenger seat of a parked BMW at the Liberty
• 31:29
  Bell right, that single terrifying moment sparked a chain reaction.
• 31:34
  A fake id led to a barricaded house. The barricades
• 31:38
  hit a chemical lab and eurns of ashes. A hard
• 31:41
  drive in the living room opened a digital abyss of
• 31:43
  seventy thousand videos, and now law enforcement is battling a
• 31:47
  legacy of sadomasochistic art while desperately searching for the physical
• 31:51
  remains of women who vanished into thin air fourteen years ago.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: It demonstrates how fragile the facade of a normal streak
• 31:58
  can best for uncovering. This nightmare did not happen in
• 32:02
  the shadows. It happened on a sunny morning at one
• 32:05
  of the most famous tourist landmarks.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: In the country, which brings us right back to the
• 32:09
  beginning of this deep dive. I asked you to imagine
• 32:12
  walking past a boarded up house in your own neighborhood.
• 32:15
  It is so easy to assume it's just an empty shell,
• 32:18
  you know, a casualty of the economy or urban decay.
• 32:21
  We walk past them every day we do. This case
• 32:24
  proves that sometimes the most profound mysteries are sitting right
• 32:27
  there behind the wood and the brick, just waiting for
• 32:30
  a random traffic stop to drag them out into the light.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: Because the physical world holds its secrets tightly, but the
• 32:36
  digital world has a memory that is almost impossible to erase.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: I want to leave you with one final thought to
• 32:41
  turn over in your mind. We live in an era
• 32:44
  where our lives are permanently etched into microscopic data. Think
• 32:47
  about the sheer volume of forgotten technology out there. Old laptops,
• 32:52
  thumb drives tossed in a drawer, external hard drives sitting
• 32:55
  in a cardboard box in a locked basement, just gathering dust.
• 32:59
  Exactly if Eugene Horche had not been driving a car
• 33:02
  with the faced weapons that morning in June, if that
• 33:04
  officer had just kept walking past the BMW, how many
• 33:08
  more decades would those six hundred thousand images have sat
• 33:11
  in the dark.
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: It's a haunting thought.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: The scariest thought isn't just what investigators finally uncovered inside
• 33:17
  four to seventeen chu Avenue, is wondering how many other
• 33:20
  hard drives are out there in the world right now,
• 33:23
  quietly holding the answers to thousands of missing persons, posters
• 33:26
  just waiting for someone to plug them in.
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: It is a reality that forces you to view every
• 33:30
  piece of discarded technology with a much more critical eye.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: It absolutely does. Thank you for joining us on this
• 33:36
  deep dive.