Unknowing Ray Horsch – Episode 5: Darkness, Podcast 175

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Gabrielle Amarando: Disappeared in 2012.

Amy McHale: Disappeared in 2016.

Maribel Fresses: Disappeared in 2018.

Nicole Fusaro: Disappeared in 2018. Investigators reportedly recovered video showing Raymond Horsch strangling her.

Blair Tonzelli: Disappeared in 2023.

There are two additional unnamed women whose identities have not been released.

These are the missing women currently at the center of the ongoing investigation centered on Ray and Eugene Horsch’s house on West Chew Ave in Philadelphia. There may be others.

They, and their loved ones, are, and must always be, the center of any story about the investigation.

If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 215 686 3334.

You can listen to the first part of this series here, the second part here, the third part here, and the fourth part here.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the audio in this podcast is strictly prohibited.

This podcast is 46 minutes long.

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Question: whose lives do we consider important?

We know that when certain people disappear, enormous resources can be mobilized to find them. Police departments hold press conferences. News organizations descend on the story. Photographs appear everywhere. Reporters interview relatives, friends and neighbors. The public becomes invested in finding out what happened.

And that attention is entirely appropriate.

But we also know that it isn’t distributed equally.

When the missing person is a sex worker, or someone struggling with addiction, or homeless, or simply poor and living on the margins, the response can be very different.

There is less coverage. Less public interest. Sometimes fewer resources. And, far too often, an assumption begins to creep in that somehow the circumstances of that woman’s life explain what happened to her.

She took drugs. She sold sex. She went home with the wrong person. She lived on the street. She made bad choices.

As if any of those things make someone less deserving of being looked for. Less deserving of being protected. Less deserving of justice.

The women at the heart of the West Chew Ave case disappeared years ago. Their plight has only come to public attention in recent months.

And perhaps that is one of the uncomfortable things we need to confront.

We are very good at celebrating successful people. Wealthy people. Famous people. People whose lives resemble the lives we imagine for ourselves.

But what if the measure of a healthy society is not how enthusiastically we celebrate those who have succeeded, but how seriously we take the lives of people who are struggling.

The addicted. The homeless. The mentally ill. The poor. The exploited.

The people whose lives are complicated and messy, and who may not always be easy to sympathize with.

If compassion only extends to people whose choices we approve of, is it really compassion?

And this isn’t simply about the police. Or the media. Or the court system. Or some abstract thing we call society.

Society is us.

Which means that this question becomes personal. And in this case, personal to me. Did I pay enough attention?

When I heard things that made me uncomfortable, did I ask enough questions?

When I encountered people whose lives were very different from mine, did I really see them? Or was it easier sometimes to look away?

Those are difficult questions, particularly now.

Because looking back, it is tempting to search every conversation, every encounter, every strange comment or uncomfortable moment for something I should have recognized.

I also know the danger of doing that. Hindsight can manufacture certainty where none existed at the time.

But that does not mean they shouldn’t be examined.

I think we should.

Not because we can somehow rewrite the past. But because we can decide what we do the next time.

We can decide whose disappearance matters. Whose suffering deserves our attention. Whose story is worth telling.

And when someone has fallen through the cracks, perhaps the one of the first questions shouldn’t be what they did to end up there.

Perhaps it should be a personal one: What should I have seen and interpreted differently?

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