Ashley Rivera has spoken out about her childhood encounter with Raymond “R.C.” Horsch, the self-described “sociopath” now at the center of a Philadelphia house of horrors investigation.
Rivera, 26, told the Philadelphia Inquirer this week that she was just 9 years old when Horsch grabbed her outside a 7-Eleven store opposite her home in March 2009. The attack came more than a decade before investigators would uncover a million files, including alleged snuff movies, in the home Horsch shared with his son.
“He looked very evil … I couldn’t forget that face,” Rivera said of the man who tried to drag her into his Jeep. “I really do feel like I escaped something big. He could have kidnapped me. He could have done the same thing to me that he did to those women. He could have raped me, killed me.”
Rivera’s stepfather, who was injured at the time, heard her screams and hobbled over to bang on Horsch’s car window, scaring him off. But Horsch soon circled back, according to Rivera’s mother, Sasha Rivera.
“I chased him with a baseball bat,” the mom recalled. “I thought he was going to kill her. If he had taken her, I may never have found my daughter.”
Police who searched Horsch’s Jeep found binoculars, camera gear, an eye patch and a condom. Horsch was arrested and charged with luring a child into a motor vehicle and corrupting the morals of a minor. He was sentenced in 2010 to 2½ to 5 years in prison and ordered to register as a sex offender.
Rivera said she is still terrified by the memory of him glaring at her in court. “I was so scared, and he just kept staring at me. I just broke down crying,” she told the paper. “I felt like I was looking at a killer.”
The conviction was vacated in 2015 when prosecutors realized they could not proceed without the key witness. Sasha Rivera had refused to put her daughter through testifying again after Horsch was granted a new trial.
“I thought he and his family would do something to us,” the mom said.
That decision now haunts the woman Rivera has become. “Maybe it’s my fault that he was free,” she said. “I thank God every day my stepdad was there to save me because I could be missing or dead. I feel really lucky. But I feel so bad for all the victims and their families. I didn’t have to go through what they went through.”
The home that Horsch lived in with his son, Eugene Horsch, has become the focus of a massive investigation. Last month, investigators uncovered harrowing video footage from 2017 that they say appears to show Horsch strangling a woman in a bedroom. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, was seen using drugs before being given money by Horsch and then handcuffed to the bed, Philadelphia police said. Horsch then appeared to put a zip tie around her neck before she lost consciousness.
Cops revealed they found images and video of two women — Maribel Frieses, last seen in 2018, and Gabrielle Amarando, last seen in 2012 — that appeared to show them deceased. Blair Tonzelli, who vanished in 2023, and Amy McHale, Horsch’s ex-wife last seen in 2016, have also been named by authorities. McHale’s family said her last known location was the home that Horsch and his son lived in.
“Something happened to her in that house,” McHale’s mom, Gloria, said.
Authorities have also uncovered multiple alleged snuff movies featuring R.C. And several missing women, along with vats of mysterious chemicals and writings referencing serial killers. Horsch, who wrote a book called “Memoir of an Empathetic Serial Killer,” is now deceased.
Rivera said the trauma has left her terrified for her own child, a son who is 9 — the same age she was when grabbed in the street. She becomes “instantly scared” whenever “men stare at me.”
“I tried to get that memory out of my head,” she said. “But I can’t. It stays with me.”