Unknowing Ray Horsch – Episode 4: Turning Point, Podcast 174

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Multiple law enforcement sources say Raymond Horsch, who died in May of 2025, is suspected to have been a serial killer. We're learning this just days before the next phase in this major investigation.

SPEAKER_2 (0:12)

The case centering on missing women with at least five fear dead has made international headlines. Officially, police have been guarded about many details, calling three news conferences in as many months.

Ashley West (0:32)

Hindsight can clarify, but it can also distort. When I started this series, I said I wanted to remain acutely aware that once the frame changes, there is a danger of forcing everything into a new picture, of turning ambiguity into evidence. And coincidence into meaning.

The challenge was to remain open in both directions. To accept that something new may genuinely change what I thought I knew, but also to resist the urge to rewrite the entire past simply because the present has become more troubling. This episode is about a moment. The point at which one piece of information can change the weight of everything around it. A turning point.

Not because it answers every question, but because after it, the old answers no longer feel quite sufficient.

This is Unknowing Ray Horsch, Episode 4, Turning Point.

After I filmed my interview with Ray at his home in Philadelphia, we stayed in regular contact. He was keen to be friendly. He'd email, call, sometimes suggesting coming to stay with me at my home in New York. And over time, I learned more about him. In the last episode, you heard Ray speak about the death of his wife, Anna, in 1989 from an overdose of prescription painkillers. It was not a subject he mentioned once and moved on from. He returned to it repeatedly. For Ray, Anna's death seemed to function almost as a dividing line in his life. A before and an after, a kind of year zero. Sometimes he described the man he'd been before her death, and then another version of himself who emerged afterwards. Darker, angrier, more restless, and increasingly drawn towards confrontation. Ray and Anna had been married for nine years. Their son Eugene was born in 1981 When Ray spoke about Anna, his tone could be affectionate. He remembered the support she'd given him during difficult periods in his life, and the loyalty she'd shown when others had not. But when he spoke about her death, something changed. You'll have heard that in the last episode. Affection gave way to anger, resentment, and even bitterness.

What was the effect of her passing on you?

Ray Horsch (3:06)

Oh, it's complicated. I mean, my son was seven at the time. He was in the room when she died. He didn't realize what had happened. My basic fundamental reaction was in his anger.

Yes. Because she kind of bailed out, left me with a kid to raise by myself.

It's just a whole bag of emotions, sir.

Ashley West (3:40)

Ray told me that Anna had died just as he believed he was beginning to build a more conventional life, responsible even. I once asked Ray how he dealt with what had happened. He was quiet for a long time. Eventually, he admitted he hadn't dealt with it very well at all. He said he became more restless. He kept moving, kept working, and kept finding things to do, anything that prevented him from sitting still with what had happened.

Some of these activities were entirely conventional. In 1991, he opened a steak house with his old pornography producer friend John Butterworth called Butterworth's Hickory Pit. He worked as a computer consultant, and he became involved in prison reform, a subject he felt strongly about because of his own experience behind bars.

But he also told me he realized he needed another kind of outlet, a more performative one.

A few years after Anna's death, Ray became friends with the filmmaker Candida Royale. It was, on the face of it, an unlikely partnership. Candida had been an adult film performer in the 1970s. But by 1984, she'd become increasingly frustrated with pornography made almost entirely from a male point of view. So she founded Femme Productions. Her aim was to create erotica centered on female desire and films that could also be used in the context of couples therapy. Here's Candida in an interview I recorded with her explaining what she was trying to do.

Candida Royale (5:13)

They were delivering a product to men who wanted to see what their wives wouldn't let them do. That's what those movies were for. I started to think to myself, well, this is all well and good, but I wonder what it would look like if you did make movies that were more positive and that had a woman's voice. So I decided that what would really be great is to explore how to make movies that reflected women's point of views, that couples could watch together, that maybe you could actually learn from, learn how to be together, how to communicate, how to make love in ways that pleased both of us. And maybe I was the perfect person to do it because I've been on both sides of the camera now.