I'm traveling to Seattle/Portland soon so I called this guy, Gene Frizzelle who owned http://www.slitparade.com (now suspended due to what I'm about to tell you).
I had planned on working with Gene in Portland awhile back, so I called him to see if he wanted to set something up during my trip. I left a message. He called back a couple hours later and left a REALLY weird message. He sounded like he was on drugs, so I texted him back, "Haha what drugs are you on?"
So two days later I received an email of a news headline that said that this very same guy has just been convicted of murdering an 18 year-old girl, Emily Egan, who had been living at his apartment and making porn videos with him. Apparentely, he called me and left that message just a few hours before the police arrived at his apartment and found him bloody from slashing his own wrists. They then put him on 24-hour suicide watch. Emily's cause of death, as it stands right now, is homocidal violence.
This shocks me, because Gene seemed like such a nice guy. We had sent dozens of emails back and forth, planning for me to fly out there and shoot. He was going to put me up in a nice hotel and take the train out to meet me and pay for travel expenses. He sent me $300 for the plane ticket, but then cancelled on me, so the shoot was postponed. The trial has not happened yet, so I suppose there is a chance they could find out that he didn't do it, which I HOPE is the case, but then alot of factors wouldn't make any sense. :( It really is a horrible, sad thing.
Of course the media HAS to mention that he was a pornographer and blame the murder on porn, but this obviously had NOTHING do with the fact that she happened to be a porn model. They were obviously involved romantically and I think if anything should be blamed, it's DRUGS. But to these people, porn and drugs are equal evils and MUST go hand-in-hand. Gene is not a MODEL MURDERER as the headlines so boldly state. If he killed Emily, it was most likely due to a relationship spat that was intensified by the use of crystal meth and various other things.
The creepiest thing is that on the message to me, these are the last things he said, when his voice changed and he started crying:
"I'm gonna go sleep with Emily now. I hope you have a good career. You probably don't need to call me back. I'm not going to be answering phones anymore."
Yeah. Truth is, there are good and bad people of every industry. If the murderer had been a refrigerator repair man, people wouldn't think that broken refrigerators were the cause of homicidal violence. No one is blaming football for what Michael Vick did. Sighh....
ReplyDeleteHi Addie, It's Wednesday Harrington. I too knew Gene, was scheduled twice to shoot with him for fetish, but for various reasons either he or I would cancel... however, I DID want to clear up a couple of misconceptions... the "porn actress" Emily was NOT a porn actress before she met Gene. He groomed her into the lifestyle. Just before i was shoot with him, he was stating that he was trying to find a female "co-star" to shoot porn with, and she moved in three days after he made that comment, initially just doing glamour nudes, and progressing into more adult/erotic content. She was barely 18 and very, VERY new to modeling. He was adamant about no male escorts, said the "artist in him" needed a closed set, and that he prefer his models also be "young" and "unattached"... yes, he was nice, he was charming, and after much negotiating, he was to allow me an escort on the set (he was pretty well assured that he would be getting nothing from me beyond quality images). But he was also the kind of photographer who looked for an opening to possibly glean more than "photos" from his models. While a "nice" guy, he was not someone I would have called professional, in hindsight.
ReplyDelete