File | 2003

Radford photographer Bob Shell is escorted from Radford General District Court in 2003. Shell is charged in connection with the death of one of his models, Marion Franklin.

Related

Part two

• The final shoot

Map

• Map between Roanoke, Radford and Boone, N.C.

About this series

'Fantasy too far' is based on police and court documents, and e-mails between Bob Shell, Marion Franklin and their friends and professional contacts. Other sources included extensive interviews, both with people involved in the case and with people in Boone, N.C., and elsewhere who knew Franklin. Franklin's parents declined to be interviewed for these stories. Bob Shell would not comment on the record. Roanoke Times reporter Joe Eaton reconstructed scenes based on documentation and the memories of those involved.

Charges filed against Bob Shell in the death of Marion Franklin.

Felony homicide

Three counts of defilement of a dead human body

Attempted forcible sodomy

Attempted sexual penetration with an animate object

Sexual penetration with an animate object

Two counts of distribution of morphine

Possession of morphine

Distribution of Valium/diazepam

Timeline of Bob Shell Case

November 2002

Marion Franklin moves from North Carolina to Radford to work for Bob Shell.

June 2003

Marion Franklin dies of a morphine overdose after a photo shoot in Shell's studio. Shell is charged in her death.

June 2003

Radford Detective Gary Fields goes against procedure by posing online as "Jeff Tate," a wealthy connoisseur of nude photography in order to gather evidence against Shell.

September 2003

Shell pleads not guilty on all charges.

July 2004

Shell sues the Radford Police Department for copyright infringement over images police seized in the investigation. The suit is later thrown out.

January 2005

Shell fires Roanoke attorney Marc Small and hires Northern Virginia attorney Gil Davis, who represented Paula Jones in her sexual harassment case against former President Bill Clinton.

October 2005

Shell's defense accuses Radford police of deleting e-mails from computers they seized from Shell's home and studio and says the e-mails would have helped his case.

April 2006

A Radford Circuit Court judge denies defense motions to dismiss the case because of the alleged e-mail deletions. The judge also declines to suppress evidence gathered after the "Jeff Tate sting." Trial is set for two weeks beginning Sept. 18.

RADFORD -- Dressed in SpongeBob panties, Marion Franklin lay slumped on a bed, her eyes shut, her blood mixed with morphine, cocaine, Valium and dextromethorphan, the active ingredient in cough syrup.

She wasn't breathing.

Bob Shell felt for her pulse. He thought he felt a quiver.

Shell ran to the dressing room at the back of his Radford photo studio and picked up the stethoscope he used to check his high blood pressure.

It wasn't the first time Franklin took drugs to take the edge off before a photo shoot and wound up blacked out in the studio. In the past she slept it off, woke up groggy.

Earlier in the day, Franklin had pulled on a fishnet cat suit. Then she had been tied up -- ropes clasping her arms and legs -- and hung from a wooden beam for Shell's cameras.

Now she was out.

Shell ran back to the bed. The stethoscope dangling from his ears, he placed the bell on Franklin's chest. He listened for the thumping beat of her heart.

Silence.

It was June 3, 2003, three years ago. Marion Franklin, the 19-year-old model who had recently become Shell's lover, was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead.

Four days later, police arrested Shell, who was charged in Franklin's death and with having sex with her corpse.

In this college town of about 16,000 people, homicide cases are rare. Rarer still are bizarre cases such as the one against the 59-year-old, nationally known photographer. Shell's trial is set to begin in September.

In the midst of the tawdry stories and speculation in Radford and in photography and modeling circles, the questions remain:

What led a North Carolina teenager to become a bondage model in Radford? And who, if anyone, is to blame for her death?

Sex and drugs

Back to early 2002, Boone, N.C., before Franklin ever stood naked in front of a camera for money.

Franklin, then 18, was sitting in her tiny apartment, Dali posters and band fliers on the wall.

Her boyfriend, a drum-and-bass DJ named Jackson Godelson, was angry. He had just found out Franklin was sleeping with a guy he knew.

It wasn't the first time. There had been other guys. And other women.

Sitting next to Franklin on the bed, Godelson cried, yelled and screamed at her for hours.

Still he couldn't break it off. Something about the gazelle legs that made Franklin look taller than her 5 feet 8 inches, and the way she loved to show them off, kept him from walking out.

The two argued into the next morning and fell asleep together on Franklin's bed. When Godelson woke up, she was gone.

Franklin had already lived a rough life. She had moved to the Boone area several years earlier from Morehead City on the Carolina coast. Her parents divorced when she was young. She had bounced back and forth between them.

Since dropping out of school, Franklin had been floating, working at a series of fast-food jobs and partying with the mountain hippies and rave kids who congregated near Appalachian State University.

Franklin smoked marijuana, dropped acid, snorted cocaine. But her drug of choice was prescription meds.

Several hours after Godelson woke up alone, Franklin walked back into her apartment. Her brown eyes were droopy, her face a placid expanse of nothing.

Godelson stood with his hands clenched, ready to punch something.

Godelson was a pot smoker. Over and over he had told Franklin that prescriptions were brain candy. They rotted your guts, brought you down and made you look wasted.

Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Jackson Godelson (above) dated Marion Franklin before she moved to Radford. He says he thinks Bob Shell took advantage of Franklin’s drug problem. Franklin took the drugs that killed her during a bondage shoot at Bob Shell’s photo studio Aubrey Goss (below) met Marion Franklin through friends in Boone, N.C., and introduced her to the modeling world. The two often modeled together for Bob Shell in Radford before Franklin began to make the trip alone.

When Franklin was off pills, she looked great, like a girl in a magazine. When she was on them, Godelson couldn't stand to look at her.

This was how it was for Franklin. She would give up drugs and straighten out for months at a time. Then she would start again slowly. Eventually she would crash and wind up back in rehab.

Godelson drove Franklin to Cannon Memorial Hospital. He called her dad and went home.

Barely Legal

When Franklin got out of rehab, she continued to date Godelson on and off. She often stayed at his apartment, which had a drug safe and a cast of friends who hung out watching television and playing "Grand Theft Auto."

It was there that Franklin met Aubrey Goss, an 18-year-old waif with red-tinted hair who worked as a model.

When Goss was 17, she had answered a newspaper ad for Johnny Meeks, a photographer eight miles up the mountain in Blowing Rock.

Meeks took pictures in his home studio and published them in Hustler Barely Legal, a magazine and Web site dedicated to women who look like girls.

He paid Goss $25 an hour, bought her clothes and paid for her haircuts.

Goss had resisted going further than tease shots where she covered her breasts and pubic hair with her arms or props.

In the winter of 2002, Goss took Franklin to meet Meeks at his home.

Franklin stripped and Meek took out his camera and shot for hours. As Franklin ran through a slew of poses, he thought she would be perfect for Barely Legal.

Meeks e-mailed the photos of Franklin to the magazine and waited. But when the response came, the magazine was not interested in Franklin.

Photo courtesy of Bob Shell

Marion Franklin poses in one of the ornate sets that filled Bob Shell’s studio. Shell thought she looked natural, not tense or wooden like most amateur models.

Bob Shell

Marion Franklin's modeling career seemed over before it started. But late that spring, Franklin got another chance. Meeks had sent photos of Franklin and Goss to Bob Shell, a Radford photographer whom Meeks looked up to. Shell wanted the women to model in his studio.

Shell had grown up in Roanoke and studied at Virginia Tech, and was known in the photo industry as a gearhead, a technical expert who knew what to buy and how to perfectly light a scene.

Shell made his money by writing technical books and working as editor at large of the respected national photo magazine Shutterbug.

The photographer also had a reputation in fringe circles -- he had been commissioned to examine the Roswell, N.M., "alien autopsy" film and was mentioned in several New Age books.

He also took nude photographs.

Franklin, Goss and Goss' boyfriend pulled into the parking lot behind Shell's studio on West Main Street in April 2002.

From the outside, the studio, with its front window covered with a curtain, did not stand out from the antique store next door. There was no sign.

Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Bob Shell’s photo studio on West Main Street in Radford.

Inside, the studio was like a warehouse filled with an obstacle course of lighting equipment and ornate sets made of wood and pull-down backdrops. A bed with a white spread sat at one end. A large red velvet chair built in the shape of a high-heeled shoe stood at the center.

Inside they met Shell, a quiet man with rounded shoulders and a wispy, graying Vandyke beard.

Goss did not take her clothes off for Shell's camera that day. She can't remember if Franklin did, or if her first nude shoot came during one of the several trips to Radford they made over the next two months.

A fateful move

Eventually, Franklin began to make the 2½-hour drive alone, at least once a week. She made good money, about $250 a day.

When she returned to Boone from a shoot, Franklin's right front pocket would bulge with cash. She would pay the rent and settle a debt for a phone bill. Sometimes she would pull out a bud of what her friends jokingly called "super black widow purple haze mix" and they would toke up on the potent marijuana.

But the miles were tearing up her silver Subaru wagon. Gas was sucking away the profit.

And Shell wanted her closer.

File | The Roanoke Times

Marion Franklin posed for bondage pictures, like this one in Bob Shell’s Radford studio.

When the photographer looked at his images of Franklin, he thought he had found something extraordinary.

She looked natural twisted into the feline poses that create the illusion of the perfect body. Not tense or wooden like most amateur models.

That fall, Shell made Franklin an offer. He told her he would rent her an apartment in Radford and pay her a salary to be his model and office manager.

In November 2002, Franklin took the deal. She told friends she was moving to Radford to make money. She told them she wanted to get away from the drug scene in Boone.

That would not happen. Instead, Franklin began working as a bondage model. Her drug use continued. It was a lifestyle that drew her closer to the end.