Infamous Murders: Dorothy Stratten
Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesDorothy Stratten poses for the Toronto Star in May 1980.
Dorothy Stratten was just a normal 18-year-old girl working at a Dairy Queen in British Columbia, Canada when she met Paul Snider. He wooed her with flattering words and told her that she was going to be a star.
Snider put the idea of modeling in Stratten’s head and even convinced her to move to Los Angeles to compete in Playboy’s 25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt. Snider latched himself onto Stratten’s rising star and intended to let her make him rich.
Hugh Hefner saw the same potential in Stratten and declared that she was going to be the next Marilyn Monroe. Stratten was featured in Playboy as Miss August 1979 and soon after began appearing in films like Buck Rogers, Fantasy Island, and Galaxina.
Stratten was quickly rising through the Hollywood ranks. The press was already calling her “one of the few emerging goddesses of the new decade.”
Getty Images Dorothy Stratten with her husband and murderer, Paul Snider in 1980.
Stratten locked down a movie role opposite of Audrey Hepburn. While filming the movie in New York, she began a love affair with the movie’s director, Peter Bogdanovich.
Snider began to grow suspicious of Stratten and hired a private investigator to tail his wife. However, once she returned home, she told her husband the truth: she was in love with Bogdanovich and wanted a divorce.
Snider didn’t say much, not in front of her, anyway. But his friends reported that after Stratten called it off, he started taking a strange interest in guns and hunting. He bought a 12-gauge shotgun, took a few shooting lessons, and started slipping into conversations that Playboy had a policy to not print nude pictures of a girl if she got murdered.
Julian Wasser/Getty ImagesDorothy Stratten and Hugh Hefner, holding up a plaque with her magazine cover as 1980’s Playmate of the Year.
On August 14, 1980, Stratten visited Paul Snider at his home to discuss a property settlement she had offered him in the divorce. However, Snider would take this opportunity where they were alone to make his move.
Snider took a 12-gauge shotgun and shot Stratten through the eye, killing her. He then raped his dead wife’s body before turning the shotgun on himself.
Stratten was once poised to be one of the next big Hollywood stars, but now her name is instead forever attached to her famous murder.
