Dorothy Hoogestraten was born in Canada in February of 1960. Her parents were immigrants from the Netherlands and they raised Dorothy and her siblings in Vancouver Canada. In 1977, Dorothy would be standing behind the counter of a local Dairy Queen, wearing her hair in pigtails and serving ice cream, when Paul Snider walked in. Little did Dorothy know, Paul would be the person to help make her dreams come true and then take her life.
Paul Snider was a bum. He was a bum, a leech, possessive, narcissistic, and a prick. And those are the nicest words I could possibly use. Did I mention that the little money he did make he did by exploiting young women as sex objects and as a pimp? No? Well, that is exactly what he did. The minute Paul saw Dorothy and how beautiful she was, he saw a money making opportunity. Not to pimp her, but something more.
After Paul sweet talked Dorothy and took her out on a few dates, they began dating. Paul would use Dorothy in his Car or boat shows as a model. Then he heard about the Playboy 25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt. Paul reached out to a friend of his to take some nude photos of Dorothy. Dorothy was really not interested in posing nude, but again, Paul sweet talked her into it.
Playboy was very impressed with Dorothy and her test shoot and although she did not win the contest, she was Miss August that year in 1979. Doors were starting to open wide. Paul and Dorothy had moved to LA and she was working in the Playboy club at the time. As fast as Dorothy could make money, Paul was spending it on frivolous, material things and his idiotic schemes. No one liked Paul. Especially Hef. When Dorothy told him that they would be married, Hef asked her not to go through with it and when she asked him to walk her down the aisle in Las Vegas, he declined. Everyone saw the way Paul treated Dorothy. Like she was his cash cow. People also called him a hustler and a pimp which was truthful. When Dorothy won Playmate of the Year, Paul sold the Jaguar she had won. And kept the money...
Dorothy started to get small roles in TV shows and movies. A good friend of Hugh Hefner's, Peter Bogdanovich, had met Dorothy at the mansion and fell head over heels for her. He wrote a part for her in his latest movie , They All Laughed. Dorothy had been getting tired of Paul's constant need to control her and take all of her money. She by this time had appointed a trustee to company , Dorothy Stratten Enterprises and had put Paul on a budget using their joint account. She had also felt a connection to Peter as well. They enjoyed spending time together and were taking things slow. When Dorothy arrived in New York , she and Peter consummated their relationship.
After leaving New York, Dorothy then went on a tour for Playboy that ended in her hometown of Vancouver. Dorothy had written Paul during the tour of Canada and told him that she wanted a separation. Paul decided after getting the letter to come to Vancouver to see Dorothy and talked her into going to a few night clubs to make appearances to make some money for him. At some point Paul and Dorothy had a fight. After that, Dorothy was done. She starting ignoring his calls and attempts to reach her. A few weeks after their first wedding, Paul received a letter stating that he and Dorothy were officially and financially separated. He responded by draining their joint checking account and sleeping with his ex. He also suspected that she was having an affair with Peter Bogdanovich and hired a detective to follow her.
On July 31 1980, Paul Snider hid in the bushes with a gun in front of Peter Bogdanovich's house after he found out Dorothy was living there. He claimed he was going to commit suicide but after waiting several hours he gave up and went home. Paul reached out to Dorothy and invited her over to his home ( their previous home together) on August 8th for lunch. Thinking he could convince her that she should come back to him, he was shot down very quickly. Dorothy confessed her love for Bogdanovich and told Paul she wanted to divorce. Paul had been borrowing a gun from a friend and the friend had requested his gun be returned. Paul was hell bent and determined to get another one.
On August 9, the day after his meeting with Dorothy, Snider and the private detective he'd hired went to a local gun store. After being told that the store couldn't sell him a firearm because of his Canadian citizenship, Paul had asked the detective to buy the gun Snider wanted for him. The detective said no. When Snider saw the private detective again the following day, he tried to convince the man to buy him a machine gun, for "home protection" as Snider explained, but the detective talked him out of the idea. The next day, August 11, Snider drove out into the San Fernando Valley to look at a gun he'd found for sale in a newspaper. He got lost, however, and eventually gave up and went home before finding the owner's address.
On August 13, 1980, the day before murdering Stratten, Snider bought a used, 12-gauge, pump action shotgun from a private seller he found in a local classified ad. Later that evening in a conversation with friends, Snider described how he had purchased a gun that day and finished his story by cryptically declaring that he was "going to take up hunting.....
The day before the murder-suicide, Paul was talking about playmates that were tragically killed. Paul invited Dorothy into the house about lunchtime on August 14th. Dorothy had been warned by her business manager not to see Paul and not to go near him alone. Dorothy told him " I just want t be his friend". I should mention that when Dorothy went to see Paul that day she had 1,100 dollars. That was going to be a payoff for a divorce . Paul had the detective sitting outside watching the home. The room mates come home that evening but no one had gone downstairs to check on Paul or Dorothy. After not being able to reach Paul by phone, the detective called the room mates line and asked them to check on the two.
The room mates found the bodies of Dorothy and Paul that night. Both were killed by a shotgun blast to the head / face and were nude. According to the medical examiner, Paul killed himself an hour after killing Dorothy.
Some time after midnight in the early morning of August 15, the private detective telephoned the Playboy Mansion and told Hefner that Stratten had been murdered. Hefner then called Bogdanovich. Stratten's mother was told of her daughter's death at her Vancouver-area home later that morning by an RCMP Mountie.
Stratten's body was cremated and the remains interred at the Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery in Los Angeles.
The epitaph on Stratten's grave marker includes a passage, chosen by Bogdanovich, from Chapter 34 of the Ernest Hemingway novel A Farewell to Arms. Three years after the murder, the author's granddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, played Stratten in Star 80, the Bob Fosse biopic about the doomed playmate and her husband.
In a twist, Peter Bogdanovich later married Dorothy's younger sister and now they all live together with Dorothy's mom. They divorced after 11 years but all still live together.
Site Sources:
Death of a Starlett- Podcast from Wondery
Dorothy Stratten- Wiki
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