In the glittering haze of late-1970s Hollywood, where ambition collided with allure like champagne flutes at a Hefner party, Dorothy Stratten emerged as a vision of untarnished promise. Dubbed the “new angel of Hollywood” by breathless tabloids, the 20-year-old Canadian beauty possessed an ethereal innocence—porcelain skin, cascading auburn waves, and a smile that could disarm the most jaded producer. Her doe-eyed gaze and lithe 5-foot-9 frame graced the pages of Playboy as the August 1979 Playmate, catapulting her to Playmate of the Year in 1980. From flipping burgers at a Vancouver Dairy Queen to rubbing elbows with the elite at the Playboy Mansion, Stratten’s ascent was meteoric, a rags-to-riches fable scripted for the silver screen. She landed roles in films like Skatetown, U.S.A. (1979) alongside Scott Baio and Galaxina (1980), her sultry voice narrating a sci-fi romp that hinted at comedic chops beyond the centerfold. “Dorothy wasn’t just beautiful; she had that rare spark—the kind that makes you believe in second acts,” recalled director Peter Bogdanovich in his 1984 memoir The Killing of the Unicorn. Yet, beneath the flashbulbs and fawning reviews lurked a darkness as suffocating as the velvet ropes of the Playboy Club: a marriage to a possessive hustler whose love curdled into lethal obsession, culminating in a murder-suicide that shattered the myth of glamour and left Hollywood reeling.

Born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten on February 28, 1960, in the working-class grit of Vancouver, British Columbia, Stratten grew up in a modest Dutch immigrant family, the third of five children to parents Simon and Nelly. Her father, a hospital maintenance worker, and mother, a homemaker, scraped by in a rough neighborhood where dreams often drowned in the daily grind. At 18, while slinging fries at the local Dairy Queen, she caught the eye of Paul Leslie Snider, a 26-year-old small-time promoter with a shark’s grin and a Rolodex of shady connections. Snider, born in 1951 to a Jewish family in Vancouver, fancied himself a Svengali—pimping out dancers at strip clubs, hawking exercise benches on infomercials, and chasing get-rich schemes with the fervor of a man allergic to legitimacy. He wooed the naive teen with promises of stardom, showering her with costume jewelry and tales of Tinseltown conquests. “Paul made me feel special, like I belonged in that world,” Stratten later confided to friends, as recounted in the 1980 Village Voice exposé “Death of a Playmate.” Within months, he convinced her to pose nude for a portfolio, mailing the glossy shots to Playboy‘s “Great Playmate Hunt.” Hugh Hefner’s team bit hard; Stratten’s innocent sensuality—a stark contrast to the era’s hardened vixens—landed her in the magazine’s August foldout, complete with a feature interview that painted her as the girl next door with a naughty streak.

Snider’s role in her discovery was his crowning glory, but it soured into a stranglehold. He parlayed her success into a 1979 marriage at a Las Vegas chapel, complete with a faux-fur coat and a lease on a Sunset Strip apartment. As Stratten jetted between Vancouver photo shoots and L.A. auditions, Snider tagged along like a shadow—managing her calendar, negotiating deals, and pocketing chunks of her earnings. Friends noticed the red flags early: his explosive temper, the way he’d isolate her from family, rifling through her mail for “evidence” of infidelity. “Paul saw Dorothy as his golden ticket, but when she started shining brighter, he couldn’t handle the glare,” said Marilyn Grabowski, the Playboy scout who first championed her, in a 2019 ABC News retrospective. Stratten’s career bloomed—guest spots on Three’s Company, a lead in the low-budget Autumn Born (1979)—but so did the cracks. She confided in Hefner, who became a paternal figure, hosting her at the Mansion and advising her to ditch the dead weight. By early 1980, she’d filed for separation, her heart turning toward Bogdanovich, the 49-year-old auteur behind The Last Picture Show. Their affair ignited on the set of his 1981 ensemble comedy They All Laughed, where Stratten’s natural charm co-starred with Audrey Hepburn and John Ritter. Bogdanovich, smitten, cast her as the wide-eyed ingenue, showering her with scripts and affection. “She was my muse, pure and unjaded,” he wrote, their romance a whirlwind of script readings and stolen kisses that left Snider seething in the dust.

Snider’s unraveling was textbook tragedy laced with menace. As Stratten’s star rose—nabbing the Playmate of the Year title with a $20,000 prize and a spread in the 1980 Playboy Annual—he spiraled. Holed up in their old West Los Angeles rental, he drowned resentments in vodka and coke, ranting to buddies about “losing his meal ticket.” Friends later testified to his morbid fixations: poring over Playboy‘s archives, obsessing over the 1977 suicide of Playmate Vicki McCree, and quizzing them on the magazine’s policy of pulling posthumous nudes from murder victims’ estates. In July 1980, he dropped $1,200 on a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun from a pawnshop, claiming it was for “protection.” Whispers of hitmen circulated—Snider allegedly shopped Dorothy’s murder to a Vancouver enforcer—but paranoia won out. He stalked her calls, tailed her dates with Bogdanovich, and penned frantic letters begging for reconciliation. Stratten, ever the soft touch, pitied him; she’d wired him money from Playboy gigs and agonized over his pleas. “I don’t see a way out of it,” she sighed to a girlfriend about the marriage, a line that would haunt her legacy. By August, divorce papers loomed, and Bogdanovich floated a $1 million settlement to buy Snider’s silence. It was too late.

On August 14, 1980—a sweltering Thursday that dawned like any other—Stratten drove her blue Mercedes to the apartment for a “final talk,” armed with compassion and a check for Snider’s silence. She arrived around noon, her lithe frame clad in a simple blouse and jeans, hair tousled from a morning audition. What transpired in those 90 minutes would scar Hollywood’s psyche. According to the coroner’s report and LAPD forensics, Snider ambushed her with the shotgun’s butt, binding her wrists with pantyhose and tearing at her clothes in a frenzy of rage and rejection. He raped her repeatedly—autopsy photos, sealed but leaked in court docs, revealed bruising consistent with hours of assault—before pressing the barrel to her left eye and firing at point-blank range. The blast obliterated her face, severing her spine and ending her life instantly at 12:30 p.m. Snider, in a grotesque epilogue, violated her corpse further, ejaculating on the wounds in a final desecration. An hour later, around 1:30 p.m., he placed the still-warm barrel under his chin and pulled the trigger, collapsing beside her in a pool of mingled blood. In his clenched fist, a fistful of her strawberry-blonde locks—his last tether to the dream he’d helped forge and then demolished.

The bodies lay undiscovered until evening, when a concerned neighbor, unable to reach Snider by phone, summoned police. Officers breached the door to a tableau of horror: Stratten sprawled naked on the shag carpet, her 36-24-36 figure marred by gunshot residue and semen stains, her once-radiant face reduced to a cavernous void. Snider slumped nearby, the shotgun bridging their corpses like a macabre bridge. Bogdanovich, alerted by a frantic call from Stratten’s sister Louise, raced to the scene, collapsing in sobs. Hefner, ever the showman, issued a statement decrying the “senseless violence,” while Playboy scrambled to yank her September pictorial proofs. The murder-suicide splashed across headlines—”Playboy Star Slain by Hubby”—igniting debates on fame’s underbelly, from Hefner’s hedonism to the perils of possessive love.

Stratten’s death rippled far beyond the crime scene, birthing a cottage industry of grief and guilt. Bogdanovich’s The Killing of the Unicorn (1984) lambasted Playboy as a predator’s playground, accusing Hefner of grooming Stratten and fostering the toxicity that doomed her—claims Hefner fired back at in a 1985 presser: “Her tragedy stemmed from the marriage’s collapse, not the Mansion.” The scandal fueled two biopics: Bob Fosse’s Star 80 (1983), with Mariel Hemingway as a haunting Stratten and Eric Roberts as the oily Snider, filmed partly at the murder flat for authenticity’s sake; and the TV movie Death of a Centerfold (1981), starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Bryan Adams’ ballad “The Best Was Yet to Come” (1983) mourned her stolen potential, while Prism’s “Cover Girl” echoed the industry’s complicity. Even today, her specter haunts true-crime pods and Reddit threads, a cautionary icon in the #MeToo era of exploitative fame.

Buried on August 20, 1980, at Los Angeles’ Westwood Village Memorial Park—eternally neighbored by Marilyn Monroe and Hefner himself—Stratten rests under a simple plaque: “Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980. Peace in Paradise.” Her family, shattered but stoic, received a $1.5 million wrongful death settlement from Playboy, which Louise Stratten parlayed into a producing career alongside Bogdanovich (they married in 1988, divorcing in 2001). At 20, Dorothy’s life was a comet—blindingly brief, eternally luminous. Her story endures not as tabloid fodder, but as a stark elegy: In the chase for stardom, sometimes the real monsters lurk in the mirrors we ignore. What if she’d seen the exit sign sooner? The halo dims, but the horror lingers.