On August 14, 1980, Playmate of the Year and budding actress Dorothy Stratten was gunned down by her estranged husband. She was just 20 years old.

Dorothy looked at the world with love, and believed that all people were good down deep,” said Peter Bogdanovich, one of the men who loved Dorothy Stratten, after her death. “She was mistaken.”

Just days earlier, the Playboy model had met her demise at the hands of one of those people she’d trusted — her estranged husband, Paul Snider.

On August 14, 1980, 20-year-old Dorothy Stratten was found murdered in Snider’s home in Los Angeles. She’d been stripped naked and shot to death during what was supposed to be a meeting about a property settlement.

It was a tragic end to what could’ve been an incredible success story.

How A Teenage Dorothy Stratten Fell For A Notorious Pimp Named Paul Snider

Born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten on February 28, 1960, Stratten began her life in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She grew up in nearby Coquitlam, and her early years were fairly ordinary. But all of that changed after she turned 18. That year, Stratten met her future husband and murderer.

As Playboy founder Hugh Hefner later reflected, “There is still a great tendency… for this thing to fall into the classic cliché of ‘small-town girl comes to Playboy, comes to Hollywood, life in the fast lane.’ That is not what really happened. A very sick guy saw his meal ticket and his connection to power, whatever, slipping away. And it was that that made him kill her.”

That “very sick guy” was Paul Snider — or, as he was known in Coquitlam, the “Jewish Pimp.” Constantly on the prowl for good-looking girls, he would often wear a mink coat with a bejeweled Star of David around his neck.

Dorothy Stratten was just an 18-year-old girl working the cash register at a local Dairy Queen when she met Snider, but he already knew that he’d hit the jackpot. “That girl could make me a lot of money,” he told a friend.

At that point in time, Stratten thought of herself as plain and uninteresting. She couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement of being courted by a wealthy man, even though he was nine years older than her.

Snider bought her diamonds and jewelry, cooked her dinner, served her wine, and gushed about how she was beautiful enough to be a model.

But the type of modeling Paul Snider had in mind didn’t involve a runway. He slowly talked Stratten into letting him take nude photos of her — even though, in Canada at the time, she was still legally underage. And after sending those pictures off to Playboy, he convinced her to move all the way to Los Angeles to compete in the 25th Anniversary Great Playmate Hunt.

Dorothy Stratten was going to make him something bigger than a local pimp who got girls to turn tricks. She was going to make him a millionaire.

Dorothy Stratten’s Rise To Fame As Playboy’s Miss August 1979

Hugh Hefne saw as much money in Stratten as Snider did. He soon gave the new model a full spread in his magazine as Miss August 1979 and started whispering in her ear about how he was going to make her a star.

According to Peter Bogdanovich, Stratten’s last romantic partner, Hefner was still whispering those promises to Stratten when he “forced himself on her” during her first night as a Playmate in the Playboy Mansion’s infamous grotto. (As reported by The Guardian, Bogdanovich was pressured to remove the word “rape” in his book about Stratten by Hefner’s lawyers.)

Despite that alleged incident, Dorothy Stratten reportedly treated Hefner’s actions that night as a forgivable lapse of judgment.

At that point in time, it seemed as though every man in Stratten’s life was using her for her body. All Hefner had apparently done was show her that he was no different from all of the other men that she met.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason why no matter how many of Dorothy Stratten’s friends tried to convince her to leave Paul Snider, she never listened. Snider was just one more pimp in a world filled with them.

When he proposed, she said yes. “He cares for me so much,” Stratten told a friend when she tried to convince her to say no. “He’s always there when I need him. I can’t ever imagine myself being with any other man but Paul.”

A Chance To Become “The Next Marilyn Monroe”

As Dorothy Stratten’s star rose, Hefner became increasingly adamant that she wasn’t just going to be a naked girl on the cover of a magazine. He was determined to make her a star on the silver screen. According to Harper’s Bazaar, Stratten was even poised to become “the next Marilyn Monroe.”

Hefner helped her get roles in Buck Rogers and Fantasy Island, and then in movies like Americathon and Skatetown, USA. In less than a year, she landed her first starring role as a sexpot robot in a sci-fi comedy called Galaxina.

“We’re on a rocket ship to the moon!” Snider told her. It was true. The press was already calling her “one of the few emerging goddesses of the new decade,” and she was lined up to co-star in a film with Audrey Hepburn.

Paul Snider, though, wasn’t as firmly locked onto her rocket ship as he wanted her to believe. For most of their time in Los Angeles, he didn’t even have a work visa and so he couldn’t bring in a penny to support them.

In time, he started to bring in a little bit — in fact, Snider was the man who helped create the famous Chippendales dancers — but he was still living in a rented home that he shared with two other roommates.

And in the meantime, Stratten’s heart was starting to wander elsewhere. She was in New York, filming her movie with Audrey Hepburn and secretly carrying on an affair with the film’s director, Peter Bogdanovich.