Before long, Paul Snider started to get suspicious. He would call Dorothy Stratten and tell her how much he loved her, and she would just go silent on the other end. Something, he knew, had changed in their relationship.

He eventually hired a private investigator to tail her and find out what was going on, but the investigator didn’t have to tell him anything. When Stratten flew back into town, she told Snider the truth herself. She’d fallen in love with Bogdanovich, she said, and she wanted a divorce.

Snider didn’t say much. Not in front of Stratten, anyway. But his friends later reported that after she called off their marriage, 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 not to print nude pictures of a girl if she got murdered.

Library and Archives CanadaDorothy Stratten during a radio interview in Montreal in 1980, shortly before her death.

Dorothy Stratten went to Paul Snider’s home for the last time on August 14, 1980. It was supposed to be a meeting about a property settlement she’d offered him as part of the divorce. Her manager had tried to talk her out of going to see him, but she’d insisted, saying, “I’d like to remain his friend.”

Just hours after the meeting, Paul Snider’s roommates found both him and his estranged wife dead in his room. Both Stratten and Snider were lying naked on the bed, a shotgun blast boring a hole through each of their heads.

According to the police report, Paul Snider had shot Dorothy Stratten in the eye with a 12-gauge shotgun, leaving nothing but a pulp of shattered bones and blood in her eye socket. Then, in a mad fit of grief, terror, and depravity, he’d stripped the clothes off of her and raped her dead body. Chillingly, there were bloody handprints left on her flesh where he’d gripped her.

It must have taken Snider a moment to realize what he’d done. He must have been staring at the horrific scene when he finally worked up the nerve to put the shotgun inside of his own mouth and pull the trigger.

The Legacy Of A Doomed Playmate And Actress

Paul Snider was wrong about one thing: Hefner didn’t pull her next spread. He knew people would buy it because Dorothy Stratten’s name was still all over the news after her death. Hefner let the October issue run with the then-deceased woman on the cover. He then worked her photos into the December issue, which called her one of the “Sex Stars of the 1980s.”

Stratten later ended up on the silver screen, but now as the tragic subject instead of the shining star. Two movies — Star 80 and Death Of A Centerfold — and a book were released telling her story over the next couple of years, and Hugh Hefner sent his lawyers after every single one.

DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection via ShutterstockDorothy Stratten and her last romantic partner, Peter Bogdanovich, in 1980.

Peter Bogdanovich would never get over her. “I don’t know if I can ever love as totally and completely as I loved Dorothy,” he said more than a year after her murder, according to People. He spent the next few years taking care of her mother and ended up marrying Dorothy’s sister Louise.

“There is no life Dorothy’s touched that has not been changed for the better through knowing her,” Bogdanovich said in his eulogy, “however briefly.”