Greed, jealousy, and possessive vengeance combined to create the insanity that robbed the world of one of Playboy's most beautiful Playmates ever, Dorothy Stratten.
And it happened on this date in 1980.
An import from the same area of Canada that would later spawn Pamela Anderson, Dorothy Stratten had the blessings of a phenomenal, nature-crafted blondness, pure and touching charisma, and a body that would have exuded irresistible sex appeal even had it been inhabited by a bitter crone rather than the bundle of breasts and sunshine that was Dorothy.
Take one glance at her fine bottom, full breasts in profile, and shag haircut in Autumn Born and be forever smitten.
The young Ms. Stratten had the great good fortune to be Playboy's Playmate of the Year for 1980. She had the greater misfortune to fall into the clutches of psychotic manager/husband Paul Snider and a clique of selfish gropers.
Among her lovers were Hugh Hefner himself, and acclaimed film director Peter Bogdonavich, who cast Dorothy in his pet project They All Laughed, and later wrote a book about their involvement as a couple, titled The Killing of the Unicorn.
Paul Snider summoned his 20-year-old estranged bride to his apartment to discuss their divorce settlement on August 14, 1980.
It is believed, then, that envious rage directed at Bogdonavich prompted Snider to blow off Dorothy's gorgeous blonde head with a shotgun, sodomize her corpse, and then turn the firearm on himself.
Both the NBC tele-movie Death of a Centerfold and the big-screen bio-pic Star 80 convey the sordid, predatory depravity of the murderous milieu that destroyed her, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Mariel Hemingway, respectively, portraying the doomed ray of sunlight that will always be Dorothy Stratten.
