Photo: Julian Wasser/Online USA Inc./Getty
Two years earlier, Snider had scouted Stratten when she was a teenager serving ice cream at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver, Canada. Their meeting would be the beginning of the end for Stratten.
“She just misjudged that guy so badly,” Jeana Keough, Playmate of the Month for November 1980, tells ABC’s20/20.“She just had that little flaw … not being able to see the evil in people.”
• Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Clickhereto get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.
Snider murdered Stratten because he was jealous of her success. When he first met her in Vancouver, Stratten was a teenager working to help her mother make ends meet while Snider was a local pimp who dreamed of fame. Right away he realized she was his ticket to Hollywood.
“She was just breathtakingly beautiful,” actress Colleen Camp, who starred alongside Stratten in the filmThey All Laughed, says in the episode. “There was something very otherworldly about being with her … Time would stop and you just felt [like] you were in a frozen moment.”
In June 1979, as Stratten’s career was taking off, she and Snider married — against the wishes of those who knew her, includingPlayboy‘s Hugh Hefner.
Stratten’s friends tell20/20while the beautiful blonde found herself attending some of Hollywood’s most exclusive parties, Snider found himself left out. However, new to the glamour, Stratten stayed close to the one person who knew her best.
“She was on the phone with him daily when we shot her,” Marilyn Grabowski,Playboymagazine’s former West Coast photo editor, tells20/20. “She would call and tell him how great it was going….She thought that whatever success she was having — and it was embryonic at that point — was totally due to Paul. She leaned on him.”
But her relationship with Snider was strained and the couple eventually separated. During this time, Stratten began to have a relationship with filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who she met at the Playboy mansion and who wrote a part for her in his filmThey All Laughed.
“As she started to slip away, [Snider] started to realize he owned nothing,” Mariel Hemingway, who played Stratten in the 1983 biopicStar 80,says in the episode.
20/20airs Friday at 9:00 p.m. EST on ABC.
source: people.com
