November 22, 2024 • 32 mins
Hey there Twisted Listeners! While Diva and Cindy take a break from the rigorous schedule that was Twisted Listers, CIndy has decided to strike out on her own and start a true crime podcast all about crime in her beautiful home state of California! We're posting her first epsiode here, and you can find her upcoming episodes by searching True Crime California, or following the link below! Give her a like and a follow, and get ready for some fun deep dives into the heinous crimes of the Golden State.
In her first episode, Cindy details the short life and terrible death of Playbody Playmate and rising star, Dorothy Stratten. Dorothy's life was short and troubled, and her death was one of many similar stories coming out of Hollywood at that time. It's a tragic tale of love, lust, and powerful men who believe they have a right to the life of a beautiful young woman.
True Crime California Instagram: True Crime California
Enjoy!
In her first episode, Cindy details the short life and terrible death of Playbody Playmate and rising star, Dorothy Stratten. Dorothy's life was short and troubled, and her death was one of many similar stories coming out of Hollywood at that time. It's a tragic tale of love, lust, and powerful men who believe they have a right to the life of a beautiful young woman.
True Crime California Instagram: True Crime California
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
and I'm glad you're here. Welcome everybody, this is a
(00:20):
really exciting day. This is the first episode of True
Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy, and as some of
you may know, I am formerly a podcast host from
the podcast Twisted Listeners. I used to host that with
my friend and co podcaster Diva. We did it for
about three and a half years. It was super fun,
it was pretty successful. We had a lot of listeners,
(00:42):
but unfortunately life kind of got in the way and
we just found it more and more difficult to find
time to record together. So eventually we had to kind
of put it on the back burner and I decided
to strike out on my own with my own podcast.
If anybody's wondering, I definitely have Diva's blessing and told
me that she would be one of my listeners. So
(01:02):
I know I'm going to get at least one download
a week, which is great, hopefully more. But yeah, I
decided to do a topic that I am really familiar
with and just love, and that is true crime in
the state of California. Now, many of you who have
listened to Twisted. Listeners know that I'm from California. I
spent a little time in Oregon, but basically, you know,
(01:25):
most of my life, I've been born and raised in California.
I live in southern California currently, and I always get
really excited when I'm doing cases from California, So it
feels right to do a whole podcast but dedicated to that.
And you know, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you
look at it, I'm probably not going to run out
of material for a very very long time. Now. I'm
(01:47):
going to do cases that are both super well known
and also more obscure. I want to kind of run
the gamut there and keep things interesting and tell the
stories of victims and survivors that maybe you haven't heard
of before. But I'm also definitely going to give my
take on more popular and well known stories as well,
because I think people like to hear, you know, various
retellings and different versions of things that we all know
(02:10):
and are familiar with. So without further ado, I'm going
to jump in and do just that. I'm going to
tell the story of a celebrity murder that took place
in the eighties. Actually so it's not a brand new
case by any means, but it's one that was really
well known and kind of shaped Hollywood and you know,
kind of the way that we look at certain parts
(02:31):
of Hollywood kind of change our view. And it was
a really well known case back then. It's still pretty
well known now. There's going to be some names that
we all recognize in this story, and I'm really excited.
So let's get into it. For my first true crime
California case, I am going to cover the murder of
(02:51):
Dorothy Stratton. Now I don't know if people are familiar
with her, but she was a huge star in the
late seventies and early eighties, so I'm just going to
get into it. Dorothy Stratton was actually born Dorothy Hoog
Stratton February twenty eighth, nineteen sixty in Vancouver, British Columbia,
(03:12):
so she's Canadian. She was born to Simon and Nellie
hoog Stratton. They were immigrants from the Netherlands and Dorothy
was a first generation Canadian, so her parents immigrated to
Canada and then had Dorothy once they were there. She
had a younger sister and a younger brother who were
always told they had the same father, but in reality,
(03:33):
her younger sister I believe was from a different father.
But they were not told that for many, many years.
And this is because Simon left Nelly when Dorothy was
four years old. Now I've read that he went back
to Holland. I really don't know. I do know that
once he was gone, there was sort of a constant
succession of men, mostly shitty men, courting Nelly, sometimes living
(03:56):
with the family, but ultimately always leaving. Now, Nellie had
grown up in hall And, like I said, and she
grew up there during the First World War and had
been taken by authorities from her mother during that time.
What I heard was her mother had gone out to
work and left the children alone, and they were taken
at that time because her mother was seen as unfit.
It's very difficult to get specifics from a different country
(04:18):
that far back for somebody who's not necessarily themselves famous,
but that is what I read. Her father, Nellie's father,
So this is Dorothy's grandfather died in the war. The
family struggled to survive, and eventually, you know, the authorities
stepped in. But this was definitely not for the better
of the children. Nellie was separated from her brother, who
was put in a mental institution supposedly due to lack
(04:41):
of space at the orphanage. And while she was in
the orphanage, Nellie had to fight for food, clothing, everything.
So this coupled with the constant falling of bombs during
the war, left her with severe PTSD along with as
you can imagine, a host of other issues related to
being abandoned by her family. Was pretty young. She married Simon,
(05:02):
who I'm sure you know was awesome before he abandoned
the family when Dorothy was four years old. I'm sure
everything was just perfect up to that point. That's heavy sarcasm.
If it's not clear, anybody who doesn't know me, you're
gonna get to know me. From there. The aforementioned men
came and went. One relationship produced Louise, the other daughter,
(05:22):
who was eight years younger than Dorothy, so Dorothy is
the oldest. Often saw, you know, the worst of these relationships,
including one where one of Nellie's boyfriend drank the bottle
of perfume that Dorothy had given her mother for her birthday.
He was such a raging alcoholics. This is so fucked
up that he drank the perfume to get drunk, which
(05:43):
is horrible on just so many levels. I don't know
that there was ever any physical abuse, but the tony
is being set, you know, for bad relationships with men.
For Dorothy, like this is normal for her, This is
all she knows. Her mother has modeled this, and I
don't necessarily blame her mother because her mother came from,
you know, a lot of trauma. So it just feels
like these women didn't kind of stand a chance. One
(06:06):
reason for all the boyfriends, though, beyond you know, just
the volatility of the household, was that Nelly was very
beautiful and Dorothy was very beautiful as well. I usually
will not comment on things like that if I can
avoid it, but it actually is very important to this story.
Dorothy's looks because she goes to Hollywood, and I think
(06:27):
it's you know, fair to point that out. So when
Dorothy was seventeen, she was working at a dairy queen
in Vancouver, sort of just living her life. I don't
know that she really knew what she wanted to do,
but again, she's seventeen and she got a lot of attention.
There one person in particular who gave her a lot
of attention was a man named Paul Snyder. When Dorothy
turned eighteen, barely i should say, he was twenty six
(06:50):
and had already established himself in the area as a
pimp and a hustler. He promoted nightclubs, which gave him
access to a lot of seedy places and people. And
you know, he wasn't good looking, but he was very
charming and very good at controlling women to get what
he wanted from them, which, as we've talked about, you know,
Dorothy's the perfect target, and Paul was the perfect fit
(07:12):
for her, considering kind of what she was used to,
you know, her idea of what relationships with men should
look like. Paul began to lavish her with gifts and
compliment her on the things he knew she was insecure about,
because I think, you know, people often don't really realize
that really beautiful women tend to be very insecure about
their looks because I think, on the one hand, they're
reduced to the way they look by strangers and friends alike,
(07:35):
which is really horrible when you think about it. But also,
you know, beauty is fleeting, so it's got to be
pretty crazy to think that, you know, the only thing
that people value for isn't going to stick around forever.
So anyway, we have Dorothy here, barely eighteen, naive and wounded,
and Paul older. He's got experience of manipulating women. Obviously
(07:57):
he makes money doing this. And Paul had some connections
to Hollywood. I'm not one hundred percent sure how, but
like I know, he went to la for a while
when he was in trouble in Canada with some bad
people over some money. But in any case, he started
working on Dorothy, getting her to consider posing nude for
him for some test shots to try to get into Playboy. Now,
(08:17):
she really wasn't into it at first, and it definitely
took some convincing, but of course, you know, she did
finally relent, and Paul took these photos and sent them
to the editor of Playboy. The editor at the time
was a woman named Marilyn Grabowski, and she said that
when she saw the photos, she quote wanted her on
the next plane out to Los Angeles. Again, Dorothy is
(08:40):
very naive, she'd never even been on a plane before
in her life. But here she goes out to Hollywood
with Paul, you know, to meet with Marylyn to get
more test photos done, and at that point, Marilyn knows
what she's looking at, and she just starts, you know,
introducing Dorothy to a ton of people, and pretty soon
before you know it, Dorothy he's on her way out
(09:00):
to LA to become a star. And I realize that
Playboy bunnies really don't very often become stars. Like I know,
there was the point where Playboy had the reality series,
and we all know some of those you know, Playboy
bunnies from there, but generally, you know, people who pose
nude are kind of frowned upon in Hollywood. And I
(09:21):
don't know what she thought when she went or what
she expected, but I think that Paul sort of, you know,
convinced her, no, this is your way in. This is
going to make you a star. You're going to be different.
You know, you can pose nude and then still get
into Hollywood. And I think, really, you know, he was
just using her, even if it was short term. He
just wanted the money. And I know, you know, part
(09:42):
of this was, you know, he was already proposing marriage
to her, trying to lock her down. He saw her
as his meal ticket and he was not about to
let that go. So he of course moved out to
Ellie with her and became something of her manager. He
inserted himself into all of her business dealings and used
her to propel himself into these groups of people that
he could have never you know, had anything to do
(10:03):
with if he didn't have Dorothy, you know, if he
wasn't hanging on to her, nobody would have given this
loser the time of day. So anyway, Dorothy, you know,
starts posing for Playboy and it's very successful. Pretty soon
she's at all the best parties, meeting celebrities from mainstream films,
meeting directors, and that same year, in nineteen seventy eight,
(10:24):
she was officially picked for the twenty fifth anniversary Great
Playmate Hunt. Now, this is a huge deal as it's
propelled her, you know, into the I don't know, the
mailboxes of people around the country. I don't know if
there was a subscription to Playboy at that point, if it,
you know, was just something that men hid under their mattresses.
But you know, around this time, there was a little
(10:44):
bit of a shift in Hollywood and they were a
little bit more open to sort of nudity and sex
and kind of accepting, you know, people a little bit
more into their main stream and so Dorothy was really
benefiting from this and started to actually be taken seriously,
you know, for roles in mainstream movies. And of course
Paul Schneyder was with her the entire way. People on
(11:07):
set it Playboy said, Dorothy seemed lost and scared and
would call him multiple times a day to check in
and tell him how things were going. He seemed to
be sort of her safe person, but most people outside
of their relationship saw trouble and saw through his facade
of a loving boyfriend and manager. I think it's pretty obvious,
you know, he was exploiting Dorothy, and most people saw this,
(11:28):
and unfortunately, she was one of the only people who,
at least at the time, did not, and he continued
to convince her to pose nude for Playboy, even though
she said she really didn't want to. He told her again,
you know, this is how you get into Hollywood. You know,
this is what this is what you're going to do
to like make it. And again she believed him, and
again they both got lucky. He got lucky lying to
(11:49):
her and it happened to come true, and she got
lucky believing him because Again, up until this point, most
women who posed nude, and I mean even to this day,
there's not a lot of cross Oftentimes the women will
start in movies and then like do a Playboy shoot,
but it's usually not the other way around. Now, definitely
we've got like Pamela Anderson. There's definitely some women where
(12:10):
that's not the case, but in this instance it was.
It was definitely weird. It was not common for somebody
to go from Playboy to mainstream. So in any case,
you know, she believed him. She kept working for Playboy,
and Hugh Hefner took a lot of interest in Dorothy
and kind of took her under his wing and as
we will later learn, very likely abused her while she
(12:32):
was under his employment. After Dorothy's death, in fact, it
was said that Hugh Hefner had at one point raped
her in a hot tub. Now he vehemently denied this,
stating there was no force and that she consented. But
this was back before people considered pressuring someone into sex
as a part of rape culture, so it's definitely a
gray area. This accusation was made by somebody that Dorothy
(12:54):
was in a relationship with, and we'll talk about that
a little bit more later, which leads me to believe
it because it feels like she was probably confiding in
this person something that she felt she couldn't tell people,
because again, he's her boss, he's her way of getting
into this industry. He can make her do his bidding.
So I do tend to believe that this is true.
(13:15):
Maybe not in the you know, purest sense of the
word rape, but I do believe that he sexually assaulted
her and that it was not consensual. And you know,
we've all heard stories, recent stories about you know, this
type of thing. So moving on, we're now in nineteen
seventy nine or a theas nineteen, and she just has
all these various men exploiting her for money, and she's
(13:36):
also meeting these Hollywood stars, these producers, and you know,
again they sort of tanked. Hollywood tanked in the seventies.
There was like sort of an about face regarding the
nude models. Like I said, so, she did start getting
cast in roles for Hollywood films, and the more she
was cast and brought into this world, the further she
got away from Paul. Paul was not the type of
(13:56):
person to transition into a mainstream lifestyle, and Paul was
acutely aware of this and was very unhappy to see
his meal to leave him behind. Before she even became
a model. He told his friend that quote that girl
can make me a lot of money. So again, total
piece of shit, knows exactly what he's doing. He continues
to pressure her about getting married, not because he loves her,
(14:19):
but so he can lock her down, and finally, on
June first, nineteen seventy nine, they were married. When her
friends asked her why she married Paul, she said she
felt she owed it to him, which is kind of
exactly what you might expect given her upbringing and track record,
you know, as well as the fact that she's nineteen
and most nineteen year olds don't make amazing decisions anyway.
(14:40):
She's got all these men in her head. She's being
exploited at every turn. It's not a good situation. And
of course, the marriage did not fix the issues Paul
was worried about, as you can imagine, and as Dorothy's
fame continued to increase, their time together became less and less.
They did live in an apartment together at least three bedrooms,
but Dorothy ended up spending more and more time away
(15:01):
from home while filming movies in various locations. Although her
first few movies weren't large roles or very well received,
she was able to make some really great connections via
the Playboy Mansion, which had always attracted celebrities even when
it was still a very taboo place. The celebrities she
met that changed the entire trajectory of her very short
life was director Peter Bogdanovich. At the time they met,
(15:26):
he had recently split with his celebrity girlfriend, Sybil Shepherd. Now,
for those who don't know, Sybil Shephard was a model
turned actress who got her start when Bogdanovich saw her
on the cover of Cosmo when she was only twenty
one or twenty years old. He was thirty one at
the time and married with two children. He of course
left his wife for Sybil after they quote fell in
(15:47):
love on the set of The Last Picture Show, probably
the best movie he ever made and one of the
best movies of all time. If you haven't seen it,
go watch it. It's fantastic. In fact, before they fell in love,
he told his wife when he saw Sybil on the
cover of the magazine that she was the one he
was going to cast saying, quote, that's jc Jac's one
of the characters in the movie. The two were together
(16:10):
for about nine years until nineteen seventy nine, when Sybil
decided she wanted a family and Peter kind of already
had one. From there, Peter was a swinging dick, making
critically acclaimed movies and also ones that were totally fucking panned.
As far as his time at Playboy that actually started
in a really weird way that also involved Sibyl. Playboy
(16:31):
had published photos of Sybil Shepherd nude which were from
the Last Picture Show. They did this without permission, which
is super fucked up, and Sybil sued, which is great.
She won and she ended up with some money and
also the rights to a film which Playboy agreed to
produce with Bogdanovitch directing. So he and Hugh Hefner became
(16:52):
kind of frenemies, almost like they were working together, and
you know, hef was funding this movie, Sybil was in it,
you know, so as Sybil's partner. Obviously he didn't like Hugh,
but they did work together, and when he became single,
he definitely, you know, used his connection to spend a
lot of time at the mansion, which is where he
met Dorothy. At this point, I want to point out
(17:15):
he was forty one. I hit my microphone. I'm mad
about this. He was forty one. And once again, she's
barely twenty years old. I think she may have even
still been nineteen. So he's like, what's his face from days?
And confused like high school girls, you know, I keep
getting older, they stay the same age. It's fucking disgusting,
like total fucking scumbag behavior, like to just keep finding
(17:37):
like the young blonde. The older he gets, he keeps
finding the young blonde. And I want to come back
to this because it comes up later, but I am
not a fan of this man. I think he's gross.
Also part of the course, you know, for Dorothy to
have yet another man much older than she sort of
controlling her and her career, you know, and just kind
(17:59):
of being it's like a father figure. I mean, I
think we all kind of know where this is coming from.
This is a father figure. So he cast her in
a movie. They all laughed, and in a turn of
events that shocks absolutely no one, the two quote fell
in love on set. The film shot in New York,
so it was easy to spend time together without Paul
Schnyder knowing. They also used the set as a place
(18:21):
to rendezvous, of course, and Dorothy would make excuses to
not have Paul fly out to be with her, which
I'm sure he read between the lines on At this point,
you know, Dorothy was fully over the relationship with Paul.
I don't think she was ever truly into it, but
you know, she'd found her way out, and so she
was not only over him, but she was over Playboy.
(18:42):
Even so, she was chosen as the Playmate of the
Year in early nineteen eighty and did agree to do
some publicity for them. She later said that her hatred
for Playboy and the photographers actually helped her get through
the shoots. I think, you know, she always hated it,
and when she was doing the shoots before she had
met Peter and she had sort of made this switch,
she felt abused. She felt like a victim. She was
(19:05):
being victimized in a way because she had all these
men telling her she had to do this, telling her
this was what was best for her career, and I
think she felt really powerless. And now she has an
out with Peter, she has this mainstream Hollywood lifestyle, so
she doesn't feel to spare at her situation, and instead
this turns into like a rage. You know, she wants
(19:27):
to tell them to fuck off, you know, like you're
not going to use me anymore. I'm gonna do this
as like a final fuck you, and then I'm fucking done.
At one point, she even thought of suing the magazine
for printing a photo of her that she didn't realize
was being taken and that showed more of her body
than she was comfortable with. And I think we can
read between the lines on that, as we know. You know,
(19:47):
because of Sybil Shepherd here, Playboy had no problem printing
unauthorized photos of naked women anyway. By early nineteen eighty,
she was trying to really pull away from Paul done
with Playboy, and Paul, in his jealousy, used her money
because they had a shared bank account, because they were married,
and he wasn't working to hire a private detective to
follow her and get information about her and to see
(20:08):
if she was having an affair. I'm sure this PI
was able to confirm the affair long before Dorothy told Paul,
but eventually the truth did come out and she asked
him to separate and divorce. Upon coming back to Los
Angeles from filming the movie, she immediately moved into Peter
Bogdanovitch's Brentwood home and the two planned to marry as
soon as her divorce was final. Now Paul lost his
(20:32):
entire fucking mind. He was still using her money to
pay the PI, but realized that was about to dry up.
So as soon as Dorothy told him she wanted a divorce,
he drained something like fifteen thousand dollars from their shared
account before she cut off access to it. Dorothy was
still making money and as far as I know, started
putting it into a different account, so his funds definitely
(20:53):
had a limit since he was not working. And then
she and Peter, you know, just tried to move on.
Now they were obviously, or seemingly I should say, very happy.
He's twenty one years her senior. So again that's a
bit of a problem to me. But Paul kept begging
Dorothy to see him, to talk, to try to work
things out. At one point during all of this, he
(21:15):
also quote borrowed a gun from a friend. He had
apparently made a comment about killing Dorothy, and at one
of the times they met up, he lost his nerve.
He told his friend that he instead had driven out
to a park and considered suicide, but also lost his
nerve there as well. As the months were on, though,
he became much more desperate, to the point that they
(21:36):
he asked the PI if they would buy him a gun.
Thank God, the PI was like, abs fucking lutely not,
so instead, he bought one from a private seller he
found in the paper, because it's definitely not difficult to
get a gun, especially back then, even in California. What
he bought was a twelve gage shotgun, which just thinking about,
(21:56):
like what that kind of weapon does to a person
is insane. He then convinced Dorothy to meet with him.
She agreed, expecting that they would discuss splitting up their
money and property. She was going to give him a
little money to help him out until he could get
on his feet. She was trying to be kind and
(22:16):
she wanted to amicably settle their divorce. And again, she's
twenty years old, she's you know, doesn't have a lot
of experience with this not the best idea, but she
did agree to meet with him. So she met him
at their formerly shared apartment, which he then had two
roommates living with with him, but neither of those roommates
(22:36):
were home. Now, this was on August fourteenth, nineteen eighty.
When his roommates came home later, they said they found
his door close and saw Dorothy's car outside, and they
had kind of assumed that the two had reconciled, so
they left them alone. This was because, you know, there
was a lot of back and forth in their relationship,
much like what Dorothy was used to in her home
(22:57):
life growing up, and I think the roommates were so
used to this kind of thing going on. The Next day, however,
they had still seen neither Paul nor Dorothy, so they
decided to knock on Paul's door. When he did not answer,
they opened it and went into his room, and very unfortunately,
they found an absolutely horrifying scene. Both Paul and Dorothy
(23:23):
were naked inside the room and both were dead. Dorothy
was on the bed and had been shot in the
face with the shotgun. She was also missing a piece
of her finger as she had put her hand up
in self defense as Paul shot her. There was also
some sort of horrific sex machine in the room that
(23:43):
Paul had made and it was later determined and this
is big trigger warning that it was used to sodomize
Dorothy while she was still alive. There was also evidence
that he raped her, either pre or post mortem. I've
read both, but in either case he was clearly using
as a way to assert his power over her and
to show her one final time that he was in charge.
(24:05):
He also, you know, I think, used killing her and
then himself as a way of showing everyone that in
the end they couldn't mess with him without paying the price.
This is a man who saw his meal ticket getting away,
who was bitter at the world because he was not
allowed into these groups. The woman he wanted didn't love him.
You know, he's just he shit obviously, but this is
(24:29):
sort of his final fuck you. So Paul was also
shot in the head, not in the face, but shot
in the head. He was twenty nine, Dorothy was only twenty.
This was huge news, extraordinarily sad, just fucking terrible. You know,
she had become kind of a darling. You know, in Hollywood.
People knew who she was. People loved her. She was beautiful,
(24:50):
she was funny, she was you know, a good actress.
People were just very very upset about this, and from
here the so called men in her life used her
death in various ways to write books, to make movies,
more exploitation of this poor woman. Even in her death,
both Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovitch went after each other's character,
which is hilarious, and I wanted to take a little
(25:12):
time to discuss those specifics because of what I said about,
you know, Bogdanovic earlier on. So Peter was the one
to claim that Hugh Hefner raped Dorothy, and again, I
do believe that, and I think we all kind of
know Hugh Hefner's track record in general, he was not
a great person. When you build your empire on the
bodies of naked women, you know you're probably not a
(25:33):
good guy. And beyond this, you know, Bogdanovich blamed Hugh Hefner,
saying that it was the playboy culture that led to
her death, saying, you know, her being in that world
with that guy Paul and with people exploiting her was
exactly why this happened. In return, have came out denying everything,
(25:54):
denying the rape, saying it's not okay to blame playboy
basically saying, you know, Playboy's been blamed every time something
goes ways with anybody connected to us. And I honestly
do see both sides of this sort of but I think,
especially back then, most women who were involved in this
type of lifestyle were not having They didn't have the
(26:14):
best lives in general. It was definitely big exploitation. Now
we can talk sex positive and say that there's opportunities
now where women are in control, but I do believe
back then it was a very different landscape where this
type of thing was concerned. So hef comes out denies
all of this. He also calls Peter Bogdanovich out for rape,
(26:36):
but not rape of Dorothy, statutory rape of Dorothy's younger sister. Now,
let's remember that when Dorothy died, I mentioned her sister
was eight years younger than her. So Dorothy was twenty,
Louis was twelve. Hugh Hefner said that Peter Bogdanovitch began
(26:59):
grooming her immediately after Dorothy's death in some twisted grief
power thing where he just can't let Dorothy go, so
he's doing the next best thing and grooming her sister.
And let's not pretend that he doesn't like his women
very very young. So it's not that big of a
leap to think that he would do something like this,
(27:19):
especially when he's grieving and used to you know, he's
a producer, he's or a director in Hollywood. He's like
big guy. He's probably used to getting his way, you know.
I this is not out of the realm of possibility,
and what comes next is going to kind of drive
this home. So Dorothy's family launched a lawsuit against Hugh Hefner, saying,
you know, this is a defamation and da da da
(27:41):
da da. They then dropped it pretty promptly. A few
years later, when Louis Stratton was twenty years old, the
magic number she and then forty nine year old Peter
Bogdanovich were married. I wonder why they dropped the lawsuit.
Fucking disgusting shit all around, and I wanted to take
(28:06):
a moment also to say that Louis's former father in
law came out in an interview. And I can't verify
this story, but he did come out in an interview
and say that Peter not only groomed Louise, he was
also grooming Nelly. Dorothy's mother, and he and Nellie are
not married anymore, and according to him, Peter Bogdanovitch is
(28:29):
a big reason why. So this just sounds disgusting all around.
All of the men in this story are complicit in
the exploitation, the abuse, and ultimately the death of Dorothy Stratton.
All of these men are fucking disgusting. I cannot fucking
believe this. The fact that her younger sister, who does
(28:50):
look a lot like her, was eight years younger than her,
and you know, Mary's Peter, like what what the fuck?
And people love they love him as a director. And
you know what's interesting is I hear other podcasts covering
this case and they all tell the love story of
Dorothy and Peter, and I am like, fucking gagm. This
(29:12):
is not a love story. This is just another in
a long line of abusive men that this poor young
woman dealt with before she was finally murdered by one
of them. And it is a tale as old as time.
There is nothing I could never feel sorry for Peter
Bogdanovitch in this situation. I could never feel bad for
him because he is a part of the fucking problem.
(29:34):
And he can sit here and point fingers at Playboy.
But dude, without Playboy exploiting her, they wouldn't have had
her ready for you to come in and exploit either.
So give me a fucking break. I'm sorry. I just
I hate it. I hate it so much. It's so gross.
So this story is really sad and horrific and really centered,
you know, around these three horrible, abusive men drunk on power,
(29:55):
and the way they all just harmed Dorothy who was
just lost the world and trying to make a life
for herself. Now, there have been numerous songs, movies, and
books written about the very short and tragic life of
Dorothy Stratton, including one by Peter That's where these accusations
were launched, because of course he has to write a
book about it and make some money off of the tragedy.
(30:17):
You know, it's just a really fucked up situation. And
I think he and Luis were married for like, actually
like a decent amount of time, they had some kids together.
None of it makes it okay. None of it makes
it okay. And there's no way that that accusation of
statutory rape was just happened, to be correct, There's no
way you get that Lucky like that shit was going on.
Everybody fucking knew it. So, I mean, I hate that
(30:40):
this is her legacy, that it's just mired in all
of this disgusting, gross business. But that's Hollywood, you know.
So that's it. That's the story of Dorothy Stratton, her
very sad short life. I feel terrible for her. She
was beautiful, she seemed extraordinarily sweet, talented, and she had
(31:00):
the potential to have such a long, successful, beautiful life
and it was just cut short and that really fucking sucks.
So all right, guys, there we have it. There's episode one.
Some of these will definitely be longer than others. They're
gonna be slightly deeper dives than we did on the
Twisted Listeners podcast for the most part. But I did
(31:22):
just want to get kind of a well known case
out there to get the party started, as it were.
Thanks again for listening. I hope you guys continue to
tune in. Thanks for supporting. I know the commercials are annoying,
but if you can listen, it puts a little money
in my pocket and makes it worthwhile for me. I'll
be back again next week with another California story of
(31:43):
true crime, some sort of murder. We're gonna do some
survivor stories as well, and until then, thanks everybody,
Hey, everyone, Welcome to True Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy,
and I'm glad you're here. Welcome everybody, this is a
(00:20):
really exciting day. This is the first episode of True
Crime California. I'm your host, Cindy, and as some of
you may know, I am formerly a podcast host from
the podcast Twisted Listeners. I used to host that with
my friend and co podcaster Diva. We did it for
about three and a half years. It was super fun,
it was pretty successful. We had a lot of listeners,
(00:42):
but unfortunately life kind of got in the way and
we just found it more and more difficult to find
time to record together. So eventually we had to kind
of put it on the back burner and I decided
to strike out on my own with my own podcast.
If anybody's wondering, I definitely have Diva's blessing and told
me that she would be one of my listeners. So
(01:02):
I know I'm going to get at least one download
a week, which is great, hopefully more. But yeah, I
decided to do a topic that I am really familiar
with and just love, and that is true crime in
the state of California. Now, many of you who have
listened to Twisted. Listeners know that I'm from California. I
spent a little time in Oregon, but basically, you know,
(01:25):
most of my life, I've been born and raised in California.
I live in southern California currently, and I always get
really excited when I'm doing cases from California, So it
feels right to do a whole podcast but dedicated to that.
And you know, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you
look at it, I'm probably not going to run out
of material for a very very long time. Now. I'm
(01:47):
going to do cases that are both super well known
and also more obscure. I want to kind of run
the gamut there and keep things interesting and tell the
stories of victims and survivors that maybe you haven't heard
of before. But I'm also definitely going to give my
take on more popular and well known stories as well,
because I think people like to hear, you know, various
retellings and different versions of things that we all know
(02:10):
and are familiar with. So without further ado, I'm going
to jump in and do just that. I'm going to
tell the story of a celebrity murder that took place
in the eighties. Actually so it's not a brand new
case by any means, but it's one that was really
well known and kind of shaped Hollywood and you know,
kind of the way that we look at certain parts
(02:31):
of Hollywood kind of change our view. And it was
a really well known case back then. It's still pretty
well known now. There's going to be some names that
we all recognize in this story, and I'm really excited.
So let's get into it. For my first true crime
California case, I am going to cover the murder of
(02:51):
Dorothy Stratton. Now I don't know if people are familiar
with her, but she was a huge star in the
late seventies and early eighties, so I'm just going to
get into it. Dorothy Stratton was actually born Dorothy Hoog
Stratton February twenty eighth, nineteen sixty in Vancouver, British Columbia,
(03:12):
so she's Canadian. She was born to Simon and Nellie
hoog Stratton. They were immigrants from the Netherlands and Dorothy
was a first generation Canadian, so her parents immigrated to
Canada and then had Dorothy once they were there. She
had a younger sister and a younger brother who were
always told they had the same father, but in reality,
(03:33):
her younger sister I believe was from a different father.
But they were not told that for many, many years.
And this is because Simon left Nelly when Dorothy was
four years old. Now I've read that he went back
to Holland. I really don't know. I do know that
once he was gone, there was sort of a constant
succession of men, mostly shitty men, courting Nelly, sometimes living
(03:56):
with the family, but ultimately always leaving. Now, Nellie had
grown up in hall And, like I said, and she
grew up there during the First World War and had
been taken by authorities from her mother during that time.
What I heard was her mother had gone out to
work and left the children alone, and they were taken
at that time because her mother was seen as unfit.
It's very difficult to get specifics from a different country
(04:18):
that far back for somebody who's not necessarily themselves famous,
but that is what I read. Her father, Nellie's father,
So this is Dorothy's grandfather died in the war. The
family struggled to survive, and eventually, you know, the authorities
stepped in. But this was definitely not for the better
of the children. Nellie was separated from her brother, who
was put in a mental institution supposedly due to lack
(04:41):
of space at the orphanage. And while she was in
the orphanage, Nellie had to fight for food, clothing, everything.
So this coupled with the constant falling of bombs during
the war, left her with severe PTSD along with as
you can imagine, a host of other issues related to
being abandoned by her family. Was pretty young. She married Simon,
(05:02):
who I'm sure you know was awesome before he abandoned
the family when Dorothy was four years old. I'm sure
everything was just perfect up to that point. That's heavy sarcasm.
If it's not clear, anybody who doesn't know me, you're
gonna get to know me. From there. The aforementioned men
came and went. One relationship produced Louise, the other daughter,
(05:22):
who was eight years younger than Dorothy, so Dorothy is
the oldest. Often saw, you know, the worst of these relationships,
including one where one of Nellie's boyfriend drank the bottle
of perfume that Dorothy had given her mother for her birthday.
He was such a raging alcoholics. This is so fucked
up that he drank the perfume to get drunk, which
(05:43):
is horrible on just so many levels. I don't know
that there was ever any physical abuse, but the tony
is being set, you know, for bad relationships with men.
For Dorothy, like this is normal for her, This is
all she knows. Her mother has modeled this, and I
don't necessarily blame her mother because her mother came from,
you know, a lot of trauma. So it just feels
like these women didn't kind of stand a chance. One
(06:06):
reason for all the boyfriends, though, beyond you know, just
the volatility of the household, was that Nelly was very
beautiful and Dorothy was very beautiful as well. I usually
will not comment on things like that if I can
avoid it, but it actually is very important to this story.
Dorothy's looks because she goes to Hollywood, and I think
(06:27):
it's you know, fair to point that out. So when
Dorothy was seventeen, she was working at a dairy queen
in Vancouver, sort of just living her life. I don't
know that she really knew what she wanted to do,
but again, she's seventeen and she got a lot of attention.
There one person in particular who gave her a lot
of attention was a man named Paul Snyder. When Dorothy
turned eighteen, barely i should say, he was twenty six
(06:50):
and had already established himself in the area as a
pimp and a hustler. He promoted nightclubs, which gave him
access to a lot of seedy places and people. And
you know, he wasn't good looking, but he was very
charming and very good at controlling women to get what
he wanted from them, which, as we've talked about, you know,
Dorothy's the perfect target, and Paul was the perfect fit
(07:12):
for her, considering kind of what she was used to,
you know, her idea of what relationships with men should
look like. Paul began to lavish her with gifts and
compliment her on the things he knew she was insecure about,
because I think, you know, people often don't really realize
that really beautiful women tend to be very insecure about
their looks because I think, on the one hand, they're
reduced to the way they look by strangers and friends alike,
(07:35):
which is really horrible when you think about it. But also,
you know, beauty is fleeting, so it's got to be
pretty crazy to think that, you know, the only thing
that people value for isn't going to stick around forever.
So anyway, we have Dorothy here, barely eighteen, naive and wounded,
and Paul older. He's got experience of manipulating women. Obviously
(07:57):
he makes money doing this. And Paul had some connections
to Hollywood. I'm not one hundred percent sure how, but
like I know, he went to la for a while
when he was in trouble in Canada with some bad
people over some money. But in any case, he started
working on Dorothy, getting her to consider posing nude for
him for some test shots to try to get into Playboy. Now,
(08:17):
she really wasn't into it at first, and it definitely
took some convincing, but of course, you know, she did
finally relent, and Paul took these photos and sent them
to the editor of Playboy. The editor at the time
was a woman named Marilyn Grabowski, and she said that
when she saw the photos, she quote wanted her on
the next plane out to Los Angeles. Again, Dorothy is
(08:40):
very naive, she'd never even been on a plane before
in her life. But here she goes out to Hollywood
with Paul, you know, to meet with Marylyn to get
more test photos done, and at that point, Marilyn knows
what she's looking at, and she just starts, you know,
introducing Dorothy to a ton of people, and pretty soon
before you know it, Dorothy he's on her way out
(09:00):
to LA to become a star. And I realize that
Playboy bunnies really don't very often become stars. Like I know,
there was the point where Playboy had the reality series,
and we all know some of those you know, Playboy
bunnies from there, but generally, you know, people who pose
nude are kind of frowned upon in Hollywood. And I
(09:21):
don't know what she thought when she went or what
she expected, but I think that Paul sort of, you know,
convinced her, no, this is your way in. This is
going to make you a star. You're going to be different.
You know, you can pose nude and then still get
into Hollywood. And I think, really, you know, he was
just using her, even if it was short term. He
just wanted the money. And I know, you know, part
(09:42):
of this was, you know, he was already proposing marriage
to her, trying to lock her down. He saw her
as his meal ticket and he was not about to
let that go. So he of course moved out to
Ellie with her and became something of her manager. He
inserted himself into all of her business dealings and used
her to propel himself into these groups of people that
he could have never you know, had anything to do
(10:03):
with if he didn't have Dorothy, you know, if he
wasn't hanging on to her, nobody would have given this
loser the time of day. So anyway, Dorothy, you know,
starts posing for Playboy and it's very successful. Pretty soon
she's at all the best parties, meeting celebrities from mainstream films,
meeting directors, and that same year, in nineteen seventy eight,
(10:24):
she was officially picked for the twenty fifth anniversary Great
Playmate Hunt. Now, this is a huge deal as it's
propelled her, you know, into the I don't know, the
mailboxes of people around the country. I don't know if
there was a subscription to Playboy at that point, if it,
you know, was just something that men hid under their mattresses.
But you know, around this time, there was a little
(10:44):
bit of a shift in Hollywood and they were a
little bit more open to sort of nudity and sex
and kind of accepting, you know, people a little bit
more into their main stream and so Dorothy was really
benefiting from this and started to actually be taken seriously,
you know, for roles in mainstream movies. And of course
Paul Schneyder was with her the entire way. People on
(11:07):
set it Playboy said, Dorothy seemed lost and scared and
would call him multiple times a day to check in
and tell him how things were going. He seemed to
be sort of her safe person, but most people outside
of their relationship saw trouble and saw through his facade
of a loving boyfriend and manager. I think it's pretty obvious,
you know, he was exploiting Dorothy, and most people saw this,
(11:28):
and unfortunately, she was one of the only people who,
at least at the time, did not, and he continued
to convince her to pose nude for Playboy, even though
she said she really didn't want to. He told her again,
you know, this is how you get into Hollywood. You know,
this is what this is what you're going to do
to like make it. And again she believed him, and
again they both got lucky. He got lucky lying to
(11:49):
her and it happened to come true, and she got
lucky believing him because Again, up until this point, most
women who posed nude, and I mean even to this day,
there's not a lot of cross Oftentimes the women will
start in movies and then like do a Playboy shoot,
but it's usually not the other way around. Now, definitely
we've got like Pamela Anderson. There's definitely some women where
(12:10):
that's not the case, but in this instance it was.
It was definitely weird. It was not common for somebody
to go from Playboy to mainstream. So in any case,
you know, she believed him. She kept working for Playboy,
and Hugh Hefner took a lot of interest in Dorothy
and kind of took her under his wing and as
we will later learn, very likely abused her while she
(12:32):
was under his employment. After Dorothy's death, in fact, it
was said that Hugh Hefner had at one point raped
her in a hot tub. Now he vehemently denied this,
stating there was no force and that she consented. But
this was back before people considered pressuring someone into sex
as a part of rape culture, so it's definitely a
gray area. This accusation was made by somebody that Dorothy
(12:54):
was in a relationship with, and we'll talk about that
a little bit more later, which leads me to believe
it because it feels like she was probably confiding in
this person something that she felt she couldn't tell people,
because again, he's her boss, he's her way of getting
into this industry. He can make her do his bidding.
So I do tend to believe that this is true.
(13:15):
Maybe not in the you know, purest sense of the
word rape, but I do believe that he sexually assaulted
her and that it was not consensual. And you know,
we've all heard stories, recent stories about you know, this
type of thing. So moving on, we're now in nineteen
seventy nine or a theas nineteen, and she just has
all these various men exploiting her for money, and she's
(13:36):
also meeting these Hollywood stars, these producers, and you know,
again they sort of tanked. Hollywood tanked in the seventies.
There was like sort of an about face regarding the
nude models. Like I said, so, she did start getting
cast in roles for Hollywood films, and the more she
was cast and brought into this world, the further she
got away from Paul. Paul was not the type of
(13:56):
person to transition into a mainstream lifestyle, and Paul was
acutely aware of this and was very unhappy to see
his meal to leave him behind. Before she even became
a model. He told his friend that quote that girl
can make me a lot of money. So again, total
piece of shit, knows exactly what he's doing. He continues
to pressure her about getting married, not because he loves her,
(14:19):
but so he can lock her down, and finally, on
June first, nineteen seventy nine, they were married. When her
friends asked her why she married Paul, she said she
felt she owed it to him, which is kind of
exactly what you might expect given her upbringing and track record,
you know, as well as the fact that she's nineteen
and most nineteen year olds don't make amazing decisions anyway.
(14:40):
She's got all these men in her head. She's being
exploited at every turn. It's not a good situation. And
of course, the marriage did not fix the issues Paul
was worried about, as you can imagine, and as Dorothy's
fame continued to increase, their time together became less and less.
They did live in an apartment together at least three bedrooms,
but Dorothy ended up spending more and more time away
(15:01):
from home while filming movies in various locations. Although her
first few movies weren't large roles or very well received,
she was able to make some really great connections via
the Playboy Mansion, which had always attracted celebrities even when
it was still a very taboo place. The celebrities she
met that changed the entire trajectory of her very short
life was director Peter Bogdanovich. At the time they met,
(15:26):
he had recently split with his celebrity girlfriend, Sybil Shepherd. Now,
for those who don't know, Sybil Shephard was a model
turned actress who got her start when Bogdanovich saw her
on the cover of Cosmo when she was only twenty
one or twenty years old. He was thirty one at
the time and married with two children. He of course
left his wife for Sybil after they quote fell in
(15:47):
love on the set of The Last Picture Show, probably
the best movie he ever made and one of the
best movies of all time. If you haven't seen it,
go watch it. It's fantastic. In fact, before they fell in love,
he told his wife when he saw Sybil on the
cover of the magazine that she was the one he
was going to cast saying, quote, that's jc Jac's one
of the characters in the movie. The two were together
(16:10):
for about nine years until nineteen seventy nine, when Sybil
decided she wanted a family and Peter kind of already
had one. From there, Peter was a swinging dick, making
critically acclaimed movies and also ones that were totally fucking panned.
As far as his time at Playboy that actually started
in a really weird way that also involved Sibyl. Playboy
(16:31):
had published photos of Sybil Shepherd nude which were from
the Last Picture Show. They did this without permission, which
is super fucked up, and Sybil sued, which is great.
She won and she ended up with some money and
also the rights to a film which Playboy agreed to
produce with Bogdanovitch directing. So he and Hugh Hefner became
(16:52):
kind of frenemies, almost like they were working together, and
you know, hef was funding this movie, Sybil was in it,
you know, so as Sybil's partner. Obviously he didn't like Hugh,
but they did work together, and when he became single,
he definitely, you know, used his connection to spend a
lot of time at the mansion, which is where he
met Dorothy. At this point, I want to point out
(17:15):
he was forty one. I hit my microphone. I'm mad
about this. He was forty one. And once again, she's
barely twenty years old. I think she may have even
still been nineteen. So he's like, what's his face from days?
And confused like high school girls, you know, I keep
getting older, they stay the same age. It's fucking disgusting,
like total fucking scumbag behavior, like to just keep finding
(17:37):
like the young blonde. The older he gets, he keeps
finding the young blonde. And I want to come back
to this because it comes up later, but I am
not a fan of this man. I think he's gross.
Also part of the course, you know, for Dorothy to
have yet another man much older than she sort of
controlling her and her career, you know, and just kind
(17:59):
of being it's like a father figure. I mean, I
think we all kind of know where this is coming from.
This is a father figure. So he cast her in
a movie. They all laughed, and in a turn of
events that shocks absolutely no one, the two quote fell
in love on set. The film shot in New York,
so it was easy to spend time together without Paul
Schnyder knowing. They also used the set as a place
(18:21):
to rendezvous, of course, and Dorothy would make excuses to
not have Paul fly out to be with her, which
I'm sure he read between the lines on At this point,
you know, Dorothy was fully over the relationship with Paul.
I don't think she was ever truly into it, but
you know, she'd found her way out, and so she
was not only over him, but she was over Playboy.
(18:42):
Even so, she was chosen as the Playmate of the
Year in early nineteen eighty and did agree to do
some publicity for them. She later said that her hatred
for Playboy and the photographers actually helped her get through
the shoots. I think, you know, she always hated it,
and when she was doing the shoots before she had
met Peter and she had sort of made this switch,
she felt abused. She felt like a victim. She was
(19:05):
being victimized in a way because she had all these
men telling her she had to do this, telling her
this was what was best for her career, and I
think she felt really powerless. And now she has an
out with Peter, she has this mainstream Hollywood lifestyle, so
she doesn't feel to spare at her situation, and instead
this turns into like a rage. You know, she wants
(19:27):
to tell them to fuck off, you know, like you're
not going to use me anymore. I'm gonna do this
as like a final fuck you, and then I'm fucking done.
At one point, she even thought of suing the magazine
for printing a photo of her that she didn't realize
was being taken and that showed more of her body
than she was comfortable with. And I think we can
read between the lines on that, as we know. You know,
(19:47):
because of Sybil Shepherd here, Playboy had no problem printing
unauthorized photos of naked women anyway. By early nineteen eighty,
she was trying to really pull away from Paul done
with Playboy, and Paul, in his jealousy, used her money
because they had a shared bank account, because they were married,
and he wasn't working to hire a private detective to
follow her and get information about her and to see
(20:08):
if she was having an affair. I'm sure this PI
was able to confirm the affair long before Dorothy told Paul,
but eventually the truth did come out and she asked
him to separate and divorce. Upon coming back to Los
Angeles from filming the movie, she immediately moved into Peter
Bogdanovitch's Brentwood home and the two planned to marry as
soon as her divorce was final. Now Paul lost his
(20:32):
entire fucking mind. He was still using her money to
pay the PI, but realized that was about to dry up.
So as soon as Dorothy told him she wanted a divorce,
he drained something like fifteen thousand dollars from their shared
account before she cut off access to it. Dorothy was
still making money and as far as I know, started
putting it into a different account, so his funds definitely
(20:53):
had a limit since he was not working. And then
she and Peter, you know, just tried to move on.
Now they were obviously, or seemingly I should say, very happy.
He's twenty one years her senior. So again that's a
bit of a problem to me. But Paul kept begging
Dorothy to see him, to talk, to try to work
things out. At one point during all of this, he
(21:15):
also quote borrowed a gun from a friend. He had
apparently made a comment about killing Dorothy, and at one
of the times they met up, he lost his nerve.
He told his friend that he instead had driven out
to a park and considered suicide, but also lost his
nerve there as well. As the months were on, though,
he became much more desperate, to the point that they
(21:36):
he asked the PI if they would buy him a gun.
Thank God, the PI was like, abs fucking lutely not,
so instead, he bought one from a private seller he
found in the paper, because it's definitely not difficult to
get a gun, especially back then, even in California. What
he bought was a twelve gage shotgun, which just thinking about,
(21:56):
like what that kind of weapon does to a person
is insane. He then convinced Dorothy to meet with him.
She agreed, expecting that they would discuss splitting up their
money and property. She was going to give him a
little money to help him out until he could get
on his feet. She was trying to be kind and
(22:16):
she wanted to amicably settle their divorce. And again, she's
twenty years old, she's you know, doesn't have a lot
of experience with this not the best idea, but she
did agree to meet with him. So she met him
at their formerly shared apartment, which he then had two
roommates living with with him, but neither of those roommates
(22:36):
were home. Now, this was on August fourteenth, nineteen eighty.
When his roommates came home later, they said they found
his door close and saw Dorothy's car outside, and they
had kind of assumed that the two had reconciled, so
they left them alone. This was because, you know, there
was a lot of back and forth in their relationship,
much like what Dorothy was used to in her home
(22:57):
life growing up, and I think the roommates were so
used to this kind of thing going on. The Next day, however,
they had still seen neither Paul nor Dorothy, so they
decided to knock on Paul's door. When he did not answer,
they opened it and went into his room, and very unfortunately,
they found an absolutely horrifying scene. Both Paul and Dorothy
(23:23):
were naked inside the room and both were dead. Dorothy
was on the bed and had been shot in the
face with the shotgun. She was also missing a piece
of her finger as she had put her hand up
in self defense as Paul shot her. There was also
some sort of horrific sex machine in the room that
(23:43):
Paul had made and it was later determined and this
is big trigger warning that it was used to sodomize
Dorothy while she was still alive. There was also evidence
that he raped her, either pre or post mortem. I've
read both, but in either case he was clearly using
as a way to assert his power over her and
to show her one final time that he was in charge.
(24:05):
He also, you know, I think, used killing her and
then himself as a way of showing everyone that in
the end they couldn't mess with him without paying the price.
This is a man who saw his meal ticket getting away,
who was bitter at the world because he was not
allowed into these groups. The woman he wanted didn't love him.
You know, he's just he shit obviously, but this is
(24:29):
sort of his final fuck you. So Paul was also
shot in the head, not in the face, but shot
in the head. He was twenty nine, Dorothy was only twenty.
This was huge news, extraordinarily sad, just fucking terrible. You know,
she had become kind of a darling. You know, in Hollywood.
People knew who she was. People loved her. She was beautiful,
(24:50):
she was funny, she was you know, a good actress.
People were just very very upset about this, and from
here the so called men in her life used her
death in various ways to write books, to make movies,
more exploitation of this poor woman. Even in her death,
both Hugh Hefner and Peter Bogdanovitch went after each other's character,
which is hilarious, and I wanted to take a little
(25:12):
time to discuss those specifics because of what I said about,
you know, Bogdanovic earlier on. So Peter was the one
to claim that Hugh Hefner raped Dorothy, and again, I
do believe that, and I think we all kind of
know Hugh Hefner's track record in general, he was not
a great person. When you build your empire on the
bodies of naked women, you know you're probably not a
(25:33):
good guy. And beyond this, you know, Bogdanovich blamed Hugh Hefner,
saying that it was the playboy culture that led to
her death, saying, you know, her being in that world
with that guy Paul and with people exploiting her was
exactly why this happened. In return, have came out denying everything,
(25:54):
denying the rape, saying it's not okay to blame playboy
basically saying, you know, Playboy's been blamed every time something
goes ways with anybody connected to us. And I honestly
do see both sides of this sort of but I think,
especially back then, most women who were involved in this
type of lifestyle were not having They didn't have the
(26:14):
best lives in general. It was definitely big exploitation. Now
we can talk sex positive and say that there's opportunities
now where women are in control, but I do believe
back then it was a very different landscape where this
type of thing was concerned. So hef comes out denies
all of this. He also calls Peter Bogdanovich out for rape,
(26:36):
but not rape of Dorothy, statutory rape of Dorothy's younger sister. Now,
let's remember that when Dorothy died, I mentioned her sister
was eight years younger than her. So Dorothy was twenty,
Louis was twelve. Hugh Hefner said that Peter Bogdanovitch began
(26:59):
grooming her immediately after Dorothy's death in some twisted grief
power thing where he just can't let Dorothy go, so
he's doing the next best thing and grooming her sister.
And let's not pretend that he doesn't like his women
very very young. So it's not that big of a
leap to think that he would do something like this,
(27:19):
especially when he's grieving and used to you know, he's
a producer, he's or a director in Hollywood. He's like
big guy. He's probably used to getting his way, you know.
I this is not out of the realm of possibility,
and what comes next is going to kind of drive
this home. So Dorothy's family launched a lawsuit against Hugh Hefner, saying,
you know, this is a defamation and da da da
(27:41):
da da. They then dropped it pretty promptly. A few
years later, when Louis Stratton was twenty years old, the
magic number she and then forty nine year old Peter
Bogdanovich were married. I wonder why they dropped the lawsuit.
Fucking disgusting shit all around, and I wanted to take
(28:06):
a moment also to say that Louis's former father in
law came out in an interview. And I can't verify
this story, but he did come out in an interview
and say that Peter not only groomed Louise, he was
also grooming Nelly. Dorothy's mother, and he and Nellie are
not married anymore, and according to him, Peter Bogdanovitch is
(28:29):
a big reason why. So this just sounds disgusting all around.
All of the men in this story are complicit in
the exploitation, the abuse, and ultimately the death of Dorothy Stratton.
All of these men are fucking disgusting. I cannot fucking
believe this. The fact that her younger sister, who does
(28:50):
look a lot like her, was eight years younger than her,
and you know, Mary's Peter, like what what the fuck?
And people love they love him as a director. And
you know what's interesting is I hear other podcasts covering
this case and they all tell the love story of
Dorothy and Peter, and I am like, fucking gagm. This
(29:12):
is not a love story. This is just another in
a long line of abusive men that this poor young
woman dealt with before she was finally murdered by one
of them. And it is a tale as old as time.
There is nothing I could never feel sorry for Peter
Bogdanovitch in this situation. I could never feel bad for
him because he is a part of the fucking problem.
(29:34):
And he can sit here and point fingers at Playboy.
But dude, without Playboy exploiting her, they wouldn't have had
her ready for you to come in and exploit either.
So give me a fucking break. I'm sorry. I just
I hate it. I hate it so much. It's so gross.
So this story is really sad and horrific and really centered,
you know, around these three horrible, abusive men drunk on power,
(29:55):
and the way they all just harmed Dorothy who was
just lost the world and trying to make a life
for herself. Now, there have been numerous songs, movies, and
books written about the very short and tragic life of
Dorothy Stratton, including one by Peter That's where these accusations
were launched, because of course he has to write a
book about it and make some money off of the tragedy.
(30:17):
You know, it's just a really fucked up situation. And
I think he and Luis were married for like, actually
like a decent amount of time, they had some kids together.
None of it makes it okay. None of it makes
it okay. And there's no way that that accusation of
statutory rape was just happened, to be correct, There's no
way you get that Lucky like that shit was going on.
Everybody fucking knew it. So, I mean, I hate that
(30:40):
this is her legacy, that it's just mired in all
of this disgusting, gross business. But that's Hollywood, you know.
So that's it. That's the story of Dorothy Stratton, her
very sad short life. I feel terrible for her. She
was beautiful, she seemed extraordinarily sweet, talented, and she had
(31:00):
the potential to have such a long, successful, beautiful life
and it was just cut short and that really fucking sucks.
So all right, guys, there we have it. There's episode one.
Some of these will definitely be longer than others. They're
gonna be slightly deeper dives than we did on the
Twisted Listeners podcast for the most part. But I did
(31:22):
just want to get kind of a well known case
out there to get the party started, as it were.
Thanks again for listening. I hope you guys continue to
tune in. Thanks for supporting. I know the commercials are annoying,
but if you can listen, it puts a little money
in my pocket and makes it worthwhile for me. I'll
be back again next week with another California story of
(31:43):
true crime, some sort of murder. We're gonna do some
survivor stories as well, and until then, thanks everybody,
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