SCIENCE IN CRIME DETECTION-120

For OCTOber 2003 issue

MURDER IN HOLLYWOOD - The Case of Dorothy Stratten

‑Dr. Anil Aggrawal

We have all heard about murders, but this time, I will tell you about the murder of a very interesting person – of a playmate from Playboy! Her name was Dorothy Stratten.

Rapes which climax in murder are a continuing affliction of our society. To counter this affliction, Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, a very famous forensic expert from California, set up a Sexual Assault Evidence Data Processing Unit in his Forensic Science Center in Los Angeles. Evidence collected by this unit aided the Los Angeles Police Department in many ways, from establishing the motive for a killing to actually identifying the murderer.

For example, the first item in the Sexual Assault Evidence Data sheet, under “General Evidence Collection,” is “Nail Scrapings Collected.” In a rape the victim often claws or scratches her assailant’s face and body. But even though police might suspect a man whose face bears such a scratch, the suspect will always claim he received the wound in an innocent matter.

Forensic science can prove it was made by the victim. I remember particularly a case in which a pretty young girl was found dead, her dress in disarray above her thighs. Her throat had been cut, and there was evidence of semen in her vagina. In sum, an obvious rape/murder. When LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) detectives questioned her boyfriend, they noticed he had a small scratch on his cheek, but it was so small it could have come from shaving, as the suspect insisted. However, our scientists had preserved a tiny roll of skin-found under one of the victim’s fingernails. They rolled it flat - and it exactly fit the scratch on the suspect’s face. That led to intensive interrogation, and he eventually confessed to the murder.

Another important item under “General Evidence Collection” is “Bite Mark Evidence.” Sexual assailants sometimes bite their victims, and forensic dentistry can now reconstruct the teeth of the murderer from such a bite mark. The most famous case of bitemark identification occurred in Florida, where, at long last, a serial killer named Theodore Bundy was apprehended.

Bundy, a clean-cut, attractive man of about thirty, began his killing spree in the Northwest. He had a specialty: beautiful college girls with long dark hair. He would approach these coeds, lure them into his car, rape and kill them, then toss them into a lonely area of the forest. By the time their bodies were discovered, they had been ravaged by animals and insects and provided no clues to investigators.

After a series of such murders, Bundy moved on to a Southwestern college and murdered several girls there. Then - always on the move to further confuse and frustrate detectives - he went all the way to Florida. But there one night at a Miami college he altered his usual pattern. Instead of luring one of the coeds into his car, he invaded her room in a small dormitory, raped and killed her, then did the same to her two roommates when they returned unexpectedly.

No doubt, continuing his modus operandi, he would have left Florida and started a new round of killings in a distant state - but he had at last made one mistake in his continuing orgy of murders. He bit the buttock of one of his victims. And then, fleeing the scene, he was stopped for a traffic violation by police in Tampa, who noted that his driver’s license was a forgery. While he was being questioned, news of the deaths in Miami and the missing murderer came through.

There was other evidence against Bundy, but none as conclusive as the reconstruction of his teeth that forensic dentists were able to make from that single bite mark found on one of his victims. Introduced in court as evidence, it matched Bundy’s teeth perfectly. He was convicted of murder, and a serial killer was stopped in his rampage, because of a bite - and forensic science.

Forensic science has many tools besides dentistry to investigate rape/murders, from microscopy and serology, which detect spermatozoa, to ballistics, which identifies firearms employed, to psychology, which seeks to profile the killer. All of these factors came together one day in the investigation of a crime in Hollywood which shocked the nation.

A beautiful girl lies dead of a shotgun wound. A young man lies near her, also killed by a shotgun, which is on the floor near his feet. A double murder by an intruder, or murder followed by a suicide?

That was the actual scene of the death of Dorothy Stratten, a “small town” girl who had come to Hollywood to pursue a career as a model and actress. The dead young man was Paul Snider, her hometown boyfriend, later her husband, and their tragic story began in Vancouver, Canada, where Dorothy Hoogstraaten was serving ice cream cones at a Dairy Queen when a young man with a mustache and trendy jeans entered. Paul Snider ordered a cone and studied the fresh complexioned, voluptuous young girl, and saw what he had been looking for: a potential Playmate for Playboy magazine.

The magazine offered thousands of dollars to those girls willing to bare their bodies for Playboy’s readers. The young woman behind the counter was the perfect girl-next-door type that the magazine craved - and Snider could get a commission. He told Dorothy he was a promoter and “producer,” persuaded her to go to dinner with him, and a romance blossomed. With one catch. Dorothy refused to take her clothes off before the camera. But eventually Snider prevailed, the pictures were sent to Playboy, and it is a tribute to Dorothy Stratten’s beauty that less than two days after Playboy received them she was on her way to Hollywood.

Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion is a notorious part of the Hollywood scene, crowded with lovely young girls and often visited by male Hollywood stars, directors and producers. Stratten was moved right into the house. Hefner, the founder of Playboy, told her she might be not only a Playmate of the Year, but a candidate for the Playmate of the Quarter-Century. Snider, elated with her success, flew down to Los Angeles, where he announced to Hefner that he was Dorothy’s manager.

According to reports, Hefner did not like Snider, whom he described as a small-time hustler. Worse for Snider, Hefner introduced the naive young beauty to Peter Bogdanovich, a skilled and respected motion picture director, who had seen his career founder through his love for another young model and actress, Cybill Shepherd. He had cast Shepherd in certain expensive movies for which her talents were apparently not suited, and in the end both Shepherd and his career had gone into temporary eclipse.

Nevertheless, such was the beauty of this young girl from Vancouver that Bogdanovich felt himself fatally attracted again. He cast Dorothy in a movie he was making in New York, and once the two were on location in the city they fell in love.

Meanwhile, Snider’s world was falling apart. Determined to cash in on Dorothy’s success, he had earlier persuaded her to marry him, thus strengthening his hold on her. But now he felt he was losing her. He had also been barred from the Playboy Mansion - the ultimate snub to someone of Snider’s makeup. Rejected and humiliated, he decided to take action. When Dorothy returned from New York, she did not move in with him. She wanted a divorce. Snider hired a private detective to follow her.

On August 15, 1980, the private investigator alerted friends of Snider’s who lived above him to the fact that neither Snider nor Stratten had emerged from Snider’s apartment after a meeting in which they were supposed to thrash out their problems. Within minutes a dreadful scene was discovered in that apartment, and an investigator from the coroner’s office, Michael A. Shepherd, was on his way to the scene.

When Dr. Noguchi became Chief Medical Examiner in 1967 there was no full-time investigator’s staff in the coroner’s office. Dr. Noguchi installed such a staff and it has done excellent work through the years. Skilled investigators who can go to the scene of a crime, search it professionally for clues to the cause and circumstance of death, collect vital evidence, and make a detailed report of all criminalistic and other relevant factors at the scene are now an integral part of the forensic process.

In the Stratten case, investigator Shepherd filed a particularly excellent description and forensic analysis of the scene.

Decedents are a 20-year-old female and 20-year-old male, who are married, but separated, pending divorce action. Decedent 80-10485 is the 1980 Playmate of the Year (professional name: Dorothy Stratten). Decedent 80-10486 is her husband....

Coroner observed both Decedents in a first floor bedroom. Both were unclothed, both in full rigor. Decedent Hoogstraaten, 80-10485, was cool to the touch, lying semi-crouched across the end of a low bed... She was lying with both legs on the carpet, and right shoulder on the carpet, with her buttocks raised. She had blood stains, possible hand prints, to her buttocks, and left leg. She had trauma to both knees. She had an entrance [wound], close to the contact shotgun wound to her left cheek, with much blood loss. She had lividity consistent with her position. She had non-consistent blood stains to her left shoulder and left arm. There was blood splatter on the east wall and curtains, next to her head. She had lost the tip of her left index finger, possible gunshot wound. Beneath her was a towel, with a hole and blood stains.

Near Decedent Hoogstraaten’s head, but at an angle away from her, a “love seat” sexual appliance was on the floor. It was set into a position for possible rear entry intercourse.

Decedent Snider, 80-10486, was cool to the touch, lying prone on the rug, lying head to the east, in line with the end of the bed ... He was lying with both hands beneath him, at lower chest level. A shotgun was observed under him, lying under Decedent, stock toward his neck, barrel toward the right knee. He had an entrance shotgun wound to the right side of his head, with open wound between his eyes, and drain from the wound behind his left ear. The left eye was bulging from the socket. His right hand had long blond hair in it (recovered by Coroner in Miscellaneous Evidence). The wound to the right side of his head had a blackened portion about it....

Decedent’s right index finger was extended, with the rest of the right fingers curled. The fingers of the left hand were curled. Lividity matched his position, to include an outline of the shotgun. He had trauma to his right thumb. An expended round of 12 gauge #4 buckshot load was recovered from the weapon, a 12 gauge Mossberg pump shotgun. It is two feet-two inches from the depressed position of the trigger to the end of the barrel.

An expended round of similar type and an unexpended round were recovered from the floor, about both bodies.

At this time, no notes were found. A tape recorder was checked at the scene, with negative results. At this point, no one has come forth with statements of intent of action or frame of mind of violent action, by either Decedent, toward the other Decedent.

To the layman, such a report might seem shocking and chillingly impersonal, but it is essential in the accurate reconstruction of any crime. And it is only the first step in a much broader forensic investigation, which includes autopsy and the careful laboratory analysis of evidence found at the scene. In the Dorothy Stratten case, it was immediately apparent that an intruder had not committed a double murder. Evidence pointed conclusively to murder followed by suicide. Yet a question remained when it was alleged that Dorothy Stratten was subjected to a sexual assault before her death.

Here again, forensic science provided the answer. Alert to that possibility, the investigator at the scene took fingernail scrapings and hair samples for analysis, and a sexual-assault test was performed. There were no laboratory findings of sexual abuse, only of “possible sexual activity.” Thus, Dorothy Stratten’s last moments of life before Paul Snider shot her in the head, then put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger, must be left to conjecture.

Captions to the figures supplied

dorothy.jpg: Dorothy Stratten

dorothy_stratten.jpg: Another picture of Dorothy Stratten

snider.jpg: Paul Snider (1951-1980), He killed his wife, Dorothy Stratten, and then committed suicide.

snider_dc.jpg: Death Certificate of Paul Snider

snider_grave.jpg: Grave of Paul Snider

stratten_dc.jpg: Death certificate of Dorothy Stratten

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Dr. Anil Aggrawal, M.D. Professor of Forensic Medicine Maulana Azad Medical College New Delhi‑110002