BEAUTY & THE BEAST

8/14/1980 - The tragically short life (she is only 20 years old at her passing) of Canadian beauty Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten comes to a violent end at the West Los Angeles home of her friend, Dr. Stephen Cushner, by way of a shotgun blast to the face from her manager and estranged husband, lunatic Paul Leslie Snider.


Hoogstraten

Still attending Centennial High School in the town Coquitlam, Hoogstraten is working part-time at a local Dairy Queen in 1977 when Snider "discovers" her.  Snider, twenty-six, a local pimp and Vancouver club promoter turns on the charm and soon the two are paired romantically ... and professionally too as the hustler becomes his wife's manager.  As such, Snider changes Dorothy's name to Stratten and orchestrates a batch of professional nude modeling shots (not yet 18, her mother has to sign a waiver for the photographer to agree to take birthday suit pictures of the teenage girl) taken of his young wife (he also forbids her to drink coffee because it might stain her pretty white teeth and secretly poisons her dog when he jealousy deems she is spending too much time with the pet).  In June of 1979 the pair marry.  


Sleezebag

Sent to Playboy magazine, the photographs soon open huge doors into the world of entertainment for Stratten ... she is soon the August Playmate for 1979, and then Playmate of the Year for 1980, triumphs that cause the couple to move to Los Angeles for Dorothy to pursue an acting and modeling career (under the guidance of her husband of course).  Following the move, Dorothy becomes a bunny at the Century City Playboy Club, a regular at Hugh Hefner parties at the Playboy Mansion, guest stars in television episodes of Buck Rogers and Fantasy Island, receives a small roll in the roller-skate, disco comedy, Skatetown, U.S.A., appears briefly in the movies Autumn Born and Americathon, scores the title role in the science fiction dog, Galaxina, and wins a major starring job in the Peter Bogdanovich film, They All Laughed (the movie tanks upon release and will be a major reason for the director declaring bankruptcy in 1985).


Cover

However, as doors open for Dorothy, they are closing all over town for her husband.  Quickly identified by Hollywood insiders as a gold digger with sociopath tendencies, Snider eventually is banned from the Playboy mansion, is told Dorothy can't be signed to various projects with Snider as part of the package, and spends huge amounts of time building bondage table for sex shops ... bondage tables that don't sell.  Frustrations growing, Snider sees the fame and fortune he was responsible for beginning to slip away, and responds by turning his beautiful wife, the source he believes of all his woes, into a punching bag ... a reaction that in turn causes his wife to dump him and move in with the new man she has fallen in love with, her director on They All Laughed, Peter Bogdanovich.  It is a slight that Snider is unwilling to forget, or forgive.


Happier times

Wanting to move on and begin a new life that includes marriage to Bogdanovich and more movies, Dorothy agrees to see Snider at the apartment they once occupied, and where her soon to be ex still lives (owned by Dr. Cushner), to discuss an amiable divorce ... and beginning what she intends as a buyout for professional services previously rendered, she arrives for their meeting carrying $1,000 in cash she intends to give to her estranged husband.  It is a serious mistake that the Playmate model will not survive.


Playmate of the Year - 1980

Arriving shortly after noon for her appointment with Snider, Dorothy is dressed in casual flat shoes, slacks, and comfortable blouse chosen so as not to arouse or inflame her ex.  It does no good.  Behind the closed doors of the apartment Snider goes into a "if I can't have her, no will" monstrous rage in which he beats her, ties her to one of his bondage table using medical tape, rapes her repeatedly, and then rage not yet assuaged, the madman grabs a 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun out of a closet, shoots his wife in the face and rapes the corpse for 30 minutes (her buttocks and breasts are covered in bloody hand prints when Homicide detectives finally arrive at the scene).  Over and out, the killer then turns the gun on himself ... SOMETHING HE SHOULD HAVE DONE BEFORE KILLING STRATTEN!


Headlines

Sex, violence, the rich and famous ... the entertainment media of course jumps all over the story, telling the tale in countless newspaper headlines, a major article in Rolling Stone, another major article in The Village Voice (which wins a 1980 Pulitzer Prize), a book by Bogdanovich about his relationship with Stratten called Killing the Unicorn (make your own judgments, completely off the deep end over the death of his lover, Bogdanovich finds and adequate substitute and begins dating her 14-year-old sister, Louise, eventually marrying her in 1988 when she is a wizened adult, all of 20-years-old ... they divorce in 2001), a special Playbody video, an episode of "E! True Hollywood Stories," and twice turning the tragedy into major motion pictures ... Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Stratten and Bruce Weitz as Snider, and director Bob Fosse's Star 80, with Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts as the doomed couple.


Hemingway as Stratten

Off to their final destinations in Heaven and in Hell, Stratten is cremated and then her ashes interred at Westwood Memorial Park, while Snider is processed by the Malinow & Silverman funeral home and buried at Vancouver's Schara Tzedeck Cemetary.


Doomed

Rest in peace Dorothy ... you left WAY too soon!


Dorothy

MOONSHINE MURDER

8/5/1932 - On the run from warrants for their arrest in the Texas murder of Hillsboro grocery store owner John Bucher, with Bonnie Parker off visiting her mother in Dallas, bandits Clyde Barrow (23 years old) and Raymond Hamilton (19 years old), along with their outlaw pals, Everett Milligan and Ross Dyer, decide to spend a portion of their Saturday evening at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma.  It is a decision that will have fatal repercussions.

                                     
                                                      Clyde at 16
                                           
                                                      Hamilton

Northbound on Route 69 in a stolen Ford, shortly after crossing over the Red River into Oklahoma, and already semi-sloshed on whiskey drunk from Mason jars, the group spots the inviting lights of an open air dance just off the road near the small country town of Stringtown.  A pleasant summer evening, pretty girls to dance with, booze, flickering multicolored Chinese lanterns, safe in a state in which they aren't wanted (yet!), hootenanny fiddles and guitars making music ... it is a combination of delights that is too much for Hamilton.  "I need to shake a leg," the teenage thug tells Clyde ... and not much wiser himself, Barrow agrees to stop and let the gang relax at the dance for a few hours.  Strangers dressed in city slicker suits but driving a mud covered new car, sipping something intoxicating out of glass jars, asking local ladies for dances and more ... it is only a few minutes before the group becomes a subject of interest to the local authorities.

                                   
                                         Deputy Sheriff Eugene Moore

Receiving information at their office in Atoka that some drunks might be disturbing the peace at the local dance, shortly after 10:00 Sheriff Charley Maxwell and 30-year-old Deputy Sheriff Eugene Moore (a husband and father of three young children) drive the eight miles out to Stringtown to investigate and maybe make a couple of easy arrests.  Arriving at the dance, they see men sitting in a car behind the bandstand sipping what appears to be moonshine and approach the group.  "We want to talk to you," Moore calls out, not expecting trouble as he and Maxwell approach the strangers with their weapons holstered.  They are the last words he ever speaks.  Surprised rattlesnakes, Barrow and Hamilton both instantly respond by drawing their weapons and blasting away at the lawmen from almost point-blank range.  In the lead, Maxwell is felled by seven bullet hits to his chest and stomach, but survives, though crippled for life, after hours of emergency surgery.  Moore is not as lucky ... hit in the head by a single bullet from a .30 caliber Stevens automatic rifle, the unlucky officer dies instantly.

                      
                                           Site of the shooting  

Dance over, Clyde floors the Ford out of Stringtown, abandoning fellow hoodlum Milligan in the process.  Not happy at being left behind by his comrades to a mob of citizens that almost lynches him, Milligan responds to the slight by telling the authorities who the shooters were at the dance, and Oklahoma joins Texas in wanting the murderers put six feet under or beyond bars for life.  Sadly though, before that happens there will be many more killings!

                     
                                     Hamilton & Barrow

Deadly dangerous as solos, Hamilton and Barrow are pure poison as a duo.  Separated by arrests, in 1934 Barrow will orchestrate the prison break that frees his former partner from the prison farm at Eastham, Texas, killing a guard in the process, Major M. H. Crowson.  It is the murder that causes Texas to finally call Texas Ranger Frank Hamer out of retirement to deal with Clyde once and for all ... a mission completed with the massacre ambush of Bonnie and Clyde on a rural road in Louisiana on 5/23/1934.  On death row for several murders at the time (he is serving a sentence of 362 years plus death!), Hamilton avoids that exit though ... but fashions one of his own that is just as fitting.

                    
                                              Clyde

While dinner is being served, using a .45 pistol smuggled into the Huntsville prison (along with commandeered bolt cutters, a paint shop ladder, and several reluctant hostage guards), on 7/24/1934, Hamilton, bank robber Irwin Newton "Blackie" Thompson, and Barrow associate Joe Palmer, manage to get out of their death row cells, over the walls of the institution, and vanish into the night in one of two waiting, black V-8 Fords (three other cons that participate in the escape are not as fortunate ... one, Whitey Walker, is shot off the ladder by guards and killed by way of a holed head, while the other two men, Charlie Frazier and Roy Johnson, are seriously wounded and end up handcuffed to beds in the prison hospital).  But not for long!  

                          
                                                 Thompson
                       
                                                    Palmer
                         
                                               Hamilton

Hiding near Amarillo, Thompson is the first to go when he fatally loses a gunfight in December of 1934 with three car loads of unhappy law enforcement agents.  Three weeks after his escape, Palmer is caught sleeping on a railroad embankment in Paducah, Kentucky, while Hamilton is on the loose a little longer, robbing banks in Texas and Mississippi, before being captured in Fort Worth.  

                        
                                               Infamy

There will be no further escapes for either of the men, and on May 10, 1935, both killers are fried to death at Huntsville in the state's electric chair, "Old Sparky" (Palmer first, a sobbing Hamilton perishes five minutes later after the chair has been cleaned up).  Hamilton's last words from behind his leather death mask are, "Well, goodbye, all."  Goodbye indeed ... adios to the Barrow Gang! 

                            
                               Old Sparky