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Paul Snider

Canadian murderer (1951–1980)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ3898158 ↗
Source-derived summary

Paul Leslie Snider (April 15, 1951 – August 14, 1980) was a criminal Canadian nightclub promoter and pimp who murdered his estranged wife, Playboy model and actress Dorothy Stratten. After the murder, Snider killed himself.

Biography

Snider was born in Vancouver to a Jewish family. By the mid-1970s he was a nightclub promoter and pimp. In 1977, he met Dorothy Stratten at a Vancouver-area Dairy Queen, where she was working part-time while still attending high school. In 1979, Snider sent professionally taken nude photographs of Stratten to Playboy magazine and she was chosen as a Playmate for the month of August that year. Snider and Stratten moved to Los Angeles and married on June 1 in Las Vegas.

While Stratten worked as a "bunny" at the Century City Playboy Club, and was cast in a few television and film roles, Snider had engaged in numerous get-rich-quick schemes, including building and selling exercise benches. Stratten supported Snider financially throughout their short marriage.

In 1980, Stratten was named Playboy's Playmate of the Year and was cast in the movie They All Laughed (1981) directed by Peter Bogdanovich, with whom she began an affair.

Editorial summary

“Paul Snider” enters the record as canadian murderer (1951–1980). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Paul, Snider and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1951, 1980, 1977, 1979—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1951-04-15. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Paul, Snider and Canadian.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Paul Snider” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Paul, Snider and Canadian provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3898158. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1980, 1977 and 1979.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Paul Snider” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.