Dorothy Stratten was a blue-eyed blonde on the brink of the Hollywood big time in 1980.

Instead, she made lurid headlines when her estranged husband, Paul Snider, raped then murdered the reigning Playboy Playmate of the Year with a 12-gauge shotgun blast to the face.

She was 20 years old. Snider, 29, then turned the gun on himself.

Nearly 40 years later, their murder-suicide is trending again thanks to the new ABC News documentary “The Death of a Playmate.”

The true-crime tale retraces Stratten’s whirlwind life — from scooping ice cream in Vancouver, British Columbia, to baring all as a Playboy Bunny in Los Angeles, to her short time as a burgeoning big-screen star opposite Audrey Hepburn.

Dr. Stephen Cushner and Patti Laurman — the couple’s former housemates in LA — knew a guilt-ridden Stratten was going to the home she once shared with Snider to negotiate a divorce settlement. Worried about the scorned man’s increasingly unhinged behavior, they went to check on their model-actress pal.

Cushner knocked to no avail before opening the door to a grisly “picture that never goes away, a mental picture that’s stuck in here forever,” Laurman recalls in the “20/20” production. “It looked like it was a horror movie. A staged horror movie — like mannequins and fake blood.”

But it was actually a very real tragedy some who knew them considered almost inevitable. By many accounts, this centerfold was an angel.

“She didn’t believe that everybody lied, and all the liars came to [Los Angeles],” recounts actor Max Baer Jr., best known as Jethro Bodine on “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

“I said, ‘Do you care about her?’ And [Snider] said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, if you really care about her . . . take her back to Vancouver. She doesn’t belong here.’ I said, ‘She’s nice. She’s got a great figure, got a beautiful face and this town will destroy her.’ ”

How a ‘Jewish pimp’ lured a ‘babe in the woods’

Dorothy Ruth Hoogstratten was an introverted 17-year-old helping her single mom make ends meet by working at a Dairy Queen in 1978 when sleazy Snider first spotted his raw ticket to the big time. Teresa Carpenter, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1980 Village Voice cover story about Stratten’s life and death, recounts how Snider was earning a “decent living” promoting auto shows at the time.

“But it wasn’t enough to accommodate his extravagant taste, so he began to procure girls and pimp them on the side,” Carpenter says in the new doc. “He didn’t keep a low profile in that he drove a black Corvette, wore a mink coat and a Star of David encrusted with jewels that he hung on his chest. He was called the Jewish pimp and he cultivated that.”

But this new girl was different, and Snider set about “grooming” his “class merchandise.” Friends and family detail how the older opportunist was the first man to tell an awkward high school student with no father figure she was beautiful — and even escorted her to her senior prom.

When Playboy launched its “Great Playmate Hunt” for a 25th-anniversary cover model and centerfold, Snider pushed his nubile discovery, then 18, to pose for nude photos without telling her mother. Snider’s brother tells ABC heated fights ensued — but Stratten eventually gave in to her enterprising boyfriend’s demands.

“It took him a little while to talk me into agreeing to taking some test pictures,” says Stratten in a grainy clip from a Canadian talk show. “I had never taken my clothes off for anyone I didn’t know . . . It took me about two weeks to agree.”

Hugh Hefner’s skin scouts, however, were instantly hot for the “innocence” in those test shots.

“I wanted her on the next plane — she was a total babe in the woods,” recounts photo editor Marilyn Grabowski, who worked at Playboy for 43 years. “I cannot remember another Playmate being that — I don’t want to say naive, [but] inexperienced, unused to her surroundings and not used to thinking that she was really beautiful.”

Crippled by shyness, the newly christened Dorothy Stratten lost out on the 25th-anniversary Playmate gig, but went to work — and earned her green card — as a Bunny at the Playboy Club West, where she wasn’t old enough to serve alcohol.

When she was fast-tracked to Playmate of the Month for August 1979, Snider tightened the grip on his asset. To prove her loyalty, and against Hef’s wishes, the 19-year-old married Snider two months before her issue hit newsstands.

From Svengali to shooting star

“She was on the phone with him daily when we shot her,” says Grabowski. “She would call and tell him how great it was going. She thought that whatever success she was having — and it was embryonic at that point — was totally due to Paul.”

Soon, however, Stratten was booking acting roles, from a low-budget horror flick, “Autumn Born,” to guest shots on “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” and “Fantasy Island.” Meanwhile, her flashy husband was exploiting her name and earnings to scheme a series of get-rich-quick male stripper showcases.

In 1980, she was named Playmate of the Year and headlined the Playboy-produced sci-fi spoof “Galaxina.” By then she had met Oscar-nominated director Peter Bogdanovich (“The Last Picture Show,” “Paper Moon”), single after a high-profile split from actress Cybill Shepherd — and cruising at the Playboy Mansion.

He fell “madly in love” with Stratten and wrote a wholesome, fully dressed role for her in his next film, “They All Laughed,” starring opposite A-listers Audrey Hepburn and John Ritter in New York City. It was a major mainstream breakthrough that set her apart from Playboy’s typical T&A trajectory.

Stratten was fast outgrowing her small-time Svengali and seeing through his manipulation, “The Death of a Playmate” reports. In her absence, Snider was banned from the Playboy Mansion by Hefner — who dubbed him a “hustler and a pimp” — and left with no income after Stratten refused to sign off on a poster featuring her face and body.

Suddenly, the big talker’s trophy wife was out of his league.

When Stratten and Bogdanovich returned from location shoots in NYC, they moved in together. She told Snider she wanted out — but felt obligated to compensate him, financially.

Retired Los Angeles homicide detective Richard DeAnda tells ABC’s crew how a desperate Snider scoured classified ads for a shotgun — and bought one on Aug. 13, 1980.

Cushner and Laurman discovered their former housemates’ dead nude bodies the next day. Strands of long blonde hair were clutched in Snider’s blood-soaked right hand, and Stratten had been sodomized, according to the autopsy report.

“He ultimately had to do what he did, and basically — to Hefner, to Bogdanovich, everybody else, to society in general — put up not one but two middle fingers and say, ‘That’s what you get for messing with Paul Snider,’ ” Cushner says.

“I think that if you look at the control factor of . . . forcing sex upon her, I think that’s all a part of his regaining his position of power,” DeAnda adds. “I think it was more realizing that he had no future without her and didn’t want anyone else to have a future.”

In a haunting twist of fate, Stratten was buried at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park — the same final resting place as inaugural Playboy cover model Marilyn Monroe.

“They All Laughed” was released on Aug. 14, 1981. It received mixed reviews at the time but is now referenced by auteur filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. Stratten’s truncated life also inspired the Bob Fosse-directed biopic “Star 80,” featuring Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts, and the TV movie “Death of a Centerfold,” starring Jamie Lee Curtis.

“To be candid, I think I lost my mind a bit,” Bogdanovich wrote in his 1984 book about Stratten, “The Killing of the Unicorn.” The veteran filmmaker spurred controversy by marrying his murdered muse’s younger sister, Louise Stratten, in 1988 — they divorced in 2001 — but he admits he never got over Dorothy.

“I loved her dearly and deeply,” Bogdanovich told Fox News in 2017. “[I miss her] wisdom, her laugh, her warmth, her beauty, her humor, her charm, her elegance [and] her empathy. Everything about her I miss.”