In early November, 1980, less than three full months after Stratten's death, the New York weekly newspaper "The Village Voice" ran a front-page article about the events leading up to her murder. The title of the piece, "Death of a Playmate", by Teresa Carpenter, is something of a misnomer in the sense that it quickly becomes obvious that the author has deliberately placed Snider, not Stratten, at the center of the story. Carpenter in fact spends a great deal of the article framing Snider in a sympathetic light, going so far as to use several paragraphs to cast doubt about whether he committed the murder. In stark contrast, Carpenter treats Stratten in a contemptuous, dismissive manner that at times borders on outright hostility, deriding, in a petty example her teenage poetry as "plodding iambs" and summing up the dead playmate's cut-short acting and modeling career by coldly pronouncing, "Whether or not Dorothy Stratten would have fulfilled her extravagant promise can't be known. Her legacy will not be examined critically because it is really of no consequence."