Original subtitles

Working as a Playboy Bunny

was kind of edgy, kind of prestigious

back in the '60s.

Good food and drink. Pretty girls. Good entertainment.

I felt like a superstar for nine hours a day.

The Bunny must always be correct and ready to smile, however tired she is.

But there was a lot of do's and don'ts.

The Bunnies had to be perfect.

If they didn't have large breasts, they augmented them.

And the Playboy Club was full of powerful men.

And even though most of these men might seem harmless,

you never really know.

The situation at the club was a time bomb waiting to explode.

I think jealousy and betrayal can make us act irrational.

She has no idea she's about to fall prey to her worst nightmare.

Around six o'clock, a frantic call came in

to the Georgia Baptist emergency operator.

In the background, there are sounds of a woman in distress.

The man was requesting an ambulance to the apartment of Jackie Hendrickson,

a Playboy bunny.

When the officer arrived on the scene,

he went to the bedroom.

The person was already deceased.

Jackie Hendrickson was born

Jacqueline Sandra Paul in Dallas, Texas.

Jackie as a child was hazel-eyed, rosy cheeks

and tended to be chubbier.

It can be tough as a young girl growing up with the beauty standards

that they had in the 1960s.

Unfortunately, it's all too common for adolescent girls

to be bullied for their appearance

and feeling that lack of self-worth at such an early age

can have a lasting consequence.

As she became more of a teenager, she definitely kind of

grew into her figure, got a little bit more self-confident.

Boys started paying attention to her.

So when Jackie graduates at 18 years old from high school as valedictorian,

she runs off to get married

to Robert Hendrickson, who was a little bit older than her,

and an Air Force cadet.

But the marriage was short-lived.

It only lasted for a few years.

So, Jackie ended up moving to Atlanta.

Jackie started working as a substitute.

And while she did want to be a teacher,

I think she quickly realized

that the pay wasn't gonna be enough for her to sustain herself.

That's when she comes across an ad.

She was a young, single girl.

She was beautiful, and I could definitely see why

she wanted to sign up to be a Playboy Bunny.

She must have felt so intrigued.

You know, working as a Playboy Bunny

was kind of edgy, kind of prestigious back in the '60s.

You can feel like you've finally been told

you're beautiful and you're sexy.

And that can be really rewarding,

especially when you've grown up not feeling that way.

She tried out to be one of the original Playboy Bunnies

at the Playboy Club in Atlanta.

And she really embodied everything

that Playboy wanted in a Bunny at that time.

The first Playboy Club opened in 1960.

It was an iconic part of American history.

Walking into the Playboy Club was really like walking into another world.

You would go and you'd see beautiful women in bunny costume.

You'd take in a show.

You'd get dinner and drinks.

The idea, I think for Hugh Hefner was to make men feel like

they could walk into the magazine.

Relaxed, urban living, good food and drink,

pretty girls, good entertainment.

It's an attempt, as much as possible to kind of bring to life

any of the notions that are popularized in the magazine.

Over the next 5 years, 12 different clubs opened across the country.

And in 1965, they set their sights on Atlanta.

The Playboy Club coming to Atlanta was a really big deal.

In each city, the Playboy Club really strove

to provide the best customer service.

So, when the Playboy Clubs were opening in the south,

there's a whole culture of politeness and warmth,

and you want to find women who embody that.

Keith Hefner, who's Hugh's brother,

was the one that was interviewing and hiring.

I knew Keith pretty well.

He was up at the mansion all the time.

He reminded me of, like, an old movie star.

The interview process involved modeling a bikini,

and I had a French bikini that I could hold in this hand.

They said, "Where's your bathing suit?"

And I said here and he said, "You're hired."

You had a three-by-five card that you put your name on,

your address, your birth date,

and why you wanted that job.

And I put, "I wanted to make money."

Jackie and I both were teaching,

and we both ended up being pushed towards the club, almost,

by a lack of money in that profession.

We made a lot more money at the Playboy Club.

There was definitely a difference.

It was 1,300 girls interviewed,

and they hired 30 of us.

And I was one of the original Bunnies.

And Jackie was one of the original Bunnies there, too.

Not everybody, of course, is cut out to be the Playboy Bunny.

Not everyone feels comfortable wearing

a one-piece bathing suit to work every day.

The Bunny costume lifted you up

and sucked you in in all the right places.

But at the same time, it's a very skimpy outfit

and you've got to go out into this club wearing it in front of so many people.

Wearing these ears takes me way back...

Way back in time. I love 'em.

Ta-da!

Sometimes we would have to put a bobby pin

to make sure 'cause of all the moving around,

sometimes they could get loose and fall.

But you had to cock your ears.

One had to be up one had to be like this.

It's almost like hearing a special song that takes you back to the event.

This takes me back to that event.

I'll put 'em on sometimes at home, just to remind myself...

♪ I am pretty Oh, so pretty ♪

I met Jackie at the Playboy Club.

We had a connection because we both had dark auburn hair.

Uh, I don't think hers was real.

Mine wasn't real.

But sometimes people would get us confused if they saw us on the floor.

Let's give it a try, go along this way, okay?

Away we go. Low carry at the moment.

Low carry.

Okay, faster.

Training was really rigorous

because they have to memorize the entire manual.

There's a lot of rules.

Jackie seemed to be a rule follower.

And she was tough.

Quickly, quickly, quickly. Quick.

High carry.

Reverse!

There was a lot of dos and don'ts.

No jewelry. You can't let your tray down.

Arm has gotta be positioned at a certain angle.

Your ears had to be a certain angle.

You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Remember to smile.

Remember to do your Bunny dip.

Oop! There we go. Whoa!

Jackie and all of us had to be perfect.

We had to pass inspection every day.

You had to brush your tail for 30 minutes.

The hair had to be perfect.

Makeup had to be perfect.

They did a weigh in every Monday,

if you gained three pounds or lost three pounds,

you could be suspended until you either gained or lost it back.

For someone like Jackie,

who has that history of insecurity about weight...

Imagine the pressure that that must have put on her.

But being a Bunny could be beneficial.

So, my, regularly, Playboy magazine would do a pictorial

featuring different Bunnies from their clubs around the country.

In 1966, we heard they were going to be doing an issue

on the Bunnies of the south, and we had Bunnies of Dixie.

Some Bunnies wanted to be featured in the magazine.

And different girls, you know, talking about how they were gonna try to be in there

and maybe even be a centerfold.

So, Jackie gets an opportunity to be photographed and interviewed for this

Bunnies of Dixie spread.

This is the August 1966 issue

featuring the Bunnies of Dixie.

You have a very cute photo of a Playboy Bunny at the door.

We couldn't wait to get it. When that magazine came out,

we couldn't wait to get a hold of it.

Everybody was, like, grabbing it, trying to see, turnin' pages.

And I remember one girl said, "Oh, my boobs look like pancakes."

I'm looking at all these photos

and it's a pretty decent sized photo spread.

You have some topless photos.

A lot of lifestyle photos.

You can see a lot of the Bunnies here fit that 1960s Southern, fresh-faced.

But they didn't publish Jackie's photo.

Her pictures didn't get into the magazine

and she was very upset about it.

She wanted in there.

She felt very slighted.

Jackie was competitive.

I think that that would have been a blow to her ego.

Thinking your photo is going to come out in the magazine

and then having it be the one that's not

must have been really hurtful.

Like, "What's wrong with me that they didn't pick my picture?"

So, for her, I think this message she's gotten is that

she's not perfect.

She's okay enough for this, but she's not perfect enough to be in the magazine,

and she's gonna go out to figure out how to be perfect.

Unaware she's about to fall prey to her worst nightmare.

Now, some people never stopped

playing with dolls, even when they grow up,

especially if they're Bunny dolls.

At the Atlanta Playboy Club,

I felt like a superstar for eight hours, nine hours a day.

You go in and you put your costumes on, your makeup,

bunny ears and you are it.

In 1967, the Playboy Club in Atlanta

has solidified itself as the it spot in the city.

Where you can rub elbows with the best people in town.

Everybody wanted to be there.

It was the place to be.

You know, you were really nothing, socially, unless you had a card, my God.

I just remember stepping out on that floor,

being happy, knowing that I was gonna meet

all these important people that were shaping Atlanta.

Actors, movie stars.

Singers, whatever, in town they were gonna be in there.

The Playboy Club is like a home away from home

for the busy and worried gentlemen of the town

and from hundreds of miles away.

After all, you don't exactly have this kind of service at home.

The Playboy Club was full of powerful men.

But Bunnies were not allowed to date customers.

They were allowed to date top executives,

but not the customers, because they wanted to create an aura around the Bunnies

and have them feel untouchable.

The customers could come in and fantasize about the Bunnies,

but they couldn't take them home.

Keith Hefner explained it to us in training that

he definitely did not want the Playboy Club to be known as a pickup place.

That you could go in there and, you know, pick up a hot chick.

The Bunnies might have been tempted to break the rules.

But, even though most of these men might seem harmless,

you never really know.

One of those prominent members is Dr. Warren Brown.

He's a plastic surgeon in the city.

Dr. Brown was something of a prodigy.

He graduated medical school at 23,

he went on to do his surgery residency here at Georgia Baptist,

even had a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic.

So it was really impressive for him to do that all at a young age.

My dad was intelligent beyond the wildest dreams.

He wanted to achieve the highest level of anything he did.

My grandfather was, I guess you could say, like, a super genius,

and he was extremely well-known in Atlanta.

And he was very charismatic.

My dad's nickname was "The Darling of Georgia Baptist."

I think he got it because he probably was a flirt.

Dr. Brown was exactly who Hugh Hefner would've created the Playboy Club for.

And he was a frequent visitor and a fan.

For Jackie, the appearance of Dr. Brown in the Playboy Club

might've seemed like divine intervention.

Looking at all the photos of those who were chosen in the magazine,

one thing Jackie did notice is, of course,

is that each of those women had that perfect Playboy bosom.

I think that big busts were important to probably all the Bunnies,

if you got right down to it. You wanted to have something

that's pushed up out of your costume.

But the girls felt that because so much emphasis

was put on the breasts at that time,

that if they didn't have large breasts,

that they augmented them.

Definitely having bigger breasts would help you get noticed in Playboy,

and get pictured in Playboy.

Getting breast implants in the '60s, though, was quite rare.

That didn't really become too common in Playboy until the 1980s.

In fact, before that, Hef said that he used to tell the girls

to go on birth control to get bigger boobs.

For Jackie, getting a boob job is about more than just

transforming herself physically.

This is opening the door to new opportunities.

Maybe she finally will be able to get featured in Playboy.

And here's a man who has the ability to give her the body she thinks she needs,

and she has the opportunity to wait on him.

So in July of 1967,

Jackie moves forward with her plans of getting a boob job,

and she goes to Dr. Brown to get it done.

After getting this major surgery done,

Dr. Brown gives Jackie a certain amount of time

that she's supposed to take off work.

But Jackie wants to show her boobs off, right?

So she goes back to work earlier than scheduled.

I actually did the same thing when I had my breast implants.

I was working at a pancake house in college,

and I went to do a shift like the next day or something,

and everybody thought I was such a zombie.

It's a painful surgery,

and you'll be kind of out of it for a couple of days.

But sometimes you overestimate yourself.

Because of the pressure on the boobs when you're having to lift those girls up,

there were complications because you probably weren't supposed to do that.

So she calls Dr. Brown because she's really worried about her complications.

And he agrees to meet with her at her apartment after hours to see what's going on.

So in this after-hours appointment,

things go from professional to passionate pretty quickly,

and the two start a romantic interaction.

I would always say if you were to date

someone that was a member and it did happen,

you just wanted to make darn sure it was somebody worth losing your job over.

It doesn't take long for this relationship to really solidify,

and from then on, they are seeing each other pretty much every day.

Just like the Bunnies maintain an air of mystery,

sometimes that went for the clientele as well.

And he does have a secret.

Dr. Brown confesses to Jackie that he's actually married with two kids.

So Dr. Brown and his wife Marjorie actually met when they were both undergrads.

My mom was a socialite.

She loved being in that element.

That was who she was.

They were members of the Country Club.

Our home was in a very prestigious area here in Atlanta.

We lived on about seven acres.

It was spectacular.

My mom wanted it to be mirrored after the governor's mansion here.

She wanted those enormous columns on the front.

And for whatever reason, he thought it was okay to have an affair.

But that was really the way it was in the '60s.

You know, I think a lot of men,

especially men who were more prestigious,

I think it was very commonplace for them to have someone on the side.

And I believe that my mom knew my dad was having an affair.

She would call and ask him where he was and when was he going to be home?

And sometimes he would answer, and sometimes he wouldn't.

So, I would think it would have been kind of lonely

because he really wasn't home that much at night.

It was almost like with my mom,

you know, you married the good girl,

and then you play around with the rest.

I'm sure Marjorie would be embarrassed

knowing that her husband has a mistress.

Any wife would feel terrible if her husband's having an affair.

Regardless of who.

I'm sure it's worse that it's a Playboy Bunny.

And I think jealousy and betrayal can make us act irrational.

She was angry.

Because she's like, "What's wrong with me?"

Jackie was a little more down to Earth in a sense.

In that, you know, because she liked fishing and hunting

and doing those kind of things,

which my mom would not have.

So, she realized in some way, she was being replaced.

To my grandmother, image was extremely important.

She didn't want anyone to think anything

bad was going on.

But I think it was everything for my mom to keep that perfect image.

The judgment would have been more than she could have handled.

And sometimes, in the heat of the moment,

that can be a motive for murder.

So Jackie is now in a place where

she's found out that her very successful and highly coveted boyfriend

is married.

And if her job finds out about the affair,

she is facing termination after going through great lengths

to succeed at this job.

So she's at a crossroads in a lot of different ways.

But Dr. Brown tells Jackie that his marriage to his wife, Marjorie,

is not really a happy one,

or that it's gonna end soon,

that Jackie is the one he really loves.

That's kind of a cliche.

When a married man is having an affair,

he always says he's gonna leave the wife

and rarely does.

She wants to see where it goes,

so she continues the affair.

But there's this rising tension that Jackie, uh, must feel being hidden.

And Jackie really starts to have a hard time at work.

So, in October of 1967,

tensions at the Playboy Club reached a boiling point

for Jackie.

She gets into this interaction with a bartender.

We had a certain order of how you had to order drinks

and which order they came in.

Either she was off-game that day,

but she ordered wrong.

And the bartender, which they did,

I had it done to me one time.

They'd take the booze and they'd just pour it all over the tray,

which means you have to go to the back of the line and start over.

I can envision Jackie getting into a fight with the bartender

because I did it myself

so often.

He was not a nice man.

She was angry,

and Jackie did have a temper.

But I think there was a lot more going on

than was just her argument with the bartender that night.

So Jackie walked out.

She quit.

When Jackie quit,

she wanted Dr. Brown to take care of her.

So Dr. Brown actually does come in and save her in a way.

He gives her a job in his medical office

as an office assistant,

but insists that she needs to work

under her maiden name, Sandra Paul,

so that nobody will make any connections about what her previous employment was.

She does so well that Dr. Brown actually trains her

to be a medical assistant.

And he decides to move her into the top floor

of a 64-unit complex that he owns.

She then, starts managing the complex that she's also living in.

She's taking rent.

She's managing complaints.

She's setting up maintenance calls.

Jackie is making herself indispensable.

She is managing this apartment complex.

She is working in his office.

She is his medical assistant.

She is going on after-hours calls.

She starts to see herself as his real-life partner,

as she even buys two matching wedding bands for them both to wear.

Every single aspect of his life,

she's a part of it,

except those promises he made at the beginning

that he was gonna leave his wife one day aren't happening.

So at this point, Dr. Brown and Jackie have been dating

for almost two years.

Jackie, of course, has the ability to play house with Dr. Brown,

but she doesn't get the big house,

the socialite lifestyle,

the access to the elite membership clubs,

and all of these things that his actual wife, Marjorie, gets.

And that's something that she really wants.

As Jackie starts to put pressure on Dr. Brown

to do what he said he was gonna do,

maybe divorce his wife,

he really pulls away.

So it's the opposite of what she wants.

And Dr. Brown is not exactly giving up his family life.

He has his wife, Marjorie,

and they're living this really elaborate life in Atlanta.

That's really important to both him and Marjorie.

So everyone in this love triangle had a lot to lose.

For Dr. Brown, it was his family and his reputation.

For Marjorie, it was everything she had,

not only her kids, but her status, her income.

And for Jackie...

it was her sanity.

So this is a breaking-point moment for Dr. Brown,

where a lot of the things that he has worked really hard to attain,

both in his personal and professional life,

are now at risk.

He wants to have the best of both of those worlds

without having to give up either.

But he can't.

Whatever he decides...

will be really hard to come back from.

On February 19, 1969,

someone makes an urgent call to Georgia Baptist Hospital,

requesting A-negative blood and an ambulance right away...

...and instructs them to prepare for a gunshot victim.

In the background, there's sounds of a woman in distress.

When the officer arrived on the scene,

he went to the bedroom...

and found

Dr. Warren Brown.

And he had a gunshot wound to the upper chest, under his armpit.

Dr. Brown was already deceased.

The female was Jackie Hendrickson.

The room was just in complete disarray.

There were clothes.

The bed was unmade.

Her pocketbook had been turned inside out.

Contents were thrown all over the floor.

And there were foreign syringes found

in close proximity to the body.

And Jackie related that the doctor had instructed her

to get syringes out of his medical bag

and begin to try to aspirate

fluid from his lungs.

She was trying to save his life.

She was giving him mouth-to-mouth

to try to restore the breathing.

But that ultimately proved not to be successful.

Then Jackie related that...

It was her.

She had shot Dr. Brown.

She said that it had been an accident.

She was moving a gun from one location to another,

and that he had grabbed her arm

and the gun discharged accidentally.

Oh, no!

The night my dad was killed,

I remember my brother just saying,

"Our dad is dead."

And Mom was just

pleading and crying,

"Please walk through that door.

Please come home."

And that would have been when my innocence was shattered.

And it shattered our whole family.

Jackie, at the police station, is really cooperative.

She's explaining how she met Dr. Brown

as a Playboy Bunny,

how they quickly fell in love.

The detectives treated it as an accidental shooting.

They gave her free rein to say whatever she wanted to.

And she related

the details of their relationship

and her belief that they were to be married

and he was going to divorce his wife and so forth.

Jackie explained that on that day,

she essentially had the day off.

Then Jackie gets a call from her friend,

who says that she had

visited Dr. Brown's office after hours to make an appointment.

And while she was there, she saw Dr. Brown's secretary

looking sort of disheveled

and noticed that Dr. Brown had lipstick on his forehead.

For Jackie, that was a bombshell.

Then, around 5:30 p.m., she heard Dr. Brown

coming into the apartment.

And Jackie was sitting on the edge of the bed,

waiting to confront him about his infidelity.

When she confronted him...

Jackie indicated that

Dr. Brown blew up.

Jackie and her statement

painted a picture of...

Dr. Brown being out-of-control angry,

that he was cursing.

I understand that he and Jackie did do some hunting,

and her apartment was full of guns.

And then there was a struggle for a gun...

and the gun discharged.

The evidence at the scene was very consistent

with her claim of accidental shooting.

The powder on the cuff of the shirt of Dr. Brown

would indicate someone perhaps holding a hand over the gun

at the time it was fired,

or in close proximity to the gun.

So it fit into her argument

that he had grabbed her hand and it... it discharged accidentally.

I first heard about Dr. Brown being killed

early over morning when I woke up

to the news.

I personally think that it was an accident.

I don't think she would do that on purpose

because she would know

that what her future would be...

if she shot him. She knows it.

And she loved him.

She loved him and she wanted to save him.

It was one of those,

"Oh, my God, what have I done?"

But interestingly enough,

during the investigation,

detectives examined the revolver that was used

to kill Dr. Brown.

It was a five-shot revolver...

and there were two empty shells

in the revolver itself...

Meaning that the gun had been shot twice.

It's highly unlikely that it would go off accidentally...

Twice.

Jackie swears that this was an accident.

She says she absolutely

did not intend to pull the trigger.

But there was one bullet

that had struck Dr. Brown,

and there was a second gunshot in the door.

And the state crime laboratory examined the revolver.

They had said that it would take nine pounds of pressure

to cause the trigger to be pulled

and the hammer to fall on the cartridge.

Nine pounds is a significant amount

of trigger pull.

We figured that

with that amount of trigger pull,

Jackie Hendrickson could not have accidentally shot Dr. Brown.

And to know that you had to pull it so hard to fire it,

not just once, but twice,

there was something in her that wanted him dead.

Detectives then spoke with Jackie's friend,

who confirmed that she went to Dr. Brown's office that day, after hours,

and saw Dr. Brown with this kiss on his forehead,

and that she told Jackie about this interaction.

The friend says Jackie was

extremely jealous of Dr. Brown.

And her response

to learning that there was an affair going on,

was that she was angry

and perhaps violently so.

When she found out that he was...

one had wandering eyes,

that really lit the fire.

And she made the comment, uh,

that she was going to whip some bitch's ass.

And that the friend

might have to come get her at jail because of that.

Jackie, in her statement,

doesn't portray any of that.

She doesn't go into any depth

about the anger that she had

toward Dr. Brown.

She described it as a terrible argument.

It was completely self-serving.

And the evidence indicated it went further than that.

This situation with Jackie and Dr. Brown

was a timebomb waiting to explode.

And this set the fuse to the timebomb.

The case made big headlines.

It didn't say who she was or anything other than

"ex-Playboy Bunny had killed her lover."

Because there was

a Playboy Bunny involved, that makes it

bigger news in the community.

It adds that element of salaciousness.

This case was sensational in Atlanta news.

It was a Playboy Bunny.

It was a famous plastic surgeon.

It was a well-to-do family.

A shooting, affairs.

You know, it was everything that makes

a shocking, sensational story,

and especially the time period.

Atlantans were enamored with it.

The trial began on June 3, 1969,

and it was an all-male jury.

So we have Jackie, who's this picture-perfect Playboy Bunny,

sitting in the courtroom with an all-male jury trying to figure out

if the murder of Dr. Brown was premeditated or an accident.

I think one of the things

that we really had to overcome

was the sympathy for Jackie by the jury.

I mean, here...

was a girl that thought,

and... and apparently honestly believed

that this man was gonna leave his wife

and his children and marry her,

and she was gonna be rich and happy for the rest of her life.

Dr. Brown was not going to be looked at as a likable person.

But the theory that we had was that she was extremely jealous,

and she really, at that point,

began running out of control.

Jackie Hendrickson, in her testimony,

portrayed herself not as the...

an angry, vindictive person,

but we argued that it was murder.

But the jury found Jackie Hendrickson guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

The, uh, jury imposed a sentence of five years.

That might be considered light

in most situations.

But here you've got a sympathetic defendant.

And I just think that 12 men got back there

and they figured this girl didn't deserve

more than five years for what she did.

I think she kind of got off easy,

if I'm being honest.

I think she deserved way more time for taking someone's life

and taking a man away from his wife and two young children.

I didn't think it was an accident at all.

I really think she was angry.

Looking back on things,

I believe my dad was gonna stay with my mom.

I think the amount of time he'd already been with Jackie,

the honeymoon period was over.

And I almost wonder if he was trying to find a way out.

But unfortunately, this was a fatal attraction.

My mom had to sell the house.

She was depressed the rest of her life.

She never got over it,

and it tore us apart.

From a very young age,

I knew that my grandfather passed away

when my mom was really little,

and I knew that it involved a Playboy Bunny.

And I always thought that Playboy Bunnies were really cool.

I grew up watching The Girls Next Door,

and I wanted to be a Playboy Bunny at one point in time,

as crazy as that might sound.

I think Playboy Bunnies are really beautiful, and successful, and smart.

I think that Jackie just was a bad one.

If Jackie had been the true Playboy Bunny

and not fraternized with the customer, any customer,

this would never have happened.

This story had so many twists and turns for me

and things I could relate to, you know.

Feeling like you're not good enough

if you don't make the cut to be in the magazine

and being in a relationship where you feel like

you're not being treated right.

So it's hard not to have

some empathy for Jackie's story when you think about it.

But the turn it took was so incredibly tragic

and inexcusable.

And at the end of the day,

you have to remember there's some children out there

who lost their father.

And there's no excuse for that.

Adrian was found unresponsive.

We agreed immediately it was murder.

The one person that benefitted from her death whether

he wanted it or not was

Hugh Hefner.

I think Hugh must have been terrified.

Hugh Hefner basically had an "X" on his back.