Dreaming of fame and fortune, Julia Sumnicht came to Miami Beach from Wisconsin to break into the exclusive, intoxicating world of modeling.

The 21-year-old met a photographer, who helped the pretty, slender college student make the flashy connections she would need.

But on her third — and final — trip in March 2010, after a night of clubbing on Lincoln Road, Sumnicht crawled into bed and never woke up. An autopsy by the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner ruled she had died of a fatal dose of GHB, a depressant known as the “date-rape drug.’’

Now, more than a year-and-a-half later, Sumnicht’s death is making national headlines from New York to the Midwest to South Florida.

Private investigators hired by her parents have linked Sumnicht’s final hours to a renowned Miami Beach celebrity photographer and his former roommate, a self-professed “king of all pimps’’ who has been convicted of charges related to running escort services and smuggling drugs. They say she died within hours of leaving their South Beach apartment.

While the Miami Beach Police Department considers the case an open investigation and no one has been charged with giving Sumnicht the drugs that killed her, for her parents back home in Green Bay, Wisc., and her college friends at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, the quest for answers has finally yielded some details.

“Nothing will ever bring Julia back,” said her mother, Marie Sumnicht, 49, an elementary school teacher. “But if we can stop this person from repeating something like this, at least we will have helped someone else and get more recognition of how awful this drug is.”

The night began at her photographer friend’s residence. The two met through a Wisconsin friend who knew how badly Sumnicht wanted to make it as a model, her mother said. The friend had photographed her on two previous trips, and they became friends. That night, the two met others at a Miami Heat basketball game, had drinks and went home.

At 12:30 a.m., according to the investigative report, Sumnicht received a text from another photographer: celebrity Miami photographer Zoltan Prepszent. The two met the year before when he also photographed her. They briefly dated.

Sumnicht arranged to meet Prepszent, 36, at Club SET on Lincoln Road.

Around 3 a.m., Sumnicht and Prepszent left the club, arriving at his luxury condo at the Flamingo on Bay Road at 4.03 a.m., according to surveillance-camera footage.

Prepszent, originally from Hungary, according to his Facebook page, owns Zoltan Photography with studios on Alton Road and has photographed celebrities and the elite. Most recently, in September, he shot the exclusive Hamptons Hoedown in New York.

According to the investigative report, Prepszent at that time shared his apartment with Jason Itzler, 44, a notoriously outspoken figure in New York’s underworld.

In September, Itzler was indicted for promoting prostitution and selling illegal drugs through his escort agency, Rockstar Models and Partygirls, according to a Manhattan district attorney’s office news release. In one incident, Itzler charged a client $19,500 for a prostitute and sold him $4,700 worth cocaine.

It was hardly Itzler’s first brush with the law. He has pleaded guilty in relation to an escort service, NY Confidential, and was convicted in 2003 of trying to smuggle ecstasy through Newark Liberty International Airport.