Ellen Louise Stowe was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, but lived in both Louisiana and Nevada before finally moving to Los Angeles as a teenager. Taking a job as a dancer in a strip club, she also adopted the first name Star.
In the 1970s, Star dated Gene Simmons of KISS, and he sent photos of her to Playboy magazine, leading to her becoming their Playmate of the Month for February of 1977. Star also appeared in several publicity photos of the band while she and Simmons were together.
Later on, after her relationship with Simmons ended, she briefly married a man named Peter Maligo, and the couple had a son named Michael. Star subsequently moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1986, where her son eventually joined her. Though she tried once again to find work as an exotic dancer, her plans didn’t pan out, and she sadly fell into sex work and drug use.
Star seemed to get back on the right track in 1991, quitting drugs and giving up prostitution. She moved in with a boyfriend and the pair seemed content for a few years. After they split up in 1996, however, Star ended up back in her old lifestyle.
On the afternoon of March 16th, 1997, three days before her forty-first birthday, Star was spotted in her usual place on the streets of her neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, but after five p.m., she disappeared. Shortly afterward, her partially nude body was discovered dumped on a roadside. She had been strangled.
Authorities believed that Star Stowe’s death was linked to that of Sandra Kay Walters, another sex worker who had been found strangled only a few weeks earlier, on February 25th, 1997. Months later, in November, another woman named Tammy Strunk was murdered in the same manner in the same area, at which point police began to suspect that a serial killer might be responsible.
As of this writing, however, all three murders remain unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 