Star Stowe Bio
Star Stowe was an American glamour model, and exotic dancer. She was born Ellen Louise Stowe on March 19, 1956, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Playboy named her its February 1977 Playmate at 20. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1970s print era, when the magazine reached the height of its mass-market influence.
Stowe had natural breasts, brown eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 32-21-33.
Long before glossy pages framed her, Star Stowe owned the kind of nickname that sounds like a promise. That name—and a set of photos sent to the magazine by Gene Simmons—put her in front of Playboy’s lens, where Pompeo Posar photographed a centerfold that refused to settle for safe poses: she reclines with a Rickenbacker bass guitar, the image punctuated by the visible tattoo that made her the first Playmate to carry ink into the centerfold. The pictorial married rock‑and‑roll attitude to studio glamour in a way that lingered beyond the issue’s newsstand run.
Away from the set, her life read like a companion piece to the shoot. She moved in rock circles, turned up in promotional materials for KISS and in the orbit of touring bands, and later built a family life with Peter Maligo, with whom she had a son. Those years trace a counterpoint between public flashes of glamour and the routines that followed—the small, private details of marriage and motherhood that rarely make the headlines.
The years after the spotlight grew harsher. A 1986 move to Fort Lauderdale preceded work as an exotic dancer and a battle with addiction and prostitution—hard, documented realities that interrupted efforts to stabilize. She managed periods of recovery, then, after a breakup in August 1996, sank again into dangerous circumstances that friends and local reports later described with grim clarity.
On March 16, 1997, just days before her 41st birthday, Star Stowe was found murdered, strangled and abandoned behind a Coral Springs shopping plaza. The slaying remains officially unsolved and has been discussed in connection with a worrying pattern of attacks on vulnerable women in South Florida. For readers who remember the centerfold and for those who followed the story afterward, the portrait that lingers is complicated: an image that captured a particular edge of 1970s glamour and a life that ended too soon, leaving as much question as memory.
