It was a huge deal to be a Playboycenterfold back in the '70s,
and Star Stowe was at the center of that.
Star was different from the other girls,
and she loved that.
[Pat LaLama] She probably had the feeling that this will last forever.
Sadly, that rarely happens in this world.
[Jeff Olson] Hef made it very clear to Star
that this is what you had to do
if you want to keep this lifestyle.
It was really an indoctrination.
You were groomed to be a certain way.
He admitted that he drove her to a location
and dropped her off for a rendezvous.
It's quite a coincidence, wouldn't you think?
At this point, it was really starting to look
like this could be the work of a serial killer.
If you go down the road of false promises,
there's no way out.
[Dennis Pickering] It was the 16th of March.
I received a phone call to respond to a scene.
I think it was about 3:30 in the afternoon.
We had an unidentified white female,
late 20s, maybe early 30s...
...and she was partially nude from the waist up,
laying over in the wood line behind the Eckerd drug store.
She was facedown
with one of her arms, I think, was underneath her.
Upon examination of the body,
they found that she had been strangled.
I noticed she had a star tattooed on her body,
and I kind of kiddingly said to the detective,
"You know," I said, "Back in the '70s,
there was a girl who was dating Gene Simmons
who had a tattoo in the very same spot.
She was a centerfold forPlayboy."
And he says, "What are the odds of that?"
Star Stowe was the Playmate of the Month in February 1977.
It was a huge deal to be a centerfold back in the '70s.
The sexual revolution was really at its height.
Almost 6 million people were reading Playboyevery month.
Just a layout in a magazine would make you much more famous
than it would today.
And Star would've been at the center of that.
I worked at the Playboy Mansion West in Holmby Hills
from 1978 to 1980.
I was a hostess at the front door.
I would guide people through the party.
Once you were in that house, you had to play the game,
and Star was very good at it.
She loved the whole idea of thePlayboy world.
It was everything, and she was gonna climb to the top.
The beginning of Star's story must have felt
like an absolute dream come true.
But she had no idea about the dark side ofPlayboy
or the way things were going to go.
She was from Little Rock, Arkansas,
and she had a small-town-girl vibe.
And she had aspirations of being a dancer
and a musician.
[Olson] She got out as soon as she could.
She wanted to explore,
and she wanted to be in a rock group.
So as soon as she was 18, she left for Las Vegas.
It was 1975, and she was at the Sahara Hotel,
and there's Gene Simmons without his makeup.
I don't know how she recognized him,
but she did, and they got to talking,
and they kinda took a shine to each other.
She said he was just an adorable guy,
really nice, down to earth,
not like his persona on KISS.
They hit it off almost immediately,
and it turned into a 3-year-long relationship.
She was crazy about him,
and he was crazy about her.
[LaLama] You look at Gene Simmons and Star Stowe,
and you think, "Well, they sort of were part of writing the original book
on how to be a famous couple in La-La Land."
[Holly Madison] She's a young, small-town girl
hanging out with some of the biggest rockstars in the world.
It just must have felt like such an incredible experience.
Gene was a big act at the peak of his career,
and she was everything to him.
And it wasn't just a romance between the two.
There was actually a romance between Star and the band.
She was their muse.
In his own autobiography,
Gene Simmons takes credit for suggesting to Star
that she send her materials toPlayboy.
Gene had sent the pictures in,
and there was a scout that went out, then reported back.
And from there, it just spiraled.
So many beautiful women were trying out to be Playmates each month,
and if one of the photos would have come along
with a recommendation from a rockstar like Gene Simmons,
that would've definitely stood out.
[Olson] Hef saw the pictures and loved it
and thought it was great
and wanted to make her centerfold.
That was her big, big moment.
She was flown to Chicago,
because that's where all the main shoots for the girls was always done.
In the 1970s, Chicago was still the home of Playboy and its main hub.
The Playboy Mansion in Chicago was definitely just as extravagant
and decadent and crazy as the Playboy Mansion West in LA.
Hef had it customized in kind of a way that nobody had ever seen before.
He had this giant indoor pool, an underwater tiki bar,
like, a fireman's pole, a bowling alley.
[Donna Pazdera] So, while she was in Chicago
for a photoshoot for the centerfold,
her life at Playboy really seemed like a nonstop party.
She was hanging out and partying with all kinds of rockstars
such as Elton John, Rod Stewart,
Blackie Lawless from W.A.S.P.
And all this attention being paid to her,
it had to have been incredible.
[Olson] When she did her shoot in Chicago,
she said it was just, like, anything you wanted,
you could ask for there, you could get it.
It would be brought to you. They catered to you.
You were just like an A-list movie star.
This was a 20-year-old girl from Arkansas.
It just makes your head spin,
because she is in a totally new, different world and situation.
[Stella Tetenbaum] This was her big moment.
You were the Playmate of the Month.
That was a really big thing.
That wasn't just a pictorial where people were just going through it.
It was like, "There I am.
I'm the one."
I have personal friends who did a lot of photography for Playboy,
and they would express to me
that many of the women were uncomfortable, insecure, afraid.
Uh, not Star Stowe.
She walked into that photography studio ready to go.
It definitely stands out among the history of all the Playboycenterfolds.
It's very unique.
The whole motif of the spread was that she was this rock and roll girl,
which was incredibly appropriate,
because that's what she was.
There were pictures of rockstars on the walls behind her.
She was holding this blue Rickenbacker bass guitar.
If you look at her face, you see the sultry baby face.
So it was sort of this combination of the innocence,
but yet the sultry, vixen-y vibe.
She really saw herself as this radical, kick-bottom kind of rock chick.
[Madison] Playboy tends to stick to one style with their centerfolds,
just, like, an upscale, kind of generic look.
And Star very much had a theme, you know?
She was trying to get into the music industry.
She was dating a very famous musician.
So they gave her kind of this glam rock centerfold.
It's really nice to read her words in the article
and kinda get a feel of who she is and what she was like.
Here, she says, "Once in LA," she recalls,
"While Gene was onstage, I flashed him.
I just opened my jacket for a split second
and I wasn't wearing anything underneath."
[reading]
"Sometimes, when I'm in the audience watching Gene perform,
every once in a while during the concert,
it seems like he's looking directly at me
and it's such a great feeling."
[reading]
A normalPlayboy centerfold pictorial would be nude,
but you would usually only see a woman from, like, the front or back.
[Tetenbaum] Star was at the forefront.
She was the first one with a tattoo.
She was the first one to do the full-front, open leg,
and it was a turning of everything.
It got more and more like soft porn
than the tasteful, pin-up girl thing
that they started out with.
When her centerfold came out in 1977
for the month of February,
it was huge.
She's the most popular girl in America for a month.
Star found it very overwhelming
because of all the attention.
She received a lot of money,
and from going from poverty almost
to getting anything you want,
uh, a lot of people can't handle that.
[LaLama] She probably had the feeling that,
"I've made it, and this will last forever."
Sadly, that rarely happens in this world,
because for all the glamor and all the excitement,
there is an ugly underbelly breathing beneath the surface.
[Tetenbaum] I think it was hard for Star.
This little girl from Arkansas,
she didn't know the ways of Hollywood yet.
She didn't know about the mansion and what was expected.
It was a very, very scary time.
It was a dangerous time
underneath and behind the closed doors.
Star didn't understand much about what would happen
after she was used up
and there wasn't somebody there to catch her.
[Olson] Star went to her shoot in Chicago,
and then she came to Los Angeles.
She was living in Hollywood and at the mansion.
Playboywas huge at that time.
Everybody who was anybody was at the mansion.
She used to tell me that she was hit on all the time.
Everybody that went up there wanted to be with her.
If you drove down the street
where the Playboy Mansion was situated,
you would never imagine, oh, my gosh,
the stuff that goes on behind those walls.
It was like a whole open house
all the time, 24/7.
I kid you not. It was just a whole lifestyle.
[Madison] When people think ofPlayboy or, like,
crazy stories from the mansion,
it definitely stems from the 1970s.
I think even in Hollywood, nobody had seen anything like this before.
There would just be, like, orgies in the grotto
and all kinds of crazy things happening upstairs.
When Star first got there,
she literally was like a little, you know, flower child.
She had this straight, long hair,
very, like, sensual, beautiful,
just stunning.
And she was a really good friend.
But she also was friends with a lot of the girls in the house,
which was unusual,
'cause it was a very catty atmosphere.
There was hierarchy, and Star was a Playmate,
so that made her on the upper level.
I was Hugh Hefner's personal valet
from 1978 to '82.
We would have a lot of conversations
because she found out I was from Maryland,
and she was from Arkansas,
and we would talk about Southern food and things like that.
One of the main rules at the mansion
was we were not allowed to talk to any of the girls.
So it all had to be done in secret
in the pantry where the butlers hang out.
[LaLama] So, not only is she reaping the rewards
of being Miss February Centerfold 1977.
She later on becomes
Playboy Japan's Centerfold of the Year.
She must have just been feeling like she was living the life,
and she was.
Star was different from the other girls that were living there.
She knew she was valuable to thePlayboy magazine.
She had so many fans
from her centerfolds, from her pictorials.
I think she knew her power.
We had a nickname for her, "El Tigre."
Because she was feisty, and she loved that.
She was a fighter.
[Madison] Sometimes when we're young,
we feel like we're more invincible than we are.
But I don't think there's any way
Star could have been prepared
for the type of debauchery that awaited her.
The parties were just extravagant,
and Star and all the starlets followed Hefner around in the party.
It was unreal.
I remember Star showed up, I think it was Midsummer Night's Dream party,
with a pacifier and a baby diaper and nothing else.
She did what nobody else would do.
Star was always at Hefner's table at the time,
in the era that I was there.
She was one of the main beautiful girls.
[Olson] She and Hef were very close.
Hef liked her personality.
He liked her body,
and being seen with her was good for him, too.
In Star's era, a lot was expected.
There were definitely a strict set of rules
the Playmates had to follow.
[Stella] The rules basically were you're Hefner's girl.
Nobody else can have you...
...if you were Playmate of the Month. That was it.
You had to have scheduled sex with Hefner privately two days a week.
[Olson] She was with Gene right at that time,
but she told me she had slept with Hef more than once.
I think she felt she had to do it
if she wanted to continue because she had heard from other Playmates
that you really had to sleep with Hef
to advance your career.
And it wasn't just Hef.
Anybody that came there that was important.
If they came to her and chose her,
then she had to sleep with them.
Hef made it very clear to Star that this was what you had to do
if you wanted to keep this lifestyle.
[Stella] It was really an indoctrination.
You were groomed to be a certain way.
And that was your normal.
Star would be an ambassador for Hefner
and go to the different advertising account executives
and do a lot of schmoozing and pleasing the men.
And there were a lot of favors.
There was always a lot of favors.
She was expected to be a play thing.
You can't keep that lifestyle up and, and be okay
and wake up and feel good, you know?
[Olson] At times she was as happy as can be and feeling great,
and other times she was depressed.
I could see it was everything that was being forced upon her.
Being forced to sleep with men.
She told me, "I don't want to sleep with these guys, they're gross."
Star was basically advised to take drugs
and alcohol because you gotta party,
and when these people want you, you have to do this.
So, you increase your alcohol consumption,
adding more and more and more until you really don't care what you do.
They had an extensive open bar at all times,
and they also had extensive drugs.
There was always drugs.
There was certain places they would keep the drugs,
and Star would go to these places.
She knew where to open the box.
take out, shoot shoot, snort snort.
Hefner would usually give the girls Quaaludes, that was his thing.
[Olson] It was a date rape drug basically,
which would make her relaxed and lethargic, really didn't care.
After a year of the fame and the glamor
and the fast lane and the sex
and the orgies and... It hardens you.
She was just in a haze.
[Madison] Star was really a fish out of water.
She was brought into this environment where,
you know, if things are starting to go off the rails for her,
who's gonna notice?
You know, her family and her friends aren't close by.
[Stella] Some girls had a certain limitation,
and they knew it.
Star didn't have that.
She didn't know how to stop.
She needed to be put in rehab,
but that wasn't an option
because you can't be normal and straight
and live that lifestyle.
You have to be out of it...
...to drown out all the hell that you're gonna have to go through...
...on a daily basis.
At one time she told me...
..."I think I'm addicted to coke...
...'cause I can't sleep.
How do I kick this stuff? I, I don't know how to go cold turkey."
She was feeling really down and depressed.
She told me that a few times,
she would, just out of the clear blue,
start crying and weeping uncontrollably.
[Stella] It was really hard for her to be in a relationship with Gene
because of all the other stuff going on.
And Gene was also a womanizer,
and he was in the mansion a lot.
And I think it was hard for Star,
because she really wanted him to be all hers.
[Stefan] She had told me a few times that
she was having problems with Gene
because he seemed to be a purist.
Gene always claimed that he never did any drugs.
So, when he found out that up at the mansion
she was doing coke, he was very angry with her.
And so, she was always...
...torn between Gene's world...
...and Hefner's world, where there was so many drugs.
Who knows what goes on behind closed doors,
but it is understood that the relationship became quite difficult,
and he eventually moved on.
[Stella] Star had such a hard time when it was over with Gene.
That whole flower child thing kinda disappeared,
and she became extremely wild.
You know, just really out of control.
It was really sad to watch.
She woke up after a while and realized that she wasn't
getting out of it what she wanted,
but Playboywas definitely getting what they wanted out of her.
It's too late to change once you get wrapped up inPlayboy,
especially if they've gotten you addicted to drugs and alcohol.
It became a real nightmare.
[Madison] I don't think Star could have ever imagined in her wildest dreams
that her decision to go toPlayboy
would have a deadly outcome.
[Stella] After Star got her main centerfold,
and all of the work that she had that first year,
she realized that there was another crew coming up.
There was always turnover,
because once you start to lose that perfect 18, 19-year old skin,
they see that you're not that fresh young girl next door.
You pretty much are over.
You're just a child, but in their world, you know, you're used up.
[Madison] There was a real disconnect in thePlayboy world
because they expect Star to be this party girl,
but then the second she develops a problem with it, she's the problem.
It was like that even when I was there.
It was seen as, like, a character flaw within that person.
So, it was a really weird, hypocritical attitude.
[Olson] Three years after her centerfold came out,
things were going downhill very fast.
She couldn't handle all this that was going on,
and then that's when she got abusive with Hef...
...and told him basically to piss off and she didn't need him,
and that's the one person you can't get abusive with.
Almost immediately, everything with Playboy turned against her,
and that was the end for her.
They didn't want her at the mansion anymore.
She was basically cut off for everything.
Advertising, promotions, personal appearances.
All of her income now is completely turned off.
[Madison] The moment that Star was kicked out,
it must have just felt like she lost everything.
Even if bad things were happening to Star at the mansion,
that was all she knew at that time.
Those were the only people she knew in L.A., that was her income.
That was her job, it was everything.
She didn't have any outside resources.
She was 22 years old.
She's now addicted to drugs and alcohol,
and it just must have felt like she was adrift.
[Olson] Star stayed in L.A. for a little bit,
but it wasn't very long... the Playboy corporation,
had put a stigma on her and her name,
and no one really wanted to hire her or do anything,
'cause they're a powerful company.
All those people that she met, like Gene Simmons and Rod Stewart,
there were no calls coming to her from them.
And she was realizing that that was all over with.
So, she decided to leave...
...and go to Las Vegas and try something there.
In 1981, she married Peter Maligo,
who was an aspiring musician, rock musician, of course.
They had a son,
and within a couple of days after giving birth,
he forced her to go out and start stripping
so that they could make money.
[Olson] She made decent money.
That's so she could support a family, easily.
People still wanted to see a centerfold.
Uh, they still wanted to see the star that was at her bikini line.
So, that was her gimmick, and that worked.
Most friends of hers said that this relationship with this guy,
Peter Maligo, was not great.
I don't think it's a great relationship
when you have a baby and then, you know,
a few days later, your husband's like,
"You need to go back out and strip
and dance for a living." You know?
'Cause they needed to pay bills.
And so, she and the husband split.
One of the biggest challenges of making money off of the way that you look
is eventually that fades.
When the...
...stripping jobs in Vegas started drying up,
she moved to Fort Lauderdale with her son
in order to make a living.
A lot of the clubs around here thought that she was sort of a celebrity,
because she had been in Playboy,
and so that was sort of an attraction.
[Olson] She thought that there was places she could dance, and she did.
But she got older...
...and that rock and roll lifestyle, with the...
...alcohol and the drugs, was catching up to her.
[Madison] It must have been really hard for Star
to be 30 and not being booked at the exotic dancing clubs,
because it was really all she had known,
was dancing, was posing forPlayboy.
From an outside perspective,
it seems like there could be so many options,
but when your self-esteem is at a certain place,
and you've been told for so many years
you're only good for one thing,
it can feel very differently.
[LaLama] She needed to pay her bills, she need to have a roof over her head.
She didn't have the body and the beauty
by Hollywood standards anymore,
but she still could have sex, and still make money
by using her body for sex.
And it is this...
...dire need to survive that led Star Stowe
to become a prostitute.
I told her, "That's a definite no-no. You gotta do something else.
You've already gone through that withPlayboy."
And then she'd say, "What can I do?"
A couple times when I went to see her at the house,
and she was already drinking and doing drugs.
I would say to her, "You know, this is not your life.
You know, you can't do this, it's gonna take its toll on you."
And she just said, "I can handle it.
I can quit any time I want."
But you can't.
She had hoped that she might be able to stop someday,
but she needed to drink and do drugs
so she didn't have to think about it and didn't have to feel.
About this time, she sent her son to go live with her mom in Arkansas,
because she just felt like he deserved a better upbringing
than what she was able to provide.
She had been a prostitute for a number of years.
And then in 1990, Star was jailed for drug possession.
When Star was in jail,
she wrote a letter to her best friend, Mitchie Stone.
I think this letter is, is really interesting,
because it speaks to her aspirations
and what she dreamed of and a lot of regret.
She said, "I had such high hopes, and now they're gone.
I did it to myself, and it's a nightmare.
But when I get home...
...I get to go be the old me.
I get to be by my son and go to church,
and it will be good, someday."
[Madison] Unfortunately, Star was not able to turn her life around.
I think Star had a huge struggle ahead of her,
just trying to get away from all the addiction and all the demons
that really originated from her time with Playboy.
You can have this idea, like, "I wanna change my life,"
but then when the rent's due,
you know, there was just so much stacked against her.
Almost 20 years to the day since her centerfold came out,
Star was last scene getting into a car in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The next day, Star was found dead.
[Olson] I was heartbroken.
Nobody deserves to be murdered,
and especially someone that is trying to get back on the right track.
Because she told me she was gonna try,
and I believe she would at some point.
I called her mother on March, uh, the 17th.
She was uncontrollably crying, obviously.
I mean, it's your child...
and, you know, it's a tough thing.
Her mother did tell us of a friend of hers named Mitchie Stone,
and we spoke with Mitchie,
and she said she was afraid for her,
and she was trying to get Star out of that lifestyle.
Mitchie told us that she had an ex-boyfriend.
They had broken up about three weeks prior
to her disappearing and being killed.
[Pazdera] Star was staying with Mitchie at the time of her death
because she and her former boyfriend broke up.
They had a pretty okay relationship
for a while,
and then a couple of days before Star was found murdered
they got into a fight.
And she ended up with this nasty bump on her head
and got away from him.
We did find out that he was actually arrested for domestic violence.
We thought he had potential as a suspect.
We knew we had to speak with this guy.
He was arrested for domestic violence,
except the charges were dropped
because the witnesses all said that he never did strike her.
She was so highly intoxicated that she fell down
and actually got the bump on her head.
He was very upset.
He obviously had a very clear love for her,
and I don't think he had the wherewithal to do something like that,
so we eliminated him as a suspect.
[Pazdera] The police were working hundreds of leads.
They were out there getting rid of shoe leather and handing out fliers,
knocking on doors, talking to people,
just trying to, you know, figure out
if they could deduce, you know,
who might be responsible for the death of Star Stowe.
[Pickering] We went to the strip in Fort Lauderdale
where she worked.
We hit every single bar, we hit every single hotel,
we hit every single pawn shop.
We spent hundred of hours on this,
just trying to find out if anybody saw her,
you know, during the last few hours, few days of her life,
and everything came back negative.
[Madison] I think often times sex workers like Star are targets
because they're seen as people who don't have a lot
of close friends and family around them
or who are kind of lost in the system,
and I think that's why these cases can be harder to solve.
[Pickering] When we were doing one of the many canvases,
we actually developed another boyfriend.
He was a little small time drug dealer,
but from what everybody was telling us that was also her pimp.
At that point, he became more of a suspect for us.
We conducted an interview with him.
He admitted that he was with her on the night she disappeared.
He admitted that he drove her to a location
and dropped her off for a rendezvous.
And that's the last time that anybody ever saw her.
We executed a search warrant on his van.
It was just a plain old white van.
And you could tell there was nothing in it.
The carpet had been ripped out of it.
Everything was out of it. It was completely gutted.
Just had the seat to drive and then passenger seat.
If there was any evidence in it it was gone.
And, of course, he denied any knowledge of Star's murder.
We didn't develop another lead on this at all
from any of that.
It wasn't until maybe a month later.
West Palm Beach had a homicide and they contacted us.
It was a prostitute who was strangled as well.
It was a month before Star's murder.
Sandra Walters was left half naked behind an adult video store,
February 25th.
She had similar physical characteristics to Star,
and so the detectives were trying to explore
whether or not this was something that could be related.
We went to West Palm Beach Police Department,
we spoke with their detectives,
and we compared our case to theirs at that point.
There were parallels. They were both prostitutes.
They were both on drugs, they were both alcoholics.
They did in fact have similar, you know, appearances and builds,
but at that point we weren't convinced
that serial killers operate like this.
[Pazdera] The day after Thanksgiving in 1997,
several months after Star and Sandra Walters were found murdered,
another woman turned up dead in Broward County.
She had fair hair, brown eyes, and a similar height.
She also was a prostitute,
and at this point
it was really starting to look like
this could be the work of a serial killer.
[Pickering] She was strangled and they threw her body in a dumpster,
and, of course, right away we wanted to look into that as well
to see if there was any similarities.
By the time it was spring of 1998,
there were six sex workers that were found murdered
and had very similar characteristics.
[Madison] With all these murders,
it must have been terrifying for any sex worker
to think that possibly there was a serial killer out there
and they might be next.
In September, we got a call from West Palm Beach
about a guy named Kevin Johnson
that they had in custody.
He was arrested in connection with
beating a prostitute so severely
that she wound up losing her eye.
They told us that he said that he was a monster
and he became very, very violent when he smoked crack cocaine.
[Pazdera] Kevin Johnson told the detectives
he picked on sex workers and was glad he got caught,
because he felt like
he had this monster inside of him
and had so much rage against women
that he was scared what might happen next.
[Pickering] And, you know, eventually he admitted
he had killed two prostitutes.
He'd bludgeoned one to death and he stabbed the other.
When they called us, obviously antenna went up at that point
because they thought he could be responsible for everything.
[LaLama] This man is readily admitting
to violently murdering two women,
and the more cops are listening,
they're thinking, "Well, we may have the very guy
who murdered Star Stowe."
[Pickering] He didn't confess to any other killings
other than the ones that he was arrested for,
so we compared our cases.
But he didn't come down this way to Fort Lauderdale,
to the strip, or anywhere around here.
And the way he picked them up, where he killed them, the locations,
was completely different.
You know, the messiness.
Like, stabbing somebody, that's a pretty messy crime scene
versus strangling somebody.
It's a big difference.
[Pazdera] Detectives were able to figure out
that Kevin Johnson was not responsible for the death of Star Stowe
or any of the other women that were found murdered.
[LaLama] At this point, police have still not found Star's killer.
Things seemed to quiet down,
but then tragedy strikes once again.
[Pazdera] About three years after Star was murdered,
there were two women that were found murdered.
Again, in South Florida.
Their bodies were found in black duffle bags on the side of the road.
It wasn't Kevin Johnson, he was in jail.
It's either a different serial killer
or a set of very tragic coincidences.
[LaLama] Their names are Sia Demas and Kim Livesey.
It appears almost undeniable
that there is still a serial killer on the loose in South Florida.
In the murder cases of Kim and Sia,
12 years later there's a big break in the case.
Through fingerprints, police were able to identify a guy named Robert Fernandes.
People ask why does it take so long? It's not bad police work.
Robert Fernandes had left South Florida after the murders.
[Pazdera] He was a Brazilian national who was living in Miami.
When he went back to Brazil the killing stopped.
[LaLama] This is an awakening for detectives because they're thinking,
"Well, maybe it was him that killed Star and others."
[Pazdera] Detectives were able to figure out
that this guy was not responsible for the death of Star Stowe
because he was nowhere in that area at the time of her death.
[LaLama] It's another disappointing turn for detectives.
Regarding his link to the murders of Sia and Kim,
well, their families would never see justice
because Fernandes died in a plane crash in 2006.
Star's case still remains open today, 25 years later.
[Pickering] I don't think it was just the work
of a serial killer in this case,
I just don't think it was.
I think that she knew who her killer was,
and I obviously can't prove that
but just, you know, my heart, that's what it tells me.
She didn't scratch the person or fight.
It just seems to me like she willingly got in that car,
and I keep going back to the guy who was her pimp.
You know, I can't get that out of my head
that he gave her a ride on the day she disappears.
It's quite a coincidence, wouldn't you think?
[Pazdera] I found out recently
that the Coral Springs Police Department have reopened this case,
which I think is pretty significant.
Detectives took some DNA from Star's body at the time of her death,
so it is possible that they may be able to find out who's responsible.
[Pickering] In '97 DNA was still kinda new.
There wasn't a whole lot we could do with it like today.
There was very few people in the database, suspect wise.
DNA is like a whole another level now.
There's some evidence in this case
and I'm sure the police department will probably resubmit it
for new testing.
This case, I think, will forever stay with me.
There's always that side that you feel bad because you didn't solve it,
and, you know, you know how hard you worked on it,
and you just came up short.
And I'm hoping that they get some DNA back on this,
and I'm hoping they do arrest somebody.
It would, you know, it would make my day.
I'm really happy that finally
the PD is gonna open this cold case again.
I think this'll be great if the police find the person that did it.
That would be a good closure for her family, and son, and friends,
and for her because Star deserved justice.
Not long after she was murdered, I got ahold of her son,
and he was 14 at the time, and he had very fond memories of his mom.
He thought that she was an incredibly cool mom.
They would talk on the phone very often,
and he recalled that when they were living together
that she would make him stir fry,
and, you know, they would play video games,
and just basically have a good time.
The other thing that he and his mom shared, they both loved music,
and he told me that they were both crazy about the new Nine Inch Nailsalbum
that had come out recently.
Star Stowe's case is heartbreaking.
Young, beautiful girl, big ambitions of going to the big city.
Gets there, falls into the cesspool of decadence
and is not prepared for it,
and something terrible happens to her.
I thought about what Star could have become
if she hadn't got that gig with Playboy,
and I think she could have made it.
She was a very good singer and she was learning to play guitar, too,
so she could have done it.
She would have been a good front person in a group.
I think she would have been a really great rocker chick.
She definitely could have done that.
It's just sad that that was a dream that never transpired for her.
I can relate to her,
because I know what it feels like
you know, to have those dreams
and to want to be a centerfold.
And I know how it feels to live at the mansion,
feel like the world is so insular,
and feel afraid.
If you're a young girl today,
I think that Star would be a good example
of what could happen
if you go down the road of false promises of Playboy
or buy into that dream.
It ruins you.
There's no way out. It's just a tragedy.
It's sad.