“She’s dead. She’s here at Piedmont Park. Please help,” a distraught Emma Clark said to the 911 dispatcher at 1:11 a.m. on June 28, 2021. Clark had just stumbled upon the body of her girlfriend of six years, Katie Janness, and the body of their dog, a three-year-old pit bull mix named Bowie. Katie had been stabbed more than 50 times, and the word “FAT” was carved into her chest. A short while earlier, Katie—a 40-year-old bartender and musician—had leashed up Bowie and walked him from their Myrtle Street apartment through the tree-lined streets to Henry’s Midtown Tavern, where Clark worked. She was surprising Clark, according to her friend Chip Powell. It was a route she’d taken dozens of times, often with friends. “She just happened to be alone that night,” said Powell, who was also Katie’s boss at Whole World Improv Theatre. The next day Katie was planning to travel to Michigan to visit her mom and sister, whom she hadn’t seen since 2019. After greeting Clark at the restaurant, Katie left and walked through the rainbow crosswalk at 12:09 a.m., probably on her way back to the apartment they shared together. She and Bowie never made it home. When Clark came home after work and found Katie and Bowie gone, she texted and called Katie. After she got no response, she used Find My to ping Katie’s iPhone and traveled to the Charles Allen Gate entrance of Piedmont Park, where she discovered the bodies of Katie and Bowie. •  •  • Nearly five years later, Katie’s killer remains free and the murder unsolved. More than a hundred people are murdered in Atlanta each year, but no recent death has haunted the city like Katie’s. In Midtown, mention of her name provokes sadness, frustration, and fear. Clark fled the city because of death threats and harassment by people who claimed that she committed the murder. Soon after Katie’s death, the Atlanta Police Department contacted the FBI for help, but even with the bureau’s assistance, the APD has no suspects or leads it’s sharing with the public. The APD declined to comment for this article, saying only that the “investigation remains active and ongoing.” Media coverage of the case since Katie’s murder has been relatively scant. There was a burst of interest locally, but few follow-up stories and little national media attention. This is perhaps surprising, given that deaths of cisgender White women like Katie tend to garner the most media attention. But in other ways, Katie is not the ideal victim: She was queer and held a working-class job. And Katie’s relatives have been mostly silent about the case, aside from one letter released by Katie’s mother, which hasn’t kept the case in the news. Powell hasn’t spoken publicly about the case in years. He stopped speaking to media after receiving harassment and death threats on Facebook. People told him they wished “he would die in the same manner as Katie,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of sympathy from the general public, as we saw that there was still hatred towards gay people.” The APD has released very little information about the case. Atlanta is one of the most surveilled cities in the nation, but there’s no video footage of the murder because the park’s cameras weren’t working. The cameras were also not working 14 years earlier, when Patrick Boland, a gay Black man, was stabbed to death in the park. In 2022, the year after Katie was murdered, the city installed 30 more cameras in the park. Into the vacuum true-crime enthusiasts and amateur sleuths have slithered, examining the sparse information released by police: Clark’s 911 call, Katie’s autopsy report, video footage of Katie walking Bowie through the rainbow crosswalk, and images of joggers nearby. Speculations and theories on podcasts and TikToks abound. E.J. Cook, who worked with Katie at Steamhouse Lounge, is investigating the police’s investigation, interviewing businesses around the crime scene to discover whether the APD and the FBI ever asked them to share their camera footage (some were asked, others weren’t). Cook even considered posing as a homeless person for a few weeks to get intel. “That’s how upset I was,” he said. The six Atlanta friends and coworkers of Katie who spoke to Atlanta magazine all want her story told. Some were especially eager to share memories. In contrast, several people claiming to be her friends in a Facebook group in Berkley, Michigan, where she grew up, replied with reticence and even hostility.  Some insisted Katie was a private person, and said they wanted to focus only on solving her murder. “Katie’s longtime friends know she would not want her life story on display,” said one person. However, another person posted, “Maybe this will bring light to what happened to her.” None of the Atlanta friends who were interviewed feel this way. Her friend and Whole World Improv coworker Paige Crawford said, “I don’t think she would want to be remembered as someone who was murdered, but I think she would hope that something good came out of it . . . like the park being safer or the cameras actually working.” •  •  • Katie Janness arrived in Atlanta around 2006, when she was in her mid-20s. She grew up in Michigan, where she was born on September 4, 1980. She lived in Berkley, a northwest suburb of Detroit. One of her parents’ friends described the area as “a small fun-loving community. All the kids ran around all the time, everybody knew everybody. Not quite the Mayberry, but pretty close.” Her parents, Marc and Bobbi Janness, were married on December 1, 1979, at the First Presbyterian Church in Royal Oak, Michigan. According to their engagement announcement, Bobbi worked at Dominico’s Restaurant, and Marc owned his own business, Marc’s Suburban Maintenance, and was pursuing a master’s degree at nearby Oakland University. The Jannesses raised their two daughters in a house “in a very decent neighborhood” that they were fixing up, a friend said. They kept very busy, working and taking care of the kids. “They were quiet, yet fun and funny.” Katie’s family life was shattered when she was eight years old. Her parents had separated, and her dad was living with his girlfriend in New Haven, Michigan. Marc Janness’s girlfriend was embroiled in a child custody dispute with her ex-husband, and Marc was upset about how the ex-husband was treating her. On June 9, 1989, around 11 p.m., as the ex-husband was exiting his car after arriving home from work in Warren, Michigan, he was shot five times. He died on his front lawn. A neighbor saw a man standing over the ex-husband who then hopped into a Chevrolet Suburban and sped away. The license plate of the Suburban was registered to Janness’s girlfriend. Less than an hour later, Marc was arrested in the trailer park where his girlfriend lived, and he was charged with murder and felony firearm possession. He was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to life in state prison. Between ages 13 and 18, Katie didn’t see her dad and communicated with him infrequently, according to a letter Marc sent to the editor of Out of Bounds prison magazine in 2011. She attended Berkley High School, played soccer, and worked at Blockbuster Video. “She was quiet, creative, funny. She loved her guitar and brought it wherever she went,” said a former Blockbuster coworker. Marc wrote in Out of Bounds that “once [Katie] turned 18 and was on her own, she began visiting again and resumed more regular communication.” He expressed his regret to Katie in a poem: “Have I wrecked her life—made her pay the toll / In loving me have I scarred her soul / Is the pain too deep down in her bone / I fear she reaps what I have sown.” •  •  • Two of Katie’s passions were photography and music. She was a devoted guitarist and also wrote songs.Photograph courtesy of Paige Crawford In 1999, when Katie was 19, she formed the all-female riot grrrl–style band Violet Skin in Detroit. She was the band’s lead vocalist, guitarist, and main songwriter and was dating the band’s bassist. On the band’s website, Katie is described as “a great photographer” and “welder” who “reads lots of Vonnegut [and] plans to start a philosophy zine.” The site says that some of Katie’s lyrics were inspired by her childhood belief “that her real mother was in fact an alien from another planet.”  “Katie was unquestionably the leader of the band, but a very quiet, unassuming leader,” said John Firneno, a former drummer for Violet Skin who joined the band around 2005 and was its only male member. Until Firneno joined, it was an all-girl band. “They dressed me up in ridiculous clothes. They [messed] with me a lot, and it was a lot of fun,” he said. Violet Skin practiced in the garage of a Detroit policeman in a sketchy area of town. They played in some of the same downtown Detroit garage rock bars where The White Stripes had played a few years earlier. “Offstage, Katie was very reserved, very quiet,” Firneno said. “But then onstage she was totally the front leader of the group, and she would totally rock out.” But the band broke up around 2006, and the same year, she moved to Atlanta. •  •  • Katie got a job at the Midtown restaurant Vickery’s and soon developed a large social circle of friends from work and integrated into the city’s queer community. By 2008, she had a serious girlfriend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Katie was “very, very sweet [and] very, very kind” and had a dry sense of humor, she said. She “was friendly with unhoused people.” Katie didn’t have a car, so the former girlfriend recalled that they would walk a lot. Katie “definitely had a street sense about her,” she said. When they walked at night near Piedmont and 10th, they’d always cross 10th Street so they wouldn’t have to walk in front of the park. The girlfriend’s relationship with Katie lasted about four years. “Katie had a pretty nasty drinking problem, and I was not equipped to know how to support her, and we just completely grew apart,” she said. After the breakup, Katie “cut ties with a lot of friends. She kind of hit rock bottom. And a lot of people were like, We can’t help her anymore.” Before they broke up, Katie got a job working at Steamhouse Lounge, a job she loved. It was there that she befriended E.J. Cook, a fellow waiter. Cook was dabbling with stand-up at The Star Community Bar, and Katie was continuing to pursue music. They bonded. “I was a street kid and so was she,” Cook said. “Her dad was in prison, so I just felt like she had some similarities [with my upbringing] and not having the best of lifestyles growing up.” E.J. CookPhotograph by Audra Melton Cook spent the night at Katie’s house around 20 times over the course of their friendship. (He emphasized that their relationship wasn’t romantic.) Katie was very generous, he said. She lived a simple life. “She’d just come home, drink, play guitar, go to bed, wake up, go work,” Cook said. They’d walk her dog, Tori, and he noticed that Katie didn’t like being approached by strangers. “She’d be like, Hey, just leave me alone, man,” Cook said. He declined to go to bars with her. “I didn’t like seeing her drunk.” By 2013, Katie was working as a waitress at Campagnolo Restaurant and Bar, down the street from her apartment. Katie was soon promoted to bartender and developed a signature cocktail with vodka, strawberries, basil, and balsamic vinegar. A former coworker said Katie “was an essential member of the queer community in Atlanta. She was a bartender at a very queer restaurant in Midtown, the gayest place in Atlanta, and she knew a lot of people, and a lot of people loved her . . . But she had a bit of darkness within her, as we all do.” Katie was also a regular at Blake’s on the Park, a gay bar near her apartment. She’d come on Monday nights, bringing her guitar to play music and sip Maker’s Mark. “[Katie] could drink a lot,” bartender Rod Llaneza said. They would chat together about the restaurant industry and Katie’s music. She offered to teach him how to play bass.  A few years later, when she was still working at Campagnolo, she got a job at Whole World Improv Theatre on the weekends. Katie fit in well at Whole World. Chip Powell said that “Katie worked her ass off to send money home to her mother and her disabled sister.” Katie became friends with Powell. “She would give us recommendations for crazy horror movies like Frankenhooker and Zombeavers,” he said. She also bonded with Crawford. “We both realized we listened to the My Favorite Murder podcast,” Crawford said. “We would just talk about it every week. That’s how we formed a friendship.” Soon they were hanging out outside of work. “She’s a person who would give you the shirt off her back, if she had one shirt. She kind of felt like this cool older sister.” Katie told Crawford she was close to her mom and sister, whom she visited a few times a year until the pandemic. She also confided in Crawford about her dad. “I remember her saying in her adulthood, she did go visit him a couple times,” Crawford said. “And I think that whatever feelings she had about her dad kind of resolved.” Katie started dating Emma Clark, who was 10 years younger than Katie and worked in the restaurant industry as well. Clark was even quieter and more introverted than Katie, Crawford said. She loved Katie and Clark’s dogs. “Bowie was so sweet, he was hyper, and he just loved people,” she said. Then, in 2018, Katie’s life was upended when the apartment building where she lived with Clark burned down. Their close friends and Campagnolo regulars pitched in to help them. They found a new apartment on Myrtle Street. Around 2019, Katie got sober. “One of the ways she was sort of coping with her sobriety is she would just take a lot of walks at night,” her ex said. •  •  • By 2021, Katie’s father had died, and her relationship with Clark was going strong. On June 24, she went to see the bands Japanese Breakfast and Mannequin Pussy with Crawford at The Masquerade. Clark was supposed to go with Katie, but she had to work, so Crawford took her place. Katie was there to see Mannequin Pussy, but their show was canceled due to tech issues. The band rescheduled for November, so Crawford and Katie bought tickets for the upcoming show. After the June concert was finished, Crawford and Katie sat outside Katie’s apartment building, and Katie talked about going to Michigan to visit her mom and sister soon. Crawford and Katie said goodbye and hugged. “She wasn’t a hugger, but that night we just decided to give each other a hug,” Crawford said. •  •  • The morning after the murder, Powell was sipping his morning coffee and reading the news on his laptop when he saw the headline. “I think I even said something to my husband, like, Oh my God, someone’s been murdered in the park,” Powell said. Soon he got a call from a friend saying the body had been identified, and it was Katie’s. “I was like, It can’t be right,” he said. That night he was performing a comedy show at Whole World. “I had to be entertaining and be funny,” he said. Nobody at the theater knew their beloved bar manager had been murdered; Katie’s name had not been released publicly. Near the end of the show, an employee pulled him aside and said Fox 5 was outside and wanted to interview him. He ran outside and made a statement. When the show was over, he shared the news with employees. To cope with his grief, Powell listened to one of Katie’s last songs, in which she sings, “You stand up for me, and I’ll stand up for you.” Chip PowellPhotograph by Audra Melton “That was kind of haunting because we were all standing up for her,” Powell said. Whole World and Campagnolo held memorials for her. Both services were packed. Campagnolo regular Edwin Dill said the memorial was filled with restaurant patrons and local construction workers bearing flowers. “That tells you what kind of impact she had,” he said. •  •  • Around this time, the FBI descended on Campagnolo and Whole World. They swabbed employees and regulars for their DNA. “I spent a lot of time talking to the FBI,” Powell said. A GoFundMe raised $79,000 for Clark and for Katie’s memorial service. Rumors spread that Clark committed the murder. Clark received death threats, and according to Rod Llaneza, people tried to break into her house, so she moved out of town. Aside from Katie, “[Clark’s] definitely the biggest victim in all of this,” Llaneza said. Clark did not respond to interview requests. In November 2021, Crawford and a few of Katie’s friends went to the Mannequin Pussy concert Katie was planning to attend. The band dedicated a song to Katie. A year ago, the FBI stopped communicating with Powell. “I think we can safely say that it’s a cold case,” he said. True-crime buffs have helped fill the information vacuum. The 500-plus-member Facebook group The Solution to the Katie Janness Case continued its informal investigation. Members of the group post theories about who might have killed her, information from public records requests, pictures of Katie, and gripes about lack of information from the police. Some members of the group didn’t know Katie, but others, like Llaneza and Cook, were friends and coworkers. •  •  • Katie’s murder has become a favorite topic for true-crime buffs, not only because it remains unsolved, but also because it was incredibly brutal: She was stabbed in the face, neck, breasts, and back. Her pants were pulled down. “FAT” was carved into her chest. Her dog was killed. (Bowie’s cause of death is unknown because the APD declined to release the necropsy.) Powell said, “I don’t think in a million years she would have thought she would have become the fodder of [crime] podcasts, but she is, and they say all kinds of stuff, and most of it’s not true.” So, what is true about the case? Priya Banerjee, a forensic pathologist and clinical assistant professor of pathology at Brown University, and Sheryl McCollum, founder of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, agreed to analyze the information released on the case. McCollum says people are usually killed for three reasons: money, revenge, or sexual thrills. She thinks Katie could have been killed for sexual reasons given that Katie’s breasts were mutilated and her pants were pulled down. She also thinks this could be an outlier case that is the work of a serial killer. She does not think the person who killed Katie knew her, because if they had, it would have been much simpler and less risky to kill Katie at her house. Katie and Bowie were murdered at the entrance to Piedmont Park, with a streetlight nearby and condos across the street. “Any of those folks, if they had just looked out that window, would have a perfect view of what happened,” McCollum said. “That’s a big risk to me. People have this idea that [at] that time of night, nobody would be in that park. That’s not true.”  Banerjee, who analyzed Katie’s autopsy, has a different theory. She thinks the killer could have had a personal connection to Katie because the level of disfigurement in Katie’s body indicates a very angry person. And the choice to stab her was an “up close and personal” way to kill because it involved defacing her body. “If you wanted to kill someone, you stab them in the chest, not slash the breast and not carve the word ‘FAT,’” she said. They think the killer might have approached Bowie, who was probably killed with a straight-edged weapon, then chased Katie and tackled her. “That’s why she’s off the beaten path, but she’s not deep in the woods,” McCollum said. “I don’t know if it’d be classified as a hate crime, but there’s definitely a very strong emotion behind the killing,” Banerjee said. McCollum says if this was a hate crime, “the killer didn’t make it obvious.” According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data, there were two murders committed due to anti-lesbian bias between 2014 and 2024. Banerjee also agreed to analyze the autopsy. The carving of “FAT” in Katie’s body is very unusual, she said. In the more than 3,000 autopsies she’s conducted, she’s only seen carvings of words once. That the killer would call Katie fat is baffling, Banerjee says. “She’s not someone I would call having too much body fat,” she says. McCollum thinks that the carving could have had misogynistic overtones. She said that the killer “didn’t try to hide her body. He wanted them to know whatever this message was.” Banerjee said that “the main, lethal injuries” to Katie were the slicing of both of her carotid arteries in her neck, which “leads to massive blood loss . . . [It’s] rapidly fatal,” she said. Death usually happens within two minutes or even within seconds. This was a seasoned killer, McCollum said. “This is something he has done in the past and he’ll do again.” She thinks a man committed the crime. “Women rarely mutilate somebody’s breast,” she said. And they rarely kill in public places. How did he get out of the park unseen, especially since he was probably covered in blood? McCollum thinks he may not have left the park and instead walked into it to “a clandestine campsite.” Katie’s friends have theories too. Crawford doesn’t think it was someone who knew Katie. “I can’t fathom anyone knowing Katie and wanting to do that, because Katie didn’t really bother anyone,” she said. “If you were to tell me she got in a fight with someone, I’d be like, That’s not Katie,” she said. McCollum doesn’t believe the lack of police communication means the case is cold. “There is not a person at the Atlanta Police Department who doesn’t want to solve this thing,” she said. •  •  • According to Anthony Jones, director of safety and security for the Department of Parks and Recreation, Piedmont Park is now safer than it used to be. The park currently has 46 to 48 working cameras, each producing four different streams of video. Defective cameras are removed if they can’t be repaired within 72 hours. Every day Jones’s team of three checks to see if the cameras are working. The trio checks only specific footage when asked by the APD. “We don’t have the manpower to go and check footage daily,” he said. The footage is saved for 14 days because “it is very expensive” to store, Jones said. On July 28, 2025, the APD raised the reward for information that leads to finding Katie’s killer, to $25,000 from $20,000. PETA—People for Ethical Treatment of Animals—is providing $10,000 of this amount. PETA said in a statement, “Katie and Bowie deserve justice, and someone out there knows, heard, or saw something. We’re urging anyone with information to come forward before whoever is responsible for this horrific crime hurts or kills someone else.” Katie’s memory remains vibrant in Midtown. Many employees and patrons at Midtown businesses have memories of her. At Blake’s, multiple customers shared stories of sitting at Katie’s bar, experiencing her humor and good service. In Campagnolo, a picture of Katie hangs behind the bar. Whole World has one too, as well as a painting of Katie from a high-school friend.  Powell regularly visits the memorial bench created in Katie’s honor in the Piedmont Park dog park. “I leave notes to warn people that you’re not safe,” he said. “Because if my sweet, innocent friend and her dog can both be brutally murdered in this park on the outskirts, where it’s well lit, then you’re not safe deep inside that park.”  Recently, Paige Crawford was chatting with another coworker about the coincidence of Katie’s love of true-crime podcasts. Crawford said the two wondered aloud together: “We were, like, isn’t it crazy that the person we would be talking to about this case . . . would be her?” This article appears in our February 2026 issue. 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