The Lingering Case of Katherine Janness and Bowie

Updated August 8, 2024

You would not be alone if the name Katherine Janness didn’t ring a bell. Her murder was just one of 184 homicides recorded by the Murder Accountability Project in the city of Atlanta during 2021. But Katie, as she was known to friends and family, was the only unsolved case of homicide resulting from a “knife or other cutting instrument” within the city that year. And if you lived anywhere near the Atlanta metro area during the summer of 2021, it was a crime so horrific, you would not soon forget it.

Shortly after midnight on July 28, 2021, Katie Janness was walking her pit bull, Bowie, close to the 10th Street and Piedmont Avenue entrance to Piedmont Park. Video footage of her walk was captured as she crossed the Rainbow Crosswalk shortly before she was attacked and stabbed over 50 times by an unknown assailant. It was a route the talented 40-year-old musician had taken many times before with her beloved dog. Not only was Katie killed, but Bowie also suffered fatal injuries in the attack. Even more tragically, her fiancé, Emma Clark, discovered Katie and Bowie when she went looking for them upon returning from work and not finding them at the home they shared. Surprisingly, there were no working surveillance cameras in the location of the murder and apparently no witnesses. According to one…