CALGARY — Local woman Katie Johnston, who listens to approximately 3-5 longform stories each week involving grizzly deaths and/or serious crimes against innocent, usually helpless people, is considered by her friends to be “an all-around ray of sunshine” and “a total sweetheart.”
When asked, friends and family of the 26-year-old marketing consultant consistently praised her upbeat attitude.
“She’s really considerate and thinks about others,” Johnston’s mother, Cheryl, said of her daughter, who recently sat down in the middle of cleaning her house to better concentrate on a story of a guy who murdered everyone in the family except the middle child. “That’s my girl.”
Johnston, who collects vinyl, volunteers at a homeless shelter and “is always up for late-night shenanigans” with her close-knit friend group regularly falls asleep to a program where “they start from the killer’s point of view and work backwards to the night of the crime.”
“Well, usually it’s the night of the crime,” Johnston explained. “Unless they’re the type that dress up as undercover policemen to lure their victims into a car—those are usually daytime,” she added before offering some of her smoothie to reporters.
“I think the first word that comes to mind when I think of Katie is ‘fun’” said Johnston’s roommate, Tim Cintra. “But she can be a little flighty.She always has to cover her face if we have a Tarantino movie on,” Cintra said, referring to a woman who once spent an entire commute wondering if a shallowly-buried body would decompose in Montana faster than it would in Alaska given thaw rates.
Despite her busy schedule, Johnston makes sure to include exercise in her routine. “Every time I run over that bridge on my morning job I think of bridge guy!” she told reporters, referring to the subject of a recent podcast, who murdered a series of people by throwing them off a bridge. “The bridge was just 40 minutes from here!”
At press time, Johnston was happily walking her dog and listening to an interview with a guy whose childhood memories of a stabbing came back after he stopped drinking.
