BUST IN SAVAGE SLASHING
Neighbor charged in rob gone wrong Lived above vic on Upper West Side
Cops arrested a 24-year-old neighbor Wednesday in the slaying of an Upper West Side advertising executive whose throat was slashed.
Cops charged Anya Johnston with murder and burglary in the death of 70-year-old Susan Trott. Police allege Trott surprised Johnston during the course of the burglary and Johnston killed her.
The victim was found dead in the bedroom of her 14thfloor apartment in the wellheeled West End Ave. building about 5 a.m. Oct. 21. Her body was likely dragged there from her living room, officials said.
Detectives were still trying to sort out if Johnston took items from Trott’s apartment after the murder, or if the victim came home to find the suspect stealing her belongings.
Johnston lives on the 15th floor of the same building. She had been held in a psychiatric facility since the murder and remains there.
Police sources said the suspect has mental health issues and a history of acting erratically when off her medication.
She had also tried to kill herself, neighbors told the Daily News. “Everyone in the building is aware of her,” said one male neighbor, who wouldn’t give his name. “She’s always been troubled.”
Once, neighbors recounted, Johnston tried to throw herself from the building, but someone intervened and stopped her. “She lived with her mother and suffered from an extreme psychosis,” said another neighbor, who wouldn’t give her name.
Johnston and Trott knew one another, the male neighbor said. Police sources confirmed the pair were casual aquaintances.
“(Trott) was eccentric. She used to leave her door unlocked and everybody knew it,” he said. “She would push her dog around in a cart, and when the dog died she would push around the cart with stuff in it.”
The News has previously reported some of Trott’s neighbors were annoyed that she fed pigeons outside the building, and let her dog off the leash. She was known by some in the building as the “bird lady.”
Stephanie Lee, a neighbor of Trott’s, said last week that people had been threatening to hurt Trott because of the pigeons — a resentment that police don’t believe had anything to do with her slaying.
Officials with the Manhattan DA’s office said it was unlikely Johnston would be arraigned Wednesday.
Trott was a creative partner at digital brand agency Code Modern.
She started her career in the 1960s and worked for just about every ad agency in New York and London, including Saatchi, Ogilvy, Wunderman and Y&R, according to her résumé.