Katherine "Kay" Howard is a fictional character in the American TV series Homicide: Life on the Street.

However, NBC president Warren Littlefield felt that the lack of other female characters was alienating the audience, so Megan Russert was added to the show.

Howard is also influenced by Detective Bertina Silver, referred to as 'Bert' by her colleagues, thought by many in the unit to be the exception to the 'Secretaries-with-guns' female officer stereotype.

The end result of the real-life influences was that Howard combined Garvey's superb and persistent work and sky-high clearance rate and Silver's complete acceptance by the male-dominated Homicide unit (which was not the case with all real-life female cops, nor amongst female cops over the run of the series).

In the Season 3 episode "The Last of the Watermen", Howard visits the small coastal oyster fishing town of Tilghman Island, Maryland where she was brought up.

Despite her generally rational approach, Howard occasionally indulges in magical thinking, feeling that some things "transcend" logic.

This includes varied superstitions, which she displays at work, and the idea that the ghost of a victim had aided her in solving a case.

During Season 3, she and fellow detectives Stanley Bolander and Beau Felton are shot while trying to serve an arrest warrant on a suspect.

It was implied in the fourth season that her intense privacy, combined with her toughness and style change to masculine clothing, had led to some speculation that she might be a lesbian; upon seeing Kay with a mystery date, Det John Munch said as much, although this may have just been a tactic to get her to tell him who the man is.