On the evening of Friday, November 10th, 1978, Patricia Anne Novak finished her shift as an X-ray technician at Anthracite County General Hospital in Colehill, Pennsylvania. She was twenty-four years old, five foot five, and engaged to be married in May. She stopped at the doctor’s office on Center Street to pick up a prescription for her mother, then walked the four blocks home in the first snow of the year. She never got there.
Patty, as everyone called her, had grown up in Colehill, a hard coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania where the hills rose like black ridges and the rowhouses climbed the slopes on stair-step streets. The population was just over six thousand. The mines were mostly gone by then, but the men who had worked them sat on porches with oxygen tanks and union pensions and watched the street. There were four churches, a bakery that made paczki on Fat Tuesday, and a hospital built in 1911.
Nobody locked their doors. The doctor had a key anyway, and used it, letting himself in at two in the morning to sit with a dying miner so the family could sleep. Patty was the younger of two children. Her father Stan had worked underground for twenty-two years and now ran the hoist at the last operating colliery in the county.
Her mother Helen cleaned the Slovak church and made pierogi for every funeral in town. Patty had gone to community college in Pottsville and returned with a radiology certificate, telling her mother the hospital had taken care of her whole family and now she was going to take care of it. She worked the day shift. She kept a shoebox of plastic dinosaurs in the X-ray room, and any child who held still got to pick one.
She wore a navy wool coat with brass buttons her grandmother had brought from Slovakia. She walked everywhere, like everyone else. She was engaged to Mike Rusnock, who worked at the garment factory. At her last visit, she had asked Dr.
Gart whether he would deliver her babies, and he had said he would not miss it for the world. The doctor on Center Street was Walter Gart. He was forty in 1978, had come to Colehill in 1965 from a residency in Philadelphia, and was the only general practitioner for eight miles. He made house calls.
He delivered babies in bedrooms when the roads were bad. He had delivered Patty herself, and he kept photographs of her and of every baby he had delivered on a corkboard in his waiting room. He sat on the hospital board and treated miners’ lungs for free when the union fund ran dry. Colehill would have told you Dr.
Gart was the closest thing the town had to a saint. That was the last winter any of them believed it. On November 10th, Patty’s shift ended at four in the afternoon. At 4:15, she told a nurse named Rita Circle she was stopping at the doctor’s office for her mother’s heart pills.
At 4:40, the receptionist, Mrs. Yablonsky, saw her come into the waiting room and go back to the dispensary where the doctor filled prescriptions himself. At 4:55, Mrs. Yablonsky left for the day.
The doctor said he would lock up. He said Patty had already gone. Home was four blocks up the hill. She never arrived.
By 5:30 her mother was looking out the front window. At six she called the hospital, then the doctor’s office. Dr. Gart answered and said Patty had picked up the pills at 4:45, left, and probably stopped at a friend’s because of the snow.
At 6:45 Stan walked the four blocks down the hill and back. At 7:15 he called the police. At 6:50 the next morning, a man shoveling the steps of the Polish church saw a navy wool coat in the drift beside the coal chute, a block and a half from the doctor’s office. Patty was beneath it.
The county coroner ruled the death a homicide. She had been strangled. She had fought. The top brass button of her grandmother’s coat had been torn loose and was found in her closed right hand.
On the button shank, the state police lab in Harrisburg found blood. It was Group B. Patty was Group O. The button was sealed in an envelope and placed in a box labeled with the case number.
Dr. Walter Gart, as the county’s deputy coroner, signed her death certificate on November 12th. The case went to Trooper Ed Solalowski, forty-one, of the Pennsylvania State Police. He had grown up on Fourth Street, and his son had gotten a plastic Stegosaurus from Patty when he broke his wrist in 1977.
He would later say he did not go back to the hospital for two years. The first suspect was the fiancé, but Mike Rusnock had been on the second shift with forty witnesses. The second suspect was a drifter with an assault record, but he had been in the back of a police car on a public drunkenness charge by six that evening. Both were cleared within a week.
Then there was the doctor. Solalowski interviewed Dr. Gart on November 15th as the last person to see Patty alive. Gart said she had picked up the pills, chatted about the wedding, and left at 4:45.
The receptionist had left at 4:55 and had not seen her leave. Solalowski noted on page 24 that the doctor had a bandaged left thumb, claiming a broken vial. He asked Gart’s blood type. Gart said it was O.
Solalowski wrote it down. He did not check it. There was no one in Colehill to check it against. The doctor kept the records.
The chief of police, whose wife the doctor had seen through two cancers, told Solalowski he was wasting the state’s time. The barracks commander, who had a daughter the doctor had delivered, told him to look at drifters on Route 61. While the state police looked at Route 61, the Novaks tried to live. Stan went back to the hoist.
Helen kept cleaning the church. Mike Rusnock came for Sunday dinner for a year, then stopped. The plastic dinosaurs stayed in the X-ray room, and the technician who came after Patty kept giving them out. Every month, Dr.
Gart came up the hill with his black bag to check Helen’s heart and sat at her kitchen table, telling her that grief was a thing the body carried. The years passed. The last colliery closed in 1984, and Stan retired to the porch. Every November 10th, the family walked down the hill and left a plastic dinosaur on the steps of the Polish church.
Ed Solalowski retired in 1995 and took a copy of the file, all 210 pages, home in a box that lived in his cellar. He read it every November, and every November he stopped on page 24 and wondered why he had never asked to see the thumb. Dr. Gart retired in 2003 at sixty-five, honored with a dinner at the firehouse and a plaque at the hospital, and moved to a condominium in Allentown.
The corkboard of babies went with him. Stan died in 2006. Helen never let go. Every November, she wrote to the state police asking whether the button had been tested with anything new.
She was told the stain was too small, again and again. Helen died in 2017 at eighty-eight. Her son Joe buried her with a plastic dinosaur. Joe Novak, then sixty-eight, kept writing.
In 2022, the Pennsylvania State Police expanded its cold case unit, and the Novak box was the oldest one in the Frackville barracks. It was opened by Corporal Dana Rusnock, twenty-seven. She was Mike Rusnock’s granddaughter, and she had not asked for the case. She read the file in a weekend.
She noticed page 24. She noticed that the doctor’s blood type had been taken on the doctor’s word. She noticed that the deputy coroner who signed the death certificate was the last man to see Patty alive. She underlined his name on a legal pad.
She sent the button to a private laboratory in Texas that specializes in recovering DNA from tiny, decades-old samples on metal. In February 2023, the lab reported a full male profile, with no match in the national criminal database. Then they used forensic genetic genealogy, uploading the unknown DNA to public ancestry websites and working backward from distant cousins through birth and immigration records until the branches narrowed to one family. On the morning of April 5th, 2023, the genealogist’s report landed on Corporal Rusnock’s desk.
The profile belonged to a man descended from the Gart family of Lehigh County. One brother had died in 2011. The other was born in 1938, had practiced medicine in Colehill from 1965 to 2003, and had signed the death certificate on page three. She looked at her legal pad and said to no one, he delivered her.
She drove to Joe Novak’s house that afternoon and told him there was a match. Joe asked one question: was it someone who had touched his mother? Rusnock said yes. Joe closed his eyes and said that man took her blood pressure for twenty years.
In hindsight, there had been signs. The thumb. The blood type nobody checked. A note on page 41 from nurse Rita Circle saying that Patty had told her in October that the doctor had started asking her to come by the office for a checkup every Friday, and that she had asked whether that was normal.
And the death certificate on which the doctor had written the time of death as approximately 11 p. m. , six hours after the coroner’s own estimate. Rusnock needed a confirming sample.
On April 20th, a trooper sat two seats down from the doctor at a bakery counter in Allentown and, when he left, collected his coffee cup. On May 8th, 2023, the lab confirmed it. The blood on the brass button in Patty Novak’s hand belonged to Walter Gart. On the morning of Thursday, May 18th, 2023, Dr.
Gart answered his door in a cardigan. Corporal Rusnock stood on the step with two troopers. Joe Novak was in the hallway. He had asked to be there.
Rusnock read the warrant. Gart looked at her name tag, then past her at Joe. According to the arrest report, he said, I told Helen it was a thing the body carried. Joe said she carried it.
Colehill did not know how to hold it. The hospital took the plaque down that afternoon. The corkboard of babies appeared in the newspaper the next morning with Patty’s photograph in the third row. The four churches held a joint service.
Then the grief turned. People remembered the house calls, the death certificate, the way he had checked Helen Novak’s heart every month for twenty years. In October 2023, faced with the DNA and Rita Circle’s statement, Gart pleaded guilty to third-degree murder under the laws of 1978. On November 10th, 2023, forty-five years to the day, he was sentenced to twenty to forty years.
He was eighty-five. Joe Novak stood at the podium and said his mother had let that man into her kitchen 240 times and had thanked him every time. Gart stared at the table. Ed Solalowski, eighty-six, sat in the second row with the box from his cellar.
Mike Rusnock, seventy, sat beside him next to his granddaughter. Patricia Anne Novak was twenty-four years old. She gave a plastic dinosaur to every child who held still. She had a wedding in May and a whole life in front of her, and it was taken by the man who had brought her into the world.
After the sentencing, Joe walked down the hill and left a plastic dinosaur on the steps of the Polish church. He told reporters, I want people to sit with that. The Novak case is the oldest ever solved by the Pennsylvania State Police. Every death certificate Walter Gart signed as deputy coroner between 1965 and 2003 is now being reviewed.
The years have a way of burying things, but they do not destroy them. A brass button in a closed hand. A blood type taken on a doctor’s word. A note about Friday checkups.
These things wait. The truth is patient in a way that people are not. What seemed settled in Colehill in 1978 was never truly closed.
It was only waiting for someone who had not been delivered by the suspect.