She was 24 years old.
She was 5 foot five and she had been born 24 years earlier in the front bedroom of her parents’ rowhouse on Third Street, delivered by the same doctor who had set her broken arm at 9, treated her strep throat at 12, and signed her physical for the hospital job at 22.
On the evening of Friday, November 10th, 1978, Patricia Anne Novak finished her shift as an X-ray technician at Anthroite County General Hospital in Colehill, Pennsylvania, stopped at the doctor’s office on Center Street to pick up a prescription for her mother, and walked the four blocks home in the first snow of the year.
She never got there.
That is not a story about a woman who crossed paths with a stranger on a dark street.
That is a story about a man with a black leather bag who had a key to half the houses in town, who signed her death certificate, and who sat at her mother’s kitchen table for the next 20 years, checking her blood pressure and telling her that grief was a thing the body carried.
It would take 45 years, a coat button, and a state police corporal who was born the year he retired to finally name him.
But before we get to any of that, we have to go back to that November.
Because to understand what was lost, you first have to understand who Patty Novak was.
Cole Hill sits in anthraite county in the hard coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania where the calm banks rise behind the town like black hills and the rowouses climb the slopes and stair steps.
Each one holding a family that has been there since the mines opened in 1978.
The population was 6,200.
The mines were mostly gone, but the men who had worked them were not, and they sat on the porches with their oxygen tanks and their union pensions, and watched the street.
There was a Polish church, a Slovak church, an Irish church, and a Lutheran one, a bakery that made Patsky on Fat Tuesday, a firehouse with a bar in the back, and a hospital that had been built by the Cole Company in 1911.
The Steelers were on their way to a third Super Bowl, and the whole town had a towel.
Men drove Chevy pickups and listened to the Phillies lose.
Kids rode bikes on streets so steep they had to walk them back up.
In November, the air smelled like coal smoke and cabbage and the first snow, and the church bells over overlapped on Sunday mornings.
Nobody in Cole Hill locked a door.
The doctor had a key anyway, and he used it, letting himself in at 2 in the morning to sit with a dying minor so the family could sleep.
Patricia Anne Novak, called Patty by everyone, was the younger of two children.
Her father Stan had worked underground for 22 years and now ran the hoist at the last operating collery in the county.
Her mother Helen cleaned the Slovac church and made the perogi for every funeral in town.
Patty had gone to the community college in Pottsville and come home with a radiology certificate because she told her mother the hospital had taken care of her whole family and now she was going to take care of it.
She was an X-ray technician on the dayshift.
She had a habit that every child who ever broke a bone in Cole Hill remembered.
She kept a shoe box 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 that her grandmother had brought from Slovakia.
She drove nothing.
She walked everywhere like everyone.
She was engaged to a boy named Mike Rsnock who worked at the garment factory and the wedding was set for May at the Slovak church.
She had asked Dr.
Gart at her last visit whether he would be the one to 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 40 in 1978, had come to Cole Hill in 1965 from a residency in Philadelphia, and was the only general practitioner for 8 miles.
He made house calls.
He delivered babies in bedrooms when the roads were bad.
He had delivered Patty Novak, and he kept a photograph of her and of every baby he had delivered on a corkboard in his waiting room.
He was on the hospital board.
He treated the miner’s lungs for free when the union fund ran dry.
Cole Hill would have told you Dr.
Ghart was the closest thing the town had to a saint.
That was the last winter any of them believed it.
On November 10, Patty’s shift ended at 4:00 p.m.
At 4:15, she told a nurse named Rita Circle she was stopping at the doctors for her mother’s heart pills.
At 4:40, Dr.
Ghart’s 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, past the bakery, past the firehouse.
Passed the Polish church with its coal chute on the alley side.
She never arrived.
At 5:30 p.m., Helen Novak looked out the front window.
At 600, she called the hospital.
Patty had left at 4.
At 6:15, she called the doctor’s office.
Dr.
Ghart answered and said Patty had picked up the pills at 4:45 and left and that with the snow she had probably stopped at a friend’s.
At 6:45, Stan walked the four blocks down the hill and back.
At 7:15, he called the Cole Hill police.
The chief, who had two officers, called the state police barracks in Frackville.
At 6:50 the next morning, a man named Andy Kutz shoveling the steps of the Polish church saw a navy wool coat in the drift beside the church’s coal shoot a block and a half from the doctor’s office.
Patty was beneath it.
The anthroite 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.
And on the button shank, the state police lab in Harrisburg found blood.
Group B Patty was O.
The button was sealed in an envelope and placed in a box labeled 781 1140.
Doctor Walter Ghart as the county’s deputy coroner signed the death certificate on November 12.
The case went to Trooper Ed Solalowski, 41, of the Pennsylvania State Police, who had grown up on Fourth Street and had gotten a plastic Stegosaurus from Patty Novak when his son 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 fiance.
Mike Rousno had been on the second shift at the garment factory from 300 p.m.
Until 11 no with 40 women and a floor supervisor.
That took a day.
The second suspect was a drifter.
A man named Leon Pasco, 33, with a record for assault in Wilsbari, had been seen at the Firehouse Bar that afternoon.
Solowski found him in Hazelton on November 14.
Pasco had been at the bar until 5:30 and then in the back of a police car by 6:15 on a public drunkenness charge and the Cole Hill chief had booked himself, cleared by November 17.
And then there was the doctor.
Solowski interviewed Dr.
Ghart on November 15 as the last person to see Patty alive.
Ghart said she had picked up the pills, chatted about the wedding, and left at 4:45.
Mrs.
Yablonsky had left at 455 and had not seen her leave.
Sookalooki noted on page 24 that the doctor had a bandaged left thumb states from a broken vial.
He asked the doctor’s blood type.
Ghart said it was O.
Sokalooki wrote it down.
He did not check it.
There was no one in Cole Hill to check it against.
The doctor kept the records.
And the chief of police, whose wife the doctor had seen through two cancers, told Solalowski that he was wasting the state’s time.
And the barracks commander, who had a daughter the doctor had delivered, told him to look at the drifters on Route 61.
While the state police looked at Route 61, the Novak tried to live.
Stan went back to the hoist because the last collery did not stop.
Helen kept cleaning the church.
Mike Rusnock came for Sunday dinner for a year and then stopped.
The plastic dinosaurs stayed in the X-ray room and the technician who came after Patty kept giving them out.
And every month, Dr.
Ghart came up the hill with his black bag to check Helen’s heart and sat at the kitchen table and told her grief was a thing the body carried.
Then the years came.
By 1981, Mike Rsnock had married a girl from Shannondoa and Helen made the pureogi.
In 1984, the last kery closed and Stan retired to the porch.
By 1988, 10 years had passed.
10 years.
Helen said the words at the kitchen table on the anniversary, and Stan got up and went out to the porch and sat with the other men.
Every November 10, the family walked down the hill and left a plastic dinosaur on the steps of the Polish church.
Ed Sokalowski 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.
Doctor Ghart retired in 2003 at 65 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.
The X-ray room got a digital machine in 2009 and the shoe box of dinosaurs moved to the new one.
Stan died in 2006.
Helen Novak was the one who never let go.
She kept cleaning the Slovak church until she was 80.
And every November, she wrote to the state police asking whether the button from box 781 11140 had been tested with anything new.
In 2001, she was told the stain was too small.
In 2010, the same.
Helen died in 2017 at 88, and her son Joe buried her with a plastic dinosaur.
Joe Novak, 68, kept writing.
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Now, let’s get back to Patty.
The case had been cold for 44 years when a state police corporal who was born in 1995 opened box 781140.
Her name was Corporal Dana Roosno, 27.
And yes, she was Mike Rsno’s granddaughter and no, she did not ask for the case.
In 2022, the Pennsylvania State Police expanded its cold case unit and the Novak box was the oldest one in the Frackville barracks.
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 her alive.
She wrote the name on a legal pad and underlined it.
She sent the button to a private laboratory in Texas that specializes in recovering dena from tiny decades old samples on metal.
In February 2023, the lab reported a full male profile, no match in the national criminal database.
So, the lab used forensic genetic genealogy, a method that uploads the unknown dena to public ancestry websites, the same sites ordinary people use to trace their family trees and works backward from distant cousins through birth and immigration records until the branches narrow to one man.
On Wednesday, April 5th, 2023, at 8:0 in the morning, Dana Rusnock opened the genealogologist’s report at her desk in Frackville.
The profile belonged to a man descended from the Ghart family of Lehi County, Pennsylvania.
Two brothers, one had died in 2011.
The other was born in 1938, had practiced medicine in Cole Hill from 1965 to 2003 and had signed the death certificate on page three.
She looked at the legal pad.
She looked at the report.
She said, “To no one, he delivered her.”
She drove to Joe Novak’s house that afternoon.
She did not say the name.
She said there was a match and that it was someone who had been in the file since 1978 and that it was someone who had been in his mother’s kitchen.
Joe, 68, asked one question.
Was it someone who had touched his mother?
RNO said yes.
Joe closed his eyes.
He said he took her blood pressure for 20 years.
Dr.
Walter Ghart was 85 in 2023.
He lived in the condominium in Allentown, walked with a cane, and still received Christmas cards from the babies he had delivered.
His plaque still hung at the hospital.
In hindsight, there had been signs.
The thumb, the blood type nobody checked, a note on page 41 from Rita Soil, the nurse, 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 Rita whether that was normal.
Solowski had underlined it and the death certificate on which the doctor had written the time of death as a prox.
11 p.m.
6 hours after the coroner’s own estimate.
Rousno needed a confirming sample.
On April 20, 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 Ghart.
On the morning of Thursday, May 18th, 2023, at 8:10 a.m., Doctor Ghart answered his door in a cardigan.
Corporal Dana Rousno stood on the step with two troopers.
Joe Novak was in the hallway.
He had asked.
Rusnock read the warrant.
Ghart looked at her name tag.
He looked 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.
Cole Hill did not know how to hold it.
The hospital took the plaque down that afternoon.
The corkboard of babies, which the doctor’s daughter had kept, was in the newspaper the next morning with Patty’s photograph in the third row.
The four churches held a joint service on Sunday.
Then the grief turned.
People remembered the house calls.
They remembered the death certificate.
They remembered that he had checked Helen Novak’s heart every month for 20 years.
Court documents show that in October 2023, faced with the Dena and Rita SoCal’s statement, Ghart pleaded guilty to thirddegree murder under the laws of 1978.
On November 10th, 2023, 45 years to the day, he was sentenced to 20 to 40 years.
He was 85.
Joe Novak stood at the podium and said that his mother had let that man into her kitchen 240 times and that she had thanked him every time.
Ghart stared at the table.
Ed Sokalowski, 86, sat in the second row with the box from his cellar.
Mike Rusnock, 70, sat beside him next to his granddaughter.
Patricia Anne Novak was 24 years old.
She gave a plastic dinosaur to every child who held still.
And she came home to take care of the hospital that had taken care of her family.
She had a wedding in May and a whole life in front of her that belonged to her by right 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 he signed her death certificate.
I want people to sit with that.
The Novak case is the oldest ever solved by the Pennsylvania State Police and every death certificate Walter Ghart 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 Cole Hill in 1978 was never truly closed.
It was only waiting for someone who had not been delivered by the suspect.
So, we want to hear from you.
Is 20 to 40 years at 85 justice?
Or did Walter Ghart get 45 years he never deserved?
What detail in this case stays with you most?
The corkboard, the death certificate, or the blood pressure cuff?
And how many other towns are trusting one man with everything?
Because there is no one else to check.
Justice came for Patty Novak after 45 years.
Stories like hers, remind us that truth, however late, always finds its way to the light.
If you believe that too, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.
And if you want more solved cold cases, the links are waiting in the description.
Thank you for watching.
