There is still only an empty lot where Catherine Novak’s house burned down in 2008.
In the hills around Narrowsburg, N.Y., where second-home owners tend gardens and the Lenape once roamed, people don’t forget a mysterious death. They still talk about the bar owner who shot his waitress in the chest late one night and served just six months in jail after saying it was an accident. Then there was the story about the man who arrived home one night only to notice that his wife, who had been in the back seat, was no longer in the car. Her body was found on the side of a road along the route he’d taken. Charges were never filed.
We own a house near Narrowsburg, but I never knew anybody who died mysteriously, until one day a couple of weeks before Christmas 2008, when I saw a picture of a burning house on the front page of our town paper with the headline “Local Woman Dies in Fire.” The woman was Catherine Novak, a cheery neighbor I’d known since 2004. For a year, we each had a kindergartner in the local school and a toddler at home. We had been lured to the area, about two hours from New York, by real estate bargains in a beautiful but isolated and depressed community. We soon learned, though, that we had traded urban problems for country ones. Heating oil was expensive, septic tanks leaked and cars needed constant maintenance. In September, the summer residents returned to the city and the restaurants closed. By January, we lived for the salt truck and the social diversion of drives to Walmart and the McDonald’s PlayPlace. I was hoping to high-tail it back to Manhattan as soon as I could, but Catherine was committed to making a life there.
I rarely saw her husband, Paul. He worked in Queens as a paramedic and slept in the city three or four nights a week. Occasionally he showed up at school events wearing a uniform with the caduceus and F.D.N.Y. patches on the shoulders. The Iraq war was entering its second year, and an American flag flapped from their porch. In those post-9/11, wartime days, it was possible to assume he might be some kind of hero.
The last time I saw Catherine was late in the summer of 2008. We had moved back to Manhattan and went up to the country only on weekends. I was packing the car when she and her daughter, who was 9, pulled up in the late-afternoon sunlight. I hadn’t seen her for several years. “I’ve been looking for you,” she called as she climbed our front steps. “I need a job. My husband’s having an affair.” She said it with a light laugh. We talked a bit, but I was in a hurry to get back to the city. I left, promising to pass her résumé to corporate H.R. I never heard from her again.
The morning Catherine died, Dec. 13, 2008, was unusually cold, with temperatures dipping into the 20s, a biting wind chill and flurries of snow. Before dawn, a neighbor rose to make coffee and saw the Novaks’ house across the road engulfed in flames. More-distant neighbors noticed the light and initially thought the sun was rising. By the time fire trucks arrived, the red-and-white house had collapsed. Later that day, investigators used a backhoe to excavate frozen ash, and in the gray light of early afternoon, reached the basement floor, where Catherine was on her back, arms outstretched, charred in situ like a figure from Pompeii. She was 41. The body of the family dog, Aladdin, was nearby, locked in a kennel.
People in Narrowsburg were suspicious for the usual reasons: Her husband had left her for a younger woman. They were fighting about money. She never kept the dog in the kennel when she was home. And that night, her two children were more than 100 miles away at their father’s apartment on Long Island.
Examiners determined that the dog died of smoke inhalation, but an autopsy found that the level of carbon monoxide in Catherine’s lungs was too low to kill her. They concluded that she died after debris from the fire crushed her chest. The lead fire investigator considered Catherine’s death suspicious but couldn’t prove that the fire wasn’t accidental. Ten days after the fire, Paul Novak passed a lie-detector test, and a few months later he collected about $800,000 in insurance money and left his job.
The case was closed. Anyone in town who thought Catherine might have been the victim of a crime straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel filed away their suspicions with the waitress and the dead wife by the side of the road.
What Narrowsburg didn’t know about the Novaks, Queens did. Catherine was raised in Glendale, a neighborhood of low apartment buildings and one- and two-family, aluminum-sided homes behind chain-link fences. The fourth and youngest child, she and her family moved from apartment to apartment while her struggling parents scraped together money for parochial school. She put herself through Marymount Manhattan College doing accounting and other odd jobs and became a semiprofessional volunteer, a woman people could count on to help clean the schoolyard, decorate the church hall and run the blood drive.
When she was 19, she joined the Ridgewood Volunteer Ambulance Corps, first becoming a dispatcher and then earning her certification as an E.M.T. She rode the ambulance a few times, but she wasn’t strong enough to lift stretchers, and eventually she became a Certified First Responder instead. She married an E.M.T. named Michael Ansbach, and they built a life around the adrenaline-fueled emergency world. But if Catherine enjoyed the drama of paramedic life, she was no thrill junkie. At home she was the responsible partner who balanced the books and checked the fire alarms monthly. When the marriage ended in divorce after four years, she started dating businessmen.
Then in the summer of 1996, Catherine went to an ambulance-corps barbecue and met a tall, dark-bearded paramedic named Paul Attila Novak, the first and only son of an Austrian mother and a Hungarian father who each immigrated to Queens during the Cold War. Novak’s mother told me Paul was “tender, like his father” and that he was drawn to emergency-medic work after volunteering to drive the elderly to treatment. But many people found him cool and unemotional. Catherine’s best friend, Margaret Hershman, didn’t like Novak from the start. “He was big-time antisocial, and he gave me the creeps,” she said. Catherine, though, “really loved him,” she said. “He was big. He was strong. And she was dedicated. And she made a lot of excuses for him.”
A career paramedic, Novak had been working for Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, in Queens, for about five years and was one of the hospital’s more seasoned ambulance drivers. He could steer a speeding truck under the sinuous elevated J train and racked up numerous certified saves — awards for successful resuscitations. His partners told me that he was known as the guy who could “get things done,” thanks to his connections to hospital administrators, but that meant that if you angered him, you might have your file pulled by the higher-ups and inspected for infractions. To his colleagues, he was a solid medic with a reputation for fearlessness. He collected and reconfigured motorcycles to make them faster. He once brought in a video of himself speeding through the upstate woods at 160 m.p.h.
Novak didn’t strike his colleagues as unusual, but that may have been because what passed for “normal” behavior among paramedics at Jamaica was already slightly askew. It was something about the combination of life-or-death situations coupled with long periods of boredom. According to Jordan Press, a former paramedic and sometime ambulance partner of Novak’s, sex in ambulances and prescription-drug abuse were common between calls. He described how he once took so much Percocet that he found himself on a call unable to remember how he got there. “It’s a strange business to be in,” he said. “It’s this invisible world that nobody knows about. You have all these people who get involved in bizarre situations all the time. When you are in it, you have no idea. But everybody who leaves, they say, ‘What the [expletive] was that?’ ”
Press said Novak often idled the ambulance near Wi-Fi hot spots so he could download triple-X images. “Paul had a porn fascination like something I have never seen before. He has some type of void in him that he was trying to fill with objects and porn. Objects and porn. He could never be satiated. It was automatic, like I automatically hit Google news.”
He rarely talked to women and had only one serious girlfriend, from high school, who was an E.M.T. They were briefly engaged but broke up, and she married someone else. A few years later, she committed suicide. Paul, hearing the emergency call on the scanner and recognizing the address, responded and, in the lingo, pronounced her at the scene.
The pairing of Paul Novak and Catherine Lane never made much sense to the other paramedics. She was frugal and had an accountant’s sense of responsibility about balanced books. He was always broke, blowing his income on electronics and motorcycles. On Valentine’s Day 1997, they married. A year later, Novak filed for bankruptcy. According to some people close to Catherine, she never had any problems with debt before, but in 2003, she filed for bankruptcy too.
By then they were living in Narrowsburg, in Sullivan County, with their 3-year-old daughter, Natalee, in the inexpensive home they had bought. He would sleep in Queens a few times a week, and she would stay in the country and raise their children.
“She always wanted to be a stay-at-home mom,” her mother, Christina Daws, says. “She really wanted to have a house so that her children could say, ‘That’s where I grew up.’ ”
In Narrowsburg, Paul and Catherine were not like the many New Yorkers buying up and renovating cheap farmhouses or congregating around one another’s ponds on summer weekends with wine from the new shops on Main Street. Their house needed work, but very little got done because money was tight. After their son, Nicholas, was born in 2003, Catherine’s family visited for the christening, celebrating amid the reek of overflowing septic in the yard. Catherine “put a brave face on it,” her mother said.
Catherine plunged into local civic life. She volunteered at the school, served on its board and acted as a deacon at the Lutheran church. A lifelong Girl Scout, she led Natalee’s troop. But the cracks in her marriage were starting to widen. When Novak talked to the police after the fire, the investigator wrote, “Novak indicated that his relationship between him and Catherine struggled when he was placed not only behind the needs of the children but also with her volunteer work with the Lutheran Church and the Girl Scouts.”
In the fall of 2007, a fresh face appeared at the Jamaica ambulance garage: Michelle LaFrance, a voluptuous 25-year-old, was completing the paramedic certification program at Stony Brook University with a stint on an ambulance. Born and raised on Long Island, the daughter of an Avis car-rental executive, she’d been volunteering on ambulances since she was a teenager. But she was also troubled. LaFrance attempted suicide at 15, and by 20 she had a cascade of ailments that included cardiac arrhythmia, fibromyalgia and premenstrual-distress disorder. She was on a variety of medications, including painkillers and antidepressants.
LaFrance was assigned to “ride the bus” with Novak and Press. After a one-night stand with Press, she began an affair with Novak, their romance stoked, in part, by the adrenaline of emergencies. She later testified that after she intubated a patient for the first time, she texted Novak: “Hey I got my first intubation!” Then, she told the court, “we met for drinks so I could celebrate; that was the first time I kissed him.”
On Jan. 16, 2008, a date LaFrance remembered because she insisted Novak backdate his separation agreement to it, they slept together. In March, Paul told Catherine he had never loved her. A few weeks later, LaFrance phoned the Narrowsburg house in the middle of the night, asking for him, and Catherine finally knew the truth.
Novak moved into an apartment with LaFrance in Glen Cove, on Long Island, and Catherine filed for divorce. He agreed to pay $1,700 a month in child support and take the children every other weekend. But the separation was far from amicable. To LaFrance, Novak seethed that Catherine was a “fat, ugly troll” and a terrible mother. They started fighting on the phone about money and the children. Novak threatened to file for custody.
To her Narrowsburg friends, Catherine was the picture of motherly devotion. She took two part-time jobs, at the school and a local church camp, telling people she wanted to save money for the children’s college educations. She had Natalee and Nicholas perform home fire drills and videotaped them, clips of which the prosecutors showed at the trial. Before she let the kids visit Long Island, she vetted LaFrance by taking her out to a local diner and asking her to help shop for Nicholas’s birthday cake.
A newly single mother on a quiet country road, Catherine never talked about fear. But two weeks after Novak moved out, she paid a neighbor’s husband to change all the locks.
After Catherine’s death, Novak used the insurance money to buy a house in Palm Coast, Fla., with an in-ground saltwater pool, and moved there with his children and LaFrance. They didn’t marry, although he bought her an engagement ring. Instead, they fought. One afternoon in April 2012, more than three years after Catherine’s death, LaFrance, who had moved out of Novak’s house, called the New York State Police and said she wanted to talk about Catherine’s case. Investigators flew to Florida and interviewed LaFrance for more than six hours. Five months later, after building their case, authorities arrested Novak and charged him with murder and arson.
Almost every weekday last August and September, Paul Novak, dressed in a dark suit, walked in chains from the Sullivan County jailhouse to the courthouse, the two buildings attached by razor wire and a chain-link fence. Three zaftig blondes sat behind him in court — his mother, his sister and his new girlfriend, Kathleen DelGrosso, a software designer he met on Match.com, who moved in with him in 2011, a year before he was arrested. Catherine’s mother, brother and a revolving cast of her relatives sat on the other side of the aisle. Reporters showed up every day, putting the story on the front page of area newspapers, and “Dateline NBC” producers wandered in and out. Around Narrowsburg, the headlines stunned neighbors and friends, the gruesome details of Catherine’s death leaving them in tears or cursing Novak under their breath.
A pair of Sullivan County prosecutors — the current officeholder and his predecessor wearing a hearing aid as well as a sling from recent shoulder surgery — told the jury that Novak’s motive was greed. LaFrance, the star witness, now certified as an E.M.T. in Florida, had immunity from prosecution. She testified for five days, alternately cocky, teary or obsequious. She couldn’t remember exactly when Novak disclosed his plan, she said, but she went along with it, hoping “to make life easier.” They visited Catherine the week before the fire, under the pretense of picking up a motorcycle. Novak sneaked downstairs and unlocked the basement door to prepare for the following week.
“He was gonna do this and save the children,” she testified. “I don’t remember exactly the conversation. He had me convinced that Catherine was the bad guy and he was the good parent and his kids were abused and his kids were miserable and we need to save the kids.”
“Did he tell you anything about what he needed to do about Catherine before Dec. 12?” the district attorney asked her.
“That he needed to kill her.”
“Did you do anything to stop it?”
“No, I did not,” she said, weeping.
In the weeks after the fire, when the state police interviewed some Jamaica Hospital paramedics about Novak, none expressed any suspicions, one investigator told me. Perhaps they were fearful; perhaps they wanted to protect him. But once the trial was underway, several had to testify. They described how Novak never made a secret of hating his wife and had been talking about ways to dispose of bodies and commit the perfect crime.
The parade of burly Queens ambulance drivers gave the small courthouse audience a glimpse into an urban subculture so inured to death and violence that they were oblivious to the casual callousness and misogyny of their own testimony. Press — who was subpoenaed but never called to testify — told me, “I still find myself thinking, Well, she’s dead, what’s the big deal?” He then has to remind himself that Novak killed her. “You see so many dead bodies,” he said. “She was just another dead body. And I know that’s how Novak saw it.” Novak complained so much about Catherine that Press jokingly suggested that he “send her to Somalia on a church mission, she’d never come back,” he said. “He comes back to me the next day and says, ‘I looked it up about Somalia, and it wouldn’t work.’ And I said, ‘Are you [expletive] kidding me?’ ”
One paramedic, Ed Palmer, testified that he overheard Novak telling Catherine on the phone, “You may be the mother of my children, but I can still kill you.” At the time, Palmer left the room, he said, to give his buddy “some privacy.” Another partner, Don Medley, testified that he was standing around the garage one day when Novak said that fire was the best way to get rid of a body. Willy Gonzalez, a veteran paramedic, one of the few with more experience than Novak, told me that he was riding in an ambulance with Novak one night as he was going through his computer. “Suddenly he has this brainstorm: ‘You know how to commit the perfect crime?’ ” Gonzalez said. “And I’m looking at him, at first taken aback, and I say, ‘No, how?’ ‘Fire! Get rid of the evidence!’ I was like, ‘O.K.’ ”
At the time, Novak’s colleagues testified, they thought his talk was just part of the black humor that got them through the shift. “At the garage, everyone talks about death and bodies all the time,” Palmer told jurors. Some of them later came to think, though, that Novak had been vetting them, looking for someone to help with his plan.
Eventually he did find his accomplice, a 6-foot-9 giant named Scott Sherwood, whose lifelong battle with bipolar disorder and daily intake of large doses of psychiatric medications — Adderall, Celexa, Seroquel, Trazodone — were no secret among his friends at Jamaica Hospital. He was emotional and fell apart easily when he was on call, especially if the case involved a child. “He would be crying and everything,” Press said about Sherwood. “I would be like: ‘Come on, dude, you know we gotta get through this night. There’s another one around the corner.’ ”
Sherwood, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in a deal that could result in a shorter sentence in exchange for his testimony against Novak, told jurors that he empathized with Novak’s plight, because he had experienced an ugly divorce himself. He was barely staying afloat paying alimony and child support for a son he was not allowed to see. When Novak said he needed to “do something” about Catherine so he wouldn’t “end up like me,” Sherwood testified, he agreed to help.
On the night of Dec. 12, the prosecutors and their witnesses told the jury, Novak and LaFrance were in their home in Glen Cove with the children. LaFrance gave Natalee and Nicholas each a Benadryl strip before bed to make sure they slept through the night. Then Sherwood arrived, and the three went upstairs, where Novak had a variety of chemicals, a glass bowl and lots of ice. The plan was to make chloroform, which they would use on Catherine, then light the house on fire and make her death look like an accident.
“And now there’s three Jamaica paramedics standing around making chloroform,” LaFrance told the jury. “And everybody’s O.K. with it.”
Sherwood then drove Novak upstate, stopping at a Walmart, where Novak bought a beanie cap, some duct tape and a pair of suede gloves. Novak directed Sherwood to park behind a barn about a mile from Catherine’s house. Novak left, and Sherwood sat in the car and waited. An hour later, Novak reappeared from the woods, peeled off a pair of scrubs, got back in the car and said, “It’s done.” They drove off as a glow illuminated the rolling hills.
“It’s done,” Novak repeated when he arrived home, according to LaFrance. A week later, he finally told her the details. He lured Catherine to the basement by setting off a fire alarm, then applied the home-brewed chloroform, but it didn’t work. So he strangled her. “He told me they were rolling around on the floor, and she was begging for her life, saying, ‘Think of the kids!’ ” LaFrance testified. “And the only thing he said the whole time was, ‘I’m doing this for the kids.’ ”
After his confession, LaFrance said, their relationship soured. She drank to forget what happened. One night, she got so drunk that she stripped and walked into a neighbor’s house. The police were called, and it took six of them to handcuff her to a tree. She woke up in the hospital the next morning, unable to remember the previous night.
“It was supposed to be this paradise,” she told the jurors about their life in Florida. “We saved the kids, we are going to be living happily ever after. And it was a disaster.”
In 2011, she moved into a condo in a nearby town and started having nightmares about Novak. “I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, I felt the bed move and I knew it was Paul coming in to kill me. I was waiting and waiting, and he wasn’t there.”
She began dating a local sheriff’s deputy in the spring of 2012. She told him about the crime, and he urged her to call the New York police.
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At the trial, Novak was represented by a New York criminal defense attorney named Gary Greenwald. As he paced back and forth in front of the jury, he laid out the defense’s theory: LaFrance, wanting Novak and his children to herself, killed Catherine, with the help of Sherwood, whom she seduced. The only hope he had of convincing a jury of this theory was to discredit LaFrance. She denied that she slept with Sherwood, but Greenwald repeatedly reminded jurors that she had affairs with a number of married men and returned often to a comment she made to the police about having had sex with “half of Mattituck,” the Long Island community where she once lived. Greenwald spent days going line by line through her and Sherwood’s lengthy medical and psychological records. The tactic drew out the proceedings, turning the trial into one of the longest in Sullivan County’s history. A majority of the jurors had no more than high-school diplomas; most were absent from much-needed jobs. Two were excused as the proceedings went a month over schedule.
On the last day of Novak’s defense, Greenwald called to the stand what he described as a “killer witness”: Paul’s daughter, Natalee, then a month shy of 14. After Novak’s arrest, the Florida Department of Children and Families put Natalee and Nicholas in the custody of Novak’s mother and new girlfriend to keep them in the same home and schools, a decision Catherine’s family didn’t challenge, because they were worried about further disrupting the children’s lives. Chewing her lip on the witness stand, Natalee told the jurors that her mom and dad loved each other and that the last time she saw her mom alive, she was hugging her dad goodbye. She wept as she spoke.
But the jury had already heard the testimony of LaFrance and Novak’s colleagues describing how much he had hated Catherine. They had also seen a picture of Sherwood’s license plate as he sped through a toll on the George Washington Bridge at 6:39 a.m. on Dec. 13. There was also the prosecution’s own killer witness: Elise Hanlon of the New York Fire Department. On the 12th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, after the judge held a moment of silence to remember New York’s lost first responders, Hanlon took the witness chair. A stout, unflappable blonde, she testified that she was a lieutenant and paramedic based in Queens. She started dating Sherwood around 2004, and they married in September 2012, two weeks before he was arrested.
Hanlon knew her boyfriend drove Novak to Narrowsburg on the night of Dec. 12, 2008. About two weeks after the fire, she testified, she confronted Novak, and he admitted that he killed Catherine. Hanlon never called the police. “I didn’t want my boyfriend to be arrested,” she testified.
On Sept. 27, 2013, a jury of eight men and four women found Novak guilty on all charges, including first- and second-degree murder, arson, burglary, grand larceny and insurance fraud. He took the news impassively, as expressionless as he was when LaFrance described how he made the chloroform and when his daughter cried on the stand. He was later sentenced to life without parole.
Leaving the courtroom for the last time, some jurors looked shellshocked. “You have three bipolar, sex-crazed adrenaline junkies” — Novak, LaFrance and Sherwood — “coming from the madness of the paramedic world known as Jamaica Hospital,” one juror said to reporters. “It’s like this nest. It’s like — I don’t even know how to begin to describe it.”
Toward the end of the trial, I returned to the scene of the crime. Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod bobbed in the shallow depression that marked where the house had stood. A shagbark hickory and a dying pine shaded the tiny red-and-white garage, painted to match the house. For four years, neighbors and friends were unable to pass the rusty mailbox and overgrown concrete driveway on County Road 25 without a feeling of unease. Now people around town were starting to talk of closure. Catherine’s death was no longer one of those terrible mysteries we wondered about and tried to put out of our minds. “I don’t know if there can be closure when someone is torn out of so many people’s lives,” said the Rev. Phyllis Haynes of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, where Catherine was a member. “But what has happened is that all of us can breathe a little easier without that niggling little poke in our hearts and minds that there wasn’t something quite right about her death.”
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