by Ann Rule
When Barbara graduated from high school, she enrolled in Randolph Macon Women’s College in Ashland, Virginia, and explained to Carlton that she intended to finish. But he persuaded her to get married by promising her she could still graduate from college. They were married in Virginia in 1959, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where Barbara worked toward her degree at Georgetown University. But Carlton had two years of public service ahead of him, and was assigned to Springfield, Missouri. Barbara Hearn finally finished college at Drury College in Springfield. And then they were transferred to Atlanta, Georgia.
Their first child, Dorothy Carlisle Hearn, was born at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on July 6, 1962, a beautiful, dark-haired baby, the oldest cousin of her generation, and the only girl in that first phalanx of cousins. Her birth coincided with her parents’ move to a big white Colonial house in Washington, Georgia, population 5,000.
Having a first baby brings about great changes in any young family, but Dolly’s arrival during the week they were moving from an apartment into a new house demanded very complicated logistics. Barbara and Dolly remained in the hospital while Carlton Hearn and Barbara’s mother managed somehow to move furniture, clothes, and everything else they owned into the home where they would put down deep roots.
“After that move, my mother said ‘Never again!’ Barbara recalled. “She said, ‘I’ll come if you have a baby, and I’ll come if you move, but I won’t come again if you do both at once!’”
There would be no more moves, but the Hearns did have two more babies. Carlton Jr. was born in 1965 and Gil in 1972. By the time Gil was born, Dolly was ten and considered herself a “second mother” to him.
THE HEARNS’ HOUSE IN WASHINGTON, GEORGIA, was built in 1854, survived the Civil War, and remained a proud example of Southern architecture. There was a sense of history and permanency in the old house and the twenty acres that surrounded it. The huge oak tree in the front yard was decades old, its lower branches curving so close to the ground that children could easily climb up and perch there. There were countless towering pecan trees, the ground beneath them thick with so many nuts in the fall that the Hearns gave them away and, at times, even sold them. The magnolia tree that Barbara won as a door prize at her garden club when it was barely more than a twig, grew to be more than twenty feet tall. Dogwoods abounded. There was a Confederate rose bush alongside the driveway leading to the back of the property.
“Every year, I tended to think it wasn’t going to bloom,” Barbara recalled, “and then, in October, it was suddenly full of blossoms.”
And so it bloomed, long promised and finally delivering just when everyone had given up. As other trees and bushes take on the hues of autumn, the Confederate rose is light pink, with layers of delicate, translucent silky petals.
Dolly and her little brothers once played under one of the tall pecan trees, just beyond a small wooden shack that surely dated back before the Civil War.
The Hearns’ home was full of antiques, many of them handed down through generations of Hearns and Hoges. In the entry hall, there was a framed family tree that traced Barbara’s roots back and back and back. And she treasured it. The house Dolly and her brothers grew up in was charming, but not in the least ostentatious. Built in the days before central heating, it had many fireplaces, vented through four white chimneys that rose from the roof.
The Hearns had both pets and farm animals, ducks and peacocks. Between the peacocks and the jaybirds, a cacophony of birdcalls sometimes demolished the silence of a sultry summer afternoon. Carlton and Barbara started collecting objects with a peacock motif many years ago.
“I was so glad,” Barbara Hearn said, “when my parents moved to Washington and lived close to us. Their names were Gilmer and Dorothy Hoge, but Dolly nicknamed them ‘Mama Buns’ and ‘GoGo Pop.’”
Carlton established his own dental practice in Washington, the youngest dentist in town then, and he could walk or drive home for lunch along the narrow streets that radiated from the quaint town square. Barbara’s father and her husband went fishing together, and the old man taught his son-in-law how to garden—especially tomatoes.
Theirs was as close to an idyllic life as any family could have, and Barbara and Carlton appreciated it. When she was in college, one of her friends had told Barbara that Washington, Georgia, was a safe place to live. When they moved there, the Hearns felt the same way.
DOLLY, CARLTON JR., AND GIL slept upstairs in the big white house. They got along with one another, although, like most siblings, they sometimes had fights. They went to grade school and then to Wilkes Academy for high school. Dolly might have been the only girl among all the boy cousins, but she gave no ground.
During her elementary school years, Dolly demonstrated that she was an exceptional swimmer, and she was remarkably agile, twirling her baton as a small majorette. She won the Golden Eagle Award for school spirit in her high school years. Despite her slender, almost delicate appearance, she was a high jumper and a shot-putter on the Wilkes track team. Anyone who has ever “put” the shot knows that those iron spheres are extremely heavy. Most girls can’t even lift them, much less throw them for any distance.
Dolly was also a tap dancer. She appeared in little theater productions like South Pacific, played the piano, and sang alto in choirs. And somewhere along the way, the little girl in braces became heartbreakingly beautiful. If she hadn’t been so nice to everyone and so unassuming, Dolly would have been the kind of teenager who made other girls jealous. But they weren’t, even when she was chosen as captain of the cheerleading squad at Wilkes Academy.
Dolly was too much fun to inspire envy, and, like her father, she loved to laugh. She pulled pranks on friends, whether it was to stake out a flock of pink plastic flamingos on somebody’s lawn, or pack friends’ rooms and cars full of balloons on their birthdays. Holidays were made for her; one Halloween she dressed up as a tree that had been “TP’ed”—draping herself with toilet paper.
Christmas was Dolly’s favorite holiday, though, and she planned for weeks ahead to find gifts for her family and friends.
Besides holidays, Dolly was enthusiastic about cats, all kinds of cats. Wherever she lived, there were pictures of cats, cat pillows, ceramic cats, and real live cats.
Her signature flower was a red rose. Dolly made many of the banners that the Wilkes Academy football players tore through as they raced onto the field just before a game, and her most memorable banner was made of red roses. She also composed several cheers for her squad. Three decades later, her “Hello!” cheer remained a favorite of cheerleaders young enough to be her daughters.
With exquisite features, beautiful eyes, and thick black hair that cascaded over her shoulders, Dolly Hearn looked like no one so much as Snow White—surrounded by red roses. Although she dated occasionally, and a lot of boys in Washington wanted to ask her out, she was more likely to be a pal and a friend to them. She wasn’t anxious to fall in love; she figured she had all the time in the world for that. She wanted a marriage like her parents had, and she admired them tremendously.
From the time Dolly was a little girl, Barbara Hearn taught her to sew, and to embroider and cross-stitch, although she couldn’t know how precious the pillows and tapestries Dolly made would become. Dolly had a special bond with her dad, and one Father’s Day she gave him a gift she had spent painstaking hours on. After finding the perfect poem for a man who loved to fish, she embroidered the lines:
I pray that I may
Live to fish
Until my dying day
And when it comes
To my last cast,
I then most humbly pray,
When in the Lord’s
Great hanging net
And peacefully asleep
That in His mercy
I be judged—
BIG ENOUGH TO KEEP!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1980–1987
WHEN SHE GRADUATED from Wilkes Academy, Dolly had no particular career in
mind, other than a desire to work in some kind of helping field. In the fall of 1980, she enrolled first in North Georgia College, which is located in Dahlonega about two hours’ drive from home. She considered careers as a pharmacist, an optometrist, or a physical therapist, and earned average to excellent grades in her undergraduate years, although she attended three colleges: North Georgia, Augusta College, and Mercer in Macon, Georgia. Her grade point average was just under 3.0 (B average) when Dolly realized that the best career for her had been right in front of her all along. She had helped her father as an assistant during her summer and Christmas vacations, and, working beside him, realized what an artist he was. Indeed, one of Carlton’s fellow dentists—who was a professor at a dental school—worked on one of Hearn’s former patients and was amazed at how precise Carlton’s work was.
“He wrote to Carlton,” Barbara Hearn recalled, “and said the dental work was so good that he was using it to teach his dental students.”
Although he had never pushed her in that direction, Dr. Hearn was proud in the winter of 1986, when Dolly applied to the dental school at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
In the distinctive handwriting that all her friends recognized, full of graceful loops, Dolly wrote:
“[I] have decided that a career within the field of medicine would bring the most satisfaction, especially realizing that I could use my knowledge and skills to ease the suffering of individuals afflicted with various illnesses and discomforts.”
On May 28, 1987, Dolly was disappointed to receive a letter from MCG saying that the dental classes were all filled up. Her application for admission could be moved to a list of alternates, and if any students dropped out, there was a chance she could still start dental school in the fall, or she could wait and apply the next year. Fingers crossed, Dolly chose the alternate list.
She was delighted when, a few weeks later, she was notified that a place in the class of 1991 had opened up. And so Dolly Hearn entered dental school in Augusta. She would be in the class a year behind Bart Corbin’s.
Dolly found an apartment at 3077 Parrish Road in Augusta. It was one of several townhouse-type rentals common to the area. The Wintergreen section was a newer building built of dun-colored bricks, set in deep shade for most of the daylight hours because of the tall pine trees that surrounded it. She moved in, posted a “Roommate Wanted” notice on the bulletin board at MCG, and registered with the student housing office.
Although they were strangers when they met through the roommate finders’ service, Dolly and Angela Garnto soon became close friends. Angela was three years younger than Dolly, and studying to be a doctor’s assistant. She moved in with Dolly in October 1988. They would live together in their pleasant apartment on Parrish Road for almost two years.
Angela always spoke of Dolly’s bright smile and friendliness, remembering how she could walk into a room and light it up, and how friendly Dolly was to everyone.
They both loved the apartment with its two bedrooms and a bath upstairs, a kitchen, living room, and half-bath on the ground floor. There was a little fenced-in patio area off the kitchen that could be reached through sliding glass doors.
Dolly soon put her stamp on the apartment, although nothing she chose to furnish it with was very expensive. She had a plaid couch and a small television set in the living room, and twin bookcases made of thin veneer that she had assembled herself—mostly filled with textbooks. Her décor was sentimental: candles, some artificial roses, heart-shaped picture frames, sheaves of straw bound with red bows, family photos, cat images, and a scratching post for the cat she had adopted from the Humane Society: Tabitha.
It wasn’t long before Dolly Hearn was familiar to many of the students at MCG. She said “Hi!” to everyone, and her ebullience cheered people up. And, of course, Dolly was beautiful. Although she scarcely needed makeup to enhance her natural glamour, she was rarely without it. She applied it dramatically, framing her eyes with carefully smudged black liner, and brushing her thick lashes with several coasts of mascara. Her high cheekbones were always dusted with blush, and her full lips painted scarlet. On anyone but Dolly, it probably would have been too much. But somehow, on her, it worked.
Dr. Fred Rueggeberg, a professor at MCG, found her dynamic and vivacious, and said she brought excitement and life to a boring dental school.
Dolly’s landlord, Dennis Stanfield, who soon became a close friend, described her in a curious oxymoron: “Dolly was flamboyant in a very conservative way.”
Like everyone else, Stanfield felt she uplifted the spirits of people she met because she was so positive, and so vibrant.
As a dental student, Dolly took required courses with daunting titles like “Applied Head and Neck Anatomy,” “Dental Systemic Histology,” “Biochemistry,” and “Oral Diagnosis.”
But despite the grind of her studies, she always looked like a movie star. There was nothing vaguely conventional about Dolly, and her new friends both respected her and delighted in her company.
In between her heavy schedule of classes, Dolly relaxed by watching midday soap operas on her small television set. A lot of college students were doing that in the 1980s, sitting in dorm lounges and keeping track of the daily television Sturm und Drang during their lunch breaks. The actors always had astounding personal relationships, tragedies and near-tragedies, and erotic sexual problems. Dolly sometimes laughed and said she was addicted to her soap operas. She figured out where the characters got their names: “The writers pick them from nature,” she explained to her family. “See—‘Thorn,’ ‘Brook,’ and ‘Lake’?”
Her mother said that Dolly’s fascination with the soap operas soon got her whole family watching them, too.
Dolly was also a loyal fan of Steve Martin during the days when he and fellow comedian Dan Ackroyd were in their “wild and crazy guy” phase. She giggled out loud at Martin’s silly gags. Her delight in ridiculous fictional situations, pranks, and jokes was contagious. It was probably inevitable when she met Bart Corbin that she would find his quick wit captivating, even though his humor tended to be much darker and somewhat meaner than her own.
Still, she liked him a lot when she first met him. It was something more than the fact that he was handsome and funny, but his dead-on humor initially drew Dolly’s attention. She knew a lot of handsome men, and many of them would have been pleased to date her. But she chose Bart.
Some of her friends at that time felt that Bart was the love of her life. Others weren’t so sure. Both Shelly Mansfield, Bart’s former lover in college, and Dolly Hearn were lovely, and each had long dark hair and dark eyes. Both were confident young women. The small percentage of Bart’s acquaintances who knew both women must have suspected that he was replacing Shelly with Dolly. And they were concerned.
There is no indication that Dolly ever knew about Bart’s failed romance with Shelly. She believed she knew him very well and that they had few secrets from one another. But there were facets of Bart’s personality that he kept completely hidden from her—at least in the beginning.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FALL 1988–Fall 1989
IN 1982, WHEN BART CORBIN and Shelly Mansfield first shared a class at the University of Georgia in Athens, Jenni Barber was only twelve years old and in the seventh grade. When Dolly Hearn and Bart Corbin began dating in the fall of 1988, Jenn was still eight years away from meeting him. Jenn was in her senior year in Central Gwinnett High School, and Bart was infatuated with twenty-six-year-old Dolly Hearn.
Jenn Barber hadn’t been very lucky in love. She dated a boy named Ted all through the ninth and tenth grade, and then her friends told her he’d been cheating on her, and she broke up with him. Jenn continued to believe in love, but after that she was a little less trusting.
There was every chance that Bart and Jenn would never meet, but in time the smallest veering off changes whole lives—sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. If Shelly and Bart had gotten married after their long roman
ce in Athens, Bart wouldn’t have become obsessed with Dolly Hearn, either. Once some lives intersect, however, there is no going back.
BART WAS ENTRANCED with Dolly from the moment he met her. They began to date, and were soon seeing each other exclusively, something Bart insisted on. He rapidly became so besotted with Dolly that his friends were worrying about him. Fellow dental student Eric Rader, one of Bart’s closest friends, urged Bart to slow down. It was clear that Bart was becoming much too involved emotionally. Rader warned him that he might be headed for a broken heart.
Those who knew Bart Corbin best in dental school at MCG realized that the confidence he evinced was fragile. Combined with that vulnerability, they suspected that he may have promised himself he would never again allow a woman to walk away from him. He hadn’t dealt well with losing Shelly, and now he had plunged into a deep relationship with Dolly. No matter how cogent his friends’ arguments, Bart wouldn’t listen.
He thought he and Dolly went together perfectly. He could dress dramatically, too, and they sometimes chose to wear black outfits as they walked on campus. By now, he had his ears pierced and wore earrings. He was a chameleon, alternating from plump to cadaverous as he gained and lost weight.
Although Dolly was attracted to him both physically and emotionally at first, she wasn’t nearly as interested in a locked-in relationship as Bart was. It was hard enough for the dental students to combine their studies with a social life; their time was so filled with classes, projects, and studying. Maintaining a romance and an acceptable GPA at the same time was almost impossible. Bart at least had a solid year at dental school behind him, but Dolly was just beginning to build a firm foundation at MCG, and she was adamant that she could not have her study time interrupted. She wanted to become an oral surgeon, and that would require that she have top grades. She knew it was a long shot, and, if she had to, she would adapt to a less lofty goal. But she was going to give it a try.