Too Late to Say Goodbye

by Ann Rule

  One of Dolly’s closest friends on campus was Travis Hampton; they would become “office partners” at the dental school where each of them had a tiny cubicle where they kept their patient records, projects, and other items vital to their studies. Travis’s brother, Derrick, was a good friend of Bart Corbin’s, and Travis himself became one of Dolly’s closest confidants soon after she arrived at the school. Theirs was a purely platonic relationship; Travis was about to be married to someone else. He observed Dolly as she dated a number of men, but she didn’t appear to be in love with any of them—not until she met Bart Corbin.

  Travis watched Dolly’s romance with Bart from its onset. It was his impression that Bart was the first man Dolly had been intimate with, and he believed that for more than a year Dolly considered Bart “her one true love,” although she still wasn’t ready to commit totally to any relationship. They seemed to be happy together, and Dolly once confided to Hampton that she had never felt about anyone the way she felt about Bart Corbin. As someone a year behind Bart in dental school, Travis admired Bart at first.

  Of all of Dolly’s friends, the two who probably knew the most about her romance with Bart were Travis and her roommate, Angela Garnto.

  Dolly didn’t take Bart home to meet her family for quite some time, perhaps sensing that he wasn’t going to go over with a bang in Washington, Georgia. She worried that he was too sarcastic, and not quite genteel enough, considering his profanity and his outspoken views on a lot of things. Still, she wanted her brothers and her parents to meet him, hoping that maybe she was wrong about how Bart would appear to her parents.

  Barbara invited Bart to dinner, and it turned out to be a rather awkward evening. Barbara and Carlton sat in the small parlor that was just off the first-floor room that had become Dolly’s bedroom, and talked with Bart about his interests. Since their guest was well on his way to becoming a dentist, Carlton naturally brought up the subject, thinking it would be an area where he and Bart would have a lot in common.

  “I can hardly wait to graduate,” Bart said with arrogance, “so I can stick it to people.”

  He expected to get rich off his dental patients. He had not wavered from his undergraduate days in Athens. He was in it for the money. Dolly’s father and mother stared at him, wondering if they had heard him correctly.

  Carlton Hearn was disturbed and “nauseated” to hear why Bart had chosen dentistry as his life’s work.

  While Bart was expansive and clever in his conversation, Barbara and Carlton Hearn weren’t at all impressed with him. They found him somewhat crude and lacking the sensitivity necessary for someone about to go into the healing arts.

  IT WAS DIFFICULT to say when things began to go wrong between Bart Corbin and Dolly Hearn. It wasn’t anything her parents said; they were smart enough to keep their opinions about him to themselves. Dolly was her own woman. She and Bart had dated exclusively—with short periods of breaking up—for almost two years. Although Dolly had mentioned getting married to Bart one day and having children, Travis Hampton noticed sometime in 1989 that she had begun to back away from Bart. She was still attracted to him, but their goals were dissimilar. Dolly wanted to help people, and Bart wanted to make money.

  Dolly could be an unconscious flirt; she didn’t mean anything by it when she smiled or winked at a man. And she was so beautiful that people were naturally drawn to her. Bart resented that, and became even more controlling and sulked jealously.

  Dolly began to feel trapped.

  Shelly had never seen Bart angry, and their years together had been fairly serene. But Dolly and Bart’s relationship was often tumultuous, and sometimes they quarreled—mostly because he clung to her so tightly, smothering her as he tried to own her. And she struggled to get free. It wasn’t that he was ever physically violent with Dolly. Bart never struck her, but their arguments were verbally fierce.

  Dolly and Bart broke up often, only to resume their relationship when he promised to give her more breathing space. But Bart inevitably slipped back into his old patterns. In mid-1989, they walked away from each other yet another time, only to reconcile in early fall. Bart Corbin was an accomplished actor who could put on a convincing mask. Even though Dolly had heard the same pleas from him before, he managed to persuade her that he had finally changed. He would place no strings on her, and he wouldn’t be jealous. She could have male friends and he would believe her when she said they were strictly platonic.

  That didn’t last. By October, it finally seemed to be over between them. After much agonizing, Dolly found the courage to break up with Bart for good, and she did that knowing full well now that it wasn’t going to be a gentle parting. Part of her still hoped for a clean break, but she didn’t expect it to happen. Dolly’s and Bart’s friends were relieved when the couple agreed to go on with their lives without the huge upheaval everyone had expected.

  But despite his calm mask, Bart Corbin was seething. Once again the woman in his life wanted her freedom. He had grown up believing that men were always in charge. More than ever, Bart saw himself as a man betrayed by love. He could not bear to see Dolly out with other men, even though she was dating only casually.

  So when Bart met a girl named Sally Fox* on Halloween night, 1989, he asked her out, although in retrospect she would realize that he was dating her just to make Dolly jealous.

  Dolly probably had some lingering feelings for Bart, even though she knew their relationship had no real future. When she encountered Bart and Sally at a party in late 1989, she was a little shaken. Dolly wore her favorite outfit that night—a black tuxedo jacket cut to fit her snugly, with a cummerbund. Sally noticed the brunette in the tux because she was very pretty and quite dramatic-looking, and because Sally saw Bart exchanging glances with her.

  Bart didn’t introduce the two women, and Sally had no idea that Dolly was his ex-girlfriend.

  Sally was intimate with Bart a few times, staying over at his house, but she soon caught on that Bart was only using her to attend dental school functions where they would be seen together, and he could be sure that word got back to Dolly. Sally realized that she was always the last-minute date. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all. She refused to go out with him again.

  The days were growing shorter as the fall of 1989 progressed. Dolly concentrated on studying, and for a few weeks she had more peace of mind than she had known for two years. While she missed Bart—or, rather, missed the way she had felt about him in the beginning, and the hopes she had once held for their relationship—she was intensely relieved to be away from his dominance. She truly wished the best for Bart, and had encouraged him to talk to a counselor. He had said he would, but instead he began to call his friends in Augusta—a couple he had met at the Halloween party, and his fellow dental student friends Derrick Hampton, Eric Rader, Tony Gacita, and Vicky Martin. He phoned them at all hours of the day and night, frequently breaking into sobs when he talked about Dolly.

  Dolly wasn’t truly frightened of Bart—not yet. But her demeanor changed subtly. She had trouble concentrating in class, and she startled easily. Dolly, however, was resolute that she would not allow herself to be stalked or terrorized by Bart. She believed she knew him, and that she could reason with him. As much as she knew they could never go back to those first good days, she wasn’t afraid.

  AND THEN, DOLLY’ S WORLD changed radically. Even places where she had always felt safe—her apartment, the dental college, the campus—seemed dangerous. Dolly had always moved with a lilt in her step, her shoulders squared and her head up. As the holiday season approached in 1989, however, everyone who knew her found her to be either distracted or frightened of something. The concept of Dolly Hearn as a woman afraid was shocking; she wasn’t the type.

  It had to be about Bart. He was the one person who could cast a shadow on her life. He had begun to behave irrationally, alternately crying and saying horrible things about Dolly.

  Bart was stalking Dolly. Even when she didn’t see him, she sensed that he
was always close by. Too late, she realized that she didn’t know him at all. Dolly still lived in her off-campus apartment with her roommate, Angela Garnto, but suddenly she was afraid to stay alone whenever Angela was away.

  Angela had lived with Dolly for all of the “Bart years,” and she had seen him be charming and attentive as well as sulking and suspicious. Dolly was convinced that Bart was behind a series of disturbing incidents in November and December of 1989, although neither Dolly nor Angela actually saw Bart do anything, nor were there any other witnesses. Taken singly, they wouldn’t have seemed so alarming. But viewed in a pattern, they were ominous.

  If anyone knew what mattered most to Dolly Hearn, it was Bart Corbin. He knew how much she loved Tabitha her cat. She had rescued Tabitha from the pound, and wherever Dolly went, Tabitha went, too—even to dental school. Tabitha was long-haired and fluffy, with tiger markings and a white nose, vest, and paws. Tabitha was an “inside cat”; Dolly worried that she might be hit by a car or come to some other harm if she got out. At least partly because of their concern for Tabitha, both Dolly and Angela were very careful to shut and lock their doors behind them.

  On November 14, 1989, the two roommates were very worried when they came home one night and saw that the sliding glass doors were slightly open. Nothing was missing, but they couldn’t find Tabitha anywhere, and their hearts sank when they agreed that the door was open just enough for a cat to slide through. The weather had turned cold, and Dolly agonized that Tabitha couldn’t survive very long outside.

  Dolly had a strong sense that Bart had been in her apartment several times when she wasn’t home. At first it was difficult to say what had been moved or disarranged, but it was discomfiting to realize how easily someone could get in, and now Tabitha had gotten out.

  Dolly reported her suspicions to the Augusta police the next day. Then there was no question that someone had been prowling around. The patrol officers felt that someone had forcibly lifted one of the apartment’s heavy glass sliding doors off its track after opening the unlocked screen door.

  She had no way to prove who the intruder was. Following the officers’ advice, Dolly inserted a thick wood dowel into the sliding door tracks so that they couldn’t be opened again.

  When Bart heard that Tabitha was missing and saw how upset Dolly was, he was very considerate, and seemed to go out of his way to help her find her lost cat. Even though he and Dolly were estranged, he came over and helped her look for Tabitha in the neighborhood along Parrish Road. But they found no sign of Tabitha, and Dolly grew more and more frantic about her cat’s fate as days passed. And then it was a week.

  After Tabitha had been gone for two weeks, Dolly almost gave up hope. Between the traffic that rumbled close to her apartment and the icy weather, Dolly began to fear that Tabitha was dead. And she was heartbroken.

  Her life was growing increasingly stressful. On November 21, a maintenance man at the dental school found some of Dolly’s patient charts in a garbage can in the oral surgery section. Someone had taken them from her little lab office. She was meticulous about filing her charts, and protecting the privacy of the patients she treated in her lab. The next day, more of her records disappeared. She also discovered that a set of wax rings and casts of one patient’s teeth were gone. In this lab course, Dolly’s entire grade was determined by the dentures she would make from the casts. Only she and Travis Hampton had keys to the office space they shared, and she knew Travis wouldn’t have allowed a stranger in there, or lost track of his keys.

  Thanksgiving fell on November 23 in 1989, and both troubled and terribly sad about the loss of Tabitha, Dolly drove home to Washington.

  Travis Hampton didn’t know who might have taken Dolly’s charts and wax casts. But he had his suspicions about what had happened to Tabitha, and so did Bart’s friend, Eric Rader. It would be November 29 before the dental students actually confronted Bart and asked him some serious questions about Dolly’s missing cat.

  Dolly’s weeks in a kind of twilight zone had only just begun. According to Lee Reardon, her brother Corey Reardon, and several other male dental students, Bart had concocted a weird Gaslight plan to frighten Dolly Hearn.

  Corey said that Bart was trying to make Dolly look paranoid. In reality, he felt it was Bart who was acting bizarrely.

  Indeed, he was. He spent a lot of time calling his friends—and sometimes Dolly’s friends—asking for advice about how to get her back. He would alternately cry and laugh when he talked about Dolly. She had broken off with him, but he thought his dating other women would bring her back. He had reason to regret it. He’d wanted to teach her a lesson and he was stunned to find Dolly wasn’t in the least interested in their getting back together. In fact, she had seemed relieved that he was interested in someone else.

  On November 27, Dolly showed up at the dental school with her eyes watering and bloodshot. She was nearsighted and usually wore contact lenses. She told Travis Hampton that her eyes had begun to burn as soon as she inserted the lenses.

  Here,” she said, holding out the small plastic bottle of lens solution. “Does this smell funny to you?”

  Hampton sniffed it and said, “It smells like hair spray.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “No wonder my eyes hurt.”

  This wasn’t a joke; Dolly’s eyes could have been permanently damaged. Moreover, Angela Garnto’s contact lens solution had also been tampered with—also with hair spray. Her eyes were burning, too. Someone had been in the women’s apartment while they were gone, doctoring up their lens solution.

  That person would have needed a key. The wood dowel was still in the sliding glass door track, and the windows were securely locked. At the same time, Dolly discovered that her gas tank cap was missing. Now, she looked on her key ring. She was a woman who liked things to line up neatly, and she had arranged the keys on her ring so that they all pointed in the same direction. Looking closely, Dolly saw that her apartment key must have been removed at some point, and then replaced; it was facing in the wrong direction, and was in a different spot on the ring than it had been.

  Dolly went to her landlord, Dennis Stanfield. He had become a good friend, and, within twenty minutes, Stanfield had changed the locks on Dolly and Angela’s apartment doors.

  DOLLY HAD KNOWN BART was depressed and that he wanted to reconcile with her once again. She expected his phone calls, and wasn’t surprised when he often began to sob, but she had never believed that he could be a physical danger to her. Now, there were times when she was actually afraid of him. The idea that he had been able to copy her keys and come and go at will in her apartment was creepy. On November 29, Dolly made a formal complaint to the MCG Campus Security Office about the incidents in her apartment and the damage to her car.

  Later that day, Travis Hampton questioned Bart closely about Dolly’s still-missing cat. Travis warned Bart that if he ever wanted Dolly to come back to him, he had better not have done anything to Tabitha.

  “I don’t know if you’re responsible for Tabitha being missing or not,” he said, “but if Dolly doesn’t find that cat, she’s going to hate you forever.”

  “Yes,” Bart said inscrutably. “I need to call her.”

  Ten minutes later, Dolly called Travis to say she had news about Tabitha. She had heard from Eric Rader, who put Bart on the line and ordered him to admit to tormenting her by destroying her property. Moreover, she told Travis, “Bart’s going to take me someplace to look for my cat.”

  When Bart and Eric called her, Dolly had flat-out accused Bart of taking Tabitha, and he had begun to cry.

  “What did you do to her?” Dolly demanded.

  Finally, he admitted that he had taken Tabitha, and he said he would take Dolly to where he’d last seen her cat. He drove Dolly across the city, almost to the far side of Augusta, and parked near a low-income housing project behind the Augusta Mall.

  Dolly jumped out of his car and started knocking on doors, asking the residents in the tiny hous
es if they had seen a fluffy, striped cat. Finally, one woman said, “I do believe I’ve seen a cat that looked like that around here sometime back—haven’t seen it lately, though.”

  There was so much traffic here, and Dolly was afraid that Tabitha wouldn’t have been able to find any food; she was a pampered pet who wasn’t used to catching mice or digging through garbage. But then Dolly spotted a cat rolling in the sunshine on a cement walkway.

  “That looks like Tabitha!” she shouted to Bart. “It really does.”

  When she called Tabitha’s name, the cat came running and Dolly swooped her up and hugged her. She was thin and scruffy-looking, and the pads on her feet were all torn up, but she was alive and purring. At that instant, Dolly knew that Tabitha had survived with no thanks to Bart. What he had done was the meanest thing he could do to Dolly, but Bart couldn’t comprehend that. He had always told her a cat was only a cat, and that he didn’t care much for animals, anyway.

  “We found her!” Dolly told Travis Hampton. “Bart knew where he dropped her off!”

  Bart admitted that he had contaminated Dolly’s and Angela’s contact lens solutions with hair spray, and he apologized to Angela for putting it in hers, saying, “I didn’t know whose solution was which—and I had to put it in both to cover my tracks.”

  There was more. Bart admitted that he’d been in their apartment two days earlier, and taken Dolly’s black tux outfit—which was her favorite—and other clothing. She hadn’t discovered that theft yet.

  The locks were changed again, Bart seemed to be truly contrite, and Tabitha was home safe at last. Quite probably, she had used up one of her nine lives.