by Ann Rule
But Bart had stretched himself and his finances a little too thin when he moved his practice to Hamilton Mill. He wasn’t attracting anywhere near the number of new patients he had expected. He had two civil suits in State Court, filed against him because he had defaulted on payments for expensive dental equipment.
He had more coupons offering his “elite dental techniques” printed up. Even though Bart was very intelligent, he apparently wasn’t a particularly effective dentist. Technically, he was okay, but from the start of his private practice, many patients complained to their families and friends that he lacked empathy and concern, and was brusque with them. He didn’t recognize that many people are fearful about going to a dentist—any dentist—and that a little compassion and patience would have taken him a long way.
The mother of a teenage girl recalled that her daughter had left his examining room after her initial visit visibly upset. “She said she never wanted to go back to that dentist again,” the woman said. “Of course I thought that he might have touched her inappropriately—but she said it wasn’t that at all. He just scared her, and she couldn’t explain why. We never went back.”
One woman never forgot her nightmarish experience in Bart’s office. She had sought a dentist who was skilled at fitting multiple crowns on front teeth, and Bart assured he was “very good” at that. But in two sessions that lasted twice as long as he’d promised, she was stunned by his unprofessional manner: he shouted at his chairside assistant, mumbled obscenities, and hyperventilated. Dr. Corbin not only seemed out of control emotionally, but he finally admitted he had virtually no experience with the procedure she needed.
She regretted that she had already paid in full—more than two thousand dollars—especially when she began to hemorrhage severely, and Bart held his head in his hands and told her he didn’t know how to stop the blood that threatened to choke her.
After blurting out that she would never sit in his dental chair again, she ran out of his office in a panic, still bleeding, with tissues pressed against her gums, to seek competent medical attention. She never got the crowns for her teeth from Bart, and she filed a complaint with the Georgia Board of Dentistry, asking for a refund of the entire amount she had paid.
When Bart was questioned by the board, he offered to refund $1,452 of the $2,272 she had paid. She refused. Almost two years later, she received word from the board that the entire amount would be forthcoming.
“The Board, however, has expressed its very serious concern to Dr. Corbin about the circumstances which led to the complaint being filed,” the letter said. Although Bart was never officially censured, he was forced to write a check for the entire amount, and word of his incompetence circulated among his peers.
On occasion now, Bart’s hands shook so badly that his patients wondered if he had some kind of palsy. He drank—but not excessively—and no one ever suggested that he used drugs. Perhaps it was only his agitation over the state of his marriage, which had begun to have dark places. As he and Jenn struggled with a marriage that was not working, his insensitivity in his clinic grew more apparent, reflecting the agitation he felt. Women had walked away from Bart before, and each abandonment had cut him more deeply. He was incapable of treating a woman as an equal partner; he needed to possess her absolutely. For more than seven years, he had felt secure that Jenn would follow his directives and show him the respect he deserved. Now he realized that she was slipping away from his control.
His financial status was shaky, too. He could no longer afford to employ full-time chairside assistants. Only Dara Prentice remained loyal to him.
Another dentist in the area was surprised to receive a scrawled note from Bart asking him to lunch to discuss the possibility of Bart’s working part-time in his office.
“He was willing to work for me more than two days a week,” the other dentist recalled. “That would make it impossible for any doctor to keep up his own practice.”
THINGS WERE FALLING APART in Bart’s life. The Corbins’ house on Bogan Gates Drive was impressive, but it had a sterile air about it. Jenn didn’t argue with him, but she no longer believed that Bart was going to change. Everything was all about him, what he wanted, how she could enhance his image. They were intimate only when he wanted to have sex. And he was perfunctory about even that, heedless of her needs. She no longer had any hope that it would ever be any better. She didn’t ask herself if she still loved him; she knew she didn’t.
They kept up a semblance of a social life. Bart and Jenn Corbin liked their neighbors, but now they tended to visit them individually, rather than as a couple. They still spent time on their houseboat, and they went to all the family gatherings. They had birthday parties, visited Janice and Richard Wilson—their friends in Alabama—and stayed close with Jenn’s best friend, Juliet Styles, and her husband, Darren. The two couples vacationed together at least once a year. Except for the Wilsons, the Styles were like most of their friends—introduced into their social circle by Jenn. Bart and Darren Styles often played golf together.
“Our kids were best friends,” Juliet said. “I was Jennifer’s best friend, and Darren and Bart were pretty close, at playing golf—whatever, however men are close.”
But by 2003, Bart probably spent more time with his brothers than he had before, often going out for drinks with Brad and Bobby, and “Iron,” his friend from the gym. Bart was the only one of Gene Corbin’s sons who had kept in touch with him after Gene and Connie split up. Now, even though they lived close to one another, Bart and his father rarely saw each other.
Brad’s first marriage had ended in divorce, and he moved in with his mother in Snellville. He was a medical transcriber, and he worked from home, which he much preferred to the business world where he felt uncomfortable. In 2003, Brad married Edwina Tims, and they established their own home.
JENN AND BART often watched Court TV’s coverage of Scott Peterson’s trial while they had coffee with Heather and Doug. Like much of America, they were both horrified and transfixed by the seeming smugness of Peterson during his trial for the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child,
“We all talked about it,” Heather said, “at whoever’s house we were at. I was watching with Bart once and I said something about Scott Peterson, and how awful it was. And Bart replied, ‘Scott Peterson only got caught because he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’”
“And I said, ‘Well, God, Bart—I hope I’m never gonna be your enemy.’ That conversation stuck with me for a long time.”
Although Heather had learned to accept Bart’s control over Jenn as an inherent part of his personality that her sister had long since learned to deal with, Jenn sometimes surprised her.
“Don’t you ever wish that sometimes you could just make cold cereal for your kids for breakfast?” Jenn once asked Heather.
“I told her I did give them cereal if I felt like it. But she said she couldn’t because Bart wouldn’t allow it. He told her, ‘If you won’t cook for my children, I’ll marry someone who will!’
“I think she lived like a Stepford Wife. Bart gave her money, but she always had to explain what it was for. She had to keep receipts for things like toilet paper and bubble gum. She didn’t have her own money until she started working at the preschool. And, even then, she made such a piddling amount. But one time she donated two months’ pay to a lady who’d been injured in a motorcycle accident.”
Jenn worried about people who were barely making it, and she did what she could to help. Once, she and Heather were in a Publix Super Market in Buford. Jenn nodded to a man who was clearly homeless, ragged—but clean. As she shopped, she picked out a whole roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. When the two sisters went through the checkout line, Heather noticed that Jenn had left one shopping bag behind, and pointed it out to her.
Jenn shook her head slightly, and said, “I’ll explain outside.”
“She’d bought dinner for the homeless guy,” Heathe
r recalled. “She didn’t want to embarrass him by giving it directly to him, but she told the checker to hand it to him. I found out she did that quite often—she was afraid he might be hungry.”
Jenn did most of the chores around her home, even those that husbands usually performed. She mowed the lawn and planted the trees. She was extremely strong, usually pitching in to help any of her family in their moves. Once, she helped her brother-in-law Doug carry a heavy pool table up from their basement. She never seemed to get tired.
JENN HAD SUFFERED a disturbing loss in the spring of 2004, one that troubled her a lot. It was her close connection to a case that wasn’t so different from the Peterson case, and she was extremely troubled by the disappearance of a woman she had considered a close friend for almost a decade. Ever since the romantic trip she and Bart had taken to Italy in 1996, Jenn had treasured her friendship with Mary Lands. She kept a photograph of herself and Bart laughing with Mary and her husband, Gary, in Italy framed on a wall of her home, a reminder of a happier times.
Mary and Gary eventually divorced, and Mary moved north to Marshall, Michigan, a small town about ten miles from Battle Creek in the southwest portion of the state. In 2004, Mary was working as a surgical nurse, and living in a townhouse with her fiancé.
Jenn was horrified to learn that Mary had apparently gone out for a walk alone at 10:30 P.M. on Friday, March 12, after she and her fiancé had argued. She’d last been seen wearing her surgical scrubs and a leather jacket as she walked out of the golden circle of light from a pole in the complex where she lived, and disappeared into the darkness beyond.
She was never seen again, although the Michigan State Police and the FBI assisted the Marshall police in an intense investigation.
“She’s dead,” Jenn insisted. “I know she’s been murdered.”
And Jenn was probably right. Mary’s car and cell phone were left behind, and she left no paper trail at all—her bank account was not accessed, nor any of her credit cards. She walked out into the chilly Michigan night and vanished completely.
While Jenn’s own life was in upheaval in September 2004, she prayed for Mary Lands when her family and friends marked the six-month anniversary of Mary’s disappearance with a candlelight ceremony many states away from Georgia.
It was impossible not to note the irony in the two young women’s long friendship. Only three months later, there would be a candlelight ceremony on Bogan Gates Drive memorializing Jenn herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY
2003–2004
ALL LIVES, NO MATTER HOW PROSAIC, have their secrets, and we never know what is actually going on in even our closest friends’ worlds. Jennifer Corbin was no different. Her involvement with someone outside her marriage began quite innocently. Narda Barber and her girls had always played old-fashioned games together. Over Christmas, in 2003, Narda heard about a Sony PlayStation game called EverQuest. She didn’t realize when she purchased it that it might require an Internet hookup. She didn’t have one, but intrigued by the “G-rated” game, she decided to invest in everything she needed to play.
“I suppose I spent about $100 to get set up,” she recalled. “It was something like Dungeons and Dragons, and it sounded like fun.”
EverQuest encompasses numerous games of fantasy using rich animation and 3-D effects on a television; the player selects characters in which to lose himself. As an artist, Narda was intrigued with the quality of the graphics that virtually invite players to enter another world. While they are there, they can choose to be anyone they want: knights, maidens, assassins, sorcerers, kings, queens, villains, and heroes, all anonymously. One game, for instance, suggests, “Create a noble human paladin, a vicious dark elf or necromancer, a greedy dwarven rogue—or any of the more than one hundred character combinations.”
The game offers players a way to step out of their own lives for a time. Narda found EverQuest relaxing and entertaining, and she mentioned it to Jenn. When Jenn seemed interested, Narda bought her the software so that they could play together. They had a lot of fun, dueling with one another, talking on the phone, and sometimes laughing until their cheeks hurt.
The game is completely interactive, and the graphics are very real. The characters can gesture to one another, and even flirt. There are “guilds,” which are akin to families. While Heather thought EverQuest was ridiculous, she knew it was an escape for her sister. Jenn even taught Dalton and Dillon how to play a simpler form of the game, and showed them how to beat “the bad guys.”
Because the game is played over the Internet, there is always the opportunity to meet others involved. Writing under her game name “wizwiz148,” Jenn exchanged messages with basically nameless participants, including someone named “sirtank1223.” Jenn’s Wizard character on EverQuest soon became entranced with his inventive postings. Sir Tank may have sought Jenn out, or it might have been the other way around—but they definitely thought on the same wavelength. Soon they decided to exchange emails outside the confines of the game. Jenn learned that sirtank1223 was a man named “Christopher,” who was also thirty-three.
Jenn didn’t have a lot of time to spend on the Internet, she was so busy teaching preschool, taking care of her boys, and keeping house. She also worked for Narda a few afternoons a week at the Lake Arts studio, where they filled orders for artists’ canvases to ship all over the world.
Even when she wasn’t actually playing, Jenn could usually find messages waiting for her from Christopher, and she looked forward to that.
When she met Christopher online, Jenn Corbin had come to a place where she had precious little joy in her life. There seemed to be no harm in exchanging her thoughts and philosophies with a man who lived seven hundred miles away. They were separated geographically; he lived far from Georgia—in St. Louis. More and more, they slipped away from the game of EverQuest to exchange private emails on the Internet.
Many of their emails have been lost, but it was probably sometime in the early summer of 2004 when Jenn and Christopher began to write more often. She never expected to meet him, and that made it easier for her to talk about the things that mattered to her and, eventually, about problems in her life. As their emails flew through the Internet, Jenn found herself attracted to Christopher. She didn’t feel unfaithful to Bart; this was no more intimate, really, than playing EverQuest. But she felt less lonely—as if there might be someone out there who could truly love her if she were ever free of her suffocating relationship with Bart.
She was a young woman who had expected love in her life, but she realized too late that Bart didn’t want her for anything more than to enhance his own image, and to pick on and belittle. Now there was a man out there who offered a shoulder, a listening ear, and who seemed to understand her.
What harm could there be in having a modern-day pen pal?
Both Jenn and Christopher still logged on to EverQuest to play out their fantasy games there, and they wrote to other correspondents in their online community. Several of them shared their feelings and their concerns for one another. It was a little like being on a plane or a train, talking to a stranger in the adjoining seat, knowing that at the end of the journey, they would all go off in their own directions to pick up their real lives.
Jenn enjoyed “talking” to Christopher, but they made no plans to meet. He wrote that he was divorced, and worked in a restaurant. He lived with his mother, and he was raising his sister’s two children. He seemed somewhat in awe of Jenn’s standard of living and education. She was, after all, married to a professional man who appeared to be quite wealthy, at least compared to what Christopher did. The way Jenn described her house apparently made Christopher feel inadequate. Still, a small affair of the heart was happening, and Jenn treasured Christopher’s emails. They were soon in the habit of writing to each other in the early mornings before Christopher went to work and Jenn left for her mile run, and then again late in the evening if Bart wasn’t home.
THE EXTENDED BARBER family and their in-laws led a fai
rly serene existence throughout most of 2004. Narda not only ran her Lake Arts business, she sold her own paintings, too. Max was working for a Ford dealer close to home in Lawrenceville. Rajel was home from California, and Heather and Doug Tierney were about to move into their new house in Dawsonville. It was a wonderful house, with a five-hundred-square-foot master bedroom, soaring ceilings, and a huge backyard. While Heather and Jenn would no longer be close neighbors, they vowed to see each other as often as before. Not to do so would be a loss for the sisters who were used to having coffee together every morning while their children—the four cousins—played together. Still, they both worried that it wouldn’t be possible.
Perhaps that problem made Jenn feel lucky to have Christopher, someone who seemed to understand her completely. Christopher’s emails revealed him to be a man who was both kind and responsible, as well as secure in his masculinity. Jenn didn’t know his last name at first, but she formed a clear picture in her head about what Christopher looked like. She hadn’t heard his voice or seen a picture of him—but she felt that she knew him better than most people she had ever known in real life. When she asked him what he looked like, he said “a little like the Marlboro man.”
She didn’t know if he was joking but complained to him teasingly, “There are lots of Marlboro men, and most of them wear hats so you can’t see their faces anyway!”