by Ann Rule
“Back when we were in school,” the one-time MCG dental student said, “I told someone that Bart admitted to me he had had ‘a very rocky relationship’ with Dolly, and that surprised me at the time—because I always thought they got along fine. But that was the only ‘admission’ he ever made to me.”
Another dentist was baffled when his name came up in the investigation of Bart Corbin. “I didn’t know him or the girl who died,” he told Peebles. “I graduated seven years before Corbin did.”
Back in 1990, Carlton and Barbara Hearn, frustrated when there was no arrest in the death of their daughter, had retained their own attorney and hired a private investigator themselves. Now, Scott Peebles phoned Barbara, who said the female PI was a young woman named Sarah Hargett Mims. Barbara was confident she could find Sarah Mims and also provide Peebles with the PI’s old investigative reports.
Barbara Hearn wanted Peebles to understand that Dolly had been on academic probation for only a short time—and that was because Bart had stolen and possibly destroyed her patient records and projects. “Those projects were to be what she was graded upon—and they were gone.”
Dolly had, in fact, been so convinced that it was Bart whose thefts were designed to make her fail, that she had secretly recorded a conversation with him. That tape was in the old file, and Scott Peebles listened to it, although the sound was not very clear. He heard Dolly’s voice asking Bart if there was any way she could get her dental charts back. And then Bart’s voice said, “I don’t know if you’ve got a recorder or something.”
She continued to question him about where her charts were and he finally said, “What do you want me to say? How do I know you’re not recording this?”
“I just want to know if they’re at the bottom of the city dump,” Dolly’s voice prodded.
Again, he told her he suspected she was recording what he said. There were long gaps of silence and garbled conversation on the tape, with Bart Corbin skittering on the edges of her questions. The closest he came to an admission on the tape was when he bluntly told her that there was no way she would ever get her dental charts back.
The tape from Dolly’s answering machine was also in the old file, frozen in time. Bart’s seemingly contrived message about breaking a date with her remained. In his first interview with detectives in 1990, Bart had denied going to Dolly’s apartment the day she died. In the second, he had done everything he could to make it look as though he saw her for only a brief half-hour at 1 P.M.
Peebles wondered why Bart had said he’d gone there to ask her to have dinner that night. That warred with his message on the answering machine, where he broke a party date with her. Why had he done that? And why had Bart said on the answering machine, “I guess you’re at work.” He obviously knew she wasn’t.
Almost eerily, Bart had ended the message: “I love you.” Peebles suspected that Dolly was no longer alive when the phone message was recorded.
As Peebles read through the voluminous reports written by Sarah Hargett Mims, the private investigator whom the Hearns had hired, he saw that Bart’s reasoning was apparent. He must have realized that he had been seen on Parrish Road that day. Sarah Mims had talked to dozens of people who knew Dolly at the MCG Dental School or at the apartment complex where she was killed. Mims had done an exceptional job, but some of the people in charge of the death probe (not Ron Peebles) hadn’t been very receptive to what she discovered.
Now, when Scott Peebles compared Bart Corbin’s recall of the day Dolly died with statements made by others who had been close to her, he found many discrepancies.
DeWayne Piper was positive that Dolly’s body had been moved after she died, and he had the pictures and reports to prove it. In addition to asking his father, Scott Peebles asked Lieutenant John Gray and Sergeant Paul Johnson if they had moved her body at the crime scene. They had not. Johnson had lifted the gun from her lap but hadn’t touched her.
So far, the younger Peebles had been able to locate everyone who had been at the scene so long ago. Angela Garnto, Dolly’s roommate, was sure she had touched Dolly only lightly to check for a pulse, but not nearly enough to move her body even slightly.
When Peebles asked Angela about Dolly’s relationship with Bart, she told him it had begun shortly after she had moved in with Dolly at the Parrish Road apartment. In the beginning, the couple had gotten along well. Neither seemed to be more in love than the other. But by the fall of 1989, Dolly had begun to chafe under Bart’s insistence that she not talk to any other men. The couple had many arguments—almost all of them over Bart’s possessiveness. And soon, Bart had begun to stalk and harass both Dolly and Angela.
On June 6, 1990, Angela said goodbye to Dolly in the morning. “She was standing in our kitchen,” Angela recalled. “When I came home late that afternoon, I know I put my key in the door and turned it out of habit—but I don’t know if the door was locked or unlocked.”
Angela said she became hysterical when she realized >Dolly was dead, and she had run next door where two girls shared an apartment. They called 911, and shortly thereafter Dr. Lyndon “Lindy” Steinhaus, a resident in psychiatry who lived in the complex, arrived home. “He went in and pronounced Dolly dead,” she finished.
Angela remembered that, later, she found the sacks of groceries in the kitchen—still unpacked—as if Dolly had just come home from the store. There were also some items that Dolly must have taken from their freezer, and they had thawed on the counter.
For Angela, as for almost everyone Scott Peebles talked to, time had telescoped; Dolly’s death might as well have occurred only a week before. Angela told Peebles that she had never believed that Dolly killed herself. “She wasn’t depressed. She ate. She slept well. She was happy, even though she was getting more aggravated with some of the things Bart did. And Dolly was a very considerate person; I know she wouldn’t have shot herself on our couch for me to find her.”
Step by step, Scott Peebles reinterviewed everyone he could locate who had had any connection to Dolly Hearn’s alleged “suicide.” Technically, this was the third time witnesses were questioned. Fifteen years earlier, Richmond County investigators had talked to a number of people; Sarah Hargett Mims had spoken to even more possible witnesses some weeks later. And now Peebles was interviewing, reviewing, asking the same probing questions again. He noted that the answers didn’t change.
When he wondered about something, Scott Peebles consulted with his father to check on the older detective’s recall of certain events.
Some artifacts of Dolly’s death survived, perhaps because there had never been a definitive conclusion to the case. The Hearns still had the .38-caliber revolver that Carlton Sr. had given to Dolly. Dennis Stanfield, Dolly’s landlord and friend, had some ledger books in his files that were still stained with a few drops of Dolly’s blood.
One of the last people to see Dolly alive was someone who had scarcely known her: a young woman named Sandra Lake.* Bart had mentioned a woman who had stopped by Dolly’s apartment on June 6 while he was there talking to her. He’d even recalled that he was in the bathroom. But Peebles saw that Sarah Mim’s report on his story was somewhat different.
In 1990, Sandra had just begun working at Dennis Stanfield’s company—Stanfield Home Builders. On Monday, June 4, Dolly had come into the office to get some check stubs so she could enter the information into Stanfield’s business ledger. The two women met and talked briefly. Dolly called later, saying she needed more check stubs to complete the job. Since Sandra didn’t know her, she was concerned at first when Dolly said she would come over to the office to look for them, but it was soon apparent that Dennis trusted Dolly. While Dolly sat on the floor, going through files, the women talked about Sandra’s job and her child. Dolly had remarked, “I’ll be an old lady before I have any children. Lots of guys propose to you, but it’s not easy to find the right one.”
They chatted again on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Dennis delivered the last of the check stubs to Dolly. When Sa
ndra came back from lunch shortly before 1 P.M. that day, she discovered that she had inadvertently locked herself out of the Stanfield Homes office. She knew Dolly had a key, so she drove the short distance to the parking lot in front of the wing where Dolly’s apartment was. There were no cars parked there, but when Sandra turned down the side road to the lower lot, she saw Dolly’s Trans Am. A silver Monte Carlo was parked next to it, and Sandra noted it had no license plate. A work truck of some kind was parked at the far end of the lot. Bart told detectives in his 1990 interview that he drove a silver Monte Carlo.
Sandra had never been to Dolly’s apartment, and had to ask a neighbor where it was. When she knocked, Dolly, carrying Tabitha, opened the door, and said, “Come on in!”
“Oh no—I just need a favor,” Sandra demurred. “If I could borrow your office key—”
But Dolly urged her to come in, insisting two or three times. Sandra stepped inside, just far enough so that the door would close. The TV was turned to a soap opera. Sandra saw that the bathroom door under the stairway was slightly ajar. As she glanced at it, she could see a man through the crack where the hinges were. She told Scott Peebles that he appeared to be quite tall, had brown hair cut in layers, and he was bare-chested.
The man had been standing very still, and he said nothing. Sandra wondered if he was watching her in the bathroom mirror. Dolly didn’t mention the man or glance in his direction. She seemed to take a lot of time retrieving her Lucite key ring, and then took several more minutes to remove two keys, commenting that she wasn’t sure which one worked in the office door.
Sandra told Scott Peebles that Dolly was very eager to have her stay and visit, even to the point of acting as if they were old friends.
“She didn’t seem stressed, and she wasn’t really acting strange—just overly friendly.”
Sandra said she had been worried about being late to work because she’d only recently started her job. While Dolly chatted with her, she was anxious to leave, and hadn’t even sat down.
And the man in the bathroom hadn’t moved at all. Surely Dolly must have known he was there. If he was a welcome boyfriend, why had she wanted to chitchat with Sandra? He was half-dressed, so it wasn’t likely he was a stranger. He just stood there, apparently listening. Peebles wondered why.
When Sandra was finally able to slip out the door, she said she had expected she would hear from Dolly during the afternoon. Sandra knew she was anxious to get more of the material she needed to finish her work for Stanfield. Yet Dolly didn’t call even once.
Sandra told Peebles that when she heard late that afternoon that Dolly was dead—shot in the head—she did not believe it was suicide. She wondered if Dolly might have been trying to persuade her to stay in her apartment because she was afraid—because something was wrong.
But Sandra hadn’t known Dolly well enough to pick up on some signal Dolly was sending. And she had never seen the brown-haired man’s face.
Bart had undoubtedly been at the Wintergreen section of the apartments that day. He had admitted it himself. But he’d insisted he hadn’t taken a shower there, and said he’d only sat on the couch and talked to Dolly. Why then had his shirt been off?
Peebles suspected that Bart hadn’t expected a witness to his visit to Dolly. Most of the other residents in the front row of apartments facing Parrish Road had been away in the early afternoon of June 6.
Only one, Russell Leffler, who lived in the first apartment, had been home for lunch that day. When someone knocked on his door, he had looked through the peephole in his front door and recognized the man as someone he had seen with Dolly Hearn. Although he had seen him drive a gray “Camaro-ish” car before, he hadn’t seen the car in the front parking lot that day. The man outside his door was leaning against it as if he was listening to see if anyone was home.
When Peebles showed him a photo of the way Bart looked in 1990, Leffler said he was sure it was the same man. Just as he was about to open the door, Leffler’s phone rang—and he had turned away to answer it. When he came back, the man was gone.
Shortly after that, a woman had knocked—asking where Dolly lived. Peebles knew that would have been Sandra.
Dr. Lindy Steinhaus and his wife, Sue, who were close neighbors of Dolly’s, were very aware of the sometimes strained relationship between Dolly and Bart. In the last few weeks before her death, the Steinhauses had noticed that Bart often visited Dolly’s apartment on the weekends when Angela Garnto was away. They suspected Angela didn’t know. Whether Dolly was happy to have Bart there was debatable. When Sue commented to Dolly that she was very thin, Dolly said she had lost twenty-three pounds.
“She said it was because of ‘boyfriend problems,’” Sue told Scott Peebles.
The walls in their apartment house were thin, and they had often heard Bart yelling loudly, but never heard anything that would indicate physical violence. As Steinhaus pulled into the parking lot shortly after 5:00 on June 6, Angela Garnto had come running up the driveway, screaming that Dolly had shot herself, and was dead. She asked him to go into their apartment and take her pulse to be sure. He had done that, but he knew she had been dead for hours; her skin had been very white and very cold, and her massive blood loss had dried. He had seen the gun in her right hand at that time, and noted that the coffee table had been moved away from the front of the couch.
Both Sue and Lindy Steinhaus told Peebles that Dolly was a woman who was always smiling, not someone who would have killed herself. Her neighbors had gathered together that night in 1990, trying to understand what had happened. Like Angela and the Steinhauses, none of them believed she had killed herself, and several remarked that they had asked her if she was still dating Bart Corbin.
“Kind of,” she had answered obliquely. “Until he goes away to residency.”
There had been almost the sense that she was playing it safe, biding her time and trying not to set off Corbin’s volatile side. He would be gone soon enough.
The Steinhauses knew that Dolly’s parents had given her the gun that killed her, and remarked that she surely wouldn’t have used their gift to kill herself. Those who had known Dolly well didn’t think it odd when one woman added: “And she never would have shot herself in front of her cat. When they wheeled her body out on the gurney, Angela was holding Tabitha, and that cat just went nuts when the stretcher passed.”
Scott Peebles knew that Tabitha was still alive after all the years between the Richmond County sheriff’s two investigations. That aging cat was probably the only living witness to Dolly’s death. But Tabitha couldn’t say what she had seen—not then and not ever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
DECEMBER 2004 AND SPRING 1990
AS SERGEANT SCOTT PEEBLES continued to interview people who had never forgotten Dolly Hearn, he was particularly interested in a statement that one of Bart Corbin’s closest friends, Dr. Eric Rader, had given to Sarah Mims, the Hearns’ private detective. Like almost all of Corbin’s friends from his days at the dental school in Augusta, Rader was married. Bart appeared to have sought out happily married couples, and was apparently anxious to be in a similar situation himself. Moreover, when his fragile emotional state began to disintegrate, he found his married friends and their wives were sympathetic listeners—even when he called late at night.
Eric Rader had, of course, been Bart’s office partner at MCG, and they spent a lot of time together at the dental school. Peebles noted that it was Rader who had insisted that Bart admit to Dolly that he had stolen her cat and show her where he’d dumped it off.
Sarah Mims had caught up with Dr. Rader on October 18, 1990—some four months after Dolly Hearn’s death. The Hearns’ private investigator had found Rader most informative. Eric Rader told Sarah Mims that Bart had complained to him that Dolly was so busy that she wasn’t paying enough attention to him. But when Bart asked Rader for advice, his friend and office partner Rader shook his head, insisting that it was none of his business and he didn’t want to be involved in Bart
’s romance. Rader remembered that, shortly afterward, Bart had broken up with Dolly, later admitting that he had done it without thinking it through. Bart had been very upset when he discovered Dolly wasn’t taking it very hard.
“He thought she would be heartbroken,” Rader said,
“and she apparently wasn’t.”
Eric Rader said he had realized early on that Bart Corbin had a negative and unstable self-image. Bart told him that he’d been fat in high school, and that, in college, he’d made conscious efforts to lose weight, work out, wear the right clothes, and have a nice car. A beautiful girlfriend was necessary, too, to bolster his confidence.
Sarah Mims’s report quoted Eric Rader’s comment that, after Bart broke up with Dolly, he regretted it. Eric recalled being with Bart and their fellow dental student, Tony Gacita, at the Tip-Top, a popular college nightspot, when Dolly arrived with a number of her classmates, mostly males. Bart had grumbled and started swearing, but he and Tony were able to persuade him not to approach her that night.
The next notation on the Rader report made Scott Peebles sit up straight. According to Eric Rader, there was a night during the late winter or early spring of 1990 when Bart confessed to him that he had come close to killing Dolly. “He said he waited in the parking lot of Dolly’s apartment,” Rader recalled. “And he had a gun. He told me he was planning to shoot her.”
Moreover—although this was hearsay—Eric Rader had heard from Tony Gacita that Bart had told him he had planned “the perfect murder.”
Both of these admissions had come out during one of Bart’s tearful sessions with his trusted friends.
While Eric had driven Bart around, trying to comfort him, on the night Dolly’s body was discovered, he could not help but notice that Bart didn’t seem as distraught as one would expect. Bart had taken pains to point out that Dolly committed suicide with a gun her father had given her for Christmas.