Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal

by Ann Rule

Corbin: At school, I was wearing a royal blue knit shirt, beige shorts, and Docksiders. When I got my hair cut, I was wearing my weight-lifting clothes that I changed into after my shower.

  Gray: Do you own a gun?

  Corbin: I don’t think it’s in my name or not. I have like a .25 caliber my father gave me.

  Gray: Have you ever seen Dolly’s gun before?

  Corbin: No, I have not. I didn’t know she had one. She never mentioned it to me.

  Gray: In other words, you have never seen or never touched that gun, have you?

  Corbin: I’ve never been near any kind of weapon. I didn’t think she carried one.

  Bart was growing nervous again.

  Gray: Do you have some keys to her house?

  Corbin. No, I do not. She has keys to my house. I do not have a key to her apartment. When we originally broke up, I’d given her key back. She just never had another one [key to her apartment] made up to give [back] to me.

  Gray: She had her locks changed, didn’t she?

  Corbin: That’s what I understand.

  Gray: To keep you out?

  Corbin: That’s what I understand.

  John Gray asked to see the keys on Bart’s key ring, and Bart painstakingly explained what each one was—from his mailbox key to his car keys, to the key to his father’s apartment, to his dental school keys. Even though he had admitted to Dolly and Angela that he was the one who stalked them, he would not admit it now; instead he replied noncommittally. He stressed that he had given Dolly the chance to marry him, and she had chosen not to—and that had been the end for them. He had loved her, but he was moving on.

  “Well, I mean,” Bart said, “that there comes a time in a relationship you’ve got to decide where you’re going to go. Either it’s going to go further, or you ain’t gonna go with it at all. And it was not going at all, so it was time for me to go. I was burnt out on trying.”

  If he and Dolly managed to see each other to say goodbye in the three days they had had left, it would have been nice—but he insisted they had made no plans to do that. After Boards he would be pulling out of Augusta.

  Asked to recall the night before when he heard that Dolly was dead, Bart said all of his close friends had gathered at Eric Rader’s house so they would be there for him when he found out. And then Vicky Martin told him Dolly was dead.

  “I didn’t believe it,” Bart told his interviewers. “I don’t think she would be making a joke about anything like that, but I didn’t believe it. Even if I did believe it, I didn’t know how Dolly could have done it. I still don’t.”

  Bart guessed that Dolly must have been very depressed because she was “down in her grades,” and she had had such high aspirations to be an oral surgeon. “She’s always been tops at this and tops at that. She just used to think that she could get things done without having, necessarily, the grades, and maybe she just realized the bottom line was you had to have them. I don’t know.”

  THE INTERVIEW ENDED, and after Bart left, John Gray and Bruce Powers sat there silently for a few minutes. Corbin had seemed remarkably in control of his emotions for a man whose longtime love had died violently less than twenty-four hours earlier. A skeptic might even have sensed a glint of “I told her so” in his eyes as he talked about Dolly’s alleged failure in dental school—a “failure” that would prove to be totally untrue. She had not only made up her fall quarter’s deficit, but she had sailed through the spring quarter. She had been on her way.

  Could anyone—anyone—recall his entire day in fifteen-minute segments as Bart Corbin had just done?

  Or was he, perhaps, hiding something?

  BART CORBIN WAS BACK in the Richmond County CID offices the next evening. This time Detective Ron Peebles joined Lieutenant John Gray. Gray explained that he needed to ask a few more questions that would help him better understand Corbin’s relationship with Dolly Hearn.

  Bart nodded.

  Once more, Gray asked Bart if he was absolutely sure he hadn’t seen Dolly on June 6, the day she died. And this time Bart admitted that he had gone by to see her.

  Corbin: Yes, sir, I did. I went by—close to one o’clock.

  Gray: What was the purpose or occasion to stop by her apartment?

  Corbin: Same as it had been on previous occasions, to see how she was doing, to see if we could possibly have dinner that night like we tried to do before she got sick.

  Gray: Okay. What did you do? Did you go up there and knock on the door and she responded to that?

  Corbin: Yes, sir.

  Gray: Okay. When she came to the door, what was she wearing?

  Corbin: Black shorts, I think—and a gray and white striped shirt.

  Gray: So she let you in the apartment and you came in? What happened then?

  Corbin: We just sat down and talked and she was watching her soap operas. We were sitting on the sofa.

  Gray: What was basically the conversation?

  Corbin: Small talk. We talked about that party that she had mentioned that she was considering going to, this party [inaudible] that I had been talking about earlier, sending her an invitation and me an invitation.

  Gray: Okay. Now, you stayed for how long?

  Corbin: Thirty minutes.

  Gray: Did anyone come over?

  Corbin: Yes, some girl from the office where she’s working at came by.

  Gray: Did she see you?

  Corbin: I don’t think so. I heard her come up when I was heading toward the bathroom at that time, and I went to the restroom. By the time I got out, she was leaving.

  Gray: Did you go anywhere else before you came up to Dolly’s house—when you pulled up to her house?

  Corbin: I knocked on the end door of the apartment [units]. When you’re facing the door, the farthest door on the left.

  Gray: Why?

  Corbin: Because—um—our state Boards, we need certain patients for certain lesions, and she, Dolly, knew these people, and I was trying to get people in to screen them, which means we take a couple of X-rays and see if they, you know, got any lesions. It doesn’t cost them anything, ’cause we’re sort of desperate for patients, that we have to have to get our license.

  Bart couldn’t recall if he had knocked on the neighbors’ door before or after he visited with Dolly because he had been to their door twice before during the week, and found no one home. They hadn’t been home on June 6, either. He didn’t know if Dolly knew them or not, but she knew several people in the complex, although probably not those at this apartment. “She didn’t hardly associate with those people.”

  After seven years of college, Bart Corbin occasionally slipped into “country” grammar, and it sounded odd coming from his mouth. But that wasn’t what fascinated John Gray and Ron Peebles. Each of them had been surprised by the changes in Corbin’s recollections. Thirty hours earlier, he had given a very different description of his movements on June 6. Had he perhaps realized that someone had seen him at the apartments on Parrish Road, and felt the need to revise his recall? Or had he been so shocked and saddened by Dolly’s death that he hadn’t been able to remember his movements accurately yesterday? Gray and Peebles asked him about Dolly’s mood on the afternoon she died.

  Corbin: [She was] sort of…um…non—I don’t want to say nonchalant, I mean, I don’t know. I mean just sort of normal, I guess I would say. (Inaudible.) She was busy, and she was still complaining about the guy she was working for on the last few days, because he’d been jerking her around about getting the hours she needed to work that he had promised her.

  Gray: Was that the apartment manager?

  Corbin: Yeah.

  Gray: Did she need money?

  Corbin: She said she needed money.

  Gray: Did you know if she was in any type of financial debt?

  Corbin: I don’t think so, because her daddy gives her most anything and pays for everything. I didn’t know her to be hurting for anything.

  Gray: Okay. What was your mood when you went by to see her tha
t day?

  Corbin: Ah, say, I guess sort of busy, fairly upbeat, I remember.

  Gray: Okay. All right. Did you have a lot to do that day?

  Corbin: Yeah, I’ve got a lot to do for several days.

  Gray: So you just went by there to just, generally talk to her. Right?

  Corbin: Right. ’Cause, I mean, I had found out that morning that a patient of mine—one of the patients I was gonna use—this is sort of hard to explain without you being a dentist or something, you know. I mean the lesion they had wasn’t gonna work out the way I had planned it, and so I was sorta desperate for patients. I had been to Dolly’s before and the last couple of days I came to knock on doors and see if these people would come by just for me to take a look at then, and, ’cause—um—it—you know, it was almost like going up to a stranger, and she knew them at least, and that was the main reason I was coming up.

  The two detectives noted that Corbin was nervous, stuttering and stammering, and still failed to show any sadness that the woman he had hoped to marry had been shot to death two days before. He was laboring over why he had been at her apartment, alternating between reasons. He denied going upstairs while he was there, and said he hadn’t taken a shower there.

  Gray: You’re positive?

  Corbin: I’m positive.

  Gray: So did y’all come to some kind of agreement whether that y’all were gonna go out together?

  Corbin: That night?

  Gray: Yeah.

  Corbin: No. She didn’t know if she wanted to go to that one party and I didn’t remember until later that I’d forgotten we had that dean’s [Dean Wallace Edwards] party to go to.

  Gray: Did anybody call while you were there?

  Corbin: I can’t remember if somebody called or not. It’s possible that maybe one person called—I can’t remember.

  Gray: Do you remember what you were wearing?

  Corbin: I don’t remember. I thought it was jeans and a T-shirt that time.

  He had described two different outfits during his interview the day before. Still, Bart was doing a fairly good job of weaving this new version—where he admitted to being at Dolly’s apartment in the early afternoon—into his perambulations around the campus of MCG and Augusta. The message on Dolly’s answering machine supported his contention that they had talked about going to a party, although Bart continued to be very vague about whose party it was.

  Corbin: I called Dolly because after we talked about that party, I remembered that I was supposed to be taking this other girl out to this other thing. And I called her [Dolly] back up to tell her I didn’t think we were gonna be able to hop over to this other party, but that I’d try to catch up with her later that night.

  John Gray reminded Bart that he had phoned someone else on the afternoon that Dolly was shot, but he said he didn’t remember who that was.

  Gray: Let me kind of refresh your memory. Did you call the hairdresser—to get your hair cut?

  Corbin: Yeah, when I was at the school. I thought you meant when I went back to school.

  Gray: All right. And you decided to get your hair cut?

  Corbin: Right. She said she could fit me in, probably around 3:15 so I left at, like, three o’clock.

  Gray: I need to ask you this. You were already up there where you were supposed to be to get your hair cut. Why did you drive all the way back and then decide to get your hair cut?

  Corbin: Because I originally didn’t have an appointment at that time. I didn’t think I had time to get my hair cut because—or even—as I was driving back there, I was supposed to be working out at 3:30 with Scott. And—um—when I got, like I said, back to the house and took a shower to come back to the school, there was a message on my phone saying “I can’t make the appointment.” Because I had a patient show up the next day, so I had to take care of her. She was long distance. So I decided to call and see if maybe I could just get my hair appointment moved to that day. If she had space because she originally told me that she could fit me in like 1:15 or something like that, and at that time I didn’t think there was any way I was gonna be able to make it, because I was running over on some work.

  The rest of Bart’s story about the time between 4 and 10 P.M. was the same as he recalled in his first interview. He had worked out, gone to Dean Edwards’ party, and then gone to Vicky and Tony’s house.

  Corbin: They live over by the Sweetheart Cup factory. I went to pick up some things they were keeping for me, and while I was sitting there, Tony was having a conversation with his momma, so I was hanging around just to see how it would come out. Vicky wanted me to go up to Eric Rader’s house.

  Bart avoided telling Gray that he had gone to Vicky and Tony’s house to pick up his guns. Gray skipped over that and the moment Bart learned that Dolly had been shot to death. Instead, he asked if Bart had ever been to counseling—and, if he had, why? Bart acknowledged that he had, explaining that it was because he was stressed, both because of his studies, and about his relationship with Dolly.

  Gray was puzzled. Corbin had clearly been intensely fixated on Dolly Hearn, but now his affect was flat—almost unconcerned—as he spoke of the last days of their being together.

  Gray: I’m gonna ask you again, and we brought it up and I know it’s a long night, and I’m not trying to continue—we’re gonna cut it off very shortly. The situation with you and Dolly was, if I understand correctly—it was gonna come to an end?

  Corbin: Yes, sir.

  Gray: And when was that?

  Corbin: When was the end gonna be?

  Gray: Yeah.

  Corbin: We didn’t ever set a date as far as I was concerned. It—the ending, I mean—if you’re talking in any kind of permanent sense. It was over. It had been over, really, for a while. It was just sort of a hanging on kind of thing. But, I mean, it was over for a few weeks. By this time, we had broke up off and on, off and on, so much [that] it was sort of nonchalant this time around.

  Detective Ron Peebles cut in, saying to John Gray, “I know you interviewed him earlier, and he mentioned he had not been around the apartments up there [on Parrish Road]. For the record, I’d like to hear him state why he lied or failed to tell the truth the first time with you, John.”

  Bart had a quick answer for that.

  Corbin: I failed to tell the truth because, back in January, Dolly’s father was under the impression that I had done certain things to her, which she had told him, and he made, in so many words, verbal threats to me back in—it was probably the second week in January, which I cannot prove because I was the only person there, and I was alone that day. And I did not want to be connected in any form with any kind of thing that might have went on or had any influence on it because of fear for myself.

  It was a truly rambling explanation. This tall, healthy, and muscular young man appeared to be terrified of Dr. Carlton Hearn, a slender man thirty years his senior, or so he wanted to imply. Dolly’s father had, they understood, warned Corbin not to hurt his daughter, but he hardly seemed to be a man who would act violently toward anyone.

  Gray continued his questioning implacably.

  Gray: Would it also be fair to say that this part of the story was not completed for reasons that you were possibly fearful that the authorities would be looking at the circumstances in a suspicious manner?

  Corbin: I guess, subconsciously, but that wasn’t my main concern.

  Gray: Your concern about the whole thing was the fact that you thought her daddy would hold you responsible. Is that correct?

  Corbin: And I still do.

  The interview was coming to an end, but when John Gray asked Bart if he had anything to add, he said he wanted to mention other men that might have been dangerous to Dolly.

  Corbin: You asked me earlier if I knew if she was seeing anyone else. I don’t know if she was, but I know this boy—this Jeff kid—he’s some high school boy and he went out with her, but he’s just little bitty old thing. He’s a waiter over at the Steak & Ale, ’cause that’s whe
re they used to work together. She told me about that. That’s been about a week or so.

  Gray [incredulously]: Did they date?

  Corbin: They did before I ever started dating her.

  Gray: How old is he—how old is Jeff?

  Corbin: He’s probably eighteen or something now.

  Gray paused. That made no sense at all to him. According to Bart’s reckoning, he had been with Dolly for two years, and if “Jeff” was eighteen now, he would have been fifteen or sixteen when Dolly first dated him! Gray suspected Corbin was trying to plant a red herring into this investigation.

  Gray asked Corbin when Dolly had seen this “Jeff” last.

  Corbin: She didn’t see him. She hasn’t seen him in years. She told me about the note the guy had left one night when she went to bed early. He knocked on the door, and she didn’t answer. Because she doesn’t answer the door late at night when she’s home alone. And, ahhh—she didn’t see him that night, either. That’s what she told me. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

  THE NEXT DAY, Dr. Bart Corbin graduated from dental school at the Medical College of Georgia. He was grinning broadly as he received his diploma. Those who had known and loved Dolly Hearn were stunned to see how carefree he appeared; it was almost as if he had never known her, never loved her. On June 10, he attended the wedding of Drs. Tony Gacita and Vicky Martin, seeming to enjoy himself at the ceremony and reception.

  Bart was on his way to a career as a dentist. There would never be a “Dr. Dolly” now, but already he appeared to have moved on, without so much as a backward glance.

  Detectives Gray and Peebles read over the transcripts of Bart Corbin’s two conflicting interviews. On the day that Dolly died, he had been a very busy man indeed. He had traveled back and forth to the dental college, sterilized and packed instruments and unneeded items in his office, gone out to lunch, picked up denture teeth at a dental supply company, taken a shower, stopped by Dolly’s apartment, knocked on doors to find dental subjects for his state Boards, made numerous phone calls, left messages, changed clothes three times, gotten a haircut, worked out at a gym, attended the dean’s party, attempted to pick up his guns at Vicky and Tony’s house, and then learned that his longtime girlfriend had died suddenly of a gunshot wound.