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

by Ann Rule

  And he remembered every minute of that day.

  And Dolly? Had her actions been those of a woman about to commit suicide? She was packing for a trip to the beach with her family, preparing to make muffins and spaghetti sauce, working on her landlord’s business ledgers, watching her favorite soap operas, and designing invitations for a party that she planned to celebrate her own birthday in a month, on July 6. Angela had shown the investigators a number of different invitations, all of them written in Dolly’s distinctive, almost joyous, swoops and swirls of ink.

  According to close friends, Dolly had not broken up with Bart Corbin but was looking forward to spending time with him during her two-week vacation between semesters.

  No one could talk to Dolly about her recall of June 6, of course, so detectives would have to reconstruct her day and attempt to find physical evidence that would support their suspicions about Bart Corbin. They could hardly cite probable cause to obtain an arrest warrant just because his demeanor appeared oddly cheerful rather then grief-stricken or at least saddened.

  Barbara and Carlton Hearn Sr., and Dolly’s brothers—Gil and Carlton Jr.—fully expected that Dolly’s cause of death would be changed to “malice murder” (according to Georgia statute definition) as the probe went on, and that Bart Corbin would be charged with the crime.

  That, however, was not to be. The Richmond County Sheriff’s Office had no blood spatter experts in 1990. The gun used to shoot Dolly had been moved before any photos were taken, making it almost impossible to reconstruct her shooting. And Dolly’s case was officially closed, leaving “Suicide” as the method of her death espoused by the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, and “Undetermined” by Medical Examiner Dr. Sharon Daspit.

  Dolly’s parents nevertheless hired a private investigator, Sarah Mims, to continue the investigation into her death. And Mims located a number of people who had heard Bart Corbin talk about killing Dolly. She talked to Dolly’s neighbors and to Dennis Stanfield’s secretary—who had seen Dolly twice on June 6. In the end, the information that Mims gleaned would prove invaluable.

  The Hearns buried Dolly in an historic cemetery in Washington, Georgia. She would rest forever just a few minutes’ drive from home. Her beloved grandparents, GoGo Pop and Mama Buns, would soon lie in the graves next to her. They were very old when they died, but Dolly’s life had only just begun.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1990–1997

  THERE HAS NEVER BEEN any indication that Jenn Barber Corbin ever heard Dolly Hearn’s name, or knew anything at all about her. Eight years of separation at their ages might as well have been twenty or thirty for women as young as they were. Nonetheless, Dolly Hearn and Jenn Barber had many things in common. Like Dolly, Jenn was interested in sports in high school, and she loved animals, too. Jenn was always as concerned as Dolly that other people were happy. Each came from loving, stable families with traditional values. They both prepared for careers that would benefit others. On the day she died, Dolly was one year away from becoming a dentist; Jenn planned at one time to be a nurse, and she was working as a teacher when she was killed. Perhaps they would have liked each other if they had ever met.

  SHORTLY AFTER HIS GRADUATION Bart packed up his belongings in Augusta and returned to Gwinnett County. Although he had told the Richmond County detectives that he hoped to practice dentistry in another state, he remained in Georgia. He substituted for vacationing dentists for a while, and then worked for Dr. Huey’s dental clinic until he could afford to open his own practice.

  During the early 1990s Bart was briefly involved with a number of women, but none of those relationships matched the intensity of his obsessions, first with Shelly, and then with Dolly. It was as if Bart Corbin had grown a shell that gradually became harder and harder until he was impervious to hurt from others.

  Bart did meet one woman who would remain in his life for over a decade, even after he married Jenn. Dara Prentice* worked records and billing in a nearby medical clinic, and occasionally did temp work in the practice where Bart worked. Dara was married, and the mother of two small children whom she adored. Even so, when Bart employed his considerable charm, Dara succumbed to it. She believed that he really cared for her, and, as the years passed, that it was only their mutual concern for their children that kept them apart. “Someday,” he told her, “we can be together.”

  Dara was a very attractive woman, somewhat buxom, with short wavy bright red hair. She resembled neither Shelly nor Dolly. Having married young, and caught in a marriage with a much older man who was sometimes cold and dismissive, Dara was a vulnerable target for Bart Corbin. It was ironic, of course, because in some ways, Bart wasn’t all that different from her husband. They both occasionally put her down, and rarely, if ever, apologized for their actions toward her.

  Dara did whatever Bart asked of her, accepting the small niche he allowed her to fill in his life. She had heard about how he treated the women who worked in dental offices with him, first when he was little more than an intern, and later when he had his own practice. Sometimes, when she worked for him as a temp at tax time or to bring his billing up to date, she observed how quickly his temper could erupt, seemingly out of nowhere. He shouted and swore and even threw things at the women who worked for him. Even as he became more successful in his career, expanding his patient roster, and able to afford larger homes and newer cars, he seemed to take little satisfaction in it. His rages meant he couldn’t keep his employees for long; once they became the objects of his wrath, most quit and moved on.

  Perhaps Dara continued to work for Bart because she wasn’t usually a target for his anger. And, of course, they were having a physical affair; she believed that they were in love, and that she was special to him and someone he turned to when he had problems.

  When Bart started to date Jenn Barber, Dara accepted that she was in no position to be jealous; after all, she wasn’t free and she couldn’t ask Bart not to see single women. Jenn would never know that Bart had discussed her first pregnancy with Dara, that he had betrayed her in talking about her most personal issues with his mistress. She didn’t know then that he had a lover, or that Bart and Dara had actually debated whether he should break up with Jenn, urge her to have an abortion, or marry her. Bart told Dara in 1996 that he was very angry when Jenn became pregnant, and that he wanted her to abort the baby.

  “I told him that I thought he should marry Jenn,” Dara would remember ten years later. “It seemed to me that that was the honorable thing for him to do. And I guess he loved her, too, but I admit that I felt really bad when he got married. I think I expected more.”

  INEXPLICABLY DARA PRENTICE liked Jenn, and didn’t consider her a rival. As the years went by, she often socialized with Bart and Jenn, going to get-togethers on their houseboat and at ball games, or to family gatherings at their homes. Still, Dara often felt guilty, although she was usually able to rationalize her affair with Bart by telling herself that she wasn’t really hurting his marriage. Jenn was his wife—and she wasn’t. Jenn had him in her bed, on vacation, for holidays, and it was Jenn who bore his children. Dara was the woman outside looking in.

  There was at least one other woman that rumor suggested Bart knew perhaps too well, although no one could be sure how intimate their connection was. Her name was Harriet Gray, and she was employed in one of the dental offices where Bart worked part-time to supplement his income. She was a good deal older than Bart, fifty to his thirty, but she was still a very handsome woman.

  Harriet was recently divorced, and her relatives noticed that she was striving to change her middle-aged image. None of them knew whether that was because “makeovers” are often a natural response to midlife divorces, because Harriet had a lover, or simply because she wanted to be fit and look her best.

  “She bleached her hair very blond, and she got a different haircut,” an ex–sister-in-law recalled. “She dieted, and then she took up yoga. She lost weight and she looked terrific.”

  But then Ha
rriet Gray vanished suddenly, a week after Labor Day, 1996. That was the weekend after Bart and Jenn were married. One day Harriet was there, and the next she was gone. Months went by with no word of her, and her daughters and extended family were worried sick about her.

  JENN WAS A LITTLE OVER two months pregnant when she married Bart. But for her, theirs was anything but a shotgun wedding. She loved him then and would have married him anyway, and she was thrilled to be expecting their child. In 1996, it wasn’t uncommon for couples to live together before they got married, and there were no whispers at all about her premarital pregnancy. Their friends were just happy for Jenn and Bart. The only odd note was their wedding rings, which didn’t match. Bart spent a lot more on his ring than he did on Jenn’s—his ring had a large diamond in it. But, when asked, he had an easy explanation for that; he pointed out that it was important for his career that he look affluent.

  It was a large wedding, and most of their friends were there. Even Dara Prentice attended the wedding and reception. “It tore my heart out,” she admitted. “Not surprisingly, I drank too much at the reception. I was dancing with a lot of Bart’s friends, and he asked one of my girlfriends to make sure I made it home okay and that I didn’t do ‘anything stupid.’”

  Bart and Jenn didn’t have a real honeymoon; they spent the rest of the weekend on the Barbers’ houseboat on Lake Lanier. It didn’t matter. The weather was perfect and the lake was like glass.

  NARDA AND MAX BARBER stayed closely connected to the young Corbins. Jenn’s parents and her sisters and brothers-in-law liked Bart a lot at the beginning, and for a while they loved him. He and Max got along and participated in a lot of activities together. Most weekends, the young Corbins visited Max and Narda.

  Bart didn’t have many close male friends beyond his brothers, Bobby and Brad. One of his few friends was a man whose nickname was “Iron”—he worked out in the same gym with Bart. Another was Richard Wilson, a man about his age who lived in a small town in Alabama. Wilson had worked for Gene Corbin’s business at the same time Bart did. Although Wilson’s home in Alabama was a good distance away from Gwinnett County—a three-hour car trip—he and his wife, Janice, usually came to Georgia for the Corbins’ Fourth of July celebration.

  Initially, of course, Bart and Jenn couldn’t afford their own houseboat; Bart hadn’t hit his financial stride yet, and for him, of all people, that was frustrating. He had never hidden the fact that he was in dentistry to make a lot of money—or, as he once said to Dolly Hearn’s parents—to “stick it to his patients.” He had expected his practice to take off far sooner than it did.

  Eventually, Bart and Jenn were able to buy their own houseboat. It wasn’t new, but it had a living room/kitchen combination, two bedrooms and a bathroom, and was surrounded by a large deck with equipment for barbecuing. They would have lots of parties there, and on Narda and Max’s houseboat, moored at the next dock.

  Jenn was blissfully happy in the first months of her marriage, thrilled about her pregnancy, in love with her husband. And Bart seemed to look forward to their baby, too. Even so, there were some things about the Corbins’ early marriage that were jarring to her family.

  Jenn had a beloved pet dog when she started dating Bart—she’d had him for years—and of course she took him with her when she got married. Sebastian was a big old yellow Lab who, true to the breed, liked everybody he met. Except for one person—and that was Bart. One night at about seven or eight, Narda got a frantic call from Jenn. “Mom,” she said urgently, “you have to take Sebastian! He keeps trying to bite Bart, and Bart’s going to kill him unless I get him out of here!”

  Jenn wasn’t exaggerating; Bart hated Sebastian as much as the dog hated him.

  Max and Narda adopted Sebastian, incredulous that of all people Jenn’s dog would snarl at, it was their new son-in-law. “Jenn missed her dog a lot,” Narda recalled, “but she couldn’t take Sebastian back to her house.”

  That was a minor problem, compared to the way Bart began to treat Jenn within a few months of their wedding. He had professed his love for her before they were married, but oddly now, he set about chipping away at her ego—at first only when they were alone.

  “For some reason,” Narda said, “he tried to make Jenn feel inferior—and often over such minor things. He made her stop wearing nail polish! Jenn always kept her fingernails and toenails polished, but Bart told her he hated the pearl-pink polish she was using. Finally, she just stopped painting her toenails because Bart asked her not to do that anymore. It wasn’t worth an argument to her to object.”

  Despite some of the bumps in the Corbins’ early marriage, Narda and Max, Rajel and Heather, and the rest of the extended Barber family welcomed Bart. “He was brilliant,” Narda remembered. “He belonged to Mensa, and he could make us laugh, too.”

  Bart and Jenn settled down in a small bungalow in Atlanta. It was a funky little house on the edge of a parking lot, and Bart’s first dental office was next door to a convenience store and gas station. They had very little money. Bart planned to eventually remodel their house into a real dental clinic. One of the reasons they had no honeymoon was that they had been in Italy so recently, but Bart was also saving his money for his practice. Jenn was glad to economize toward that end.

  Bart graciously offered free dental care to Jenn’s family, and they appreciated that. For a man who husbanded his assets so carefully, that was a generous gesture.

  Bart and Max often went fishing together, and, in time, of course, the Barbers and Corbins docked their houseboats side by side on Lake Lanier. In a crowd, Bart was usually fun to be around. He and Jenn came to all the family functions, and Jenn’s family made a big event of everyone’s birthday or anniversary, not to mention holidays. The family often ate out, crowding twenty-five or thirty adults and children around tables that were pushed together.

  DALTON WAS BORN IN MARCH 1997, less than seven months after Jenn and Bart were married. Both his parents appeared to be overjoyed with their new baby. Jenn was a serene stay-at-home mom, and Bart usually seemed fine with that, although he sometimes told Jenn that he felt ignored. He resented it if Jenn cleaned house when he was home because that meant she wasn’t giving her full attention to him. He wanted their house to be immaculate, but he didn’t want her doing housework and “neglecting” him when he was home.

  BOTH BART AND JENN kept journals, and he wrote in his that, “Jenn spent an hour cleaning the kitchen when she could have been spending that time with me…”

  To those who had known him in college, Bart’s behavior would not have seemed unusual. He was a man who had to be first in his female partner’s life, and he had an almost insatiable need for power and control. While he had managed to keep that hunger banked when he first dated a woman, it had always surfaced in time. Sometimes Jenn wondered if he was one of those men who made perfect boyfriends and fiancées, but as husbands shed their disguises like a cicada sheds its skin.

  She had reason to be concerned. Now, he rarely complimented her on her accomplishments or her appearance, and he was quick to criticize her—as if diminishing her would somehow make him stronger. That was in private, of course. When they were out with her parents or with other couples, Bart seemed as devoted to Jenn as he always had been.

  And there were good times. Their family scrapbooks were soon full of snapshots of Bart and Jenn and, later, with their little boys, enjoying vacations and trips. In these pictures, they appeared to be having a wonderful time.

  Baby Dalton was much loved by all of his relatives, and Jenn—who had once been focused on a career—proved to be a natural mother.

  During the first years of Jenn’s marriage to Bart, her sister Heather was in college at the University of Georgia, studying to become an attorney. Heather often visited Bart and Jenn’s little house, and happily became Dalton’s main babysitter. On the nights she looked after Dalton, Heather stayed over, sleeping on their living room couch. Whether she wanted to or not, Heather was privy to Bart’s
“put-downs” of Jenn, as he explained her inadequacies to her and outlined how he expected their marriage to proceed. Jenn rarely argued, but simply waited out his tirades. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known that Bart considered women in general far less important than men, so his picking at her was no surprise. Like so many brides, Jenn believed that, in time, he would change.

  Heather liked Bart well enough, but she found him odd. She usually woke up to hear Bart muttering angrily to himself. He was the grumpiest person in the morning she had ever encountered. Getting ready for work, he moved between the kitchen and bathroom—unconcerned that he might wake Dalton or that Heather could hear him. It was almost as if he was having a conversation with someone, but he was talking to himself, and he was always mad about something. He threw things around in the kitchen, and slammed cabinet doors.

  It was the same way in the evening. Everything was always Jenn’s fault—even if it was only that he couldn’t find a wine cork.

  “He didn’t care if I was listening or not,” Heather remembered. “She would just sigh and say ‘Whatever, Bart…’ and roll her eyes at me. Bart could be hilarious, but he could also be mean and thoughtless.”

  Narda Barber was more distressed by his behavior. Jenn eventually admitted to her mother that Bart had told her before they were married that he was willing to marry her—as long as Jenn remembered that he was a doctor, and would always be the person in charge. She was to do what he told her, and he had given her her job description. Jenn was to be the perfect helpmate, housekeeper, and social partner. Bart had even told Jenn that she was only “the bimbo,” and that she could never be of his caliber, never be equal to him.