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

by Ann Rule

  Danny Porter ran a remarkable district attorney’s office. He was that rare prosecutor with virtually no need for ego gratification or desire to take sole credit for the cases he had successfully prosecuted—and there were many. Having won four elections, and in his fourteenth year as Gwinnett County’s DA, Porter was just as happy to have his assistant DAs and investigators appear in the media—perhaps more so—than he was to garner publicity for himself. While he dressed impeccably in the courtroom, Porter usually wore cargo pants and sports shirts around his office. He was handsome in a “Humphrey Bogart” kind of way, and he spoke in a deep, growly voice. He often taught courses for cops. Once a group of deputies waiting to hear a lecture by a highly regarded district attorney didn’t recognize him when he hopped out of his beat-up 1970 Land Cruiser, dressed in his preferred garb. They thought he was someone who had fallen on hard times.

  That Toyota Land Cruiser, an FJ-55, was both Porter’s hobby and his passion. He spent weeks in an auto mechanic course and fixed its innards before he bothered with cosmetic details.

  Porter’s road to become one of the outstanding DAs in the state of Georgia was as dissimilar from the usual approach as his vehicles and clothing were. His father rose from being a TV antenna installer to top management in the Space Control program, and during those years the family lived in Utica, New York, in the Bahamas, in Florida, and eventually in Atlanta. During the elder Porter’s offshore assignments, there were no accredited schools, but Danny Porter read constantly, and, back on the mainland, he was always ahead of his class. He began college at the University of Georgia majoring in architecture and ended up in law school—which he hated.

  “Lawyers should solve problems,” he commented.

  “Law school wants you to think in a circular pattern.”

  Porter became a Gwinnett County assistant district attorney on September 8, 1981. Early on, one of his main concerns was for victims of crime and their families. Jack Burnette, Porter’s right hand, who supervised the twenty-three investigators in the District Attorney’s Office, had Porter’s support from the beginning. “Danny has a little cop inside screaming to get out,” Burnette commented. Porter prosecuted some of the more bizarre cases in the South. His first homicide scene was in a pet store where exotic birds flapped overhead.

  Often, Porter had to take his small son, Kyle, with him when he was called out to a murder scene. “Jack took care of Kyle for me. And he held ladders for me while I clambered over cold roofs in the dark.”

  “Each case had its own twists,” Porter recalled. Some of the “twists” involved threats against his own life. A school bus driver was once furious when a search warrant of his home produced 150 guns, and Porter ordered them all destroyed. The berserk man threatened to cut Porter’s throat.

  “Luckily, he was wearing a GPS monitor,” Porter recalled, “on the night they tracked him to within three miles of my house.”

  Never concerned for himself, the DA worried continually about his family. In 1992, Porter successfully prosecuted one of the first murder cases in Georgia where no body was ever found. Later, while most of America was watching the O. J. Simpson trial, Danny Porter was in court on the kind of case any prosecutor dreads—a homicide involving a dirty cop. A dead woman was found shot in her parked car at midnight as a fierce thunderstorm raged. Everything pointed to her grown son as the killer, but something didn’t quite fit. She had come into $14,000 in an insurance settlement, and half of that was missing from her trailer after a break-in.

  Porter and Burnette found ten witnesses who had seen a police car driving behind the woman the night she was shot. The hugely popular cop who responded to her burglary complaint hadn’t filed a report on it. He was identified as the cop witnesses had spotted the night of her murder, but that wasn’t enough to arrest him. Burnette searched the suspect’s police car, and found a small amount of blood on an arm rest. “It held the victim’s DNA,” Porter recalled, “and we got a conviction. He was sentenced to two life terms.”

  Sometimes criticized for being too tough on criminals, Porter shrugged it off; he had seen too much tragedy for victims. Raised Catholic, he was not a churchgoer but he was a devout man, often troubled by the unfairness of life. “My job makes you see things that would absolutely make you deny the existence of God,” he once told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter. “Then there are other times with no other explanation but the hand of God. I accepted a long time ago that we’ll never know why some of these things happen. I used to agonize over that.”

  For Danny Porter, who once found law school onerous, his job was endlessly fascinating. He never knew what challenge was coming next. Porter quoted the Roman poet Juvenal: “The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things—bread and circuses!”

  Bread and circuses. The Atlanta-area media responded to the public’s insatiable curiosity about the Jenn and Bart Corbin case with headlines that served to titillate. There was, indeed, a rather morbid circus going on. But Danny Porter was deeply concerned with the survivors’ emotional pain, and he made himself available to them whenever they needed to talk.

  Jack Burnette and Porter did go way back, and Burnette spoke in the Georgia drawl that most people expect to find in Southern cops. Burnette was once a road deputy and then a detective for the Gwinnett County Police Department. He was a big man, standing about six feet five inches tall. He was absolutely devoted to his wife of thirty years, whom he called “Miss Marian.” They lived a very happy life together in Social Circle, Georgia, and doted on their children and grandchildren. When asked how they first met, Jack Burnette tried to avoid the subject, but finally admitted that his once macho attitude toward female officers almost guaranteed that Marian would dislike him intensely.

  Burnette was on patrol out in the county one night and a violent rainstorm came pounding down in blinding sheets. Burnette underestimated the amount of water on the road and didn’t realize his police car was hydroplaning. He skidded off the road and ended up down in a field. He radioed for assistance, and the first unit responding was driven by Miss Marian. She rolled down her window and called out to ask if he needed help.

  Burnette opened his mouth and put his foot squarely inside as he answered, “I don’t think there’s a thing in the world a woman can do for me right now.”

  She lifted her hand, gave him a familiar gesture of disrespect with one finger, and drove away, leaving him standing in the rain on the interstate.

  After that, it took a couple of years for her to even speak to Burnette—except for business—and another year before she would accept his invitation for a date. But she changed his way of thinking about what women could do, and he considered himself very lucky when she finally agreed to marry him.

  Burnette’s wife was the first female officer in his department, and turned out to be one of the best cops they had for many years.

  Burnette never again cast aspersions on the intelligence and capability of women in law enforcement. He held his female investigators in high esteem. “Always hire people smarter than you,” he advised, “never dumber.”

  Burnette followed his own advice. And although he might have seemed the quintessential good ol’ Georgia boy, he was as well versed in forensic science as anybody on his team. He could be wonderfully crafty and sly when he needed to “play dumb.” He would fill a number of roles in this investigation. Now, he dispatched several of his investigative team to find out more about Jenn and Bart Corbin, while Marcus Head moved ahead on the Gwinnett County Police’s probe into Jenn’s death.

  Jack Burnette’s twenty-three investigators were a fascinating cross-section of personalities and demographic origin; the only things they seemed to have in common were an intense desire to find answers where there appeared to be none—and their satisfaction in their jobs. There were both men and women in a 75–25 percent ratio. They were intellectuals, seemingly rough cobs who flew by the sea
t of their pants, computer experts, techies, careful and patient plodders, rapid thinkers, streetwise veterans, and young Turks. Some of Burnette’s investigators worked from home by computer and some worked in the DA’s office. They were all given a great deal of freedom to do what they did best.

  Morale in Porter’s office ran high. That would be important as they embarked on this investigation. Even as they worked alongside the Gwinnett County Police Department’s Marcus Head; District Attorney Danny Craig of Richmond County in Augusta and his investigators; and Richmond County sheriff’s detectives Scott Peebles and De Wayne Piper, it would be a very long time before the person who killed Jenn Corbin might finally be headed for trial.

  Two days before Jenn’s funeral, Danny Porter’s investigator, Kevin Vincent, drove to Bart Corbin’s dental office at 3617 Braselton Highway in Dacula. Corbin’s practice was housed in Suites 102 and 103. Vincent found the office closed, with a sign posted saying there had been a death in the family. There were no phone numbers listed to call in an emergency—not even for an alarm company.

  An attorney whose office was in Suite 104 told Vincent that he’d last spoken to Bart on Friday, December 3. It was his understanding that Bart had either bought—or was buying—the section of the commercial building that housed his dental practice. The lawyer said that he and Bart occasionally bartered legal advice for dental work. He knew from personal experience that Bart Corbin was a man of volatile temperament. He said he could often hear Bart shouting at his staff—“right through the walls.”

  The attorney said that Bart had asked him “nervously” on the afternoon before his wife was shot about which of them would be legally responsible for paying the mortgage on their home if he and his wife were to divorce. “I told him that it would be the one of them who could most afford to pay.”

  There was no question who that would be. As deep in debt as Bart Corbin was, he made far more money than Jenn could make teaching part-time in preschool.

  The lawyer observed that Bart had been acting strangely that Friday afternoon. “He said to me, ‘Everyone told me not to marry her. I should have listened, but it will all be over soon.’”

  At the time, the lawyer took that to mean Bart was speaking about their upcoming divorce.

  Kevin Vincent talked to a number of people in the Buford-Dacula area who had called in to say that they might have information. One woman said that she had been standing in a long line waiting to vote in a Bogan Park precinct in November when she overheard a conversation between two men ahead of her. She was startled to hear one of the men complaining about his wife, “Jennifer.”

  “He was telling the other man that Jennifer was a bitch, and that she was lazy and useless. He said she spent most of her time on the computer and she wasn’t bringing in as much money as she used to. I got the impression that he was either in the midst of a divorce or that he was planning to divorce this ‘Jennifer.’”

  The man had spoken of being a dentist, and she had listened for his name as he gave it to the precinct worker. “It was Corbin. I only listened because I wanted to make sure that I never went to him!”

  She didn’t know the other man’s name, but he had talked about his job, which had something to do with natural gas.

  In a door-to-door sweep of the Corbins’ closest neighbors, DA’s Investigators Kevin Vincent, Eddie Ballew, and Brad Wiley found that the disintegration of the Corbins’ marriage was fairly well known—as were Bart’s explosions of temper. It hadn’t always been so, but lately his fuse had seemed to grow shorter. A nearby neighbor said that on one occasion he had felt it necessary to step in to protect Dalton from Bart’s temper.

  In the first few days of December, Bart Corbin seemed to have gone out of his way to discuss his marital problems, always painting himself as the injured party. He stressed to neighbors that he would do anything to avoid divorce. He had called both his family and Jenn’s family, sobbing on the phone, and begging for advice.

  Wanting to believe his sincerity, Narda Barber had suggested that he might make one last attempt at a reconciliation. Maybe he could write a “sweet letter” to Jenn? And he had done that—eager to create a written record of a man with a broken heart.

  The detectives learned that Bart had lost fifty to sixty pounds over the last few months, and he now looked almost skeletal, a man ravaged.

  He had filed secretly for divorce, but still seemed consumed with pain and rage during the days before Jennifer died. The DA’s investigators continued to find both acquaintances and strangers who were witness to that.

  Bart was pulling ahead on the original list of possible suspects. If they needed to find someone with a motive for murder, he was a likely candidate. He had been obsessed with getting his wife back. The question was, What might have set him off? They weren’t going to find out from him; he still refused to talk with detectives and he had hired attorneys to represent him. He had not, however, authorized them to release any statements quoting him.

  On December 9, Ballew and Wiley assisted Kevin Vincent in locating Bobby and Brad Corbin and two other men said to have been with Bart that Friday night before Jenn Corbin died. Although Connie Corbin said that she hadn’t seen her sons lately and appeared distraught to be asked about them, she wrote down Kevin Vincent’s number and said she would pass it on to Brad if she heard from him.

  Only a few minutes later, Vincent got a phone call from Bart Corbin’s twin, who said he and Bobby were at the Men’s Wearhouse at the Mall of Georgia being fitted for suits for Jenn’s funeral. Brad agreed to meet with the investigators, who served him with a subpoena requiring him to appear before a grand jury that DA Porter had called for. Bobby had already left.

  The DA’s investigators went next to the gym where Bart worked out each morning: BodyPlex. They were looking for Bart’s friends, Kevin “Iron” Lyttle and Brian Fox, to serve them with grand jury subpoenas.

  That was accomplished, but it wasn’t until Jenn’s services the next day that Jack Burnette, along with Manny Perez and Tom Davis, was able to locate Bobby Corbin. He was considerably disgruntled that he was served, however discreetly, at the Sugar Hill Methodist Church.

  “Why here?” Bobby asked. “You could have called me, and I would have come in.”

  But they had no assurance of that; the Corbin brothers weren’t being particularly cooperative with the detectives and continued to form a protective barrier around Bart. Now legally served, they would have to appear before the grand jury on December 15.

  JUDY KING, who had been prepared to represent Jenn in her divorce petition and was now the Barbers’ attorney, told the media, “The family was highly suspicious [of Bart]. When they heard about the circumstances in Augusta, they became even more suspicious.”

  She meant, of course, the gunshot death of Dolly Hearn so many years before. The Atlanta-area media kept abreast of any new information on the investigation and had quickly reported the information about the Hearn case. The public also knew that Dalton had blurted out that his father had shot his mother, although DA Danny Porter didn’t feel that the seven-year-old’s certainty would be enough yet to draft an affidavit for an arrest warrant.

  There was physical evidence—mostly ballistic—that indicated homicide, but that wasn’t official yet. The rest of the evidence that investigators were gathering was more ephemeral. If this did prove to be an “intrafamily murder,” finding more physical evidence would be tough. The usual things left behind by a killer—blood type, DNA, hairs and fibers, body fluids, and fingerprints—wouldn’t be nearly as convincing to a jury if they had come from a family member rather than a stranger. This kind of physical evidence was expected to be found in a household where they had all lived. (Both of the .38 revolvers—Dolly’s and the mystery gun used to kill Jenn—had been wiped clean of fingerprints!)

  Circumstantial evidence was a bit more convincing. The Corbins’ marriage had fallen completely apart, and there were numerous witnesses who would testify to that. And Dalton had talk
ed of seeing his parents arguing during November and December, although a child his age could have easily assumed that had led to murder. Rather than long for his surviving parent, Dalton was clearly afraid of his father.

  Already, there was a tug-of-war between Bart’s and Jenn’s families over the boys. Everyone was traumatized, of course, and Heather and Doug Tierney were doing their best to protect the youngsters from any more stress, but it wasn’t easy. They wanted to establish legal precedent that would ensure that the boys would stay with them, at least for the present. They sought to have visits with Dalton and Dillon from Bart or the extended Corbin family evaluated by a skilled counselor so that the little boys wouldn’t be more upset than they already were.

  “Dalton is in complete fear of his father,” Narda Barber wrote in her affidavit supporting the Tierneys’ bid for temporary custody of the boys. “If the doorbell rings or the dogs bark, Dalton runs into the bedroom and hides behind the door.”

  Doug Tierney agreed, recalling the first phone conversation between Bart and Dalton. They had spoken for only moments when Dalton began crying and refused the phone. He said he was afraid and did not want to talk to his dad.

  Even so, both Dalton and Dillon were fearful of displeasing Bart. He was the punitive parent who shouted at them whenever they failed to live up to the standards he had set for them.

  Both of the Corbin boys were seeing a therapist to help them deal with their loss. It was fortunate that Heather and Jenn had spent so much time together, while the four cousins played. The Tierneys’ home was almost as familiar to the Corbin boys as their own.

  THERE WAS MUCH TALK about guns. Jenn had said a shotgun was missing from the house on Bogan Gates Drive when she called 911 after Bart ran over her foot on December 1. It had always been in the back of a closet, unloaded so that the boys weren’t in danger, and she had suddenly discovered it wasn’t there any longer. It was still missing. And during the funeral, someone had broken into Narda and Max’s house in Lawrenceville and stolen, among other things, Max’s shotgun. No one yet knew where the .38-caliber pistol that had killed Jenn had come from, although detectives were certainly working to find out.