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

by Ann Rule

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  DECEMBER 2004

  THE INVESTIGATION into Jenn Corbin’s death was becoming increasingly complicated. There were literally dozens of people who knew something about Bart Corbin that they wanted to tell to detectives. Some had helpful information, and some had only general comments, or repeated unfounded rumors. The media was anxious for anything new that might give them an edge in their daily coverage. Certain aspects of the probe into Jenn Corbin’s death had been quickly made available to the public, something that Bart deplored.

  Bart stayed away from his dental offices for several days, but ultimately he went back to work. And he was exceedingly annoyed at the photographers and reporters who seemed always to be driving by or hanging out in his parking lot. Finally, he called the police because of the reporters congregating in his parking lot. Patrol officers checked, and did observe the media presence, but told him they were breaking no laws.

  District Attorney Danny Porter, his investigator, Kevin Vincent, and Detective Marcus Head were intrigued by one aspect of the dentist’s behavior. They had read over the Richmond County file on Dolly Hearn’s still-unsolved case. One detail in the Augusta file didn’t seem all that interesting on their first reading, but they were looking for more similarities, however slight, between two cases where women involved with Bart Corbin had died of .38-caliber gunshot wounds to the right side of the head.

  Fourteen years earlier, part of Bart’s complicated alibi for the afternoon of June 6, 1990, when Dolly was shot was that he had gotten a haircut that day in Augusta. That was true enough. But it struck the investigative team as more than a coincidence when they learned Bart had made a barbershop appointment for December 4, 2004. Getting a haircut wasn’t usually suspicious, of course, but they had to wonder if Corbin was following some kind of pattern that had worked for him once before.

  In December 2004, the owner of a high-end barbershop in Duluth, Georgia, called detectives. Dr. Jon Paul Zaleski, who was also a dentist, informed them that earlier in the week, Bart Corbin had made an appointment to have his hair cut at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, December 4. He was a first-time client, referred by another dentist. However, at 8:30 P.M. on Friday, December 3, Bart had phoned to say that his oldest son had a ball game the next day, and asked if he could come in after 1:00 that afternoon. His request to change his appointment would have taken place an hour or so before he was to meet his friends at the Wild Wing Cafe in Suwanee. And approximately six hours before Jenn was shot.

  Of course, the Corbins’ world had changed overnight, and Bart hadn’t shown up at Jon Paul’s at all on Saturday; he had been instead on his way to police headquarters to have a gunshot residue test on his hands.

  Four days later, on Wednesday, December 8, Bart Corbin called Jon Paul’s hair salon again close to 5:30 P.M., and left a message on the answering machine asking for an appointment. “I need to come in,” he said, “because I have to attend a funeral tomorrow.”

  In that same message on the answering machine, he added, “I’m widowed and I need a new look.”

  The receptionist called back and gave him an appointment two hours later that evening. Since it was his first visit and he arrived early, he was given a “client information” form to fill out. Under the question asking marital status, he circled “No,” and wrote in “widowed.”

  The receptionist noted that he seemed tired and looked like a man who had “had a bad week.” When she commented sympathetically about that, he had answered that he had “family problems.”

  She offered him a glass of wine, which he first refused, saying, “My brother doesn’t want me to drink.”

  But after Cathy Zaleski, who was Dr. Zaleski’s wife, began to cut Bart Corbin’s hair, he said he’d changed his mind and would like a glass of wine. As barbers and beauty operators often do, Mrs. Zaleski made conversation, and asked him if the person who had died was someone close to him. She had not connected him to the headlines and news bulletins, and had no idea that it was his wife’s funeral he was going to the next day.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he answered, and she quickly dropped the subject.

  “Why did you marry Jon Paul,” Bart suddenly asked her.

  “Oh you know,” she joked. “The second time around is for money.”

  “I think my wife married me for my money,” he said.

  She didn’t know whether he was joking or not.

  The hair salon’s answering machine tape was handed over to Kevin Vincent. The message left on Jon Paul’s tape on December 8 mentioned only that Bart had to go to a funeral. Bart’s voice was very calm, almost cheerful as he said he needed a “new look.”

  Apparently he liked the way his hair looked, because he made another appointment for a month later, on January 7, 2005.

  Rob and Jenn Grossman, his friends in the satellite business, had an even more unusual situation. Bart called Rob on Sunday, December 5. He didn’t mention their estrangement; he wanted Rob’s help in getting some information off his computer. When Rob called him back to ask what was going on, Bart told him everything and everyone was fine, but that he and Jenn were getting a divorce and he needed Rob’s help to get the info from his computer so he could prove she was cheating on him. Rob told him he really did not want to get involved.

  Rob turned to his wife and said that the Corbins were getting divorced, and she was “shocked” at that news.

  But Jenn Grossman was about to have a bigger shock. “Later in the day, Rob was going to work and he heard on the radio that Jenn was dead, and he called me to see if anything was on the news—and if it was really Jenn Corbin. We couldn’t believe it, but sure enough, I turned on the TV and saw Jenn’s beautiful face all over the news saying that they suspected suicide!”

  The Grossmans realized then that Jenn Corbin had already been dead when Bart had called Rob earlier in the day saying everyone was fine at his house. “He knew she was dead and he was still trying to get info that Jenn was cheating on him,” Jenn Grossman said.

  DETECTIVES THOUGHT they knew what Bart was looking for in his computer. One thing that had not become instantly available to the public was the information about Jenn’s online relationship with someone in Missouri.

  Anita Hearn had been in daily—perhaps hourly—contact with Jenn at the end of her life. Within a few days of Jenn’s death, Narda and Heather had discussed what, if anything, they should do about contacting this person who had meant so much to Jenn.

  “All we knew,” Narda remembered, “was that, next to her sons, and our family, this person seemed to have meant more to Jenn than anyone. I can’t remember now if we were even sure whether ‘Chris’ was a female or a male. I don’t think we knew. Would he be wondering why he could no longer contact Jenn? What if he never knew what had happened? We decided it would be the kindest thing to call him and tell him what had happened.”

  The Gwinnett County Police had seized Jenn’s T-Mobile cell phone—her newest cell phone—as evidence when they found it on the bed where she died. Narda and Heather looked through the list they had made of the numbers in Jenn’s phone address book. They found a phone number for someone in Missouri. That was where Jenn said her correspondent lived, and there were no other numbers in that state. This was probably the person Jenn called “Chris.” There was evidently someone named “Anita” at this number, too.

  Jenn’s mother and sister weren’t sure just how they felt about Jenn’s Internet friend; for so long, they had pictured “him”—and now, perhaps “her”—as a negative influence in Jenn’s life, but they had gradually come to accept that the encouragement and friendship had made Jenn happier than they had seen her in years. In their own grief, they reached out to a complete stranger, wary of whom they might find.

  Narda made the call. A woman answered, her voice cautious and evasive as if she might be expecting a bill collector or some other unwelcome caller. When Narda asked to speak to Chris or Anita, the woman said that she was Chris’s sister.
“She lives next door,” the woman said. “She doesn’t have a phone, but I can go get her.”

  She? Narda looked at Heather, confused. There was a long wait, and then another voice came on the line. It was a female voice. This was Chris/Anita Hearn. Narda wasn’t sure, but she suspected this was the same woman who had answered the phone in the first place, and said she was “Chris’s sister.”

  She sounded nervous, as if she didn’t know who was calling or what to expect, as, of course, she didn’t.

  “Chris? Anita?” Narda began. “I am Jennifer’s mother, and I have terrible news to tell you—”

  Narda Barber explained that Jenn was dead, possibly murdered, and she heard the woman in Missouri begin to sob and grow more and more hysterical. She said she had been trying to get through to Jenn on the phone, on the Internet, through the EverQuest game, and was worried sick that there was no response. That had never happened before, and Anita said she had known that things were reaching a crisis point in Jenn’s home.

  “She was absolutely devastated,” Narda recalled.

  “She blamed herself, and I can’t really say that I didn’t blame her, too. It was so hard to know. Once I sorted out who she really was, I think Anita had begun something online, maybe some part of the game, and then she lost control of it—until she was in too deep—and didn’t know how to back out. She must have known that the time would come when she had to tell the truth, and we found out that she had done that—and that Jenn had forgiven her.”

  Nevertheless, what Anita Hearn had done to Jennifer Corbin seemed a wicked deception. She had courted a vulnerable woman for months, pretending to be a man. Narda and Heather sensed that Anita had done this before on the Internet. Hiding behind the characters on EverQuest, anyone could be someone else, if only for a short time. But Anita Hearn’s subterfuge had ended in stark tragedy. Maybe she hadn’t meant to do harm, and she certainly hadn’t been a factor in the eight years during which Jenn’s marriage had slowly crumbled. But she had possibly been a catalyst in the final denouement. That much was inescapable, and Anita knew it.

  Even as she pondered this, Narda realized that Anita must have been very lonely, too, and that in her way she had loved Jenn and that she would miss her, however impossible their connection had been. She had expected to talk to a cold-hearted opportunist, a person with his/her own agenda, perhaps even a con artist. But Narda didn’t sense that in Anita Hearn. The woman on the other end of the phone line sounded completely broken-hearted and consumed with guilt.

  Anita had been, perhaps, the last person to talk to Jenn on the night she died. She promised Narda that she would do what she could to help the detectives who were investigating the shooting.

  Marcus Head obtained the Corbins’ telephone records, and saw that Jenn had, indeed, been on the phone or online with Chris “Anita” Hearn for hours during the last evening of her life, not once but several times.

  The conversations had been lengthy. Head knew that he was calling a female, and he was very curious to see what she might remember from the phone calls that night, and what her relationship to Jenn Corbin might have been.

  Even as mourners were gathering at the Sugar Hill Methodist Church, Head called Anita. It was 4:40 in the afternoon of December 10. His call, too, was answered by a woman who said Anita wasn’t home, and had gone over to her sister’s house. She was expected back in fifteen minutes.

  Anita did call Marcus Head back within that time period.

  After Head’s first contact with Anita Hearn, he knew that she had been very close to Jenn at the time of her death. Anita knew about Bart’s running over Jenn on December 1, and she also knew that Jenn’s journal was missing. She asked Head if the detectives had found it when they executed a search warrant of the house.

  “We took the game, the PlayStation, and we looked for the journal—which we can’t find,” he said. “We knew he stole one journal, and Jennifer’s sister told us that Jennifer went and bought a new one and she redrafted some of the contents from the old one into the new one, and that she took extra steps to hide it, so that he wouldn’t find it this time. So then we took extra steps, too, to look for it. But we didn’t find it.”

  “Okay,” Anita said. “She never mentioned where she hid it to me.”

  Head asked Anita to go over the timeline for Friday night, December 3. “I’ve got phone records coming in, but would you verify for me that y’all were playing the game online that night?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay—how long were you connected to the game?”

  “[Until] 1:15 in the morning—her time—maybe even 1:20, close to 1:30.”

  Head said he had a copy of the EverQuest game, and he wondered if it was possible for him to retrieve a message that was on a screen after the players had cleared it.

  “We can’t,” Anita said. “Do they [the game administrators] keep records of it? I’m not sure. They may very well. I know that if you delete your character, they keep it for so many months.”

  Anita said that Bart had left the house about 9 P.M. on Friday night while she was talking to Jenn on the phone, and that after that, she and Jenn had been on the phone with one another off and on during the evening.

  Jenn had told Anita that Bart left without telling her where he was going. He had just walked out without speaking to her. Jenn had been aware that night that Bart had filed for divorce. But she hadn’t been upset about it at all, just a little surprised that he had filed first. She had told Anita sometime in the past week or so that she had to delete some of her email, because Bart was coming home to talk with her.

  “And they talked that night,” Anita continued, “and she called me that night, and she said, ‘That totals it.’”

  Jenn had confided in Anita, saying that she knew in her heart that even if she tried and went to marriage counseling, it just wasn’t going to work. She had told Bart that she had a new friend she cared for in another state, but Anita was quite sure that Jenn never told Bart that Anita was a woman. She had wanted to end her marriage amicably, because of her sons.

  “And he was gonna be in her life for the rest of her life,” Anita said, “and she wanted things okay for the kids.”

  Jenn had hoped that Bart would be moving out that night, but he had decided to stay, or, possibly, he had asked Jenn if he could stay because he didn’t have anywhere to go, and he didn’t want to go to his mom’s.

  That was when Jenn had suggested he move to their houseboat, and he had refused, saying it was too cold.

  “So she told him: Okay, he could stay until he found somewhere—”

  “Tell me about the plans you and she had made—that you agreed to talk again?” Head asked.

  Anita said that she and Jenn had agreed to wait to meet until after Christmas to decide what they were going to do. At that point, they would consider moving in together with their children and seeing if they could afford a place if they both pitched in.

  Anita Hearn seemed anxious to have Head read all the correspondence between herself and Jenn Corbin, almost as if she wanted to validate her friendship with a dead woman she had never met. Anita’s family were still unaware of any plans she had to move to Georgia. She didn’t know how much Jenn’s family knew, but told him she had spoken with Jenn’s mother and sister. Her conversation was strangely matter-of-fact and tightly controlled, until she asked Head if anyone knew if Jenn had been awake or asleep when she was shot.

  “We don’t know,” Head said. “There’s some suggestion, but it’s only a suggestion…about the way she was found that suggests she may have been asleep.”

  “Okay, that’s what I’m hoping for. And do you know who has her cell phone?”

  “I have it. It’s locked up in evidence.”

  Anita offered to email all of the correspondence she had had with Jenn, whatever was left on her computer. At this time, Head had no idea what a landslide of emails that would be. He asked her again if she felt Jenn was really planning to share a house with her in G
eorgia.

  “Yes, I mean in our conversations, yes. I mean at first—when she found out I was a woman and stuff, everything kind of changed a little bit. But, after that, she was okay with it. We were still—she said she wanted to be a mom to my kids, and things like that.”

  It was difficult to tell if Anita Hearn was convincing herself that she had not pulled off a hugely dark deception on a woman who was now dead—perhaps even dead because of Anita’s lie. Maybe she truly believed that the man she had pretended to be—the masquerade she had carried out for month after month—was no part of Jenn’s death. Everything she said, however, had a tinge of guilt to it.

  “It is kind of weird,” she continued. “My last name—Hearn—the woman he may have killed before—had the same name. Did you guys get the letters he had?”

  “No. We can’t find them. He cleaned the house out. We also think that he may have taken a lot of things that belonged to Jennifer, that Jennifer had documented.”

  There was so much missing beyond the journals that Jenn’s family knew she always had with her. Head suspected that Bart had taken them, and hidden them or destroyed them to save himself embarrassment or to hide things that might incriminate him.

  “I know he had my name,” Anita said. “Because he called me twice on my cell phone. I never answered.”

  “Do you know what number he called from?”

  “His home phone as far as I know. I can tell when I get my phone bill.”

  Anita said that Jenn had told her, too, about Bart’s mysterious trip to Alabama. “All she said was she found a receipt that basically showed he had been in Alabama that day—a few days before she died. She goes ‘Well, I thought maybe somebody just told him there was a good lawyer in Alabama.’”