by Ann Rule
And maybe not. Comeau was frank that the only sense he used that made him believe it was Bart had been aural; he had heard, but he hadn’t seen.
Now, when Danny Porter asked Bobby Corbin if he knew the name “Dolly Hearn,” he replied that he had read it recently in the newspapers.
“You were not aware your brother had a girlfriend that died under mysterious circumstances?”
“I am aware of it—I just didn’t know her name. I never met her. If I met her, it was only once and I don’t remember.”
“Have you ever discussed that circumstance with—”
“I was down there,” Bobby cut in. “I mean I was called down there. I got a call from my dad, I believe. Old memories here. And he [Bart] was depressed and upset about the fact that this had happened. So I went down there and stayed with him through his medical boards.”
“Did he ever discuss the circumstances, or how this happened?”
“No—any other than the fact that he thought it was suicide—that was the only thing we knew, as I can recall.”
BOBBY CORBIN HAD BEEN extremely considerate of his older brother’s feelings, never pressing Bart about where he had been when Jenn was shot, never speculating on what might have happened. He hadn’t asked much about Dolly Hearn’s apparent suicide, either.
If Bobby’s approach was hands-off, Brad Corbin, Bart’s fraternal twin, had been even further removed from what had happened eleven days earlier. It appeared that the connection among the three brothers was almost unemotional, more like that of casual acquaintances. Perhaps they had been raised to respect each other’s privacy.
Or perhaps they didn’t ask questions because they didn’t want to know the answers.
Brad told the grand jurors that he and Bart had shared a “womb and a room” for twenty-three years—until they went in different directions after they left the University of Georgia in Athens in the late ’80s. Like Bobby, Brad recalled having a friendly relationship with his sister-in-law. He had been quite fond of her. The last time he’d seen Jenn was on November 12, when she and Bart came to Connie Corbin’s birthday party. Brad said he was aware that Jenn and Bart were having some marital troubles and knew that both the Corbin and Barber families supported their getting counseling. Brad continually stressed in his testimony that he wasn’t an expert on emotional problems—even in his own family.
“It seemed like they were at least trying,” he said.
“[Jenn] said basically she didn’t know what she was going to do—that she had not been out in the work place before.”
“So she really expressed,” Porter asked, “that she didn’t know how she was going to support herself and the children, and how she and the children would go on? And when you had a conversation with Bart about the divorce, what did he express?”
“The same. I mean I think it was a combination of sadness, remorse—again I don’t want to sit here and say I’m a psychiatrist.”
“Did he ever express to you specifically the reason he was pursuing the divorce?”
“He did not give me the details, but he did say she might be having some sort of Internet affair—some sort of Internet gaming thing, possible addiction, as far as that goes.”
Brad said he knew that his twin had taken the hard drive from his computer to find out what was on it. He didn’t know what—if anything—Bart had learned about that. Brad recalled that he had not seen Bart on Friday evening. He hadn’t learned of Jenn’s death until about nine on Saturday morning, when his mother called him. He had gone to his mother’s home and “walked around in a fog” like the rest of his family were. They had all been in shock, including Bart.
He described Bart’s demeanor as “disheveled, numb—blank.”
“Was he agitated?”
“No.”
Danny Porter asked Brad if he had ever asked his twin about Jenn’s death. No, he hadn’t at that time, nor later in the day when he and Bobby had accompanied Bart to the police station for the gunshot residue tests on Bart’s hands. By that time, Bart had hired an attorney.
“Since then, and later that day, did you have conversations with Bart about the death of Jennifer Corbin?”
“I have had none.”
“You have not spoken to him about the death of his wife?” Porter asked with incredulity in his voice.
“No, sir. But have I asked? Yes.”
“Have you asked?”
“Yes.”
“What was his response?”
“He said, basically, it was like his lawyer told him he could not say anything—and he said for us not to take it personally.”
“So he has said he was not even to talk to you?”
“Um, hum.”
It seemed odd, considering the bond that most people expect twins to share. But as Porter’s questioning continued, Brad Corbin seemed not to have been privy to his twin’s life. He knew no more about what had happened on the morning of December 4 than anyone who read a newspaper in Atlanta did—if that much. He acknowledged that he had heard Dolly Hearn’s name, but said he had never met her. He’d never questioned Bart about her strange and sudden death.
One of the grand jurors asked Brad if he and Bart were, indeed, twins. He nodded and said yes. The woman looked a little confused, perhaps even a bit dismayed.
Bradley Corbin was dismissed.
KEVIN VINCENT AND EDDIE BALLEW met with their boss, Jack Burnette, and set out to drive the Gwinnett County roads that Bart Corbin and Kevin Lyttle had traveled on December 4. Investigators clocked time and distance both at 9 A.M. and, again, at about 1 A.M. The early morning test showed that Lyttle’s house was 15.5 miles from the Wild Wing Cafe, and it took twenty-one minutes to get there. When Bart reportedly left Kevin Lyttle house’s shortly after they argued about his car keys, his departure time would have been between 1:40 and 1:45 A.M. The 9 A.M. reenactment probably took longer than the drive would have shortly after midnight when few cars were on the road.
The detectives suspected that Bart had driven from Lyttle’s house on Marshview Court in Hoschton directly to his own house on Bogan Gates Drive, and that he had spent about fifteen minutes there. And that during that time he had shot and killed his wife.
The distance between Kevin’s house and Bart’s house was 10.5 miles, and it took them twenty-three minutes during daylight hours, and sixteen minutes at 1:47 in the morning. That would place Bart at the murder scene between 2:03 A.M. and 2:15 A.M.
If Bart had then walked out of his house, leaving his small sons asleep and his wife dead, at approximately 2:30 A.M. and then drove to his brother Bobby’s house, he had 14.9 miles to travel. And the time elapsed during that drive would have been between twenty and thirty minutes. He would have used Bobby’s code to open the garage door there sometime between 2:50 and 3:00 A.M.
Bobby Corbin’s dog often barked during the night for any number of reasons, and Bobby hadn’t gotten up until 3:23 when Bart called his cell phone and said he was cold sleeping in the garage.
To be fair, Burnette and his investigators checked out the distance that Bart would have traveled if he had, as he claimed, driven directly from Kevin Lyttle’s house to his brother Bobby’s house. It was a short drive—only 6.2 miles, and it took twelve minutes. If Bart hadn’t gone to his own house during those early morning hours, he should have arrived at his brother’s at approximately 1:47 A.M. And Bobby had testified—albeit by hearsay—that his wife, Suzanne, had heard their dog bark at 2:30 A.M.
But neither of them had checked to see why.
In the end, there was no way to determine absolutely where Bart Corbin had been for the vital period of nearly two hours. No one saw him. All the detectives had to go on were sounds: the barking of a dog, the roar of a truck’s engine. Neither would fly in court; there had to be some other way to track Bart Corbin.
PART SIX
The Investigation
RICHMOND COUNTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DECEMBER 2004
WHILE
THE GWINNETT COUNTY DETECTIVES were working to determine how and why Jennifer Corbin had died, the parallel investigation into Dolly Hearn’s death was taking place in Augusta at the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office. The detectives in each jurisdiction kept in constant touch with each other, and they were discovering more and more similarities in the two shootings.
Detective Sergeant Scott Peebles in Richmond County was the son of Ron Peebles, one of the first investigators on the scene of Dolly Hearn’s shooting in June 1990. Scott had just graduated from high school that week. And that was also the week Dolly had attended her brother Gil’s graduation in Washington, Georgia.
“My high school was across the street from where Dolly Hearn died,” Scott recalled. “I remember standing at my school and I could see her apartment.”
Although the younger Peebles recalled the mystery of Dolly’s death, he never expected to revisit it. But he grew up wanting to be a cop like his father, and he moved up rapidly in the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department. And now, almost fifteen years later, he had just been assigned to be the lead detective on the newly revived investigation into Dolly’s case. He was literally following in his father’s footsteps.
Scott Peebles pored over the thick, tattered files of the original Hearn investigation, reading words his father had written and recognizing his dad’s scribbled additions in now-faded ink. He saw that each incident Dolly had reported—either to the Medical College police or to his own department back in 1989 and 1990—had been checked out. She had told officers she was afraid of her ex-boyfriend, Bart Corbin, but, in the end, she had backed away from prosecuting him. Caught somewhere between feeling sorry for him, remembering the good days they had shared, and being afraid of him, Dolly had finally decided that she didn’t want them to arrest Bart.
Without a complaining witness who would testify in court, there was no point in filing charges against him.
Forensic science techniques had steadily advanced in sophistication since 1990, and Scott Peebles could see that the investigation that took place then had some holes in it, most of them not the fault of the men working the case in the weeks after Dolly died. While it was still standard procedure for patrol officers to remove weapons from locations where someone could be hurt, it bothered detectives to reach a crime scene and find that it had been disturbed.
“If they can just take photographs first,” Peebles said firmly, “we have a chance to reconstruct the scene—but once a gun is removed, we can’t be sure just where it was.”
Reading over Bart Corbin’s two meetings with detectives in 1990, Scott Peebles wondered why Corbin hadn’t been pushed a little harder in these interrogations, particularly in the second interview where he admitted that he had lied.
“I realized that they were hoping to get him on a polygraph,” Peebles said, “and they felt that going a little easy on him might make that more likely—but, in the end, he balked at being hooked up to the lie detector.”
Now, Bart was refusing the lie detector test in Gwinnett County, too, and this time, he wasn’t willing to talk to detectives as he once did in Augusta.
And so, in the last days of 2004, Scott Peebles, his fellow investigators, District Attorney Danny Craig and Senior Assistant District Attorneys Parks White and Jason Troiano were faced with reopening an old case that many had believed was a suicide. They didn’t have a lot to work with. They had only a thin folder of photos of Dolly Hearn’s body and her apartment, some follow-up police reports, the old autopsy reports, and a list of witnesses, half of whom were probably scattered all over America. The Augusta team realized all too well that memories dim as the years pass and new experiences are superimposed over them. But they would have to work with what they had, and somehow take another look at what had happened to Dolly on that June afternoon just before graduation ceremonies at the Dental School at the Medical College of Georgia.
One man that Peebles turned to early on was the investigator who had trained him in crime scene investigation: DeWayne Piper. They were both young men—under forty—but, between them, they had years of experience in criminal investigation and training in the newest advances of forensic science.
DeWayne Piper had come to a career in law enforcement after four years in the U.S. Army, during which he had been stationed in Washington, D.C. In the two decades since, Piper had undergone intensive training, read voluminously, and honed his skill until he became, arguably, one of the outstanding experts in this country in a relatively new discipline of forensic science: bloodstain pattern analysis. Piper was also an expert in fingerprint analysis. He worked as a crime scene investigator for Richmond County.
“Scott and I kind of went in different directions,” Piper recalled. “He loves following suspects, finding out everything about them, matching up circumstantial and physical evidence—and he’s very, very, good at it; I love looking at a crime scene or photographs where blood has been shed, and figuring out what happened. You might say we each have special talents.
“I know it might sound strange,” Piper added. “but blood patterns are almost an art form and you have to have a predilection for it. It’s like learning to play a musical instrument. I have a guitar and music scores, and I’ve studied all of that—still I can’t make music the way I want to. But I can see things in bloodstains that other people often can’t see.”
He wasn’t bragging; he was simply stating fact. Blood found after a shooting is different from blood shed in a stabbing, or flung off when a bludgeon has been swung with great force. Given body positions, weapons, velocity, and a dozen other variables, it is quite possible for blood pattern experts like Piper to re-create what has happened as if they had actually been present when attacks occurred. Many times, suspects are shocked to learn the telltale secrets they left behind in scarlet testimony. There are splashes, streaks, drips, spatters, spray, smears, and even transfers of blood stains, and DeWayne Piper could read them all.
“DeWayne looked at the photographs of Dolly’s body, sitting there on her sofa,” Scott Peebles said. “He saw things I didn’t—but once he showed me, it was so obvious.”
Piper took the negatives Scott Peebles found in the old Hearn file to have them developed. There weren’t many—perhaps two dozen—but he had them enlarged and gave one set to Peebles. There were a dozen pictures of Dolly Hearn’s body, a lovely woman sitting cross-legged on her nubby-textured plaid couch. She might have appeared almost relaxed were it not for the dried blood that coated her entire face and then left stains on her clothing and certain portions of her bare skin. She wore shorts and a black and white blouse. The expression on her face was tranquil, as if she had died without ever knowing she was in danger.
For the next two days, Piper spent all of his time silently studying the pictures of Dolly’s body, the surrounding furniture, and the everyday items in the photographs.
He had his own thoughts about what had happened, but he wanted to compare his opinions with experts who had done postmortem evaluations. Almost immediately, he had doubted that she had committed suicide. Now, he wondered if anyone back in 1990 had had similar suspicions.
The autopsy report was signed by Dr. Sharon G. Daspit, M.D., M.E., and there were neuropathological notes added by Dr. Farivar Yaghmai, M.D. Luckily, both physicians were still in the Augusta area.
Dr. Daspit told Piper that she had “vivid recall” of the Hearn case, and even though she was told Dolly’s death was a suicide, she had questioned that. That was why she ruled the manner of death as “Undetermined.”
When asked about what the immediate effect from a gunshot wound to the head would be, Sharon Daspit said that the victim would have been rendered unconscious immediately. Her breathing would have stopped at that moment, too. “It was a contact wound,” she offered, “and there should have been some blowback of her blood into the barrel of the gun.”
Could Dolly’s body have moved—either consciously or by reflex after being shot? The answer was no. But Dr. Daspit suggested that Piper
talk to Dr. Yaghmai since that was more in his area of expertise.
With Sergeant Scott Peebles, Piper went to interview Dr. Yaghmai. Both detectives were convinced that Dolly hadn’t been found in a position that she should have been in just after she was shot. As Peebles and Piper asked Yaghmai questions, they were careful not to reveal their own suspicions. They hoped for validation of what they believed—but they wanted to glean information from the neuropathologist without planting any suggestions in his mind.
Yaghmai reviewed his notes and looked at the photos Piper presented. He, too, remembered this case even though he had been called in to consult on numerous violent deaths since he had last thought about Dolly Hearn.
He explained that the bullet through Dolly’s brain had cut such a destructive path that all brain activity would have ceased immediately. “Her heart might have beaten for seconds,” Yaghmai said. “But the only possible movement in her body would have been an immediate ‘jerking’ motion, or a very brief trembling.”
When DeWayne Piper asked if she would have been capable of moving into the position her body was discovered in—at the end of the couch, with her head and upper torso leaning slightly over the arm rest—Yaghmai shook his head. He felt someone had changed her body position after she died.
And that was exactly what DeWayne Piper thought, too. There was much too much blood on her left thigh for the position she was found in. And there was a transfer stain on the skin of her right leg that could not be explained.
Dr. Yaghmai opined that while he could not completely rule out suicide as a possibility, he didn’t think that was probable.
But even at this point, Piper wasn’t ready to submit his report. He decided to replicate the scene as it had been on June 6, 1990, and to do that he needed fresh blood. He knew that his own blood was healthy, not inclined to clot—neither too thin or too thick. He was about to make a blood donation to the cause of justice.