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

by Ann Rule

  “My niece is an RN,” he recalled. “So I asked her to remove a pint and a half of blood from me.”

  To keep Piper’s blood at the proper viscosity, a small amount of heparin was added. He began some of his tests within an hour or so and continued the next day.

  With the help of his thirteen-year-old son, Ryan Piper, DeWayne arranged a couch and end table—and even a piece of cardboard with fourteen clothespins clipped to it that had been on the floor next to Dolly’s couch—so that they had virtually re-created a possible crime scene of fifteen years earlier.

  The Pipers, father and son, also constructed boards in their garage that would catch blood at varying velocities. Although Piper felt Ryan was still too young to be present when his dad’s blood was used, Piper enlisted him to participate by sitting on the couch just as Dolly would have.

  DeWayne manipulated Ryan’s arms, legs, and torso into the most likely position Dolly was in when she was shot—and then into the position in which she was found, slightly leaning against the cushions near the left arm of the sofa.

  In that final posture, there was simply no possible way that a cascade of blood could have fallen on Dolly’s lower left thigh near her kneecap. Nor was there any explanation for the smear of blood transfer on the skin of her other leg—not unless someone else had moved her body.

  Even some of the stains on the clothespins and cardboard warred with the original supposition that Dolly was a suicide. They were stained with low-velocity spatter that would have dripped from her head when she was slightly moved by someone after her death.

  Although he was now positive that Dolly hadn’t shot herself, DeWayne Piper asked for a peer review on his findings from Senior Criminalist John Black at the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Headquarters in Columbia. He didn’t know Black personally or professionally, nor did he know any of the other special agents—Steve Derrick, Vicki Hallman, and Eddie Porter. Piper provided the basic details of the Hearn case and the 8x10 photographs of Dolly’s body.

  The South Carolinians came to a unanimous conclusion that matched Piper’s. The bloodstains in the photos could not be explained unless someone else had been present to manipulate her body and the scene.

  Back in 1990, there weren’t many bloodstain pattern analysts. And no one had detected the telltale patterns that would have proved Dolly was no suicide. But now, Scott Peebles moved forward with this information, and reviewed witness statements about the relationship between Dolly and Bart Corbin.

  With his father’s approval, Peebles was starting from scratch, as if this suspicious death, unresolved for fifteen years, had never been investigated before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  DECEMBER 2004

  WHILE DETECTIVES ON BOTH SIDES of Georgia continued to gather and evaluate evidence and the public speculated about media coverage of the Corbin case, Dr. Bart Corbin appeared to have gone back to work full-time. In mid-December, he put up a sign at his clinic on Braselton Road in Dacula: “New Patients Accepted.” Jenn’s funeral was over, and he was ready for business as usual. When a reporter appeared at his clinic seeking an interview with him, Bart quickly turned away, saying, “This conversation is not taking place.”

  He did give one short quote to a reporter from WAGA-TV, but only to complain about being harassed: “I’ve been persecuted by the media in the last ten days,” he said. “I’m anxious to speak, but have not because of legal advice. The truth will come out in the end.”

  He arrived at his clinic that morning, but locked the doors as he left at noon, and did not return. He still refused to talk to the police or to the district attorney’s investigators.

  Danny Porter confirmed to the media later that day that Jenn Corbin had been engaged in an Internet correspondence with a subject in Missouri, and that computers in the Corbin home had been seized during the execution of a search warrant.

  A hundred people gathered outside the Corbins’ empty house in Buford for a prayer vigil. It was a cold night, and the winds whipped down the street, bending trees and blowing out the candles of those participating.

  Said to be living with relatives, Bart Corbin had not asked to have his sons come home to be with him. Maybe he was simply too emotionally upset himself to cope with taking care of them. If Bart Corbin had regrets—and surely he must have—answering the questions of his sons would be extremely difficult.

  Bart was not without his supporters; aside from the Comeaus and other close neighbors, most people who had known the Corbins as a couple still tended to believe that they had been happily married. They were baffled to learn that Jenn and Bart had been arguing in the last few months. Friends that the Corbins had socialized with still felt that whatever was wrong, it couldn’t have been anything so bad that it led to divorce. And they couldn’t understand the gossip that said Bart might have killed Jenn.

  Jenn’s family members were convinced otherwise, and they were adamant that the best place for Dalton and Dillon was with Heather and Doug Tierney. None of them wanted to turn the boys over to Bart, or to his family. The fact that Bart was avoiding a conference with the investigators who only wanted to sit down with him and explore who might be responsible for Jenn’s death, reinforced her relatives’ doubts about him.

  Even before Jenn’s funeral, Heather and Doug had petitioned for an emergency hearing to seek temporary custody of Dalton and Dillon. They offered affidavits and the youngsters’ psychological test results to support their contention that their home was the safest place for the boys.

  Their attorney, Judy King, explained to the media that the Tierneys wanted to keep the boys safe and unafraid. At the moment, she said, they continued to be “very fearful.”

  Bart and his attorneys were not notified of the custody hearing until two hours before it was to take place. None of them were present when the judge ruled that, for the moment, the Tierneys should continue caring for their nephews.

  Bart countered by removing his sons from his health insurance coverage. He was working feverishly to raise money to pay his lawyers. There was the cash advance of $40,000 from his credit card, and he had also phoned the insurance agent who had written the policy on Jenn’s life four years earlier. Patricia Murphy, an insurance agent in Lawrenceville, was one of Jenn’s longtime friends. Bart and Jenn had gone to her on November 16, 2000, and applied for an insurance policy on Jenn’s life. The policy—a term life with Lincoln Benefit Insurance Company—was issued shortly thereafter. It insured Jenn’s life for $250,000.

  Both Jenn and Bart had signed the application, and Bart had opted to have the yearly premium paid in automatic monthly payments of $19.91. The premiums would not go up for twenty years, and would increase thereafter as Jenn aged. She would have coverage until 2066, when she was ninety-five.

  Jenn seemed a good risk; she was a healthy twenty-nine years old at the time and had no history of ill health. Bart was listed as the principal beneficiary, with Dalton and Dillon in the second spot.

  Detectives found it interesting that Bart had called Patricia Murphy on Sunday morning, December 5, a little more than twenty-four hours after Jenn’s death. He left a message that Jenn had been in a “terrible accident,” and asked Patricia to return his call. Indeed, he left several more messages on that Sunday.

  Patricia Murphy wasn’t at her phone, and she hadn’t heard about Jenn’s death. However, on Monday morning, she was driving to work and listening to the news on her radio when she learned that Jenn was dead—that she had been shot. Later, Patricia told Jenn’s family that she “cried all the way to work.”

  When Murphy played back her answering machine messages, she thought that Bart Corbin’s voice sounded remarkably calm for a man who had just lost his wife. She was instantly suspicious. Bart should have been grieving, and he was already trying to collect on Jenn’s insurance. Patricia called Judy Laxer, the staff claim representative at the Lincoln Benefit Insurance Company headquarters in Vernon Hill, Illinois. She urged Laxer not even to think about payin
g out on the policy, no matter what Jenn Corbin’s widower said.

  Bart’s Sunday call to Patricia Murphy had taken place about the time he’d called Rob Grossman, the satellite salesman, and he sounded just as calm.

  It would be two more days before he called his sons.

  HEATHER AND DOUG TIERNEY now had four children, three little boys and a girl, two dogs, three cats, and a guinea pig. Looking back, they realized that taking care of their own two children had seemed like a walk in the park compared to the chaos with their newly blended family. Heather hit the ground running every morning. Someone was always coming down with one childhood illness or another, laundry piled up endlessly, and the noise level threatened to knock the plaster off the walls. Still, all the activity was a blessing. Being busy and needed made Heather feel somewhat better, and when the kids went to their Aunt Rajel’s house or to stay with Max and Narda, they brought joy to everyone.

  Without blinking, the Tierneys took on the financial responsibility for Dalton and Dillon, too. Whatever it took, they would find a way. Whenever Heather felt overwhelmed, she asked herself: “What would Jenn do—if I was the one who died?”

  So alike in many ways, the sisters also had had different personality traits. In her emails to Chris, Jenn had once lamented that Heather was “disorganized,” and recalled that, when Heather packed to move to her new house, she was likely to pile things from her pantry, her laundry-to-do, and her makeup all in one unlabeled box. But Jenn said it in a noncritical way.

  Now, when Heather remembered Jenn, she said, “If she was in my place, she would take charge, and get going to solve problems. She was the neat freak. She would grieve for me, but she’d handle it.”

  Heather handled it, too, although it would be years before she could bring herself to open to some of the packing boxes that held the things Jenn planned to use in her new life without Bart.

  JENN’S BOYS HAD THEIR BLEAK MOMENTS where they grew suddenly silent in the midst of raucous play. Dalton and Dillon understood as much as small children could that their mother was gone, but they could not visualize “always.” They had bad dreams and missed her terribly. They still held out hope that she would find a way to come back to them. It broke Heather’s heart when they spoke about Jenn. They did not ask about their father.

  Christmas was bearing down on them, though, and all the Barbers realized that, for the children’s sake, they couldn’t just skip the holidays, as much as they wanted to. All their long-cherished family traditions for Christmas were agonizing to contemplate now, making them miss Jenn more than ever. The funeral was over, and the years ahead without her yawned emptily. The reality of loss and grief bloomed as painfully as a toothache when the Novocain wears off. Only the little children left behind were still looking forward to Christmas with joy and excited anticipation.

  Friends and strangers delivered presents for Dalton and Dillon—and for Max and Sylvia, too. This helped the adult survivors tremendously.

  “We decided to make it a ‘kids only’ Christmas,” Heather recalled. “None of the adults could bear having to go Christmas shopping. The kids would have plenty and we would get joy from seeing them tear into their presents.”

  Dillon and Dalton were adjusting well to living in a new home, happy to be with their cousins, Max and Sylvia. Their Aunt Heather had always been a large part of their lives, and so had their Uncle Doug. Heather and Doug were rapidly growing used to their expanded family. There was never any question that they would take Jenn’s little boys, just as Jenn would have looked after Sylvia and Max if something happened to them. Heather hadn’t forgotten the pact she and Jenn had made years before, never really thinking that tragedy would visit their lives. Now, it was the only thing Heather could do for Jenn, and she felt her sister’s presence often, her spirit approving and looking over all of them. Heather woke from happy dreams where Jenn came back and told her everything would be fine, but she had just as many nightmares when she wept in her sleep and awakened to a sodden pillow.

  They decorated a Christmas tree. How could they not have done so? All the children would have been bereft without it. Maybe next year, Heather would be able to unpack Jenn’s tree ornaments and Christmas decorations, or maybe they would just start over with new things.

  All of the presents that Jenn had bought and wrapped for her sons were still in the house on Bogan Gates Drive, and Bart refused the Barbers’ requests to be allowed to remove them, along with more clothes for the little boys.

  Max finally took matters into his own hands, crawled in a window, and retrieved the last presents his daughter would ever buy her sons. When Bart called police to make a burglary report, Max shrugged his shoulders. It was the least important problem facing the family. Somehow, they were going to have to get through the holidays and keep smiles on their faces so that all the grandchildren could have some happy memories of this terrible year.

  Gwinnett County police did not bring charges against Max Barber.

  Heather had begun a website. It helped her to talk about Jenn, report how the boys were doing, and how her whole family was coping with the loss of an integral family member. Before long, her weblog became a touchstone for people everywhere, and it helped Heather when she felt overwhelmed with sorrow. One day, Heather’s web pages would have 400,000 posts from people all over the world.

  Heather wrote about a dream that Dalton had—so real that she hoped somehow it might be true. He came down to breakfast one morning, really happy for the first time. “He said he was leaving church and he saw his mommy standing outside by the flowers. She gave him hugs and kisses, and they went to a carnival. Dalton said they played lots of games, and had all the tokens they needed. They rode the roller coaster.”

  The mommy in his dream had taken him to a toy store and bought him a little street bike. They fed Zippo, Dalton’s dog, and then she tucked him into bed, told him how much she loved him and that she would always be with him.

  “She told him not to worry,” Heather wrote. “Everything would be okay. I asked him if Jenn knew where we were living, and he said, ‘Mommy is an angel and she is everywhere.’”

  For a seven-year-old boy, it would be enough for a while, but he still carried a huge load of guilt and regret that he hadn’t been able to protect his mother when she needed him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  DECEMBER 2004

  TO GIVE BART CORBIN the benefit of the doubt, Marcus Head agreed with Corbin’s attorneys that Dalton Corbin may very well have leapt to an erroneous conclusion that his father had killed his mother. He was, after all, only a child, and he had witnessed his parents violent arguments in recent weeks.

  “We need to talk to Corbin,” Head told reporters, explaining that the dentist’s own reluctance to talk with the police made them wonder more about what he might be hiding.

  Bart had become what police call a “person of interest,” a euphemism for “suspect.” He was aware that his movements and reactions on December 3 and 4 were the subject of grand jury hearings in both Richmond and Gwinnett counties, and he must have realized that at some point he would have to submit to questioning.

  Each day when Bart arrived at his clinic on Braselton Highway, he had to walk a gauntlet of reporters and photographers. The one employee he’d always been able to count on—Dara Prentice—was there for him as he tried to attract new patients despite his growing notoriety.

  He was under constant surveillance—both by the media and by Gwinnett County investigators. As the pressure grew, there was the feeling among law enforcement officials that he might cut and run.

  Whether Bart realized how many eyes were watching him, only he knew. He was aware of the reopened probe into Dolly Hearn’s violent death in Augusta, and he remarked scornfully to one friend that “that bitch in Augusta” was still causing him trouble.

  Sergeant Scott Peebles continued to peruse the 1990 case file. Given the state of forensic science at the time, he wasn’t surprised when he found no physical evidence th
at might have convinced a jury that Bart Corbin had shot her. They had the blood pattern evidence now, but Peebles and DeWayne Piper had to agree with District Attorney Danny Craig that they needed more before they sought an arrest warrant.

  Back in 1990, one of Dolly’s female cousins worked for the FBI. At that time she suggested to a now-retired supervisor in the sheriff’s office that the FBI lab might be able to review Dolly’s file and the notes and pictures of the crime scene and come up with a new approach, but only if he requested federal assistance.

  “Now, why would I want to do that?” he asked her in a condescending tone, as if to pat her on the head for being a good—but deluded—little girl.

  J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, held that post for forty-eight years, until his death in 1972, and never encouraged his agents to exchange information with local police agencies. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, city and county police departments remained reluctant to share the results of their investigations with the FBI, recalling the old days when they could send “the Feds” information—but it wasn’t a reciprocal relationship. Fortunately, by 2004 that distrust was a thing of the past.

  Scott Peebles read the old reports that traced Bart’s and Dolly’s movements during the week before she was shot—particularly the last twenty-four hours of her life. Once again, he studied the two interviews with Bart Corbin where he had given an almost minute-by-minute description of how he spent June 6, 1990. Scott’s father, Ron, sat in on those interviews, and he had harbored doubts at the time about Bart Corbin’s honesty. Could the younger Peebles go back after almost fifteen years and winnow out more information?

  Beyond tracking reported witnesses, Scott Peebles had other, somewhat distracting, leads to follow. When people learned of Jenn Corbin’s death, rumors began to circulate, and Peebles received phone calls from informants who said they had heard that Bart Corbin had admitted that he’d lied about Dolly’s death. When the Augusta detective followed these rumors back to their sources, however, the leads had evaporated. One man, who was now a practicing dentist, had not yet heard that Bart’s wife was dead, and possibly murdered. He told Peebles that Bart had never admitted any guilt in Dolly’s death to him.