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

by Ann Rule

  “Okay, and that is that you were having an affair with him.”

  “I’ve heard rumors, ummmmm.”

  “Is there any truth to that?”

  “No, we have been good friends, and like I said, ummmmm, we go to lunch just about every day together because we work together.”

  “You’re not in any type of relationship at all?”

  “Friendship.” Dara refused to discuss anything more about what she and Bart Corbin were to each other. She was clearly torn, and trying to protect her boss by minimizing his temper tantrums, and insisting that he could not have shot Jenn in the head. He’d sworn he hadn’t done that when he spoke to Dara on December 4.

  That information had not been released on the day Jenn died, and Henry jumped in and asked, “He knew she’d been shot in the head?”

  “Right. He knew that after.” She realized her mistake, and tried to make up for it. “I don’t know when he knew that, but you know—I know he’d found that out, but he didn’t know where—”

  In the end, Dara struggled with what might be the truth. “I’ve just gone back and forth, ’cause I sit there and look at the stuff on the news. I look at that other case in Augusta, and like it doesn’t look good. But then I try to think that I’ve known him a long time. I would hate to think my judgment’s that bad.”

  Henry tried to make it easy for her to give her frank opinion: “Things like this happen in the blink of an eye, just for a fraction of a second. Then everything’s back to normal, and somebody loses their temper and their cool for just a couple of seconds and they do something that normally they would not do, and then it’s something they have to regret for the rest of their lives. I deal with it all the time, because I work Homicide, so I see really good people that do things not in their normal character…Sometimes everything is aligned just right, and something happens, and then it’s over with and the chances of its happening again are a million to one.”

  “I feel bad for her family,” Dara said, “and I feel bad for the boys. I really hate it for the boys.”

  Did Henry really believe that Bart was unlikely to hurt anyone again? Hardly a possibility. Henry knew all about Dolly Hearn. And it seemed that the odds involving what harm Bart Corbin might do were much lower than “a million to one.”

  Later, Dara would admit to investigators that Bart had called her on either December 2 or 3 and asked her to come to his dental clinic to help him clean up broken glass. He said he had discovered that someone broke out a back window, although he wasn’t yet sure what was missing.

  As always, she had done what he asked without question.

  When the investigative team learned of that, they had discussed their suspicions with one another. They concluded that Bart had accidentally locked the .38 revolver in his office on December 3, and broke in to retrieve it.

  MARCUS HEAD AND HIS CREW and DA Danny Porter’s investigators were uncovering more and more parallels between Dolly’s and Jenn’s murders. Bart had created an alibi when he left the message on Dolly’s answering machine breaking a date with her—ironically ending it with “I love you.” But he had to adjust his alibi when Sandra Lake saw him in Dolly’s bathroom. With an eyewitness coming forward, he had no choice but to admit in his second interrogation that he had visited Dolly’s apartment on the afternoon she died.

  He had also set up several alibis in Jenn’s murder. Some, like making a haircut appointment, were almost identical in both murders. However, he hadn’t left a phone message for Jenn. Instead, he had written in his journal, probably expecting that the Gwinnett team would find it.

  They did, and they read the three carefully composed pages he had written, beginning on December 1. Bart portrayed himself as sensitive and loving, while painting Jenn as unstable and confused, the kind of woman who might well commit suicide. He’d done it with Dolly, and now, he’d done it with Jenn.

  His phrases were flowery and overdone, his style part Edwardian, and part Harlequin romance.

  On Wednesday, December 1, he wrote, “Hardest but most cleansing discussion Jenn and I have ever had. I am proud of the discipline I displayed externally, but it disguises a man torn apart.”

  Bart described how Jenn had allowed him to comfort her, as she seemed to be the “sweet, sensitive woman” of their early days together.

  “As we became ‘re-introduced’ to some comfort level of long ago, we delved into deeper waters of emotion. I wished not to feel again, but sadistically drawn to [her] as a moth to a flame. I tried in vain to kiss away her tears of pain, repressing memories, long, hard passionate kisses. Her great pain fed by a grotesque false sense of inadequacy she has endured. Her demeanor became more cold, matter of fact, and stoic. Was this an instrument to deliver retaliation with confessions admitted to me? Necessity or purge? Benefit or consequence? Pain as I would hesitate to lay upon my worst counterpart, my cross to bear faithfully in sacrifice to cease my lover’s anguish. I questioned not enough; she spoke not enough. Can I conjure the strength and courage to weather the storm? I know not now. Time will tell. Jenn is my only love.”

  The Gwinnett County investigators might have found Bart Corbin’s first journal entry more convincing if he had not dated it on the day that he had begun by stealing his wife’s purse, journal, cell phone, and then running over her foot. And when was this soul-searching conversation supposed to have taken place? Jenn had stayed Wednesday night at her sister Heather’s home.

  The detectives knew it was all a faked journal entry. And they noted the repetitive use of I…I…I…I. Bart wrote continually of his own feelings, stopping only to describe Jenn as a mixed-up, neurotic woman in pain.

  His journal entry on December 2 was almost pure pornography, something one might expect to find in XXX-rated magazines in plain wrappers, kept behind the counters of convenience stores. Bart wrote about being lasciviously seduced by Jenn in their shower, suggesting that he had been shocked at her immodesty. He—the honorable man in the journal—had been extremely disturbed that the mother of his children had been so sexually demanding.

  But Jenn had told her mother, her sister, and her best friends that she could not bear to have her husband touch her. More indicative that Bart’s version was not true: Jenn wasn’t even home during the time he described. She was still at Heather’s house, trying to explain why she had to go home or lose her house in the divorce action to come.

  After his description of wanton sex with Jenn, Bart wrote on December 3 about how Dalton had asked to ride bikes with him—so he had agreed. He had also agreed to “let” Jenn take Dalton to basketball practice. Then Bart wrote that he had cooked supper, and played a SpiderMan game and the Candy Land game with Dillon.

  Continuing to burnish his image as the perfect father, Bart described how he’d helped Dillon brush and floss his teeth. “He asked me to sleep with him [as he does frequently] until he fell asleep close to 9:30 P.M. Jenn returned from practice, [but she] contrived to finish housework, then retreated to the master bedroom to watch television.”

  The rest of Bart’s last entry in his journal was taken up with his continuing complaints that Jenn was too sexually aggressive, while before she “was always angelic to me.” He wrote that he would have much preferred to sit quietly with her and hold her hand.

  Bart had never cooked dinner in anyone’s memory. The rest of his “journal” was equally suspect.

  The December 3rd entry was the last.

  AS HE CONTINUED to interview people who had been important in Jenn Corbin’s life, Marcus Head discovered how frantic Bart Corbin was on that last Friday night. Head doubted that he would have been capable of cooking supper or playing games with Dillon. When Head interviewed Juliet Styles and her husband, Darren, he found that Bart had called them on Friday night, too. Bart had reached Juliet on her cell phone, and she was surprised because she didn’t think he had the number, and he called her only rarely—usually when he was looking for Jenn. Later, she learned he had stolen Jenn’s phone and was calling eve
ryone whose information was stored there.

  “I’d been talking to Jenn earlier,” Juliet told Head,

  “but Bart was sorta popping in and out of the house, and she would say, ‘Bart’s here—I’ve gotta go.’”

  When Bart called Juliet on that last Friday night, December 3, he had sounded rational at first, but she could hear a hoarseness in his voice that sounded as though he’d been crying. He asked her, “Do you think there’s any hope?”

  She had tried to soothe him and said that Jenn was going to go to marriage counseling, and that could be a good sign. But Bart kept harking back to Jenn’s Internet relationship. Had Juliet ever seen a photograph, and had she ever met the man? She told him “No”—which was true—and said that as far as she knew, the person was out of state. And Juliet had tried to lighten his mood by saying, “He can’t be any better looking than you.”

  “Is she only staying with me for financial reasons?” Bart pressed.

  Juliet had admitted that that was certainly one of the reasons. “But she’s scared to leave you, Bart. Besides throwing away her marriage, she’s like me—a stay-at-home mom, and she’s worried about how she’s gonna support herself.”

  Later, Juliet wondered if she had told Bart too much, but he’d sounded in fairly good control of himself. She knew that her best friend was leaving her husband, but she thought he would adjust to it in time. Juliet told Marcus Head that she’d invited Jenn to her house the next day, Saturday, when they planned to discuss Jenn’s plans in depth.

  “She did tell me,” Juliet said, “that she wasn’t leaving her husband for this Internet person; she was leaving because this person had opened up her eyes that she didn’t have to walk around on eggshells, and fear Bart, you know—his sharp words and stuff, anymore.”

  Of course, it had been far too late for Jenn. Marcus Head now knew that, at that point, Jenn Corbin had approximately five and a half hours to live.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  DECEMBER 23, 2004–MARCH 24, 2006

  BART WAS SITTING in the Richmond County Jail in Augusta, charged with the murder of Dolly Hearn. That was somewhat ironic because both Danny Porter and Danny Craig felt that Gwinnett County had the stronger case for a murder conviction. But it had only been eighteen days since Jenn’s murder, and Porter’s case was embryonic; they had many avenues to explore before they would have it tightly knit.

  The Gwinnett County investigators had an avalanche of circumstantial evidence, but they still needed to trace Corbin’s movements after he drove off from Kevin Lyttle’s house during the early morning hours of December 4. They had yet to find any witnesses who had actually seen him before he appeared at his brother Bobby’s house. Steve Comeau was sure it was Bart’s truck he’d heard come down Bogan Gates Drive. But that was merely supposition.

  Comeau figured it was Bart and that he’d probably had a few too many drinks. Whoever it was who had turned into the Corbins’ driveway had stayed no more than thirty minutes—if that. Comeau didn’t remember anyone else on the street during that time. No one else in their neighborhood drove a Chevy truck with a 350-horse-power engine and dual exhausts.

  How could the investigators place Bart in his own house at the vital time?

  One member of Jack Burnette’s team, Russ Halcome, had an idea about that, but first he had to check out how Jenn and Anita Hearn had corresponded.

  Halcome, who was one of the top forensic technology experts in the DA’s office, drafted two search warrants that enabled detectives not only to search the Corbin house on Bogan Gates Drive, but also to seize the computer there.

  Halcome maintained his “own little computer lab” in the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office. Whenever he began an evaluation of a suspect computer in an investigation, he looked first into the tower case, which held the hard drive and other computer components. He searched for signs that someone had recently been in there, and might have attempted to modify the computer components. Had any screws been changed or replaced? That would indicate that the hard drive had been in and out, or even that a booby trap such as a device with an electromagnetic force had been placed inside the tower case. In this instance, there was no hard drive at all, but Halcome detected where it had once been by traceries in the dust patterns.

  It was frustrating to look into the empty case, but often there are other ways to get around such blank walls, and Halcome got lucky. A day or so later, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter wrote a feature article about computer forensics, a relatively new—but powerful—investigative tool. It was common knowledge in Atlanta that emails were somehow involved in the Jenn Corbin probe, and the reporter used the Corbin case as an example of how detectives utilized computer forensics. That was fortuitous for Russ Halcome.

  “I got a phone call in early January from a guy who read that article,” Halcome recalled. “He wondered if I’d be interested in what was on the hard drive that had been in the Corbins’ computer.”

  Suppressing his excitement, Halcome replied laconically. “Yeah, I would.”

  The caller was the computer technician in Norcross who had worked on the hard drive that Bart asked him to look at.

  “I happen to have a copy of the hard drive that Bart Corbin brought in,” he said. “My practice is always to make a copy before I start working on it, and I use that copy to work from.”

  Bart had told the computer expert that he was filing for divorce because his wife was having an affair on the Internet. She had printed out some of the emails sent through his Bell South provider, but he said he hadn’t been able to find anything after September. He said he’d discovered that she had a Yahoo email account, but he didn’t know the name she was using or the password. He did know that she was writing to someone named “Chris” or “Christopher” with an email address of sirtank1223@yahoo.com. Corbin had wanted copies of any emails or correspondence—including instant messages—that might exist on the hard drive.

  The computer technician told Halcome that Bart Corbin returned on December 8, nine days after he left the hard drive. He had come back “in a rush and a huff,” demanding to have it back at once. The computer expert said he had handed it over, but he still had the copy he’d made of the contents on that hard drive. He hadn’t gotten around to destroying it yet.

  Halcome could no longer hide his enthusiasm, “Where are you? I’ll be right over.”

  The technician wasn’t sure what he should do, and asked if he could talk to an attorney first. Although he hated to wait, Russ Halcome said, “Sure.”

  On his attorney’s advice, the computer whiz asked that the DA’s office send him something official, asking for the evidence. Assistant DA Tom Davis wrote up a subpoena, and Halcome presented it, and then took the hard drive into evidence.

  Russ Halcome knew that once the hard drive was out of the Corbins’ computer, Jenn would have lost a key way to communicate with Anita Hearn, because she had lost her basic Internet connection. However, her PlayStation II had a keyboard and was online so Jenn had been able to instant-message on that, though IMs, by their very design, have to be short.

  In Jenn’s last days, she had written scores of brief messages to Anita, and from eight hundred miles away, Anita had been virtually an “eyewitness” to Jenn’s murder. They had instant-messaged and phoned each other throughout the evening of December 3.

  And then, suddenly, Jenn was no longer there. Not on her PlayStation. Not on her cell phone.

  CELL PHONES ARE one of the richest sources of information for forensic technology experts to mine. The normal investigation procedure is to determine if a suspect has a cell phone. If he does, detectives want to see phone records. Halcome had numerous contacts with phone companies, and he filled out phone requests for “call detail” reports.

  “We were looking for calls in and calls out,” he explained. “In this case, the original investigators had already identified certain cell phone numbers.”

  Russ Halcome turned next to checking on Bart Corb
in’s cell phone usage, and was pleased to find that Corbin was a cell phone addict. Between December 1 and December 22, when he was arrested on the Richmond County warrant, Bart had initiated 851 calls on his cell phone. Sixty-five of them were on December 4 and 5. Corbin had apparently felt naked without his cell phone, and his obsession with it had increased over the previous few months. He had used it to try to trace and trap Jenn Corbin, but also to create alibis for himself.

  Now it occurred to Halcome that that sword could cut both ways. Bart’s cell phone could be used to trace his activities as well. Following his footsteps would require a lot of research and cross-connections, but Halcome was a man who loved the challenges in each new case.

  “I haven’t had to work a day in my life,” he said cheerfully. “This is all great fun.”

  Halcome focused now on Bart Corbin’s cell phone calls, charting the “towers” and “sectors” where Corbin’s calls had leap-frogged from their origins to their final destinations. Most people don’t notice the cell phone towers that rise from the landscapes of America like skeleton trees whose bones are made of metal. And yet the towers are virtually everywhere, bouncing signals that connect our wireless networks. These networks can be searched for phone records, but they also can be used to chart the comings and goings of the humans who make those cell phone calls. Cell phones are actually far more accurate for this purpose than calls made from an ordinary phone wired to one location.

  Armed with a list of Bart’s telephone calls, Halcome set to work, believing he could make a map of exactly where Bart Corbin had been at particular times. It was all dependent upon how often he had used his cell phone, and with those sixty-five calls he’d made shortly before and after Jenn Corbin’s murder, Halcome had more than enough information. He shared his findings with Jack Burnette and DA Danny Porter.

  “When we found out where he was—at the Wild Wing Cafe, and then at Kevin Lyttle’s house—we charted out the tower locations, and drew up maps to follow his route and times on the night of December 3rd and 4th,” Halcome explained. “The guys at Nextel gave me a key—or a code—to figure out physical addresses, sectors, latitudes, and longitudes. Then I put that information into Microsoft’s ‘Streets and Trips’ software. And there was Bart Corbin driving through small towns in Gwinnett County.