by Ann Rule
“We could see Hamilton Mill Road where they hooked up.
“I am on my own cell phone a lot, working out my ‘to do’ list as I’m driving. Bart apparently did the same thing.”
Russ Halcome put his spreadsheets on a computer disk, and he read all the police reports from his fellow investigators, and from the Gwinnett County Police file that Marcus Head had prepared. He read all the witness statements. Everything tracked for the first part of the evening. Bart’s calls were hitting on the towers that matched the addresses where he claimed to have been.
Halcome was prepared to testify in Corbin’s trial that the defendant had, indeed, been at the Wild Wing Cafe, and buying coffee at a Wal-Mart on the way to Lyttle’s house, and, finally, after 3 A.M., at a tower close to his brother Bobby’s house.
“But there was no way he could have been at Bobby’s as early as he said he was,” Russ Halcome pointed out.
“His cell phone hit on a tower close to his own house in Buford—just about the time we figured that Jenn was shot—right after Steve Comeau heard what he thought was Bart’s truck coming up the street. He made a couple of phone calls that bounced off the tower closest to Bogan Gates Drive.”
Believing he was smarter than any detective, Bart Corbin was unaware that he’d left a trail of cell phone tower hits behind him, hits that showed he had been in his own neighborhood for just long enough to kill the wife who wanted only to be free of him. In fact, one of those outgoing cell phone calls was at 1:58 A.M.
Could Russ Halcome explain the very technical and detailed aspects of how he had tracked Bart Corbin to a jury? He thought of how confused the O. J. Simpson jury had been as the prosecutors tried to explain DNA to them. What made perfect sense to Halcome might be difficult for a jury of laypersons to understand.
But it was enough to take to the grand jurors in Gwinnett County and get the indictment that Danny Porter and Marcus Head and their backup teams wanted so badly.
On January 5, 2005, a month after Jenn Corbin’s death, the grand jury indictment came down in Gwinnett County. Barton Thomas Corbin was officially charged with one count of malice murder, one count of felony murder, and one count of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. The felony was Jenn’s murder.
Superior Court Judge Melodie Snell Conner had issued a bench warrant to be sure there was a hold on Corbin in the unlikely chance he was able to post bond in Augusta. He would now face trials in two counties, but no one could say which jurisdiction would be the first to proceed. Judge Conner recused herself, asking to be replaced. Her reason was not—as some people thought—that she had attended high school in Snellville with Bart, but rather that she had taken evidence in Corbin’s case and granted one of the early search warrants of the Bogan Gates house.
Judge Debra Turner would be the next judge to oversee matters involving Bart Corbin.
Shortly before the Gwinnett County indictment in Lawrenceville, Bart Corbin hired two of Georgia’s top criminal defense attorneys, Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe of Atlanta. The two had worked as a team before, and very successfully. They had gone on the offensive immediately, asking for a most unusual order from the judge. They asked to have the grand jury hearings moved out of Gwinnett County, suggesting that the already massive media saturation might have prejudiced or otherwise tainted the grand jurors. Although the motion was not granted, Judge Turner granted a sweeping gag order. There was little question that it was necessary. Greta Van Susteren, 48 Hours, Dateline, People, the weekly tabloids, and untold reporters were anxious to focus on each new detail of the crimes that Bart Corbin stood accused of. Turner’s gag order shut down the flow of information, and the media soon found doors at least partially closed. It was frustrating, of course, to those who were seeking quotes and scoops on information that no one else had.
Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe were showmen. Wolfe was a former standup comedian whose thick gray hair grew over his collar. Harvey wore a ponytail and had tattoos peeking out below his shirt cuffs and above his collar. He was famous for his theatrics in trials, and savvy court-watchers were anxious to see what Harvey would do next as he fought for his clients. On one occasion where he represented a former table dancer in a racketeering trial in federal court, Harvey doffed his jacket and swirled it around as he performed a mock table dance for the jury. In another trial, he ripped off his tie and took a pugilistic pose aimed at the prosecutor. A peeved judge found little humor in that. Harvey blamed his behavior on nicotine deprivation because he was trying to quit smoking. That demonstration landed him in jail with a short stay for contempt.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
2005
ON JANUARY 17, 2005, after less than a month in jail in Augusta, Bart Corbin was moved back to the Gwinnett County Jail in Lawrenceville, where he was housed in “administrative segregation.” For his own protection, he would be kept away from other prisoners. Most men in jail and prison don’t hurt women, and they take a harsh view of prisoners accused of killing them. Inmates charged with crimes against women or children who are housed in the general population are prone to “accidents” for which no witnesses come forward.
Initially, Danny Craig and Danny Porter decided that the first trial would be in Augusta, for the murder of Dolly Hearn, followed immediately by a trial in Jenn Corbin’s case in Gwinnett County. Bart Corbin was arraigned in Lawrenceville on January 21, 2005, before Judge Turner.
The third Superior Court judge in Gwinnett Court, who became the permanent judge in the prosecution for Jenn Corbin’s death, was Michael C. Clark. Back in 1981 when Gwinnett County was far more rural, Clark and Danny Porter were assistant DAs together. With the other four ADAs they had time then to drink beer, eat oysters, and tell war stories. Clark also went to the University of Georgia, but really mastered the law when he was a law clerk. A lifelong scholar, his chambers overflowed with books—all kinds of books. He had read them all, and was working toward his Ph.D. attending classes and seminars all over the world.
Before being elected to the bench in 1992, Michael Clark was a defense attorney for a decade. “Then, I was going through a big bottle of Rolaids every week,” he recalled. “As a judge, I didn’t have to take any.”
Serious in trial, Clark’s chambers were more whimsical. The placard on his desk read, “When in doubt, mumble.” Next to that, two bronze dolphins represented another avocation: scuba diving in the Caribbean. His deepest dive was 217 feet.
IT SEEMED THAT A TRIAL would surely begin soon—either in Augusta or in Gwinnett County.
Newspapers in Georgia filed suit to have all gag orders in the Corbin cases dropped. On March 28, 2005, Judge Clark lifted the gag order, although he warned family, witnesses, police officers, and others to be careful of what they might say to the media. Max Barber appeared on the Nancy Grace show on Court TV, but he was cautious in what he said.
On March 29, both Jenn Corbin’s family and Dolly Hearn’s were in the courtroom for another hearing, wearing buttons with the dead women’s pictures on them. Bart studiously avoided making eye contact with them.
Asked to speculate on trial dates, Danny Porter would say only that he expected the Richmond County case to go to trial in Augusta in the summer of 2005, and the trial on Jenn’s murder in the fall.
In March, Max Barber filed a civil complaint asking that Bart be stopped from selling the house, along with other possessions that had once belonged to Jenn. In the years they had lived on Bogan Gates Drive, Bart had, of course, transferred title to their house three times to Jenn “with love and affection,” meaning no money changed hands. It was a way to protect himself. Two months before her death, he had taken it back again. As it turned out, after Bart’s refinancing there was no equity left in the house, nothing for Dalton and Dillon. It would eventually sell well below market value.
When Max had crawled in a window before Christmas to get the presents Jenn had bought for her sons, Bart had wanted the District Attorney’s Office to file breaking and entering char
ges against him. No charges had ensued. Because they’d been barred from taking Dalton’s and Dillon’s beds from the house, Max and Narda had bought two sets of rough-hewn bunk beds so that Jenn’s boys and Max and Sylvia would have somewhere to sleep—both at Doug and Heather’s house and when they stayed at their grandparents’ home.
AS THE FIRST SIGNS of spring 2005 appeared, Heather went to Jenn’s dormant garden and dug up several of the plants Jenn had loved, moving them to her own yard. The family planted a weeping willow tree in Jenn’s memory, and Heather surrounded it with scores of tulip bulbs, Jenn’s favorites. Within weeks, someone dug up Jenn’s flowers. No one could say who had done that.
Heather searched constantly for signs that Jenn was somehow nearby, that she approved of the way Heather was managing all four of their children. It made her feel less lonely for her sister. She often saw a white dove whirling out of the sky to alight nearby, and ladybugs suddenly appeared where there had been none. Like Dalton, she had myriad dreams of Jenn. One morning when she had just wakened, Heather felt a sharp poke in her shoulder. She rolled over to see who had done it.
“Nobody was there,” she recalled. “But I knew it was Jenn—just like the old Jenn, who was so organized—telling me to get up and get the kids ready for school.”
Almost every day, Heather added something to her Internet journal, and it helped her get through the worst days. She wrote that she was grateful to be so busy with the children that she sometimes forgot her grief. And she shared the things she couldn’t really explain with the thousands of people who read her website about Jenn.
One day that spring, Heather heard a faint sound, a “ping…ping…ping.” It was coming from somewhere in her house, and she held her breath as she searched, hearing the insistent chime grow louder and then fading. It took Heather two days to locate its source. She hadn’t yet had the heart to go through Jenn’s things, but now she recognized the sound of the alarm on Jenn’s watch, and she finally found it caught up in her sister’s curlers, snagged on the blond hairs there. The watch, set months before to remind Jenn that she needed to pick her sons up at Harmony School, had, for some unexplainable reason, begun to chime. Its small sound was somehow comforting.
“You know your life has changed,” Heather had written in February, “when you spend Valentine’s Day with your husband at Chuck E. Cheeses!”
It was clear that Doug and Heather Tierney put the children—all four of them—first.
In April, a new website appeared on the Internet: “Friends of Bart Corbin.” Brad, Bart’s twin, was the webmaster, and the introduction of the new site said, “This web site has been created by Bart Corbin’s friends to express our disappointment at unjustified assassination by private and public parties and the voyeuristic behavior of the media. Our purpose is to ask you to keep an open mind and think beyond what is published in the press and the CaringBridge.com website [host to Heather’s site].”
The Corbins’ site featured numerous pictures of Bart and Jenn in happier days, photos of the children, and extolled Bart’s virtues, while denying any possibility of his guilt. It also requested donations to help pay for Bart’s legal expenses. He had been the shining light in his family, and they were having a difficult time trying to raise funds for his defense in two trials that would surely last weeks, even months.
Dolly Hearn’s brother Gil had a website, too, filled with photographs and memories of Dolly. She seemed as alive as she had ever been. Years before, her family had set up a scholarship in her name at the MCG Dental School, and many students had already benefited from it.
Soon, discussion groups on the Corbin case began to spring up on the Internet. This was a whole new venue for grieving, communicating, arguing, and politicizing. Just as the forensic investigation had moved into technical realms, so had those who cared for Jenn, Bart, and Dolly.
Would future jurors read these Internet pages? Perhaps. But although Danny Porter objected to the anonymous discussions about specifics and quality of evidence on the Corbin sites, he acknowledged that shutting down websites or home pages could violate the First Amendment. He and David Wolfe discussed problem areas and reached some agreement that certain posts should be removed.
The Internet speculation was akin to discussions about crimes a century ago among locals sitting around a pot-bellied stove at a country store—except that, in 2005, their opinions could instantly travel around the world.
DA DANNY PORTER and Senior Assistant DA Chuck Ross were gearing up for trial in Gwinnett County, just as Danny Craig and Jason Troiano were in Richmond County. Ideally, a prosecuting duo would have attorneys who complemented each other—one slightly more skilled at oratory and persuasive arguments, the other adept at the cross-examination. In Gwinnett County, Porter was the cross-examiner who could ask a series of questions that would lead a witness or defendant down a dead-end street, and then pounce and trip them up when their lies became apparent.
Chuck Ross was the “natural arguer.” Always on the debate teams in high school and college, he had abandoned his ambition to earn a Ph.D. in political science when he became fascinated with criminal law. Ross paid his way through law school working as a bartender, and, even after he became an attorney, he invented somewhat bizarre drinks. Two of his specialties were the “Key Lime Pie” and the “Tiramisu” martinis. He was also a gourmet cook, but his remarkable knowledge of computer technology was what made him essential to the Corbin case.
Aware that their evidence might confuse a lay jury, Ross, the senior assistant DA and DA Danny Porter knew they were quite possibly in for the courtroom battle of their lives as they prepared the prosecution’s case against Bart Corbin.
Everyone involved—from Bart Corbin, the defendant, to detectives and prosecutors in two counties, the families of the victims, the media, and the public—was anxious to see the case go to trial. Everyone, that is, with the exception of Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe. Corbin’s defense team seemed determined to delay any trials for months—years—if they could. Some of their motions were capricious, and some were based on precedent-setting rulings in the state of Georgia.
And yet the summer of 2005 passed without a trial date, and hearings set for early September were postponed after Bart Corbin’s defense team filed a motion claiming that the Gwinnett County investigators had illegally obtained evidence from the Corbins’ home. They also wanted the information derived from the electronic surveillance of his cell phone thrown out.
On September 8, 2005, a first trial date was finally set: January 9, 2006. District Attorney Danny Craig in Augusta was scheduled to go first, prosecuting Bart Corbin for the murder of Dolly Hearn.
In the interim, Corbin’s attorneys continued to file motions. On October 31, David Wolfe and Bruce Harvey, with a bit of bluster, asked for a fourteen-year delay in prosecution. Their reasoning was that it had taken Richmond County fourteen years to charge their client in Dolly’s murder, so it was only fair that the trial should be put off for that long.
On December 7, a year and three days after Jenn Corbin’s murder, a preliminary hearing was postponed after Harvey and Wolfe submitted a motion to have both the evidence retrieved after a search warrant on the Bogan Gates house and all evidence gleaned from Halcome’s electronic surveillance barred from the upcoming trial in Augusta. They were determined not to have any evidence from the Jenn Corbin case pop up in the Augusta prosecution of Bart Corbin for Dolly Hearn’s murder. If they could get it thrown out early, they wouldn’t have to worry about it.
On December 14, 2005, the pretrial hearing was held in Superior Court Judge Carl C. Brown’s Augusta courtroom. DA Craig listed all the similar circumstances that were part of both Dolly Hearn’s and Jenn Corbin’s murders, and submitted that just before Dolly’s death Bart had told “a good friend” that he had planned the “perfect murder.”
Again, both the Hearn and the Barber families were in the courtroom, this time for a hearing that would be exquisitely painful for them. Bruce Harvey p
resented a slide show. The first frame was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, something that had nothing to do with either case. But, later, there were sexually provocative and incendiary quotes from Jenn Corbin’s emails to Anita Hearn, the words hugely magnified on the screen. Narda Barber realized that the defense undoubtedly intended to use these slides in front of a jury, and her heart sank. Taken out of context, they were shocking. Her eyes filled with tears, and she dreaded the upcoming trials even more than she had before.
Next, Harvey painted Dolly as an academic failure who had been in danger of flunking out of dental school. He did not, of course, mention that Bart had stolen the projects that determined her grades for an entire quarter.
The defense position was that both women had been suicidal, and that Bart Corbin was about to be prosecuted for deaths that weren’t even homicides. He suggested that Dolly had been depressed because she and Bart were breaking up, and Jenn had been shocked and saddened to find out the real identity of her email correspondent
Danny Craig pointed out that, in his opinion, Harvey’s take on the dead women was completely backward; the victims had been anxious to be rid of Bart Corbin, and what Harvey saw as indications that the victims were suicidal was really evidence of Corbin’s guilt.
“You don’t jilt Dr. Corbin,” the Augusta prosecutor intoned. “You die [if you try].”
Undeterred, Harvey and Wolfe asked Judge Brown to drop all charges against Bart Corbin in the case of Dolly Hearn. They stressed that so much time had passed that witnesses’ memories had blurred and changed, and evidence had been lost. They suggested sarcastically that the state must have waited for Corbin to kill another person to advance their case against him for Dolly’s alleged murder.