by Ann Rule
Craig scoffed at that. “That is preposterous,” he said. “And long delays usually help—rather than hurt—the defendant’s case.”
Moreover, he assured the judge that the interview transcripts and police files from the 1990 case involving Dolly were intact, and that the gunshot residue test results were perfectly adequate.
Judge Brown reserved his decision on the defense motions.
ANOTHER CHRISTMAS HAD PASSED without a trial. Indeed, it would be a far longer delay for any trial in either victim’s case than anyone involved could have guessed. But at least at the moment the one trial date was set: January 9, 2006. Shortly after Christmas, Danny Craig and his chief assistant DA, Jason Troiano, were scheduled to begin the trial in Dolly Hearn’s murder.
January 9 arrived, but there was no trial. Instead, in yet another pretrial hearing, the two Dannies—Craig and Porter—announced that they had agreed that the positioning of the trials should be switched.
Danny Porter would prosecute Bart first in Gwinnett County for Jenn’s death. After that, Porter hoped to move to Augusta and, as a specially appointed prosecutor in that venue, continue in a second trial, prosecuting Bart in the case of Dolly Hearn.
Danny Craig was open to that, but it would mean that there would be no trial at all in January. Now, Judge Brown postponed the first trial until April in Gwinnett County.
It was beginning to be difficult to keep track of the players and dates without a program.
As he sat in Judge Brown’s courtroom, Bart Corbin’s complexion was the pale yellow of prison pallor, and he appeared to be even thinner than before. His gaunt frame had lost all muscle tone; he was no longer working out in a health club. He spent his days and nights in a jail cell, avoiding other prisoners.
Bart wrote to people he had been close to in the past, including Shelly Mansfield, the girlfriend of his youth at the University of Georgia. Shelly was thousands of miles away, living in another country, married to someone else—but she had heard of his arrest and written to him, asking if there was anything she could do for him.
Bart’s first letter to Shelly sounded “like the old Bart,” Shelly recalled. He was hopeful that she might be a character witness for him when he went to trial. Remembering the gentle “boy” she’d known when he was nineteen, she felt sorry for him, and wrote back, telling him that she would consider being a defense witness.
But she was shocked by the acid tone of his second letter, a letter filled with vituperative and cruel criticism of his own son, Dalton. He was a grown man complaining about a little boy. She realized that Bart Corbin was no longer the person she remembered. She wondered if he ever had been. She didn’t write to him again.
WITH THE LATEST TRIAL DATE coming up in April, there were motions to rule on. The most serious was undoubtedly the question of whether the startling similarities between Dolly’s and Jenn’s murders would be allowed in both trials. If they were, it would be a coup for the prosecution. And if they were not, jurors in Dolly’s trial would not hear about Jenn’s death fourteen years later. Conversely, Jenn’s jurors wouldn’t know about Dolly. Legally, incorporating evidence from two different homicides in one trial would be allowed only as “similar transactions.”
Since the Gwinnett County trial was going first, it was now up to Judge Michael Clark to rule on the defense motions.
On Friday, February 17, 2006, Clark had a less compelling motion to deal with. It was silly enough that even the defendant didn’t seem too concerned. Surprisingly, Bart appeared less drawn, and he wasn’t as thin and gloomy as he sat at the defense table. Now, he had a slight tan, and he had actually gained a little weight. It was obvious that he was chewing gum, an insult to the Court, and he turned to wink at his mother, his brothers, and Brad’s wife, Edwina, who were in the courtroom. He ignored Jenn’s and Dolly’s families, however, his eyes seeming to sweep deliberately in another direction, focusing in the distance. It was almost as if he had never known them. He had only met Carlton and Barbara Hearn once, but he had been a beloved member of Jenn’s extended family for almost a decade.
Judge Clark denied the defense request to delay the trials for fourteen years. He was not amused by this pretrial motion. Even Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe would admit they had initiated the “fourteen-year delay” as a way to draw attention to the case.
Clark responded in kind, offering the defense a deal. If they would agree to a state motion that Corbin waive his right to bond and agree to stay in jail for the next fourteen years, Clark would stipulate to postponing the trials for a similar period.
Clearly, the defendant had no intention of doing that, and Clark moved ahead, setting the next pretrial hearing for March 24, 2006.
Bobby Corbin spoke to the press, saying that he wondered if Porter “really had a case. All I hear is ‘similar transaction.’ That’s crazy.’”
He told reporters that Danny Porter’s case consisted of only “smoke and mirrors,” and that there was no real evidence implicating his brother.
Judge Clark’s decision on allowing evidence from the Dolly Hearn case into the Jenn Barber case could give the prosecution a huge advantage. Although the attorneys from both sides had waited to see if Clark would rule on that, he hadn’t addressed similar transactions in this February hearing.
Michael Clark, with the help of his assistant, attorney Greg Lundy, pored over case law and other cases where the question had been raised. It was understandable that the defense attorneys wanted the “similar transactions” in Jenn’s and Dolly’s cases thrown out.
DANNY PORTER was an easy “boss,” and he trusted his staff to work unsupervised at those things they did best. While he had trouble sending an email and had very little knowledge of computers, he counted on Chuck Ross and Russ Halcome for such technical expertise. And he had Jack Burnette and other investigators working on other trial preparations. Burnette had assigned Investigator Bob Slezak to work with Scott Peebles in arranging to bring witnesses from Augusta, while Russ Halcome and Investigator Mike Pearson were braiding any loose ends of missing evidence together into one seamless cord of physical exhibits.
The usually upbeat Porter called in his teams for a strategy meeting. He outlined the Jennifer Corbin prosecution as he and Ross saw it, and asked for suggestions. After a few minutes of silence, Danny Porter looked up to see his men either shaking their heads, unable to come up with a different approach, or worse, nodding and agreeing with him. And that was the last thing he wanted. Porter’s ego didn’t require burnishing. He wanted answers, and he smacked the table with the flat of his hand.
“Quit saying yes,” he shouted in his deep voice. “I’m not here for you to agree with me!”
“One of the few times I’ve ever seen him angry,” one investigator remarked. “He didn’t necessarily want to have all the answers. He wanted us to point out any weak spots. He sure didn’t want us to sit there and nod. He wanted our input—not ‘yes men.’ So we all started pitching our own theories. And it worked better.”
Chuck Ross, who had studied the photographs of Jenn Corbin’s bed, noted that a pillow on the door side of the bed had a deep indentation in the middle of it. “It looks to me,” Ross said, “as if the shooter knelt here on the pillow, as he shot her.”
Porter agreed. The sheet on that side of the bed was slightly untucked, as it would have been after someone knelt on the bed. From the timing of Jenn’s calls to Anita Hearn, they knew for sure that Jenn had been alive long after midnight. Marcus Head’s report said that Anita estimated their last call was between 1:20 and 1:30 A.M. Bart had placed the cell phone call that emanated from the closest tower to his house at 1:58 A.M.
Anita Hearn had said that during one of Jenn’s phone calls late that night, she had admitted for the first time that she feared Bart might murder her. She had been uncharacteristically pessimistic when she said she hoped to meet Anita some day. “Maybe we will,” Jenn said, “if your plane doesn’t crash on the way here—or if my husband doesn’t kill me f
irst.”
“I think he walked in the house,” Chuck Ross said,
“straight back to the master bedroom, knelt on the bed, reached out and pushed her down, shot her, walked out of the house, and drove away.”
Perhaps. Or he might have stayed long enough to shout at Jenn before he shot her. Their boys hadn’t heard anything, but they’d been sleeping soundly upstairs.
No. More likely, Bart Corbin had determined beforehand what he was going to do, carefully planning how he would kill Jenn and to have an alibi already in place for that night.
The prosecution team had the cell phone connections, and they felt they were close to getting a point-to-point tracking on the gun that killed her. Out of all the vital elements in their case, this one was still elusive. They needed to know where that gun had come from, and they needed to link it absolutely, categorically, irrevocably, to Dr. Barton Corbin.
They still weren’t able to do that. But the prosecution, nevertheless, got a boost on March 24, 2006, when Judge Michael Clark announced that he was going to allow the similar transaction information into the upcoming trial for Jenn Corbin’s murder. Jenn’s jury would hear about Dolly’s death.
He also said he hoped to avoid postponing the newest trial date, April 17. Finally, it looked as if the trial would be a “go” after all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
FALL 2005–SUMMER 2006
THE RICHMOND COUNTY district attorney’s team knew where the gun that killed Dolly came from. Her father had given it to her. But the Gwinnett County prosecutors didn’t have the full history of the .38-caliber revolver that killed Jenn. They didn’t know the origin of the gun found in her bed. Her killer had placed it in a position which he mistakenly believed would indicate she had held that weapon. There had been no fingerprints on this gun; either they were wiped off or the killer wore latex gloves.
Where had that old gun come from? None of the people that the detectives had interviewed remembered seeing a .38-caliber revolver in Bart Corbin’s possession, nor had any of his more recent acquaintances ever heard him talk about guns. He had once owned a shotgun, and that was missing from his closet. After he ran over Jenn’s foot, she had told the police dispatcher that she was concerned about the missing weapon. Bart’s permit to have a gun had expired, and he’d never bothered to renew it. A shotgun had also been stolen from the Barber home. But there seemed to be no connection between either missing shotgun and Jenn’s murder.
The .38 was a mystery gun, but it didn’t have to stay that way, even though efforts to trace it had been so far tantalizingly unsuccessful. But time was running out, and they were a few months away from trial.
In a sense, guns are like people. They don’t come with a birth certificate, but a gun has a record of when and where it was manufactured, the date it left the factory, and its “life” through the years. Whenever a gun changes hands, it is a legal requirement that those exchanges be noted in police records. Of course, that doesn’t always happen. Criminals file serial numbers off guns because they don’t want their weapons traced, and many guns are transferred privately and secretly; some are simply stolen. Law enforcement personnel attempt to note the peregrinations of every weapon they come across, although that isn’t always possible.
If Danny Porter and Chuck Ross could somehow link that old .38 revolver to Bart Corbin, it would strengthen their case tremendously.
When Jack Burnette, Eddie Ballew, Kevin Vincent, and Russ Halcome served a search warrant on the Corbins’ residence on Bogan Gates Drive in Buford, they had looked for any record that might show where the .38 had come from—and found nothing.
But they had winnowed down the possibilities to one likely source. Jenn’s family had mentioned a man named Richard Wilson, Bart’s good friend for many years. Wilson lived in Troy, Alabama. Neither Richard nor his wife, Janice, had come to Jenn’s memorial service, and that seemed strange, since everyone said that Jenn had gone out of her way to entertain them, and welcome them to the Corbins’ Fourth of July celebrations every year.
Russ Halcome had first placed Bart at the scene of Jenn’s murder by tracking his cell phone, all perfectly legal, despite the defense lawyers’ motions to the contrary. Next, Halcome mapped the cell phone towers and the sectors where Corbin had used his phone on November 29, 2004. Once again, Halcome charted a path. This one showed that Bart—or his phone—had been on a long, apparently secret, round-trip to Birmingham and Troy, Alabama.
The DA’s investigators and Marcus Head already knew that Bart Corbin had been in Birmingham on Monday, November 29, because Jenn had found a parking stub for that date in his clothing, and mentioned it to at least two people. That trip to Birmingham from the Atlanta area was 148 miles. Now, they wondered if Bart had also driven down to see his old friend Richard on the same day. It wouldn’t have taken him that long to drive another 140 miles south to Troy. If he drove the hypotenuse of this “triangle,” on his return, the direct route from Troy back to his clinic in Hamilton Mill was approximately 193 miles.
No one had seen Bart on that Monday, so he could have taken a side trip to Troy and been home in the evening, having covered something under 500 miles in one long day.
But why would Bart have gone to Troy? Was Richard Wilson such a close friend that Bart had driven all that distance to gain some comfort or wisdom from him? Or was there a dark reason for his trip? The detectives suspected that Wilson might have provided Bart with the .38 that he used to shoot his wife five days later.
Within a week of Jenn Corbin’s murder, Kevin Vincent and Gwinnett County Police Detective Eddie Restrepo left to drive to Troy, Alabama. Leaving Lawrenceville at 6 A.M., Vincent and Restrepo arrived at Wilson’s home at 9:15. His home served as his business, Troy Small Motors, which was basically small engine repair, and some selling and trading of items like lawnmowers, tools, and anything with a motor that is of use around a home or farm. The shop had a brick façade, two bays to hold larger vehicles, and was plastered with signs reading “Stihl,” “Dixon,” and “Dixie.” There were some all-terrain vehicles parked outside.
Janice Wilson said her husband wasn’t home, but should be shortly. Wilson drove into his yard ten minutes later and invited them to come into his kitchen to talk.
“Do you know why we’re here?” the Gwinnett County investigators asked.
“I have a pretty good idea.”
Wilson explained immediately that no matter what he told them, he was sure to upset “one side of the family or the other.” He was grateful to Gene Corbin, who had put him to work right out of college, and he didn’t want to offend him. He had known Bart’s father for about fifteen years, but he said he’d only known Bart since about 1992. Janice Wilson chimed in to say they usually took a yearly trip up to Lake Lanier for the Fourth of July, although they hadn’t been able to make the trip this year.
“The last time I saw Bart and Jenn, and their kids,” Richard recalled, “was this year—in August—when Janice threw a surprise birthday party for me here in Alabama.”
The Wilsons said Jenn Corbin had become very ill during that visit. The Corbin family had to leave early on Sunday morning after Jenn threw up all night. Richard said the last time he had spoken with Bart before Jenn’s death was sometime around Thanksgiving. Bart had told him then that he was getting a divorce because Jenn was having an affair with someone on the Internet.
“He said she had a second cell phone that she didn’t tell him about, and she only used it to call her ‘lover.’”
Wilson was sure that the next time he spoke to Bart was on December 5 when Bart called and told him that he couldn’t talk on his cell phone—but he would call him back. Bart did call back about 8:30 P.M. and asked him if he had heard what happened. Richard Wilson told him he hadn’t heard anything, and it was then that Bart had told him that Jenn was dead, and the police were “all over him” for it.
Their conversation had been very awkward. “What do you say,” Richard asked, “when you hear that?”
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Janice and Richard said they had gone directly to the Internet and looked up newspaper websites in Atlanta. After reading the coverage of Jenn’s death, they had come to the conclusion that the media had already convicted Bart. Janice pointed out that they also felt that Dalton could not have said all that he said about his father’s guilt—not unless someone had coached him. “Absolutely no way!”
The Wilsons obviously didn’t care for Heather Tierney and said they were concerned that she had the children, but, when pressed, they could give no reason for their feelings about her.
“Do you know of any guns that Bart owned?” Kevin Vincent asked.
“All I know about was a Ruger Red Label shotgun, and that was it.”
“You never gave any member of the Corbin family a gun?”
“No.”
“We do know that the gun that was used to kill Jenn Corbin was purchased someplace in Alabama—as far as we can track it.”
Wilson said he knew nothing about that. And he denied having a visit from Bart on November 29.
The Georgia detectives asked Richard Wilson if he would accept a subpoena to appear before the grand jury in Gwinnett County. He shook his head, saying he knew they could not make him come to Georgia because he didn’t live in that state. “I won’t be there,” he said flatly. “I’m not going to appear before any grand jury.”
He was right. At that point, they could not force him. They would have to have evidence connecting Wilson to the death gun before they could extradite him. While it was against federal law to give or sell a gun to someone in another state who then used it in a crime, they could not prove yet that Wilson was “a party to a crime.”
They were a long way from being finished with Richard Wilson, although they could not have realized the long and tortuous road they would have to travel.