by Ann Rule
There was pain on every side; a family watching someone they love on trial for murder suffers anguish, too. Connie Corbin had done her best to raise her three boys without the presence of their father, and she had been so proud of Bart, her son, the dentist.
IT WAS LABOR DAY, 2006, and jury selection for Bart Corbin’s trial in Gwinnett County was only days away. David Wolfe and Bruce Harvey were still lobbying for a change of venue, which is a standard defense motion in almost every murder trial with any pretrial publicity. They announced that the voir-dire process (where attorneys question potential jurors directly) would probably reveal how many people in Gwinnett County had already formed opinions about Bart Corbin’s guilt, as a result of what the lawyers considered massive publicity that would make it impossible for their client to get a fair trial.
While Judge Clark had ruled earlier against moving the trial, he agreed to consider hearing their renewed arguments if it should begin to appear that picking an unprejudiced jury in Gwinnett County was unlikely.
Although they were continually making motions, Harvey and Wolfe were actually only patching up every possible crevice in their case. In truth, they felt confident. No one had heard the gunshot when Jenn Corbin was killed, and her exact time of death—measurable by several factors such as the temperature in her house that night—might possibly, in the defense team’s opinion, have been as late as six in the morning. They would use that to lessen the impact of Bart’s cell phone call at 1:58 A.M. hitting on the tower so close to Bogan Gates Drive.
They could say the cross-hatched gun butt pattern wouldn’t hold fingerprints.
They also believed they could tear apart the similarities between Jenn’s and Dolly’s cases. They might have been whistling in the dark, but in front of reporters they scoffed at the idea, insisting that the two cases weren’t all that much alike.
And, of course, they would take Jenn’s sad little online romance and shape it to blend into their theory that she probably had been suicidal. They would portray Jenn as a distraught woman, who believed that Bart could successfully prove in a custody hearing that she was a bad mother and a wanton woman. Wouldn’t suicidal thoughts be expected in a woman who had lost a “lover” who never existed, and was soon to lose her home and her children?
In the hands of brilliant defense attorneys, a case that was heavily circumstantial and with physical evidence that might confuse a lay jury was certainly no slam-dunk for the prosecution.
THERE WOULD BE TWO PHASES in jury selection. The Court would hear first from people who felt it would be a great hardship on them to serve—those with small children to care for, or health issues, or those whose jobs assured the public good. Those who did not speak English would certainly be excused. Gwinnett remained a small-town county in many ways. There were bound to be some who actually knew the principals or the attorneys, or felt they might be called as witnesses.
Forty people from the first pool asked to be excused. By September 12, only five people who had been questioned were deemed neutral enough to go on the second list. There were forty-two more possibles in the second pool. Both the prosecution and defense teams would have nine peremptory challenges to excuse jurors without cause. And they would undoubtedly lose a few more for cause.
Nevertheless, Danny Porter said he expected to begin opening statements on September 25.
It was true that the charges against Dr. Barton Corbin had garnered widespread publicity, but perhaps it wasn’t so pervasive that it would be difficult to select a jury. Heather Tierney’s website in memory of her sister now had almost 400,000 “hits.” Some of those, however, were multiple drop-ins by the same readers, and posts had come in from all over the world. Court TV, Greta Van Susteren, Nancy Grace, Inside Edition, and People magazine were all interested in covering the trial. Dateline NBC and 48 Hours were preparing documentaries of the Corbins’ story.
As the trial date neared, Bart Corbin was anxious to present his side of the story, convinced that any jury they picked would believe him if he testified. Always before, he had referred questions to his attorneys and he remained a somewhat mysterious figure, his image caught briefly on television or newspaper cameras as he was led in and out of various court proceedings or back to jail. To those who didn’t know him, he was an enigma. But those who did know him were sure his arrogance would not allow him to plea-bargain to lesser charges. Surely he would demand to get on the witness stand and explain his innocence.
The consensus among most Georgians seemed to be that the lanky dentist was guilty, but survivors of the two dead women still worried about the possibility of an acquittal. Narda Barber kept going back to the what-ifs of a trial. The tenth anniversary of Jenn and Bart’s wedding had passed on September 1, but no one seemed to remember it or the joy and hopes Jenn had then. Her mother had been stunned to learn that Bart had been able to walk away from Dolly’s death and go on with his life, brushing Dolly’s memory off his shoulders as he would a shred of cobweb.
Would the same thing happen with Jenn’s death?
This wasn’t a television drama; this was real life. And the likelihood of some decisive evidence being discovered at the last minute was slim.
CHUCK ROSS AND INVESTIGATOR BOB SLEZAK were absent from the courtroom activity on September 6. They had a date in Superior Court in Troy, Alabama. Ross had drafted a material witness order that he planned to present to a judge in that city. Court in Troy started at nine, and Ross and Slezak rolled out of Gwinnett County at 5 A.M., even before the sun began to lighten the sky.
Richard Wilson didn’t know what a “material witness” was, and he had consistently refused to leave his hometown. But now, he would have to. Ross’s testimony convinced the Alabama judge to issue the material witness order, a ruling that was an unpleasant surprise for Bart Corbin’s good friend.
What Porter and Ross would ask Wilson once they had him on the witness stand was still up in the air. Mike Pearson had never given up on tracking the revolver that had killed Jenn Corbin. He was just stubborn enough to keep trying. But he’d run out of options.
Pearson was about to get an idea from the investigator who shared his office, one of the many cubicles opening off the long hallways of the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office.
Jeff Lamphier might have been the only investigator in Danny Porter’s office who didn’t have a smidgen of a Southern accent. Lamphier was from New York State, and he was a natural. He didn’t have a college degree. He believed—and rightly so—that for him the best training came on the job. Lamphier signed on first with the DeKalb County, Georgia, DA’s office. After eighteen months, he moved to Gwinnett County. There they quickly began to call him “The Smartest Man in the World.”
Mike Pearson described himself as a “blabber,” who was always talking, while Lamphier spoke only when he had something important to say.
“Jeff was over there typing,” Pearson remembered.
“And we’re sitting back to back. I’m saying, ‘I know that guy in Alabama knows something, but I can’t prove the. 38 came from there. Everything points to Alabama.’”
As Pearson vented his frustration about his unsuccessful search to link Bart Corbin to the death gun, Lamphier whirled around from his computer, and asked quietly, “Have you tried this?”
“Tried what?”
“An off-line search.”
“No.”
“Has anyone else?”
Mike Pearson had done any number of traces—through the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), NCIC (National Crime Information Center), the GCIC (Georgia Crime Information Center), with no luck.
Now, Lamphier reminded him, “You have the gun, you have the serial number, and an off-line search goes back ten years. Try it.”
He handed Pearson the name of a young woman at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and said, “I hope it helps.”
They were so close to trial. They needed this badly.
Most legitimate gun buyers check wi
th police departments to see if secondhand weapons have ever been stolen or used in a crime. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Georgia Crime Information Center can get access to those inquiries about guns by auditing the NCIC records over the preceding ten years.
“If any police department or police agency in the United States has ever checked a gun, it will show up on an off-line search,” Pearson explained. “It will show the day, the time, the place, and the officer who asked for the information—usually by radioing the dispatch operator to see what’s on record for a particular gun.”
Mike Pearson gave the woman at the GBI the information on the make, model, and serial number of the .38 that killed Jenn Corbin.
“By lunchtime, she called me back. She said that she had been able to go back ten years, and she hoped it helped. She had found six entries off-line on this gun.”
The first four weren’t useful. They were the inquiries that the Gwinnett County DA’s office itself had submitted.
But there were two more.
Pearson ran his finger down the page. There was a query in 1996 radioed in to the Montgomery, Alabama, Sheriff’s Office at 2 A.M. That was ten years back, but at least it placed the mystery gun in Alabama.
“But the next one was from the Troy, Alabama Police Department—September 2002. Bingo! I thought I’d fall out of my chair!” Pearson recalled. “I couldn’t even talk at first because I was so excited. I finally yelled at Jack, “This gun’s been run in Troy!’”
Pearson and Jack Burnette made a phone call to the Troy Police Department and learned that the officer who asked for information on the .38 in 2002 had been a captain in their department, since retired. Mike Pearson called him and asked for details about the gun. The retired officer did his best to remember the circumstances on that morning in September, four years earlier. But the memory evaded him; he’d run so many guns off-line. It could have been during a traffic stop, but it might just as well have been for somebody who simply hailed him over.
Pearson asked about the 911 tapes in the Troy Police Department, knowing it was a long shot. It would take a massive search to find a tape four years back, and there was always the chance that its contents had been erased and taped over with more recent calls.
Jack Burnette and Mike Pearson tried the other—more remote—possibility: contacting the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office about the 1996 inquiry in their jurisdiction. The request to have the .38 checked out had been a full decade earlier. At 2 A.M., it had to be a traffic stop.
They were a year too late. Montgomery had had gone computerized in 1997—not 1996. The operator told Pearson he would have to go through files stored in the attic.
For Mike Pearson, it was a replay of an old, bad dream. He wasn’t surprised when no records were found in Montgomery. That was the way his luck had been running in this case.
AFTER THE MATERIAL WITNESS ORDER naming Richard Wilson was issued, he had no choice but to appear in court in Troy. And the news appeared in the local newspaper that he had been ordered to testify in Bart Corbin’s trial.
After reading that, the chief of police in Troy, Anthony Everage, called his detectives in and asked them, “Are we helping these guys in Georgia as much as we can?”
Everage was a tall, good-looking man, and, incidentally, another squirrel hunter. “But we’d tried that avenue already,” Pearson said with a grin, “and it didn’t work.”
But now, Anthony Everage believed more could be done by his department, and decided to step in to help nudge Richard Wilson toward a witness chair in Gwinnett County, Georgia. He called Jack Burnette, and said, “I know Wilson. I’ve known him for ten years. I’ll help if I can.”
Everage’s most important offer came next. He said that his department’s 911 system had gone digital—and that he would have it searched for a call-in from the now-retired captain.
And, finally, something solid popped up in the Troy Police Department’s 911 system. Almost as if he still couldn’t believe their luck, Mike Pearson said, “The chief pulled out a twenty-second conversation where the Troy captain was asking for information on a gun with the same serial number that we’d all memorized: 397676. Best of all, they had it on tape!”
It was a twenty-second blip on a long-ago tape that could very well change the whole outcome of the Corbin trials.
Everage called Burnette and let him know what he had found. He said, “I’ve got the tape. Do you mind if I go talk to Wilson?”
After so long and so much disappointment, it seemed almost miraculous that things were suddenly moving so fast. Burnette looked at Pearson and asked, “What can it hurt if the chief goes to see Wilson?”
The two Gwinnett County investigators waited tensely to hear back from Anthony Everage. When the phone rang, they both jumped.
The Troy chief of police filled them in on what had happened, quoting the conversation he’d had with Richard Wilson.
Everage said he’d driven up to Wilson’s small motor repair shop, and Wilson had been perfectly willing to walk out to sit in his police car, something he had always refused to do with the Georgia investigators. But he knew Everage, and he felt comfortable with him.
“He said to me,” Everage told Burnette, “‘I have a feeling you’re not here about lawnmowers.’
“‘You’re right,’” I said. “‘I’m here to talk about you doing the right thing.’”
At that point, Everage said he’d popped the tape of the 911 call made four years earlier into his dashboard, and Wilson listened intently to the crackling voices, as the captain asked for information on the gun.
“Who do you think he was running that gun for?” Everage had asked.
“Probably me.” Richard Wilson’s shoulders had slumped at that point.
“Richard,” Everage had said firmly, “you’re gonna go to court, and those people over there in Georgia are really good. You’re gonna end up telling a lie on the stand, and you won’t be coming back to Alabama, and I’m gonna have to find someone else to fix my lawnmower.”
After almost two years of protecting Bart Corbin, Richard Wilson had run out of ways to avoid the truth. He told the Troy Chief that he had, indeed, given Bart the gun. And, yes, he had done it on November 29, four days before Jenn was shot.
“How do you want me to handle it?” Everage asked Burnette. “Do you want to come on down and ask him more details? No matter what he says, I just heard it, so I guess I’m on your witness list now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
SEPTEMBER 2006
IT WAS TUESDAY MORNING, September 12, and in Lawrenceville, Georgia, jury selection had moved into a kind of rhythm. They were beginning to make progress. Narda Barber was sitting in the back row beside Jennifer Rupured, Jenn’s fellow teacher at Sugar Hill Methodist, when she became aware of someone walking toward the prosecution table as Danny Porter and Chuck Ross interviewed prospective jurors. Porter turned slightly and saw Jack Burnette approaching. These two old friends had worked so many cases together that they knew how each other’s minds worked. There was no way that Burnette would interrupt a court session if he didn’t have something really important to impart.
Burnette handed Porter a folded slip of paper, and the DA glanced at it. Narda and Jennifer saw his shoulders straighten. It wasn’t a broad gesture, but it indicated a bit of surprise.
“The note from Burnette read, ‘Come out of the courtroom, NOW! Wilson copped to the gun!” There were five lines slashed under the “NOW.”
It took a lot of acting skill for Porter to maintain a casual attitude, but he managed it as he asked Judge Clark’s permission to step out of the courtroom for a moment. Burnette and Mike Pearson were practically bouncing off the ceiling with their amazing news. They told Porter and Ross that Richard Wilson had finally admitted to giving the old .38 to Bart Corbin. Someone had to get down to Troy and talk to him further, and arrange to bring him up to Georgia as a prosecution witness.
Back in the courtroom, Porter asked Judge Clark f
or a sidebar session and the four attorneys—prosecution and defense—moved up to the bench where they held a whispered conversation.
Court-watchers fidgeted, straining to hear what was being said. Everyone tried to guess what was in the note that might have made Porter ask to approach the bench, but neither the judge’s nor the attorneys’ faces betrayed what they were thinking.
The sidebar seemed normal enough; there had been others. And Narda didn’t sense that anything had changed. Judge Clark remarked that it was almost time for lunch, and dismissed the jury pool and gallery a few minutes early. Narda and Jennifer Rupured headed downstairs to the cafeteria for lunch.
But there had been rumblings in the courtroom, and those who knew the prosecutors and defense attorneys felt an almost palpable electricity, despite the effort they and Judge Clark made to appear blasé.
When Narda rode up the escalator after lunch, she encountered Danny Porter in the hallway. They locked eyes, and she questioned him silently. Now, she was sure that something had happened. The DA and his staff had been unfailingly responsive and considerate of her family—of all victims’ families. But she sensed that at the moment Danny Porter didn’t want to talk to her.
“I can’t tell you,” Porter finally said, reading her mind. “I just can’t tell you anything.”
“Is it good or is it bad?” Narda asked quietly.
“It’s good,” he said. And with that he walked away, leaving her with a slight surge of optimism. She wondered if he had come up with some piece of evidence or a witness for the prosecution. He seemed both uncommonly cheerful and tense.
Surprisingly, the Tuesday afternoon session began routinely, as if nothing had changed. The attorneys questioned more potential jurors. But not for long. Judge Clark announced crisply that he had a sudden scheduling conflict, and that he needed to accommodate that. He dismissed the jury pool until Thursday morning.
A little bemused, Narda headed home. She had come to know Danny Porter well enough over the past twenty-two months to suspect that something was up, something of earthshaking proportions for the trial of her son-in-law. When Porter called her on Wednesday, there was no question about it. There was obviously some kind of detour along the path toward trial.