by Ann Rule
Early on, the Hearns established a Memorial Scholarship Award—the “Dolly Award”—for dental students at the Medical College of Georgia. It isn’t given to students with great scholastic ability or those recommended by faculty. Each Spring, approximately fifty members of the current junior class pick classmates who embody characteristics that reflect who Dolly was. The criteria was “P.E.P. for “Professionalism, Empathy, Perseverance.”
And that was Dolly Hearn. Dozens of students have already benefited from the generosity of those who loved her. But, perhaps the greatest balm to her survivors came true on January 12, 2007. In May, 1990, a week before she died, Dolly was thrilled to announce that she would be “Dr. Dolly” in only a year. Members of her graduating class tried their best in 1991 to see that she received her dental degree posthumously along with them, but it didn’t happen. They could only put her photo in their class composite picture, and present her parents with the hood she would have worn.
After Bart Corbin confessed to her murder, her once-fellow dental students—now in their forties—persuaded faculty members to join them in lobbying for Dolly’s dental degree.
In June, Dolly Hearn will finally receive her degree in dentistry when the Class of 2007 graduates. “The degree really helps confirm that she did have the utmost respect of her mentors and her peers,” MCG Dean Connie Drisko said. “And I think it speaks highly of her character and the wonderful memories people have of her.” We have always called her ‘Dr. Dolly,” Barbara Hearn said, “And now she will be. We’re very happy.”
Dalton and Dillon Corbin, now nine and seven, live, of course, with Heather and Doug Tierney in a large house filled with cousins, sunshine, paintings, music, and dogs and cats. They often call Heather “Aunt Mommy,” and she and Doug are always there for their four children. When they take a rare, short vacation, Narda and Max or their Aunt Rajel take care of Dalton, Dillon, Max, and Sylvia. Somehow, Heather manages to juggle the needs of a preschooler, three elementary students, and a husband, and she coaches Dillon’s basketball team as well. Doug is unfailingly patient, and didn’t hesitate for a moment about taking responsibility for raising two more children.
Heather still breaks into tears when she speaks of Jenn, and she probably always will. There will be numerous challenges for Jenn’s sons as they grow older, and the Tierneys will see that they have the counseling they need. Heather understands why Bart’s mother and sister-in-law, Suzanne, sometimes come to watch Dalton and Dillon at their ball games, and she hopes that the boys’ relatives on their father’s side can be a part of their lives.
The Corbins have asked for huge time chunks of visitation, more than they had when Jenn was alive and she and Bart were together. For now, that isn’t workable, but Jenn’s relatives don’t want her boys to be totally cut off from half of their heritage. Dalton and Dillon love their cousins—Bobby’s children—and Jenn always made sure that they celebrated Connie’s birthday, and other important dates in Bart’s family.
Dalton is extremely bright, and still carries within him a sense that he failed to protect his mother, along with a continuing fear of his father. As Bart approached two trials, Heather attempted, with the advice of a counselor, to answer Dalton’s questions. “I told him that his father was going to trial for Dolly Hearn’s murder, and that he might also be on trial for killing his Mommy.”
Dalton asked her how long Bart would be in prison, and she told him that it might be a very long time. Even though she knew how frightened Dalton was, she wasn’t prepared for his next question.
“Don’t they have an electric chair anymore?” Dalton asked.
Dillon is a far less intense child, younger when his mother was shot, and his memories are blurry and a little confabulated. Neither of the boys has asked to visit their father.
The Tierneys’ house is seldom silent, full of shouts, laughter, and typical sibling arguments among the younger family members, along with barks and meows from Fuey, Sophie, and Zippedy Doo Dog: “Zippo,” the dog who came with Dalton and Dillon. Someone is always hungry—dogs, cats, and humans.
Heather has a number of cartons that had once been in Jenn’s house in Buford. She finally came to a place where she was able to open a box from Jenn’s pantry. It held her sister’s spices, Lipton soup packets, rice, and a jar of peanut butter. When Heather opened the peanut butter, she saw three little swipes had been taken from the jar, and felt one of the thousand pangs that catch her unawares.
“All I could think of was that Jenn didn’t know this was her last jar of peanut butter.”
Heather put a label on it that said, “Do not use. Do not throw out.” Someday, she will have to deal with it, but not at that moment.
The Jennifer Barber-Corbin Memorial Playground at Sugar Hill Methodist Church was dedicated On November 13, 2005. Both Narda and Heather have their own memorial gardens in their yards, where they grow Jenn’s favorite flowers.
Within a week of Bart’s guilty pleas, Narda opened her mail and was stunned to find a bill from the funeral director Bart had retained in 2004. This was the mortuary where she had been told she had no say over whether her daughter would be buried or cremated. All the arrangements had been Bart’s prerogative. Narda and Max, understandably, protested. Narda had begged the director not to go ahead with the cremation, but she could not stop it; Bart had made that decision.
This bill for thousands of dollars could not possibly be their responsibility, but it seemed that the funeral parlor now believed that Bart wouldn’t—or couldn’t—pay, and they had turned to the Barbers.
It was yet another blow for Jenn’s family. They contacted an Atlanta television reporter who had always treated them fairly and asked to go on the air to tell about this indignity.
The bill was withdrawn.
Just before Thanksgiving 2006, Brad Corbin left a letter for the Barbers and Tierneys at their church. Jenn’s family wanted to get through Christmas before they read it and waited until January 3, 2007, to pick it up. It was part apology, part condolence, but it was full of Brad’s continued insistence that he hadn’t believed that his “twin” was guilty. Rather than using their given names, Brad referred to Bobby as his “younger brother” and Bart as his “twin.”
He assured Jenn’s family that he had never met Dolly Hearn, and had never known how she died. His letter was strangely flat; it was more a plea for them to understand how rough Bart’s crime had been on him, and his family. He wanted to mend fences.
Brad stressed that the Corbin family had absolutely trusted Bart, although they had never asked him outright for the truth. They had all been shocked, Brad said, when they met with Bart at 9:30 P.M. on September 14, 2006. Only then had he confessed the murders and told them that the murder gun had been traced to him.
In his letter, Brad Corbin referred to Jenn as “his sister,” and said he missed her. Certainly, the Corbin family has suffered losses, too, although they apparently used denial to deal with them as long as they could. Whether there will ever be any healing of the rifts that remain after Jenn’s death and Bart’s imprisonment, no one knows.
For months after his arrest, Dara Prentice faithfully picked up Bart Corbin’s mail from his clinic address and either took it to him in jail or forwarded it to him. She remained ambivalent about his guilt or innocence, and, even after his guilty plea to both murders, she had a great deal of trouble believing it. She is still married, believing that her husband was unaware of any personal involvement she had with Bart. Ironically, Dara isn’t so different from Jenn—at least when it came to what matters the most to her—and that is that her two children won’t be hurt. Her goal is to see them through to adulthood, and to be as good a mother as she can be.
The last time Dara saw Bart was in March 2005. Although he wrote several letters to her from jail and prison, she hasn’t written back. Her regret, guilt, and stress over the final denouement of her affair with him may have been the cause of many illnesses she has suffered since Jenn’s death.
A reader asked me recently if I remember the homicide victims that I’ve written about in the past, or if I move on to future books and reach a point where I no longer think about them or their families. I do remember every victim I’ve “met,” even though I never knew them in life. After spending a year or two researching each book, meeting their families, talking to detectives and prosecutors and judges, I write the victims’ stories, including some of the most personal parts of their lives. It would be impossible for me to forget any of them.
I may have been as close to Jenn Barber Corbin and Dolly Hearn as I have been to any victim. That is partly because I have daughters who are close to their ages, and also because the investigations into their deaths were so thoroughly documented by law enforcement agencies. But I suspect the real reason is because their families have kept them within the circle of love, even though they are gone.
When I visited Narda and Max Barber’s split-level home in Lawrenceville, Narda led me downstairs to their guestroom. That evening, I had just come from Danny Porter’s office. Bart Corbin had already pleaded guilty and been sentenced, so journalists were allowed to read certain investigative files, and that afternoon I had looked at the crime scene photos. Although I don’t include body pictures in my books, it’s necessary for me to see them so I can be accurate when I describe a crime scene. And so I had studied the pictures in the Corbin files. It was obvious that neither Jenn nor Dolly had any warning that they were about to die.
I will never become inured to or blasé about homicidal tragedy, no matter how many books I write, and I was somewhat shaken by the crime scene investigators’ photographs.
As we walked into the guest room at the Barbers’ home, I instantly recognized the bed with its four posts with pineapple-like carvings. I had just seen pictures of it—the bed where Jenn had died. Her mother and I sat on the side of that bed as we talked. And then I became aware of a huge photo of Jenn on the wall; it was a lovely self-portrait, taken when she was years younger, and her long blonde hair spread out like a shining halo.
Beneath the portrait, a candle glowed atop a handsome, transparent container, and I realized that it held Jenn’s ashes, finally released to her family after two years. I felt the infinite sadness in the room—a place not in the least haunted, but somehow encompassing the monstrous loss of a precious life.
We drank Jenn’s favorite—mojitos—in her memory before dinner, and the soup served was one of the recipes she—the gourmet cook in their family—was known for: a thick and hearty squash soup. Although I would never meet Jenn, I now felt closer to her than ever.
Less than a week later, I was in Washington, Georgia, welcomed into the historic white house where Dolly Hearn had grown up. An almost life-sized portrait of her dominated the entry hall. The same photo is displayed at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. Dolly’s bedroom is little changed since the last time she left it, but it isn’t a memorial; the memory of Dolly is alive, a part of her family’s lives. Her nieces wear the small dresses with smocked bodices that she once wore. The old tree that Dolly posed in almost twenty years ago grows just outside the private entrance to her room.
Almost miraculously, Dolly’s cat Tabitha lived to be twenty-one years old. She was a comforting cat, albeit a little deaf and crotchety with arthritis, usually sleeping in a chair next to the fireplace in the parlor where Barbara Hearn and I talked. The old cat allowed me to pet her, and I couldn’t help thinking how amazing it was that she not only survived Bart’s kidnapping in 1989, but was more than a hundred years old in “cat years.” Tabitha died on March 6, 2007, leaving an empty place in the Hearn family home in Washington. When I heard that Tabitha had left this earth, I immediately thought how happy Dolly must have been to see her again.
We walked in the yard where Dolly and her brothers played under a pecan tree. That tree is no longer safe, but Dolly’s nieces and nephews play the same games on another side of the huge yard.
We looked at her father’s garden, and her mother’s magnolia tree, won at a garden club years ago, and now twenty feet tall. It was October. The Confederate Rose bush had just burst into bloom, and Barbara picked a rose for me. I pressed it between the pages of my notebook, and I kept it on my desk as I wrote this book at home. I’m not sure why—probably for the same reason that I carried home a baggie full of seeds from Jenn’s garden. They will soon be flowering in Seattle.
At the end of the afternoon, I followed Barbara Hearn’s car as she led me to the cemetery. We stood at the foot of Dolly’s grave. After Bart Corbin’s guilty pleas, both friends and strangers sent dozens of roses to the Hearns, and to this cemetery. Bart’s staff placed a red rose in every room of his clinic.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s headlines about Bart Corbin’s plea on September 15 had filled almost half of the front page. Barbara had that front page laminated and she had placed it on a wire stand at the head of Dolly’s grave. The headlines shouted “Guilty! Guilty!” twice—once for Jenn and once for Dolly. We saw that the display still stood there a month later, undisturbed by anyone who had driven or walked through the quiet graveyard. There were still a few faded red roses on Dolly’s grave, and one ceramic red rose that would never fade.
I have written scores of stories about young women who died much too prematurely, and I always have the thought of “If only…” If only their lives had played out differently. Both Dolly Hearn and Jenn Corbin were women who wanted other people to be happy, who worried that they might have hurt someone’s feelings, and when things began to spin out of control, they continued to believe that they could find a way to leave a violent, jealous, maniacally possessive man without a bitter ending.
And that became impossible. Knowing who they were, I’m sure they would be at peace to know that their tragedies may well warn other women for whom it is not yet too late.
Bart Corbin’s guilty pleas were both a triumph and a disappointment for the men and women who had worked overtime for two years to build a case against him and to prepare for trial. They had done that, but even so, the investigators and the prosecutors were left with an empty feeling. So was Judge Michael C. Clark. Clark had done his best not to have “Corbin tried on the Internet,” and to keep a lid on too much information leaking out before trial. For twenty months, everyone involved—literally scores of people on the prosecution side—had done their best to protect their case against Corbin. Every conceivable loophole had been sealed up, and they had all chosen their words carefully. They had planned the State’s cases—one in Lawrenceville in Gwinnett County, and the other in Augusta in Richmond County—with the utmost precision. Their witnesses were on deck, and the charts, tapes, forensic tests, cell phone records, all the audiovisual aids, were ready.
And suddenly, it was all over. Many of them felt like athletes who had trained, practiced, and visualized how they would compete in the Olympics or in a championship game—and then had the game called off for good. Even though they were professionals, and they knew that some trials never go to a jury, they had all been geared up to perform at their peak, and they were curious, too, about how the Corbin cases would play out in court.
But, above all, justice itself was the most important issue. And Dolly and Jenn had been avenged. Next to that, Porter and Craig wanted to save the dead women’s families from any more pain, and they had managed to do that, too. They were relieved for the Barbers, the Tierneys, and the Hearns, and both Danny Porter and Danny Craig and their staffs thought first of what would be best for the victims’ survivors.
Bart Corbin’s defense team had been ready to compete, and were very confident. But they had been shot down by things their client had failed to tell them, so their disappointment with the outcome was especially sharp.
It was finally over.
Several months after the sudden end to Corbin’s trial, Anita Hearn, the mystery woman who some believed had been the catalyst who—knowingly or unknowingly—set a disaster in motion finally came forward to speak on national
television. Anita’s hair was jet-black, long and straight, and her heavily made-up eyes appeared to be black, too. Her mien was almost gypsy-like. She was a small woman who looked to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, and she spoke in a flat, husky voice with virtually no affect, often laughing or smiling inappropriately. Seeing her, it was impossible to view her as the masculine, tender persona that “Christopher Hearn” had been to Jenn.
“At first, we were just pretending,” she said, as she attempted to explain away her false seduction of Jenn on the Internet. “We were playing. Things were getting intense. I said [wrote], ‘My name isn’t Chris—My name is Anita.’ Jenn logged off.”
But, later, Jenn had come back on, trying to understand what had happened. Anita insisted that she had grown to love Jenn, and made no apologies for her own actions. She said she was sure that Jenn would not have killed herself, and, speaking as if she were an expert about a woman she had never really known at all, Anita said, “She was stressed out—but not suicidal. I don’t think that’s a path Jennifer would have taken.”
And, of course, Jenn had not committed suicide. On the night she died, she was looking forward to a happier life, one that was free of Bart’s influence. Perhaps the part of Jenn’s story that many people find the most puzzling is that she forgave Anita Hearn for her cruel subterfuge, and even continued to correspond with her.
I believe that Jenn Barber Corbin was brainwashed, and that, had she ever met Anita Hearn in person, she would have quickly moved on.
But images deeply embedded in the human brain are not easily erased. And what Jenn was feeling was a phenomenon peculiar to the age of the Internet. A year after Jenn was murdered, television documentaries and talk shows began to feature segments about women who had fallen in love with men they met online.