Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (14 page)

Angela always spoke of Dolly’s bright smile and friendliness, remembering how she could walk into a room and light it up, and how friendly Dolly was to everyone.

They both loved the apartment with its two bedrooms and a bath upstairs, a kitchen, living room, and half-bath on the ground floor. There was a little fenced-in patio area off the kitchen that could be reached through sliding glass doors.

Dolly soon put her stamp on the apartment, although nothing she chose to furnish it with was very expensive. She had a plaid couch and a small television set in the living room, and twin bookcases made of thin veneer that she had assembled herself—mostly filled with textbooks. Her décor was sentimental: candles, some artificial roses, heart-shaped picture frames, sheaves of straw bound with red bows, family photos, cat images, and a scratching post for the cat she had adopted from the Humane Society: Tabitha.

It wasn’t long before Dolly Hearn was familiar to many of the students at MCG. She said “Hi!” to everyone, and her ebullience cheered people up. And, of course, Dolly was beautiful. Although she scarcely needed makeup to enhance her natural glamour, she was rarely without it. She applied it dramatically, framing her eyes with carefully smudged black liner, and brushing her thick lashes with several coasts of mascara. Her high cheekbones were always dusted with blush, and her full lips painted scarlet. On anyone but Dolly, it probably would have been too much. But somehow, on her, it worked.

Dr. Fred Rueggeberg, a professor at MCG, found her dynamic and vivacious, and said she brought excitement and life to a boring dental school.

Dolly’s landlord, Dennis Stanfield, who soon became a close friend, described her in a curious oxymoron: “Dolly was flamboyant in a very conservative way.”

Like everyone else, Stanfield felt she uplifted the spirits of people she met because she was so positive, and so vibrant.

As a dental student, Dolly took required courses with daunting titles like “Applied Head and Neck Anatomy,” “Dental Systemic Histology,” “Biochemistry,” and “Oral Diagnosis.”

But despite the grind of her studies, she always looked like a movie star. There was nothing vaguely conventional about Dolly, and her new friends both respected her and delighted in her company.

In between her heavy schedule of classes, Dolly relaxed by watching midday soap operas on her small television set. A lot of college students were doing that in the 1980s, sitting in dorm lounges and keeping track of the daily television Sturm und Drang during their lunch breaks. The actors always had astounding personal relationships, tragedies and near-tragedies, and erotic sexual problems. Dolly sometimes laughed and said she was addicted to her soap operas. She figured out where the characters got their names: “The writers pick them from nature,” she explained to her family. “See—‘Thorn,’ ‘Brook,’ and ‘Lake’?”

Her mother said that Dolly’s fascination with the soap operas soon got her whole family watching them, too.

Dolly was also a loyal fan of Steve Martin during the days when he and fellow comedian Dan Ackroyd were in their “wild and crazy guy” phase. She giggled out loud at Martin’s silly gags. Her delight in ridiculous fictional situations, pranks, and jokes was contagious. It was probably inevitable when she met Bart Corbin that she would find his quick wit captivating, even though his humor tended to be much darker and somewhat meaner than her own.

Still, she liked him a lot when she first met him. It was something more than the fact that he was handsome and funny, but his dead-on humor initially drew Dolly’s attention. She knew a lot of handsome men, and many of them would have been pleased to date her. But she chose Bart.

Some of her friends at that time felt that Bart was the love of her life. Others weren’t so sure. Both Shelly Mansfield, Bart’s former lover in college, and Dolly Hearn were lovely, and each had long dark hair and dark eyes. Both were confident young women. The small percentage of Bart’s acquaintances who knew both women must have suspected that he was replacing Shelly with Dolly. And they were concerned.

There is no indication that Dolly ever knew about Bart’s failed romance with Shelly. She believed she knew him very well and that they had few secrets from one another. But there were facets of Bart’s personality that he kept completely hidden from her—at least in the beginning.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

FALL 1988–Fall 1989

I
N
1982,
WHEN
B
ART
C
ORBIN
and Shelly Mansfield first shared a class at the University of Georgia in Athens, Jenni Barber was only twelve years old and in the seventh grade. When Dolly Hearn and Bart Corbin began dating in the fall of 1988, Jenn was still eight years away from meeting him. Jenn was in her senior year in Central Gwinnett High School, and Bart was infatuated with twenty-six-year-old Dolly Hearn.

Jenn Barber hadn’t been very lucky in love. She dated a boy named Ted all through the ninth and tenth grade, and then her friends told her he’d been cheating on her, and she broke up with him. Jenn continued to believe in love, but after that she was a little less trusting.

There was every chance that Bart and Jenn would never meet, but in time the smallest veering off changes whole lives—sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. If Shelly and Bart had gotten married after their long romance in Athens, Bart wouldn’t have become obsessed with Dolly Hearn, either. Once some lives intersect, however, there is no going back.

B
ART WAS ENTRANCED
with Dolly from the moment he met her. They began to date, and were soon seeing each other exclusively, something Bart insisted on. He rapidly became so besotted with Dolly that his friends were worrying about him. Fellow dental student Eric Rader, one of Bart’s closest friends, urged Bart to slow down. It was clear that Bart was becoming much too involved emotionally. Rader warned him that he might be headed for a broken heart.

Those who knew Bart Corbin best in dental school at MCG realized that the confidence he evinced was fragile. Combined with that vulnerability, they suspected that he may have promised himself he would never again allow a woman to walk away from him. He hadn’t dealt well with losing Shelly, and now he had plunged into a deep relationship with Dolly. No matter how cogent his friends’ arguments, Bart wouldn’t listen.

He thought he and Dolly went together perfectly. He could dress dramatically, too, and they sometimes chose to wear black outfits as they walked on campus. By now, he had his ears pierced and wore earrings. He was a chameleon, alternating from plump to cadaverous as he gained and lost weight.

Although Dolly was attracted to him both physically and emotionally at first, she wasn’t nearly as interested in a locked-in relationship as Bart was. It was hard enough for the dental students to combine their studies with a social life; their time was so filled with classes, projects, and studying. Maintaining a romance and an acceptable GPA at the same time was almost impossible. Bart at least had a solid year at dental school behind him, but Dolly was just beginning to build a firm foundation at MCG, and she was adamant that she could not have her study time interrupted. She wanted to become an oral surgeon, and that would require that she have top grades. She knew it was a long shot, and, if she had to, she would adapt to a less lofty goal. But she was going to give it a try.

One of Dolly’s closest friends on campus was Travis Hampton; they would become “office partners” at the dental school where each of them had a tiny cubicle where they kept their patient records, projects, and other items vital to their studies. Travis’s brother, Derrick, was a good friend of Bart Corbin’s, and Travis himself became one of Dolly’s closest confidants soon after she arrived at the school. Theirs was a purely platonic relationship; Travis was about to be married to someone else. He observed Dolly as she dated a number of men, but she didn’t appear to be in love with any of them—not until she met Bart Corbin.

Travis watched Dolly’s romance with Bart from its onset. It was his impression that Bart was the first man Dolly had been intimate with, and he believed that for more than a year Dolly considered Bart “her one true love,” although she still wasn’t ready to commit totally to any relationship. They seemed to be happy together, and Dolly once confided to Hampton that she had never felt about anyone the way she felt about Bart Corbin. As someone a year behind Bart in dental school, Travis admired Bart at first.

Of all of Dolly’s friends, the two who probably knew the most about her romance with Bart were Travis and her roommate, Angela Garnto.

Dolly didn’t take Bart home to meet her family for quite some time, perhaps sensing that he wasn’t going to go over with a bang in Washington, Georgia. She worried that he was too sarcastic, and not quite genteel enough, considering his profanity and his outspoken views on a lot of things. Still, she wanted her brothers and her parents to meet him, hoping that maybe she was wrong about how Bart would appear to her parents.

Barbara invited Bart to dinner, and it turned out to be a rather awkward evening. Barbara and Carlton sat in the small parlor that was just off the first-floor room that had become Dolly’s bedroom, and talked with Bart about his interests. Since their guest was well on his way to becoming a dentist, Carlton naturally brought up the subject, thinking it would be an area where he and Bart would have a lot in common.

“I can hardly wait to graduate,” Bart said with arrogance, “so I can stick it to people.”

He expected to get rich off his dental patients. He had not wavered from his undergraduate days in Athens. He was in it for the money. Dolly’s father and mother stared at him, wondering if they had heard him correctly.

Carlton Hearn was disturbed and “nauseated” to hear why Bart had chosen dentistry as his life’s work.

While Bart was expansive and clever in his conversation, Barbara and Carlton Hearn weren’t at all impressed with him. They found him somewhat crude and lacking the sensitivity necessary for someone about to go into the healing arts.

I
T WAS DIFFICULT
to say when things began to go wrong between Bart Corbin and Dolly Hearn. It wasn’t anything her parents said; they were smart enough to keep their opinions about him to themselves. Dolly was her own woman. She and Bart had dated exclusively—with short periods of breaking up—for almost two years. Although Dolly had mentioned getting married to Bart one day and having children, Travis Hampton noticed sometime in 1989 that she had begun to back away from Bart. She was still attracted to him, but their goals were dissimilar. Dolly wanted to help people, and Bart wanted to make money.

Dolly could be an unconscious flirt; she didn’t mean anything by it when she smiled or winked at a man. And she was so beautiful that people were naturally drawn to her. Bart resented that, and became even more controlling and sulked jealously.

Dolly began to feel trapped.

Shelly had never seen Bart angry, and their years together had been fairly serene. But Dolly and Bart’s relationship was often tumultuous, and sometimes they quarreled—mostly because he clung to her so tightly, smothering her as he tried to own her. And she struggled to get free. It wasn’t that he was ever physically violent with Dolly. Bart never struck her, but their arguments were verbally fierce.

Dolly and Bart broke up often, only to resume their relationship when he promised to give her more breathing space. But Bart inevitably slipped back into his old patterns. In mid-1989, they walked away from each other yet another time, only to reconcile in early fall. Bart Corbin was an accomplished actor who could put on a convincing mask. Even though Dolly had heard the same pleas from him before, he managed to persuade her that he had finally changed. He would place no strings on her, and he wouldn’t be jealous. She could have male friends and he would believe her when she said they were strictly platonic.

That didn’t last. By October, it finally seemed to be over between them. After much agonizing, Dolly found the courage to break up with Bart for good, and she did that knowing full well now that it wasn’t going to be a gentle parting. Part of her still hoped for a clean break, but she didn’t expect it to happen. Dolly’s and Bart’s friends were relieved when the couple agreed to go on with their lives without the huge upheaval everyone had expected.

But despite his calm mask, Bart Corbin was seething. Once again the woman in his life wanted her freedom. He had grown up believing that men were always in charge. More than ever, Bart saw himself as a man betrayed by love. He could not bear to see Dolly out with other men, even though she was dating only casually.

So when Bart met a girl named Sally Fox* on Halloween night, 1989, he asked her out, although in retrospect she would realize that he was dating her just to make Dolly jealous.

Dolly probably had some lingering feelings for Bart, even though she knew their relationship had no real future. When she encountered Bart and Sally at a party in late 1989, she was a little shaken. Dolly wore her favorite outfit that night—a black tuxedo jacket cut to fit her snugly, with a cummerbund. Sally noticed the brunette in the tux because she was very pretty and quite dramatic-looking, and because Sally saw Bart exchanging glances with her.

Bart didn’t introduce the two women, and Sally had no idea that Dolly was his ex-girlfriend.

Sally was intimate with Bart a few times, staying over at his house, but she soon caught on that Bart was only using her to attend dental school functions where they would be seen together, and he could be sure that word got back to Dolly. Sally realized that she was always the last-minute date. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all. She refused to go out with him again.

The days were growing shorter as the fall of 1989 progressed. Dolly concentrated on studying, and for a few weeks she had more peace of mind than she had known for two years. While she missed Bart—or, rather, missed the way she had felt about him in the beginning, and the hopes she had once held for their relationship—she was intensely relieved to be away from his dominance. She truly wished the best for Bart, and had encouraged him to talk to a counselor. He had said he would, but instead he began to call his friends in Augusta—a couple he had met at the Halloween party, and his fellow dental student friends Derrick Hampton, Eric Rader, Tony Gacita, and Vicky Martin. He phoned them at all hours of the day and night, frequently breaking into sobs when he talked about Dolly.