Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (15 page)

Dolly wasn’t truly frightened of Bart—not yet. But her demeanor changed subtly. She had trouble concentrating in class, and she startled easily. Dolly, however, was resolute that she would not allow herself to be stalked or terrorized by Bart. She believed she knew him, and that she could reason with him. As much as she knew they could never go back to those first good days, she wasn’t afraid.

A
ND THEN
, D
OLLY
’
S WORLD
changed radically. Even places where she had always felt safe—her apartment, the dental college, the campus—seemed dangerous. Dolly had always moved with a lilt in her step, her shoulders squared and her head up. As the holiday season approached in 1989, however, everyone who knew her found her to be either distracted or frightened of something. The concept of Dolly Hearn as a woman afraid was shocking; she wasn’t the type.

It had to be about Bart. He was the one person who could cast a shadow on her life. He had begun to behave irrationally, alternately crying and saying horrible things about Dolly.

Bart was stalking Dolly. Even when she didn’t see him, she sensed that he was always close by. Too late, she realized that she didn’t know him at all. Dolly still lived in her off-campus apartment with her roommate, Angela Garnto, but suddenly she was afraid to stay alone whenever Angela was away.

Angela had lived with Dolly for all of the “Bart years,” and she had seen him be charming and attentive as well as sulking and suspicious. Dolly was convinced that Bart was behind a series of disturbing incidents in November and December of 1989, although neither Dolly nor Angela actually saw Bart do anything, nor were there any other witnesses. Taken singly, they wouldn’t have seemed so alarming. But viewed in a pattern, they were ominous.

If anyone knew what mattered most to Dolly Hearn, it was Bart Corbin. He knew how much she loved Tabitha her cat. She had rescued Tabitha from the pound, and wherever Dolly went, Tabitha went, too—even to dental school. Tabitha was long-haired and fluffy, with tiger markings and a white nose, vest, and paws. Tabitha was an “inside cat”; Dolly worried that she might be hit by a car or come to some other harm if she got out. At least partly because of their concern for Tabitha, both Dolly and Angela were very careful to shut and lock their doors behind them.

On November 14, 1989, the two roommates were very worried when they came home one night and saw that the sliding glass doors were slightly open. Nothing was missing, but they couldn’t find Tabitha anywhere, and their hearts sank when they agreed that the door was open just enough for a cat to slide through. The weather had turned cold, and Dolly agonized that Tabitha couldn’t survive very long outside.

Dolly had a strong sense that Bart had been in her apartment several times when she wasn’t home. At first it was difficult to say what had been moved or disarranged, but it was discomfiting to realize how easily someone could get in, and now Tabitha had gotten out.

Dolly reported her suspicions to the Augusta police the next day. Then there was no question that someone had been prowling around. The patrol officers felt that someone had forcibly lifted one of the apartment’s heavy glass sliding doors off its track after opening the unlocked screen door.

She had no way to prove who the intruder was. Following the officers’ advice, Dolly inserted a thick wood dowel into the sliding door tracks so that they couldn’t be opened again.

When Bart heard that Tabitha was missing and saw how upset Dolly was, he was very considerate, and seemed to go out of his way to help her find her lost cat. Even though he and Dolly were estranged, he came over and helped her look for Tabitha in the neighborhood along Parrish Road. But they found no sign of Tabitha, and Dolly grew more and more frantic about her cat’s fate as days passed. And then it was a week.

After Tabitha had been gone for two weeks, Dolly almost gave up hope. Between the traffic that rumbled close to her apartment and the icy weather, Dolly began to fear that Tabitha was dead. And she was heartbroken.

Her life was growing increasingly stressful. On November 21, a maintenance man at the dental school found some of Dolly’s patient charts in a garbage can in the oral surgery section. Someone had taken them from her little lab office. She was meticulous about filing her charts, and protecting the privacy of the patients she treated in her lab. The next day, more of her records disappeared. She also discovered that a set of wax rings and casts of one patient’s teeth were gone. In this lab course, Dolly’s entire grade was determined by the dentures she would make from the casts. Only she and Travis Hampton had keys to the office space they shared, and she knew Travis wouldn’t have allowed a stranger in there, or lost track of his keys.

Thanksgiving fell on November 23 in 1989, and both troubled and terribly sad about the loss of Tabitha, Dolly drove home to Washington.

Travis Hampton didn’t know who might have taken Dolly’s charts and wax casts. But he had his suspicions about what had happened to Tabitha, and so did Bart’s friend, Eric Rader. It would be November 29 before the dental students actually confronted Bart and asked him some serious questions about Dolly’s missing cat.

Dolly’s weeks in a kind of twilight zone had only just begun. According to Lee Reardon, her brother Corey Reardon, and several other male dental students, Bart had concocted a weird
Gaslight
plan to frighten Dolly Hearn.

Corey said that Bart was trying to make Dolly look paranoid. In reality, he felt it was Bart who was acting bizarrely.

Indeed, he was. He spent a lot of time calling his friends—and sometimes Dolly’s friends—asking for advice about how to get her back. He would alternately cry and laugh when he talked about Dolly. She had broken off with him, but he thought his dating other women would bring her back. He had reason to regret it. He’d wanted to teach her a lesson and he was stunned to find Dolly wasn’t in the least interested in their getting back together. In fact, she had seemed relieved that he was interested in someone else.

On November 27, Dolly showed up at the dental school with her eyes watering and bloodshot. She was nearsighted and usually wore contact lenses. She told Travis Hampton that her eyes had begun to burn as soon as she inserted the lenses.

Here,” she said, holding out the small plastic bottle of lens solution. “Does this smell funny to you?”

Hampton sniffed it and said, “It smells like hair spray.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “No wonder my eyes hurt.”

This wasn’t a joke; Dolly’s eyes could have been permanently damaged. Moreover, Angela Garnto’s contact lens solution had also been tampered with—also with hair spray. Her eyes were burning, too. Someone had been in the women’s apartment while they were gone, doctoring up their lens solution.

That person would have needed a key. The wood dowel was still in the sliding glass door track, and the windows were securely locked. At the same time, Dolly discovered that her gas tank cap was missing. Now, she looked on her key ring. She was a woman who liked things to line up neatly, and she had arranged the keys on her ring so that they all pointed in the same direction. Looking closely, Dolly saw that her apartment key must have been removed at some point, and then replaced; it was facing in the wrong direction, and was in a different spot on the ring than it had been.

Dolly went to her landlord, Dennis Stanfield. He had become a good friend, and, within twenty minutes, Stanfield had changed the locks on Dolly and Angela’s apartment doors.

D
OLLY HAD KNOWN
B
ART
was depressed and that he wanted to reconcile with her once again. She expected his phone calls, and wasn’t surprised when he often began to sob, but she had never believed that he could be a physical danger to her. Now, there were times when she was actually afraid of him. The idea that he had been able to copy her keys and come and go at will in her apartment was creepy. On November 29, Dolly made a formal complaint to the MCG Campus Security Office about the incidents in her apartment and the damage to her car.

Later that day, Travis Hampton questioned Bart closely about Dolly’s still-missing cat. Travis warned Bart that if he ever wanted Dolly to come back to him, he had better not have done anything to Tabitha.

“I don’t know if you’re responsible for Tabitha being missing or not,” he said, “but if Dolly doesn’t find that cat, she’s going to hate you forever.”

“Yes,” Bart said inscrutably. “I need to call her.”

Ten minutes later, Dolly called Travis to say she had news about Tabitha. She had heard from Eric Rader, who put Bart on the line and ordered him to admit to tormenting her by destroying her property. Moreover, she told Travis, “Bart’s going to take me someplace to look for my cat.”

When Bart and Eric called her, Dolly had flat-out accused Bart of taking Tabitha, and he had begun to cry.

“What did you do to her?” Dolly demanded.

Finally, he admitted that he had taken Tabitha, and he said he would take Dolly to where he’d last seen her cat. He drove Dolly across the city, almost to the far side of Augusta, and parked near a low-income housing project behind the Augusta Mall.

Dolly jumped out of his car and started knocking on doors, asking the residents in the tiny houses if they had seen a fluffy, striped cat. Finally, one woman said, “I do believe I’ve seen a cat that looked like that around here sometime back—haven’t seen it lately, though.”

There was so much traffic here, and Dolly was afraid that Tabitha wouldn’t have been able to find any food; she was a pampered pet who wasn’t used to catching mice or digging through garbage. But then Dolly spotted a cat rolling in the sunshine on a cement walkway.

“That looks like Tabitha!” she shouted to Bart. “It really does.”

When she called Tabitha’s name, the cat came running and Dolly swooped her up and hugged her. She was thin and scruffy-looking, and the pads on her feet were all torn up, but she was alive and purring. At that instant, Dolly knew that Tabitha had survived with no thanks to Bart. What he had done was the meanest thing he could do to Dolly, but Bart couldn’t comprehend that. He had always told her a cat was only a cat, and that he didn’t care much for animals, anyway.

“We found her!” Dolly told Travis Hampton. “Bart knew where he dropped her off!”

Bart admitted that he had contaminated Dolly’s and Angela’s contact lens solutions with hair spray, and he apologized to Angela for putting it in hers, saying, “I didn’t know whose solution was which—and I had to put it in both to cover my tracks.”

There was more. Bart admitted that he’d been in their apartment two days earlier, and taken Dolly’s black tux outfit—which was her favorite—and other clothing. She hadn’t discovered that theft yet.

The locks were changed again, Bart seemed to be truly contrite, and Tabitha was home safe at last. Quite probably, she had used up one of her nine lives.

W
ITH
C
HRISTMAS FAST APPROACHING
, Dolly made it clear to Bart that their relationship was over. On December 9, she went to a party, and the next morning, as she headed for class she saw that her car had been vandalized during the night. One tire was flat—its sidewall slashed with a sharp object. Two fog lights were broken, and there were broken slivers from a tequila bottle on the ground near the broken lights. Someone had deliberately used a key or some other sharp object to leave ugly scratch marks in the paint on both sides of her car. Dolly reported this to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office.

The stalking had begun again, and this time she was sure it was Bart Corbin who was following her.

The very next day, Dolly discovered that her mailbox had been broken into. She had ordered two hundred business cards and she was expecting a package from the printer, but it hadn’t arrived. She checked with her post office and talked with the letter carrier on her route who recalled delivering that package on December 10.

She reported each incident to the police. After the mailbox theft, she told the Augusta police officers that she suspected Barton Corbin, her ex-boyfriend, emphasizing that he was a “person of real concern” to her.

Dolly told her friends not to send her any Christmas mail, warning them that it would probably be stolen from her mailbox.

D
OLLY HEADED HOME
to Washington to celebrate Christmas with her family. They were relieved to hear that she was through with Bart Corbin for good. She seemed to mean it. But while her car was parked at her parents’ home, paint—or something like it—was dumped into the gas tank, contaminating the fuel. Her father had it analyzed to be sure.

Carlton Hearn had recently replaced Dolly’s old Volkswagen Bug with a good used black Pontiac Grand Am with a sunroof, and having someone systematically trying to destroy it was just one more stress for her.

As the new year began, Dolly started making the dentures that would count for her entire grade in the spring of 1990. She was working with a soft-spoken old lady, who came into Dolly’s tiny office many times as Dolly measured and adjusted the false teeth. They were coming along extremely well, and Dolly was elated. She was fond of her patient, and always walked the woman out of the building to be sure she met her ride or got on her bus without any trouble.

But troubling things continued to haunt Dolly. In January and February, Dolly made serious allegations to the Medical College of Georgia Police. She had lost dental supplies. First, she lost $1,495 worth of dental tools. Next, she had a more serious loss in terms of her time and artistry. Someone had taken the full set of dentures she had worked on for class credit. The material in the dentures had been worth only about $110, but her time was invaluable and she had fashioned them so meticulously. The single dental instrument that had been stolen this time was worth about $275. That instrument, a prosthodontic articulator, was discovered on the third floor of the dental school a day later, but the dentures had completely vanished.