Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (22 page)

That hadn’t been easy to do because Jenn Barber Corbin had gone into her marriage as a woman who knew who she was: strong, popular, and talented. If she had a vulnerable area, it was about men. When her longtime teenage boyfriend had betrayed her, it came at a vulnerable stage in her life and left a lasting impression.

“Bart was still trying to make Jenn feel inferior,” Narda said. “He shouted at her, and called her names. She didn’t let on how much it hurt her, but we could tell it did. Heather knew more than I did—but she didn’t tell us. I think she was trying to protect Max and me.”

The Barbers invited Bart’s family for holidays, outings, and celebrations, and occasionally they accepted. But Bart’s father never came, not since Jenn’s wedding. By 1997, he had a whole new life with his younger woman and the son who wasn’t much older than Dalton and Dillon.

Connie Corbin and Bart’s brothers did join Jenn’s family from time to time, but the visits were a little strained. Narda and Connie had virtually no shared interests. They had nothing at all in common, except that their children were married to each other. Narda felt an invisible wall between herself and Bart’s mother, some transparent blockade that Connie hid her real feelings behind. Probably Connie felt the same way.

Brad Corbin, Bart’s twin, was quite removed, too—either shy or out of his element. But their younger brother, Bobby, was friendly. “Bobby seemed to have a good heart,” Narda said. “It was hard to read the others in Bart’s family.”

Many families—probably the majority—fail to mesh completely when their children marry. And Bart’s and Jenn’s families were no different. Jenn was always the one who tried to bring them together, and went out of her way to visit Bart’s relatives. Jenn loved to throw parties and oversee family celebrations, and she did that with Bart’s family as well as with her own. She and Bart appeared smiling and united at Bobby’s wedding to Suzanne. And Jenn loved Bobby’s children—Zachary and Riley—who were Dalton and Dillon’s first cousins and almost the same age. Jenn got along fine with her mother-in-law and with both Brad and Bobby and their wives.

Max Barber made it a point to attend Dalton’s and Dillon’s ball games as often as he could. Everyone had noted that Bart was “different, somehow” after the little boys were born. He seemed to love his sons, but he had such impossibly high expectations for children so young. It got worse as the boys grew older. On one occasion, Max was a witness when Dalton struck out in a Little League baseball game, and Bart was furious. As he often did, he screamed at Dalton, who was then only about six, calling him a “loser” and “an idiot.”

Max was disturbed enough by Bart’s behavior that he stepped between Bart and Dalton in an attempt to stop the tirade against his grandson. He knew he was stretching a grandfather’s duties, but he couldn’t stand seeing Dalton’s shoulders slump as he fought back tears. Yet Max also excused Bart. He thought that this was the way Bart and his brothers had been raised. Maybe Bart just didn’t know any better. For Bart, winning was the most important goal in sports—and in life.

Bart demanded as much of himself. The once-overweight teenager worked out to hone his body to top condition. He rode and raced mountain bikes. Fishing was about the only leisure activity Bart was involved in that didn’t require a lot of physical effort. He was a desultory golfer, although he recognized that that was a sport almost required of a young dentist on his way up. So he played golf and pretended to enjoy it.

Bart urged Dalton to ride bikes with him, but his oldest son didn’t match up to Bart’s expectations there, either, and he whined when his father insisted he go.

A
SEA CHANGE
was coming over Jenn. She had been able to cope with Bart when he picked at her and criticized her. But she would not allow him to undercut the boys’ confidence. At six, Dalton had begun to beg not to go places with his father. Would Dillon be far behind?

By Christmas 2003, Jenn and Bart were still making stabs at saving their marriage, but she couldn’t hide the sadness she felt. She had long since accepted that she had not married her “soulmate.” She and Bart had had such a romantic trip to Italy once. Now, he treated her and their sons to a Caribbean cruise and Max and Narda joined them. But Jenn was only acting, pretending to be having a good time. All the smiling photographs they took served only to mock her. The expensive trip didn’t make up for the isolation she felt in her marriage. Worse, she knew the cruise was something he could brag about to prove how successful he was.

Bart’s practice had grown slowly, but he got into financial trouble. He tried gimmicks to draw patients in, even giving away coupons that offered “Elite Care, without an Elite Price!” And, after moving his practice to Hamilton Mill, Bart made sure locals knew he had long been an active supporter of youth athletic teams. Although he was disappointed with what he considered his own sons’ lack of dedication to sports, he sponsored the 2002 Dacula Falcons’ twelve-year-olds’ football team. The next year, he was the assistant coach of the Indians’ T-ball team, and sponsored the Dacula/Mill Creek eleven-year-olds’ football team. In 2004 he sponsored the T-ball “Reds” team at Bogan Park and the Mill Creek eighth-grade football team. Bart liked baseball, and it was good for business, too.

But Bart had stretched himself and his finances a little too thin when he moved his practice to Hamilton Mill. He wasn’t attracting anywhere near the number of new patients he had expected. He had two civil suits in State Court, filed against him because he had defaulted on payments for expensive dental equipment.

He had more coupons offering his “elite dental techniques” printed up. Even though Bart was very intelligent, he apparently wasn’t a particularly effective dentist. Technically, he was okay, but from the start of his private practice, many patients complained to their families and friends that he lacked empathy and concern, and was brusque with them. He didn’t recognize that many people are fearful about going to a dentist—any dentist—and that a little compassion and patience would have taken him a long way.

The mother of a teenage girl recalled that her daughter had left his examining room after her initial visit visibly upset. “She said she never wanted to go back to that dentist again,” the woman said. “Of course I thought that he might have touched her inappropriately—but she said it wasn’t that at all. He just scared her, and she couldn’t explain why. We never went back.”

One woman never forgot her nightmarish experience in Bart’s office. She had sought a dentist who was skilled at fitting multiple crowns on front teeth, and Bart assured he was “very good” at that. But in two sessions that lasted twice as long as he’d promised, she was stunned by his unprofessional manner: he shouted at his chairside assistant, mumbled obscenities, and hyperventilated. Dr. Corbin not only seemed out of control emotionally, but he finally admitted he had virtually no experience with the procedure she needed.

She regretted that she had already paid in full—more than two thousand dollars—especially when she began to hemorrhage severely, and Bart held his head in his hands and told her he didn’t know how to stop the blood that threatened to choke her.

After blurting out that she would never sit in his dental chair again, she ran out of his office in a panic, still bleeding, with tissues pressed against her gums, to seek competent medical attention. She never got the crowns for her teeth from Bart, and she filed a complaint with the Georgia Board of Dentistry, asking for a refund of the entire amount she had paid.

When Bart was questioned by the board, he offered to refund $1,452 of the $2,272 she had paid. She refused. Almost two years later, she received word from the board that the entire amount would be forthcoming.

“The Board, however, has expressed its very serious concern to Dr. Corbin about the circumstances which led to the complaint being filed,” the letter said. Although Bart was never officially censured, he was forced to write a check for the entire amount, and word of his incompetence circulated among his peers.

On occasion now, Bart’s hands shook so badly that his patients wondered if he had some kind of palsy. He drank—but not excessively—and no one ever suggested that he used drugs. Perhaps it was only his agitation over the state of his marriage, which had begun to have dark places. As he and Jenn struggled with a marriage that was not working, his insensitivity in his clinic grew more apparent, reflecting the agitation he felt. Women had walked away from Bart before, and each abandonment had cut him more deeply. He was incapable of treating a woman as an equal partner; he needed to possess her absolutely. For more than seven years, he had felt secure that Jenn would follow his directives and show him the respect he deserved. Now he realized that she was slipping away from his control.

His financial status was shaky, too. He could no longer afford to employ full-time chairside assistants. Only Dara Prentice remained loyal to him.

Another dentist in the area was surprised to receive a scrawled note from Bart asking him to lunch to discuss the possibility of Bart’s working part-time in his office.

“He was willing to work for me more than two days a week,” the other dentist recalled. “That would make it impossible for any doctor to keep up his own practice.”

T
HINGS WERE FALLING APART
in Bart’s life. The Corbins’ house on Bogan Gates Drive was impressive, but it had a sterile air about it. Jenn didn’t argue with him, but she no longer believed that Bart was going to change. Everything was all about him, what he wanted, how she could enhance his image. They were intimate only when he wanted to have sex. And he was perfunctory about even that, heedless of her needs. She no longer had any hope that it would ever be any better. She didn’t ask herself if she still loved him; she knew she didn’t.

They kept up a semblance of a social life. Bart and Jenn Corbin liked their neighbors, but now they tended to visit them individually, rather than as a couple. They still spent time on their houseboat, and they went to all the family gatherings. They had birthday parties, visited Janice and Richard Wilson—their friends in Alabama—and stayed close with Jenn’s best friend, Juliet Styles, and her husband, Darren. The two couples vacationed together at least once a year. Except for the Wilsons, the Styles were like most of their friends—introduced into their social circle by Jenn. Bart and Darren Styles often played golf together.

“Our kids were best friends,” Juliet said. “I was Jennifer’s best friend, and Darren and Bart were pretty close, at playing golf—whatever, however men are close.”

But by 2003, Bart probably spent more time with his brothers than he had before, often going out for drinks with Brad and Bobby, and “Iron,” his friend from the gym. Bart was the only one of Gene Corbin’s sons who had kept in touch with him after Gene and Connie split up. Now, even though they lived close to one another, Bart and his father rarely saw each other.

Brad’s first marriage had ended in divorce, and he moved in with his mother in Snellville. He was a medical transcriber, and he worked from home, which he much preferred to the business world where he felt uncomfortable. In 2003, Brad married Edwina Tims, and they established their own home.

J
ENN AND
B
ART
often watched Court TV’s coverage of Scott Peterson’s trial while they had coffee with Heather and Doug. Like much of America, they were both horrified and transfixed by the seeming smugness of Peterson during his trial for the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child,

“We all talked about it,” Heather said, “at whoever’s house we were at. I was watching with Bart once and I said something about Scott Peterson, and how awful it was. And Bart replied, ‘Scott Peterson only got caught because he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’”

“And I said, ‘Well, God, Bart—I hope I’m never gonna be your enemy.’ That conversation stuck with me for a long time.”

Although Heather had learned to accept Bart’s control over Jenn as an inherent part of his personality that her sister had long since learned to deal with, Jenn sometimes surprised her.

“Don’t you ever wish that sometimes you could just make cold cereal for your kids for breakfast?” Jenn once asked Heather.

“I told her I did give them cereal if I felt like it. But she said she couldn’t because Bart wouldn’t allow it. He told her, ‘If you won’t cook for my children, I’ll marry someone who will!’

“I think she lived like a Stepford Wife. Bart gave her money, but she always had to explain what it was for. She had to keep receipts for things like toilet paper and bubble gum. She didn’t have her own money until she started working at the preschool. And, even then, she made such a piddling amount. But one time she donated two months’ pay to a lady who’d been injured in a motorcycle accident.”

Jenn worried about people who were barely making it, and she did what she could to help. Once, she and Heather were in a Publix Super Market in Buford. Jenn nodded to a man who was clearly homeless, ragged—but clean. As she shopped, she picked out a whole roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, vegetables, and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. When the two sisters went through the checkout line, Heather noticed that Jenn had left one shopping bag behind, and pointed it out to her.

Jenn shook her head slightly, and said, “I’ll explain outside.”

“She’d bought dinner for the homeless guy,” Heather recalled. “She didn’t want to embarrass him by giving it directly to him, but she told the checker to hand it to him. I found out she did that quite often—she was afraid he might be hungry.”

Jenn did most of the chores around her home, even those that husbands usually performed. She mowed the lawn and planted the trees. She was extremely strong, usually pitching in to help any of her family in their moves. Once, she helped her brother-in-law Doug carry a heavy pool table up from their basement. She never seemed to get tired.

J
ENN HAD SUFFERED
a disturbing loss in the spring of 2004, one that troubled her a lot. It was her close connection to a case that wasn’t so different from the Peterson case, and she was extremely troubled by the disappearance of a woman she had considered a close friend for almost a decade. Ever since the romantic trip she and Bart had taken to Italy in 1996, Jenn had treasured her friendship with Mary Lands. She kept a photograph of herself and Bart laughing with Mary and her husband, Gary, in Italy framed on a wall of her home, a reminder of a happier times.