Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (23 page)

Mary and Gary eventually divorced, and Mary moved north to Marshall, Michigan, a small town about ten miles from Battle Creek in the southwest portion of the state. In 2004, Mary was working as a surgical nurse, and living in a townhouse with her fiancé.

Jenn was horrified to learn that Mary had apparently gone out for a walk alone at 10:30
P.M
. on Friday, March 12, after she and her fiancé had argued. She’d last been seen wearing her surgical scrubs and a leather jacket as she walked out of the golden circle of light from a pole in the complex where she lived, and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

She was never seen again, although the Michigan State Police and the FBI assisted the Marshall police in an intense investigation.

“She’s dead,” Jenn insisted. “I know she’s been murdered.”

And Jenn was probably right. Mary’s car and cell phone were left behind, and she left no paper trail at all—her bank account was not accessed, nor any of her credit cards. She walked out into the chilly Michigan night and vanished completely.

While Jenn’s own life was in upheaval in September 2004, she prayed for Mary Lands when her family and friends marked the six-month anniversary of Mary’s disappearance with a candlelight ceremony many states away from Georgia.

It was impossible not to note the irony in the two young women’s long friendship. Only three months later, there would be a candlelight ceremony on Bogan Gates Drive memorializing Jenn herself.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

2003–2004

A
LL LIVES
,
NO MATTER HOW PROSAIC
, have their secrets, and we never know what is actually going on in even our closest friends’ worlds. Jennifer Corbin was no different. Her involvement with someone outside her marriage began quite innocently. Narda Barber and her girls had always played old-fashioned games together. Over Christmas, in 2003, Narda heard about a Sony PlayStation game called EverQuest. She didn’t realize when she purchased it that it might require an Internet hookup. She didn’t have one, but intrigued by the “G-rated” game, she decided to invest in everything she needed to play.

“I suppose I spent about $100 to get set up,” she recalled. “It was something like
Dungeons and Dragons,
and it sounded like fun.”

EverQuest encompasses numerous games of fantasy using rich animation and 3-D effects on a television; the player selects characters in which to lose himself. As an artist, Narda was intrigued with the quality of the graphics that virtually invite players to enter another world. While they are there, they can choose to be anyone they want: knights, maidens, assassins, sorcerers, kings, queens, villains, and heroes, all anonymously. One game, for instance, suggests, “Create a noble human paladin, a vicious dark elf or necromancer, a greedy dwarven rogue—or any of the more than one hundred character combinations.”

The game offers players a way to step out of their own lives for a time. Narda found EverQuest relaxing and entertaining, and she mentioned it to Jenn. When Jenn seemed interested, Narda bought her the software so that they could play together. They had a lot of fun, dueling with one another, talking on the phone, and sometimes laughing until their cheeks hurt.

The game is completely interactive, and the graphics are very real. The characters can gesture to one another, and even flirt. There are “guilds,” which are akin to families. While Heather thought EverQuest was ridiculous, she knew it was an escape for her sister. Jenn even taught Dalton and Dillon how to play a simpler form of the game, and showed them how to beat “the bad guys.”

Because the game is played over the Internet, there is always the opportunity to meet others involved. Writing under her game name “wizwiz148,” Jenn exchanged messages with basically nameless participants, including someone named “sirtank1223.” Jenn’s Wizard character on EverQuest soon became entranced with his inventive postings. Sir Tank may have sought Jenn out, or it might have been the other way around—but they definitely thought on the same wavelength. Soon they decided to exchange emails outside the confines of the game. Jenn learned that sirtank1223 was a man named “Christopher,” who was also thirty-three.

Jenn didn’t have a lot of time to spend on the Internet, she was so busy teaching preschool, taking care of her boys, and keeping house. She also worked for Narda a few afternoons a week at the Lake Arts studio, where they filled orders for artists’ canvases to ship all over the world.

Even when she wasn’t actually playing, Jenn could usually find messages waiting for her from Christopher, and she looked forward to that.

When she met Christopher online, Jenn Corbin had come to a place where she had precious little joy in her life. There seemed to be no harm in exchanging her thoughts and philosophies with a man who lived seven hundred miles away. They were separated geographically; he lived far from Georgia—in St. Louis. More and more, they slipped away from the game of EverQuest to exchange private emails on the Internet.

Many of their emails have been lost, but it was probably sometime in the early summer of 2004 when Jenn and Christopher began to write more often. She never expected to meet him, and that made it easier for her to talk about the things that mattered to her and, eventually, about problems in her life. As their emails flew through the Internet, Jenn found herself attracted to Christopher. She didn’t feel unfaithful to Bart; this was no more intimate, really, than playing EverQuest. But she felt less lonely—as if there might be someone out there who could truly love her if she were ever free of her suffocating relationship with Bart.

She was a young woman who had expected love in her life, but she realized too late that Bart didn’t want her for anything more than to enhance his own image, and to pick on and belittle. Now there was a man out there who offered a shoulder, a listening ear, and who seemed to understand her.

What harm could there be in having a modern-day pen pal?

Both Jenn and Christopher still logged on to EverQuest to play out their fantasy games there, and they wrote to other correspondents in their online community. Several of them shared their feelings and their concerns for one another. It was a little like being on a plane or a train, talking to a stranger in the adjoining seat, knowing that at the end of the journey, they would all go off in their own directions to pick up their real lives.

Jenn enjoyed “talking” to Christopher, but they made no plans to meet. He wrote that he was divorced, and worked in a restaurant. He lived with his mother, and he was raising his sister’s two children. He seemed somewhat in awe of Jenn’s standard of living and education. She was, after all, married to a professional man who appeared to be quite wealthy, at least compared to what Christopher did. The way Jenn described her house apparently made Christopher feel inadequate. Still, a small affair of the heart was happening, and Jenn treasured Christopher’s emails. They were soon in the habit of writing to each other in the early mornings before Christopher went to work and Jenn left for her mile run, and then again late in the evening if Bart wasn’t home.

T
HE EXTENDED
B
ARBER
family and their in-laws led a fairly serene existence throughout most of 2004. Narda not only ran her Lake Arts business, she sold her own paintings, too. Max was working for a Ford dealer close to home in Lawrenceville. Rajel was home from California, and Heather and Doug Tierney were about to move into their new house in Dawsonville. It was a wonderful house, with a five-hundred-square-foot master bedroom, soaring ceilings, and a huge backyard. While Heather and Jenn would no longer be close neighbors, they vowed to see each other as often as before. Not to do so would be a loss for the sisters who were used to having coffee together every morning while their children—the four cousins—played together. Still, they both worried that it wouldn’t be possible.

Perhaps that problem made Jenn feel lucky to have Christopher, someone who seemed to understand her completely. Christopher’s emails revealed him to be a man who was both kind and responsible, as well as secure in his masculinity. Jenn didn’t know his last name at first, but she formed a clear picture in her head about what Christopher looked like. She hadn’t heard his voice or seen a picture of him—but she felt that she knew him better than most people she had ever known in real life. When she asked him what he looked like, he said “a little like the Marlboro man.”

She didn’t know if he was joking but complained to him teasingly, “There are lots of Marlboro men, and most of them wear hats so you can’t see their faces anyway!”

It was the perfect opportunity for him to attach his picture to an email, but he didn’t send one. And still Jenn accepted Christopher on faith because it didn’t really seem to matter what he looked like. By the end of the summer, the two strangers’ correspondence revealed that they had begun to think that one day they might actually have a future together.

In September 2004, Christopher confessed that he was falling in love with Jenn, and expressed some anxiety that Jenn might just be “putting him on.” She quickly wrote to reassure him that she was as serious as he was.

“Christopher, you don’t need to apologize to me again,” she wrote. “I’m just sorry you felt like I could maybe play you. It’s o.k. to be scared, Christopher. I’m scared. We are both gonna have to make big changes in our life if we want to be together, and that is never easy. I love how you make me feel. I love that there are no walls with you. I love that I feel I can tell you just what I feel at that moment…I know with you that my whole life is going to change, that our love is going to be so powerful that it’s going to be overwhelming.

“I don’t know why it is we feel like we do. How did I meet a man so far away from me that can affect me the way you do—a man I’ve never laid eyes on—I’ve never seen smile or heard laugh. A man that I can confess every thought I have or bad moment I have ever had, and I’m comfortable doing just that. I want you to feel comfortable doing just that.”

S
OME MIGHT SAY
that Jenn Corbin was an accident getting ready to happen. She was caught in a loveless marriage, starved for affection. Like most women in their mid-thirties, Jenn was at her sexual peak, but she had no outlet for her feelings. She confided in Kelly Comeau that she had not experienced an orgasm in years. She told her sister she had
never
had an orgasm with her husband.

Jenn had stayed on the computer all summer long. She told Kelly at the end of July that she had met some really interesting people on the computer, but she didn’t seem seriously interested in anyone. Still, things were different that summer, and Kelly couldn’t ignore that. She and Steve had always enjoyed going to the houseboat with Jenn and the Corbins, but that didn’t happen in the summer of 2004.

Worried, Kelly once asked Jenn if she was in love with the person she had met online.

“I haven’t even met this person online!” Jenn said, avoiding a direct answer.

Kelly knew that Jenn had never cheated on Bart. “We had a girls’ night out once,” Kelly recalled, “and some guy really, really wanted her, but Jenn wasn’t interested.”

By 2004, it was painfully obvious to Jenn that Bart didn’t love her, even though he expected her to be available to him whenever he wanted sex. And yet she was torn about Chris. Was she being fair to Dalton and Dillon? As hopeless as she felt about the likelihood that her marriage was salvageable, she wasn’t willing to deprive her sons of a two-parent home, or to yank them out of the elementary school they loved, not to mention away from their friends.

If she did leave Bart, could they make it on their own? Jenn scribbled out budgets, and they only showed her that it would be very difficult for her to earn enough money for herself and the boys. She had no savings of her own, and Bart was parsimonious enough when they were living together. She doubted that he would agree to pay her child support or alimony without a huge court battle. He would consider it as paying for a dead horse.

When Jenn finally told Heather about Christopher in the late summer of 2004, Heather was surprised and concerned.

“Jenn,” she said with exasperation, “you have no idea who this guy is! He could be anybody, and you can’t simply believe what he tells you. He might be married, for all you know—”

“Well, I’m married,” Jenn cut in, “and I know he’s divorced.”

“How do you know?” Heather said. “He may be some weirdo pervert who’s sneaking around on his wife. He may be sixty years old. Or an ex-convict. You don’t even know for sure where he lives. For all you know, he’s one of those Nigerian con men! You’re taking everything on faith, and that isn’t safe. Especially on the Internet!”

But Jenn would not be swayed. She was sure she knew who Christopher was through the emails he sent her every day now.

And now, several times a day.

Jenn made little pretense about how lonely she was in her marriage. And the gentleness and respect in Christopher’s emails made her more aware that Bart made an effort to be nice to her only when he wanted something. She had put on a brave and cheerful face for too long. She talked to her co-worker Jennifer Rupured at the Sugar Hill Church preschool about how empty her marriage was, how abusive Bart was emotionally, and how much she wanted to be free of him, if only she could figure a way out that wouldn’t hurt her boys. Her best friend, Juliet, knew too, as well as Kelly, and, of course, Heather. They were all pulling for Jenn to find happiness.

Sometimes, Jenn talked to her mother as well, although Narda was more likely to discourage her from making any sudden changes. She feared for Jenn if she stepped away from her marriage. It wouldn’t be easy for a woman in her mid-thirties with two small boys.

On the afternoons Jenn wasn’t teaching, she was usually in Lawrenceville, helping Narda with canvas orders at Lake Arts. Working for her mom, Jenn knew she could always be done in time to pick up Dalton and Dillon from school. And she liked being with Narda. But she still didn’t make nearly enough money to support a family. Sometimes Narda paid her a salary, and often she bought things for Jenn or the boys—things that Bart wouldn’t give her money for.