Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (28 page)

On December 2, she and her boys were still safely ensconced at Heather’s. Doug and Heather took turns talking with Jenn, listening to her plans to “just get through the holidays.” Their home was a kind of oasis for her, and they urged her to stay. Seeing her sister wrapped in her old pink flannel robe made Heather feel as though, somehow, she could always keep her safe.

“I gotta go home, you know,” Jenn told her.

“I don’t want you to go back there.”

“Heather, no. I have to. If I don’t go back, he’s going to take my house.”

The sisters were both emotionally drained. They had talked about problems, solutions, new starts, closed doors that could never be opened again, what Bart might or might not do, and they had kept assuring each other that everything would work out for the best.

Heather and Doug Tierney had virtually put their lives on hold so they could help Jenn. They didn’t want her to move home, but they needed a little “time out” from her marital problems so they could concentrate on their own family. The last few weeks had been so up and down and disturbing. Maybe Jenn was right about going home. It was a moot point, anyway. Once she made up her mind, there was no talking her out of it, and she was determined to go back to Bogan Gates Drive and finish decorating her Christmas tree.

Even though Bart seemed to grow angrier and more hyper every day, she was no longer afraid of him. As long as he didn’t try to have sex with her, she thought they could get along in the same house. She had suggested he live on their houseboat until he found an apartment, but he complained that it would be too cold there at that time of year, and she relented.

Jenn had confided in her sister that she felt she had never loved Bart and never had a satisfactory sex life with him. He cared only about his own sexual drive and didn’t bother with foreplay or romance. “Heather,” she once said, “when he touches me, I just shiver and go ‘ewwww’ inside.”

Heather didn’t know how to respond to that. It broke her heart that her sister who had always been the one who was “so comfortable to be around, who made people feel good, who was kind and nonjudgmental” could be this unhappy.

At 9
A.M.
on that Thursday, December 2, Heather watched Jenn drive away. Thinking they would talk later, Heather turned to catch up on the chores she still had to do to settle into their new house. She and Jenn would have time to get together, drink coffee as they always did, and work things out.

I
N THESE EARLY
D
ECEMBER DAYS,
Bart was usually in his dental offices, although moving his clinic to Hamilton Mill wasn’t drawing enough patients to keep it afloat financially. He was gone somewhere most nights after they ate supper—probably out drinking beer with his brother or his friends. Both Jenn and Bart had their own lives now. Most of the time, she didn’t know, or care, where he was.

One discovery, though, had puzzled her. When she was doing the laundry, she had found a parking lot stub in the pocket of one of his shirts. It looked to be from a library in Birmingham, Alabama, and it was stamped November 29. Bart had apparently made a quick trip there a few days earlier. She had no idea what for. Jenn mentioned it to her good friends, Juliet Styles and Jennifer Rupured. The drive to Birmingham and back would have taken him more than six hours.

She was only vaguely curious, just enough to tell her friends and then forget about it. Jenn’s biggest concern was the same as it always had been—that her sons were doing okay. She hoped she could keep Bart from yelling at them. Sometimes she wondered if she could ever find a way to undo the negative effect he had on Dalton.

A
LTHOUGH
B
ART RESENTED
that Heather and Doug were supporting Jenn as she pulled away from him, he made one more phone call to Heather on Friday morning, December 3. “He kept asking me about why Jenn wasn’t with him,” Heather said, “and was she going to get a divorce? He kept saying he didn’t really want a divorce. He wanted to work it out with her.

“And then he said, ‘I can’t change who I am. I’m going to do what I have to do to protect myself—and I should have been doing it all along.’”

That was odd, Heather thought. He had
always
protected himself. She knew that a year earlier, when he was besieged by creditors, Bart had put all of his assets in Jenn’s name. And it was the third time he’d done that. They had barely any equity in their house—Bart had taken out a second mortgage. The juggling he had done, “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” according to his in-laws, was about to catch up with him because he refused to compromise on what he needed or wanted. Sure that he could trust Jenn, he made her responsible when his debts were called in. Now that he realized she was about to leave, he had taken back what he considered his, emptying his accounts of all the liquid cash he could take out, putting everything back in his name.

On that Friday, Jenn was scheduled to work with Narda. But first, she had a meeting with Angie Smith, who was president of the PTA at Harmony School; when she applied at Harmony, she had been encouraged to hear that she more than met their requirements.

Smith found her cheerful and upbeat. “Like a woman looking forward to her future.”

When Jenn arrived at her mother’s warehouse a little later, Narda saw that she was very happy, optimistic and positive about her life. Jenn had been to Target and spent almost $500. She had loaded up her SUV with her final purchases for her new home, wherever that was going to be. She was smiling as she stacked packages in the empty cupboards of Narda’s warehouse.

It was great to see Jenn so happy. Narda was planning to meet a couple of her women friends that evening for drinks and dinner and she asked Jenn to come along, but Jenn said she couldn’t; Dalton and Dillon had basketball games, and they wanted her to take them. Dalton was still saying to anyone who would listen, “Daddy’s going to kill Mommy,” and he didn’t want to go anywhere with Bart.

It was disturbing to hear Dalton talk like that, but Narda and Jenn agreed it was a phase. Earlier that afternoon, Bart had insisted on taking Dalton to the park to ride his bicycle, and that hadn’t turned out at all well. Dalton had stopped at a curb to wait for a car to go by, and apparently Bart had shouted at him,
“Go!”
He had come home very upset, saying his daddy tried to push him in front of a car.

Jenn had always told her sister and her mother that she would never keep Bart from seeing his sons after they were divorced. He was, after all, their father. But she still wanted to be sure that Bart stopped shouting at Dalton, and belittling him. That was something they would definitely have to work out. But she didn’t believe that he would hurt their children.

Narda would remember watching Jenn back out of her driveway. “She was smiling, and she was going to Star-bucks to get a Caramel Macchiatto and say hi to Rajel’s son, Joey, who worked there. I didn’t even hug her goodbye.”

December 3 was the first day in months that Heather and Jenn hadn’t talked—not even on the phone. “I was exhausted,” Heather would remember, her voice full of tears. “Jenn’s troubles were occupying so much of my time. I needed a break, and I didn’t call her. The last time I saw her was the morning before when she left my house, and I couldn’t stop her. I guess it was like giving a drunk driver car keys.”

And yet, Jenn hoped that she and Bart could just get through Christmas. They were so close to going their separate ways. Only three more weeks.

It was Friday night, December 3, 2004.

PART FIVE

The Investigation

GWINNETT COUNTY

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE

DECEMBER 4–10, 2004

E
VEN AS HER FAMILY
was bracing for her funeral, the probe into Jenn’s death was widening. Investigators had learned early on that the last few weeks of her life had been marked by dissension and shocking revelations. They knew that her mother had seen her on the late afternoon of Friday, December 3, and, according to seven-year-old Dalton Corbin, that the couple had eaten together with the kids in their home on Friday evening. Dalton, who was a very intelligent little boy, related that his father had gone out somewhere. He and his brother had watched television and gone to bed. They hadn’t heard anything during the night and slept peacefully until Saturday morning when Dalton discovered his mother dead in her bed.

It was vital now for detectives to find the locations of people who were part of Jenn’s life at the time she died. They knew that she had been emailing and phoning someone in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri—someone that even those closest to her had never seen. Actually, as far as anyone knew, Jenn herself had never seen this person who might be named “Christopher Hearn,” or was possibly named “Anita Hearn.” No one close to Jenn Corbin could say absolutely whether this person was, in actuality, a male or a female. Jenn had been secretive about her email correspondent—even with her sister. Was it possible that Jenn had been set up by a deadly con artist who had traveled to Georgia to harm her? It seemed outlandish, but then so did the idea that she had become so involved with a stranger.

Jenn and Bart had been locked in an ugly divorce and custody battle, so it was also very important to know where Bart Corbin had been in the early morning hours of December 4.

And there was another woman in the picture—Bart had had at least one mistress since before he was married to Jenn. Dara Prentice had apparently loved him for more than nine years, and the only obstacle between Dara and Bart had been Jenn. However, Dara didn’t seem to be a likely suspect; if she wanted Bart and was privy to most of the details about his personal life, she would have known that he was soon to be divorced. She wouldn’t have had to kill her lover’s wife so she could have him.

It appeared that Jenn had no real enemies. Her killing might have been a random thing. Perhaps she had wakened to find a burglar in her home—and been shot when she surprised him. She was a striking woman whom men noticed. Although her sisters and her closest friends didn’t recall that she had spoken of being harassed or stalked by a man, Jenn herself might not have realized that someone was watching her and waiting for a time when her husband wasn’t home.

Steve Comeau had heard a truck coming down their street early Saturday morning—during the period that Medical Examiner Dr. Carol Terry estimated as Jenn’s time of death. He was quite sure that he had recognized the familiar sound of Bart’s pickup truck as it slowed and turned into the Corbin’s driveway close to 2
A.M.
But Steve hadn’t actually
seen
either Bart or the truck. He could testify only to an almost subconscious impression—not as an eyewitness.

Marcus Head, leading the Gwinnett County Police Department’s detectives in the investigation, and Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter needed to follow up all possibilities and refuse to allow themselves to be locked into any one theory on who the killer they sought might be.

Most of the public still believed that Jenn Corbin had committed suicide, but insiders knew that the physical evidence gleaned from the shooting scene made that the least likely cause of her death.

The police detectives and the two dozen DA’s investigators working on various aspects of the Corbin case were very different from one another, a diversity that had worked well for them in case after case.

Danny Porter ran a remarkable district attorney’s office. He was that rare prosecutor with virtually no need for ego gratification or desire to take sole credit for the cases he had successfully prosecuted—and there were many. Having won four elections, and in his fourteenth year as Gwinnett County’s DA, Porter was just as happy to have his assistant DAs and investigators appear in the media—perhaps more so—than he was to garner publicity for himself. While he dressed impeccably in the courtroom, Porter usually wore cargo pants and sports shirts around his office. He was handsome in a “Humphrey Bogart” kind of way, and he spoke in a deep, growly voice. He often taught courses for cops. Once a group of deputies waiting to hear a lecture by a highly regarded district attorney didn’t recognize him when he hopped out of his beat-up 1970 Land Cruiser, dressed in his preferred garb. They thought he was someone who had fallen on hard times.

That Toyota Land Cruiser, an FJ-55, was both Porter’s hobby and his passion. He spent weeks in an auto mechanic course and fixed its innards before he bothered with cosmetic details.

Porter’s road to become one of the outstanding DAs in the state of Georgia was as dissimilar from the usual approach as his vehicles and clothing were. His father rose from being a TV antenna installer to top management in the Space Control program, and during those years the family lived in Utica, New York, in the Bahamas, in Florida, and eventually in Atlanta. During the elder Porter’s offshore assignments, there were no accredited schools, but Danny Porter read constantly, and, back on the mainland, he was always ahead of his class. He began college at the University of Georgia majoring in architecture and ended up in law school—which he hated.

“Lawyers should solve problems,” he commented.

“Law school wants you to think in a circular pattern.”

Porter became a Gwinnett County assistant district attorney on September 8, 1981. Early on, one of his main concerns was for victims of crime and their families. Jack Burnette, Porter’s right hand, who supervised the twenty-three investigators in the District Attorney’s Office, had Porter’s support from the beginning. “Danny has a little cop inside screaming to get out,” Burnette commented. Porter prosecuted some of the more bizarre cases in the South. His first homicide scene was in a pet store where exotic birds flapped overhead.