Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (35 page)

Gwinnett County police did not bring charges against Max Barber.

Heather had begun a website. It helped her to talk about Jenn, report how the boys were doing, and how her whole family was coping with the loss of an integral family member. Before long, her weblog became a touchstone for people everywhere, and it helped Heather when she felt overwhelmed with sorrow. One day, Heather’s web pages would have 400,000 posts from people all over the world.

Heather wrote about a dream that Dalton had—so real that she hoped somehow it might be true. He came down to breakfast one morning, really happy for the first time. “He said he was leaving church and he saw his mommy standing outside by the flowers. She gave him hugs and kisses, and they went to a carnival. Dalton said they played lots of games, and had all the tokens they needed. They rode the roller coaster.”

The mommy in his dream had taken him to a toy store and bought him a little street bike. They fed Zippo, Dalton’s dog, and then she tucked him into bed, told him how much she loved him and that she would always be with him.

“She told him not to worry,” Heather wrote. “Everything would be okay. I asked him if Jenn knew where we were living, and he said, ‘Mommy is an angel and she is everywhere.’”

For a seven-year-old boy, it would be enough for a while, but he still carried a huge load of guilt and regret that he hadn’t been able to protect his mother when she needed him.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
E
IGHT

DECEMBER 2004

T
O GIVE
B
ART
C
ORBIN
the benefit of the doubt, Marcus Head agreed with Corbin’s attorneys that Dalton Corbin may very well have leapt to an erroneous conclusion that his father had killed his mother. He was, after all, only a child, and he had witnessed his parents violent arguments in recent weeks.

“We need to talk to Corbin,” Head told reporters, explaining that the dentist’s own reluctance to talk with the police made them wonder more about what he might be hiding.

Bart had become what police call a “person of interest,” a euphemism for “suspect.” He was aware that his movements and reactions on December 3 and 4 were the subject of grand jury hearings in both Richmond and Gwinnett counties, and he must have realized that at some point he would have to submit to questioning.

Each day when Bart arrived at his clinic on Braselton Highway, he had to walk a gauntlet of reporters and photographers. The one employee he’d always been able to count on—Dara Prentice—was there for him as he tried to attract new patients despite his growing notoriety.

He was under constant surveillance—both by the media and by Gwinnett County investigators. As the pressure grew, there was the feeling among law enforcement officials that he might cut and run.

Whether Bart realized how many eyes were watching him, only he knew. He was aware of the reopened probe into Dolly Hearn’s violent death in Augusta, and he remarked scornfully to one friend that “that bitch in Augusta” was still causing him trouble.

Sergeant Scott Peebles continued to peruse the 1990 case file. Given the state of forensic science at the time, he wasn’t surprised when he found no physical evidence that might have convinced a jury that Bart Corbin had shot her. They had the blood pattern evidence now, but Peebles and DeWayne Piper had to agree with District Attorney Danny Craig that they needed more before they sought an arrest warrant.

Back in 1990, one of Dolly’s female cousins worked for the FBI. At that time she suggested to a now-retired supervisor in the sheriff’s office that the FBI lab might be able to review Dolly’s file and the notes and pictures of the crime scene and come up with a new approach, but only if he requested federal assistance.

“Now, why would I want to do that?” he asked her in a condescending tone, as if to pat her on the head for being a good—but deluded—little girl.

J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI, held that post for forty-eight years, until his death in 1972, and never encouraged his agents to exchange information with local police agencies. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, city and county police departments remained reluctant to share the results of their investigations with the FBI, recalling the old days when they could send “the Feds” information—but it wasn’t a reciprocal relationship. Fortunately, by 2004 that distrust was a thing of the past.

Scott Peebles read the old reports that traced Bart’s and Dolly’s movements during the week before she was shot—particularly the last twenty-four hours of her life. Once again, he studied the two interviews with Bart Corbin where he had given an almost minute-by-minute description of how he spent June 6, 1990. Scott’s father, Ron, sat in on those interviews, and he had harbored doubts at the time about Bart Corbin’s honesty. Could the younger Peebles go back after almost fifteen years and winnow out more information?

Beyond tracking reported witnesses, Scott Peebles had other, somewhat distracting, leads to follow. When people learned of Jenn Corbin’s death, rumors began to circulate, and Peebles received phone calls from informants who said they had heard that Bart Corbin had admitted that he’d lied about Dolly’s death. When the Augusta detective followed these rumors back to their sources, however, the leads had evaporated. One man, who was now a practicing dentist, had not yet heard that Bart’s wife was dead, and possibly murdered. He told Peebles that Bart had never admitted any guilt in Dolly’s death to him.

“Back when we were in school,” the one-time MCG dental student said, “I told someone that Bart admitted to me he had had ‘a very rocky relationship’ with Dolly, and that surprised me at the time—because I always thought they got along fine. But that was the only ‘admission’ he ever made to me.”

Another dentist was baffled when his name came up in the investigation of Bart Corbin. “I didn’t know him or the girl who died,” he told Peebles. “I graduated seven years before Corbin did.”

Back in 1990, Carlton and Barbara Hearn, frustrated when there was no arrest in the death of their daughter, had retained their own attorney and hired a private investigator themselves. Now, Scott Peebles phoned Barbara, who said the female PI was a young woman named Sarah Hargett Mims. Barbara was confident she could find Sarah Mims and also provide Peebles with the PI’s old investigative reports.

Barbara Hearn wanted Peebles to understand that Dolly had been on academic probation for only a short time—and that was because Bart had stolen and possibly destroyed her patient records and projects. “Those projects were to be what she was graded upon—and they were gone.”

Dolly had, in fact, been so convinced that it was Bart whose thefts were designed to make her fail, that she had secretly recorded a conversation with him. That tape was in the old file, and Scott Peebles listened to it, although the sound was not very clear. He heard Dolly’s voice asking Bart if there was any way she could get her dental charts back. And then Bart’s voice said, “I don’t know if you’ve got a recorder or something.”

She continued to question him about where her charts were and he finally said, “What do you want me to say? How do I know you’re not recording this?”

“I just want to know if they’re at the bottom of the city dump,” Dolly’s voice prodded.

Again, he told her he suspected she was recording what he said. There were long gaps of silence and garbled conversation on the tape, with Bart Corbin skittering on the edges of her questions. The closest he came to an admission on the tape was when he bluntly told her that there was no way she would ever get her dental charts back.

The tape from Dolly’s answering machine was also in the old file, frozen in time. Bart’s seemingly contrived message about breaking a date with her remained. In his first interview with detectives in 1990, Bart had denied going to Dolly’s apartment the day she died. In the second, he had done everything he could to make it look as though he saw her for only a brief half-hour at 1
P.M
.

Peebles wondered why Bart had said he’d gone there to ask her to have dinner that night. That warred with his message on the answering machine, where he broke a party date with her. Why had he done that? And why had Bart said on the answering machine, “I guess you’re at work.” He obviously knew she wasn’t.

Almost eerily, Bart had ended the message: “I love you.” Peebles suspected that Dolly was no longer alive when the phone message was recorded.

As Peebles read through the voluminous reports written by Sarah Hargett Mims, the private investigator whom the Hearns had hired, he saw that Bart’s reasoning was apparent. He must have realized that he had been seen on Parrish Road that day. Sarah Mims had talked to dozens of people who knew Dolly at the MCG Dental School or at the apartment complex where she was killed. Mims had done an exceptional job, but some of the people in charge of the death probe (not Ron Peebles) hadn’t been very receptive to what she discovered.

Now, when Scott Peebles compared Bart Corbin’s recall of the day Dolly died with statements made by others who had been close to her, he found many discrepancies.

DeWayne Piper was positive that Dolly’s body had been moved after she died, and he had the pictures and reports to prove it. In addition to asking his father, Scott Peebles asked Lieutenant John Gray and Sergeant Paul Johnson if they had moved her body at the crime scene. They had not. Johnson had lifted the gun from her lap but hadn’t touched her.

So far, the younger Peebles had been able to locate everyone who had been at the scene so long ago. Angela Garnto, Dolly’s roommate, was sure she had touched Dolly only lightly to check for a pulse, but not nearly enough to move her body even slightly.

When Peebles asked Angela about Dolly’s relationship with Bart, she told him it had begun shortly after she had moved in with Dolly at the Parrish Road apartment. In the beginning, the couple had gotten along well. Neither seemed to be more in love than the other. But by the fall of 1989, Dolly had begun to chafe under Bart’s insistence that she not talk to any other men. The couple had many arguments—almost all of them over Bart’s possessiveness. And soon, Bart had begun to stalk and harass both Dolly and Angela.

On June 6, 1990, Angela said goodbye to Dolly in the morning. “She was standing in our kitchen,” Angela recalled. “When I came home late that afternoon, I know I put my key in the door and turned it out of habit—but I don’t know if the door was locked or unlocked.”

Angela said she became hysterical when she realized >Dolly was dead, and she had run next door where two girls shared an apartment. They called 911, and shortly thereafter Dr. Lyndon “Lindy” Steinhaus, a resident in psychiatry who lived in the complex, arrived home. “He went in and pronounced Dolly dead,” she finished.

Angela remembered that, later, she found the sacks of groceries in the kitchen—still unpacked—as if Dolly had just come home from the store. There were also some items that Dolly must have taken from their freezer, and they had thawed on the counter.

For Angela, as for almost everyone Scott Peebles talked to, time had telescoped; Dolly’s death might as well have occurred only a week before. Angela told Peebles that she had never believed that Dolly killed herself. “She wasn’t depressed. She ate. She slept well. She was happy, even though she was getting more aggravated with some of the things Bart did. And Dolly was a very considerate person; I know she wouldn’t have shot herself on our couch for me to find her.”

Step by step, Scott Peebles reinterviewed everyone he could locate who had had any connection to Dolly Hearn’s alleged “suicide.” Technically, this was the third time witnesses were questioned. Fifteen years earlier, Richmond County investigators had talked to a number of people; Sarah Hargett Mims had spoken to even more possible witnesses some weeks later. And now Peebles was interviewing, reviewing, asking the same probing questions again. He noted that the answers didn’t change.

When he wondered about something, Scott Peebles consulted with his father to check on the older detective’s recall of certain events.

Some artifacts of Dolly’s death survived, perhaps because there had never been a definitive conclusion to the case. The Hearns still had the .38-caliber revolver that Carlton Sr. had given to Dolly. Dennis Stanfield, Dolly’s landlord and friend, had some ledger books in his files that were still stained with a few drops of Dolly’s blood.

One of the last people to see Dolly alive was someone who had scarcely known her: a young woman named Sandra Lake.* Bart had mentioned a woman who had stopped by Dolly’s apartment on June 6 while he was there talking to her. He’d even recalled that he was in the bathroom. But Peebles saw that Sarah Mim’s report on his story was somewhat different.

In 1990, Sandra had just begun working at Dennis Stanfield’s company—Stanfield Home Builders. On Monday, June 4, Dolly had come into the office to get some check stubs so she could enter the information into Stanfield’s business ledger. The two women met and talked briefly. Dolly called later, saying she needed more check stubs to complete the job. Since Sandra didn’t know her, she was concerned at first when Dolly said she would come over to the office to look for them, but it was soon apparent that Dennis trusted Dolly. While Dolly sat on the floor, going through files, the women talked about Sandra’s job and her child. Dolly had remarked, “I’ll be an old lady before I have any children. Lots of guys propose to you, but it’s not easy to find the right one.”

They chatted again on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Dennis delivered the last of the check stubs to Dolly. When Sandra came back from lunch shortly before 1
P.M.
that day, she discovered that she had inadvertently locked herself out of the Stanfield Homes office. She knew Dolly had a key, so she drove the short distance to the parking lot in front of the wing where Dolly’s apartment was. There were no cars parked there, but when Sandra turned down the side road to the lower lot, she saw Dolly’s Trans Am. A silver Monte Carlo was parked next to it, and Sandra noted it had no license plate. A work truck of some kind was parked at the far end of the lot. Bart told detectives in his 1990 interview that he drove a silver Monte Carlo.