Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (40 page)

“Nobody was there,” she recalled. “But I knew it was Jenn—just like the old Jenn, who was so organized—telling me to get up and get the kids ready for school.”

Almost every day, Heather added something to her Internet journal, and it helped her get through the worst days. She wrote that she was grateful to be so busy with the children that she sometimes forgot her grief. And she shared the things she couldn’t really explain with the thousands of people who read her website about Jenn.

One day that spring, Heather heard a faint sound, a “ping…ping…ping.” It was coming from somewhere in her house, and she held her breath as she searched, hearing the insistent chime grow louder and then fading. It took Heather two days to locate its source. She hadn’t yet had the heart to go through Jenn’s things, but now she recognized the sound of the alarm on Jenn’s watch, and she finally found it caught up in her sister’s curlers, snagged on the blond hairs there. The watch, set months before to remind Jenn that she needed to pick her sons up at Harmony School, had, for some unexplainable reason, begun to chime. Its small sound was somehow comforting.

“You know your life has changed,” Heather had written in February, “when you spend Valentine’s Day with your husband at Chuck E. Cheeses!”

It was clear that Doug and Heather Tierney put the children—all four of them—first.

In April, a new website appeared on the Internet: “Friends of Bart Corbin.” Brad, Bart’s twin, was the webmaster, and the introduction of the new site said, “This web site has been created by Bart Corbin’s friends to express our disappointment at unjustified assassination by private and public parties and the voyeuristic behavior of the media. Our purpose is to ask you to keep an open mind and think beyond what is published in the press and the CaringBridge.com website [host to Heather’s site].”

The Corbins’ site featured numerous pictures of Bart and Jenn in happier days, photos of the children, and extolled Bart’s virtues, while denying any possibility of his guilt. It also requested donations to help pay for Bart’s legal expenses. He had been the shining light in his family, and they were having a difficult time trying to raise funds for his defense in two trials that would surely last weeks, even months.

Dolly Hearn’s brother Gil had a website, too, filled with photographs and memories of Dolly. She seemed as alive as she had ever been. Years before, her family had set up a scholarship in her name at the MCG Dental School, and many students had already benefited from it.

Soon, discussion groups on the Corbin case began to spring up on the Internet. This was a whole new venue for grieving, communicating, arguing, and politicizing. Just as the forensic investigation had moved into technical realms, so had those who cared for Jenn, Bart, and Dolly.

Would future jurors read these Internet pages? Perhaps. But although Danny Porter objected to the anonymous discussions about specifics and quality of evidence on the Corbin sites, he acknowledged that shutting down websites or home pages could violate the First Amendment. He and David Wolfe discussed problem areas and reached some agreement that certain posts should be removed.

The Internet speculation was akin to discussions about crimes a century ago among locals sitting around a pot-bellied stove at a country store—except that, in 2005, their opinions could instantly travel around the world.

DA D
ANNY
P
ORTER
and Senior Assistant DA Chuck Ross were gearing up for trial in Gwinnett County, just as Danny Craig and Jason Troiano were in Richmond County. Ideally, a prosecuting duo would have attorneys who complemented each other—one slightly more skilled at oratory and persuasive arguments, the other adept at the cross-examination. In Gwinnett County, Porter was the cross-examiner who could ask a series of questions that would lead a witness or defendant down a dead-end street, and then pounce and trip them up when their lies became apparent.

Chuck Ross was the “natural arguer.” Always on the debate teams in high school and college, he had abandoned his ambition to earn a Ph.D. in political science when he became fascinated with criminal law. Ross paid his way through law school working as a bartender, and, even after he became an attorney, he invented somewhat bizarre drinks. Two of his specialties were the “Key Lime Pie” and the “Tiramisu” martinis. He was also a gourmet cook, but his remarkable knowledge of computer technology was what made him essential to the Corbin case.

Aware that their evidence might confuse a lay jury, Ross, the senior assistant DA and DA Danny Porter knew they were quite possibly in for the courtroom battle of their lives as they prepared the prosecution’s case against Bart Corbin.

Everyone involved—from Bart Corbin, the defendant, to detectives and prosecutors in two counties, the families of the victims, the media, and the public—was anxious to see the case go to trial. Everyone, that is, with the exception of Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe. Corbin’s defense team seemed determined to delay any trials for months—years—if they could. Some of their motions were capricious, and some were based on precedent-setting rulings in the state of Georgia.

And yet the summer of 2005 passed without a trial date, and hearings set for early September were postponed after Bart Corbin’s defense team filed a motion claiming that the Gwinnett County investigators had illegally obtained evidence from the Corbins’ home. They also wanted the information derived from the electronic surveillance of his cell phone thrown out.

On September 8, 2005, a first trial date was finally set: January 9, 2006. District Attorney Danny Craig in Augusta was scheduled to go first, prosecuting Bart Corbin for the murder of Dolly Hearn.

In the interim, Corbin’s attorneys continued to file motions. On October 31, David Wolfe and Bruce Harvey, with a bit of bluster, asked for a
fourteen-year
delay in prosecution. Their reasoning was that it had taken Richmond County fourteen years to charge their client in Dolly’s murder, so it was only fair that the trial should be put off for that long.

On December 7, a year and three days after Jenn Corbin’s murder, a preliminary hearing was postponed after Harvey and Wolfe submitted a motion to have both the evidence retrieved after a search warrant on the Bogan Gates house and all evidence gleaned from Halcome’s electronic surveillance barred from the upcoming trial in Augusta. They were determined not to have any evidence from the Jenn Corbin case pop up in the Augusta prosecution of Bart Corbin for Dolly Hearn’s murder. If they could get it thrown out early, they wouldn’t have to worry about it.

On December 14, 2005, the pretrial hearing was held in Superior Court Judge Carl C. Brown’s Augusta courtroom. DA Craig listed all the similar circumstances that were part of both Dolly Hearn’s and Jenn Corbin’s murders, and submitted that just before Dolly’s death Bart had told “a good friend” that he had planned the “perfect murder.”

Again, both the Hearn and the Barber families were in the courtroom, this time for a hearing that would be exquisitely painful for them. Bruce Harvey presented a slide show. The first frame was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, something that had nothing to do with either case. But, later, there were sexually provocative and incendiary quotes from Jenn Corbin’s emails to Anita Hearn, the words hugely magnified on the screen. Narda Barber realized that the defense undoubtedly intended to use these slides in front of a jury, and her heart sank. Taken out of context, they were shocking. Her eyes filled with tears, and she dreaded the upcoming trials even more than she had before.

Next, Harvey painted Dolly as an academic failure who had been in danger of flunking out of dental school. He did not, of course, mention that Bart had stolen the projects that determined her grades for an entire quarter.

The defense position was that both women had been suicidal, and that Bart Corbin was about to be prosecuted for deaths that weren’t even homicides. He suggested that Dolly had been depressed because she and Bart were breaking up, and Jenn had been shocked and saddened to find out the real identity of her email correspondent

Danny Craig pointed out that, in his opinion, Harvey’s take on the dead women was completely backward; the victims had been anxious to be rid of Bart Corbin, and what Harvey saw as indications that the victims were suicidal was really evidence of Corbin’s guilt.

“You don’t jilt Dr. Corbin,” the Augusta prosecutor intoned. “You die [if you try].”

Undeterred, Harvey and Wolfe asked Judge Brown to drop all charges against Bart Corbin in the case of Dolly Hearn. They stressed that so much time had passed that witnesses’ memories had blurred and changed, and evidence had been lost. They suggested sarcastically that the state must have waited for Corbin to kill another person to advance their case against him for Dolly’s alleged murder.

Craig scoffed at that. “That is preposterous,” he said. “And long delays usually help—rather than hurt—the defendant’s case.”

Moreover, he assured the judge that the interview transcripts and police files from the 1990 case involving Dolly were intact, and that the gunshot residue test results were perfectly adequate.

Judge Brown reserved his decision on the defense motions.

A
NOTHER
C
HRISTMAS HAD PASSED
without a trial. Indeed, it would be a far longer delay for any trial in either victim’s case than anyone involved could have guessed. But at least at the moment the one trial date was set: January 9, 2006. Shortly after Christmas, Danny Craig and his chief assistant DA, Jason Troiano, were scheduled to begin the trial in Dolly Hearn’s murder.

January 9 arrived, but there was no trial. Instead, in yet another pretrial hearing, the two Dannies—Craig and Porter—announced that they had agreed that the positioning of the trials should be switched.

Danny Porter would prosecute Bart first in Gwinnett County for Jenn’s death. After that, Porter hoped to move to Augusta and, as a specially appointed prosecutor in that venue, continue in a second trial, prosecuting Bart in the case of Dolly Hearn.

Danny Craig was open to that, but it would mean that there would be no trial at all in January. Now, Judge Brown postponed the first trial until April in Gwinnett County.

It was beginning to be difficult to keep track of the players and dates without a program.

As he sat in Judge Brown’s courtroom, Bart Corbin’s complexion was the pale yellow of prison pallor, and he appeared to be even thinner than before. His gaunt frame had lost all muscle tone; he was no longer working out in a health club. He spent his days and nights in a jail cell, avoiding other prisoners.

Bart wrote to people he had been close to in the past, including Shelly Mansfield, the girlfriend of his youth at the University of Georgia. Shelly was thousands of miles away, living in another country, married to someone else—but she had heard of his arrest and written to him, asking if there was anything she could do for him.

Bart’s first letter to Shelly sounded “like the old Bart,” Shelly recalled. He was hopeful that she might be a character witness for him when he went to trial. Remembering the gentle “boy” she’d known when he was nineteen, she felt sorry for him, and wrote back, telling him that she would consider being a defense witness.

But she was shocked by the acid tone of his second letter, a letter filled with vituperative and cruel criticism of his own son, Dalton. He was a grown man complaining about a little boy. She realized that Bart Corbin was no longer the person she remembered. She wondered if he ever had been. She didn’t write to him again.

W
ITH THE LATEST TRIAL DATE
coming up in April, there were motions to rule on. The most serious was undoubtedly the question of whether the startling similarities between Dolly’s and Jenn’s murders would be allowed in both trials. If they were, it would be a coup for the prosecution. And if they were not, jurors in Dolly’s trial would not hear about Jenn’s death fourteen years later. Conversely, Jenn’s jurors wouldn’t know about Dolly. Legally, incorporating evidence from two different homicides in one trial would be allowed only as “similar transactions.”

Since the Gwinnett County trial was going first, it was now up to Judge Michael Clark to rule on the defense motions.

On Friday, February 17, 2006, Clark had a less compelling motion to deal with. It was silly enough that even the defendant didn’t seem too concerned. Surprisingly, Bart appeared less drawn, and he wasn’t as thin and gloomy as he sat at the defense table. Now, he had a slight tan, and he had actually gained a little weight. It was obvious that he was chewing gum, an insult to the Court, and he turned to wink at his mother, his brothers, and Brad’s wife, Edwina, who were in the courtroom. He ignored Jenn’s and Dolly’s families, however, his eyes seeming to sweep deliberately in another direction, focusing in the distance. It was almost as if he had never known them. He had only met Carlton and Barbara Hearn once, but he had been a beloved member of Jenn’s extended family for almost a decade.

Judge Clark denied the defense request to delay the trials for fourteen years. He was not amused by this pretrial motion. Even Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe would admit they had initiated the “fourteen-year delay” as a way to draw attention to the case.

Clark responded in kind, offering the defense a deal. If they would agree to a state motion that Corbin waive his right to bond and agree to stay in jail for the next fourteen years, Clark would stipulate to postponing the trials for a similar period.

Clearly, the defendant had no intention of doing that, and Clark moved ahead, setting the next pretrial hearing for March 24, 2006.

Bobby Corbin spoke to the press, saying that he wondered if Porter “really had a case. All I hear is ‘similar transaction.’ That’s crazy.’”

He told reporters that Danny Porter’s case consisted of only “smoke and mirrors,” and that there was no real evidence implicating his brother.