Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (43 page)

Barbara and Carlton Hearn would also be attending this first trial in Lawrenceville, along with Dolly’s brothers, Gil and Carlton Jr.

That summer was very long for all of them. They had geared up for trials three times before, only to have the dates pass without the prosecution going forward.

A
S PREPARATION
for the trials continued, Porter and Ross reviewed their potential witness list. There were eighty-four names there, and they had fifteen pieces of evidence set. Porter would probably handle the opening statement and the closing arguments, along with questioning the families and friends of the two victims. Ross would question the witnesses expert in forensic technology: the Internet explorations, the information caught on the hard drives, and the way Bart Corbin’s cell phone calls had left damning trails behind him. Ross would also lead Russ Halcome through his explanations about a myriad of charts and displays in a way that jurors could understand.

The gun? They still had no evidence that would allow them to connect it to Bart Corbin.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
IVE

AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 2006

D
ANNY
P
ORTER AND
C
HUCK
R
OSS
were prepared to dig in as the September trial approached. Once it began, they would have tunnel vision, thinking only of what went on in the courtroom.

The Corbin family gathered round Bart. They believed in him totally, and were determined to stand by him. Brad’s wife, Edwina Tims, had become the family spokes-person, although she and Bart’s twin hadn’t been married very long when Jenn died. Perhaps inevitably, the once-friendly relationship between Jenn’s and Bart’s families seemed irretrievably broken.

As August became September, it was still warm and humid in the suburbs of Atlanta, but the sun set earlier. Heather bought school clothes for her youngsters—Dalton, Dillon, Max, and Sylvia. Max and Narda took a short vacation, but they were afraid to go very far, in case there were no further postponements. Once the trial started, they expected to be in Judge Michael Clark’s courtroom until almost Thanksgiving.

Orientation for prospective jurors was set to begin on September 8. Danny Porter had asked that there be a huge pool of jurors available. Beginning with 650 possibles, they would need to find fourteen people who, supposedly, had formed no opinions about the guilt or innocence of Dr. Barton Corbin. Winnowing that number down to find twelve jurors and two alternates could take two or three weeks. Only then would the actual trial begin.

Narda and Max Barber were taking it one day at a time. They decided to attend jury selection and to keep going if they found they could bear to hear the testimony. So did many of Bart’s family members. Edwina Tims planned to be in the courtroom every day, sitting in a back row of the courtroom. Word was that Dr. and Mrs. Carlton Hearn would be attending this first trial. They wanted to see Bart Corbin face a jury of his peers. They had endured sixteen years when it seemed that everyone but her family had forgotten Dolly and how she died.

There was pain on every side; a family watching someone they love on trial for murder suffers anguish, too. Connie Corbin had done her best to raise her three boys without the presence of their father, and she had been so proud of Bart, her son, the dentist.

I
T WAS
L
ABOR
D
AY
, 2006,
and jury selection for Bart Corbin’s trial in Gwinnett County was only days away. David Wolfe and Bruce Harvey were still lobbying for a change of venue, which is a standard defense motion in almost every murder trial with any pretrial publicity. They announced that the voir-dire process (where attorneys question potential jurors directly) would probably reveal how many people in Gwinnett County had already formed opinions about Bart Corbin’s guilt, as a result of what the lawyers considered massive publicity that would make it impossible for their client to get a fair trial.

While Judge Clark had ruled earlier against moving the trial, he agreed to consider hearing their renewed arguments if it should begin to appear that picking an unprejudiced jury in Gwinnett County was unlikely.

Although they were continually making motions, Harvey and Wolfe were actually only patching up every possible crevice in their case. In truth, they felt confident. No one had heard the gunshot when Jenn Corbin was killed, and her exact time of death—measurable by several factors such as the temperature in her house that night—might possibly, in the defense team’s opinion, have been as late as six in the morning. They would use that to lessen the impact of Bart’s cell phone call at 1:58
A.M.
hitting on the tower so close to Bogan Gates Drive.

They could say the cross-hatched gun butt pattern wouldn’t hold fingerprints.

They also believed they could tear apart the similarities between Jenn’s and Dolly’s cases. They might have been whistling in the dark, but in front of reporters they scoffed at the idea, insisting that the two cases weren’t all that much alike.

And, of course, they would take Jenn’s sad little online romance and shape it to blend into their theory that she probably had been suicidal. They would portray Jenn as a distraught woman, who believed that Bart could successfully prove in a custody hearing that she was a bad mother and a wanton woman. Wouldn’t suicidal thoughts be expected in a woman who had lost a “lover” who never existed, and was soon to lose her home and her children?

In the hands of brilliant defense attorneys, a case that was heavily circumstantial and with physical evidence that might confuse a lay jury was certainly no slam-dunk for the prosecution.

T
HERE WOULD BE TWO PHASES
in jury selection. The Court would hear first from people who felt it would be a great hardship on them to serve—those with small children to care for, or health issues, or those whose jobs assured the public good. Those who did not speak English would certainly be excused. Gwinnett remained a small-town county in many ways. There were bound to be some who actually knew the principals or the attorneys, or felt they might be called as witnesses.

Forty people from the first pool asked to be excused. By September 12, only five people who had been questioned were deemed neutral enough to go on the second list. There were forty-two more possibles in the second pool. Both the prosecution and defense teams would have nine peremptory challenges to excuse jurors without cause. And they would undoubtedly lose a few more for cause.

Nevertheless, Danny Porter said he expected to begin opening statements on September 25.

It was true that the charges against Dr. Barton Corbin had garnered widespread publicity, but perhaps it wasn’t so pervasive that it would be difficult to select a jury. Heather Tierney’s website in memory of her sister now had almost 400,000 “hits.” Some of those, however, were multiple drop-ins by the same readers, and posts had come in from all over the world. Court TV, Greta Van Susteren, Nancy Grace,
Inside Edition,
and
People
magazine were all interested in covering the trial.
Dateline NBC
and
48 Hours
were preparing documentaries of the Corbins’ story.

As the trial date neared, Bart Corbin was anxious to present his side of the story, convinced that any jury they picked would believe him if he testified. Always before, he had referred questions to his attorneys and he remained a somewhat mysterious figure, his image caught briefly on television or newspaper cameras as he was led in and out of various court proceedings or back to jail. To those who didn’t know him, he was an enigma. But those who did know him were sure his arrogance would not allow him to plea-bargain to lesser charges. Surely he would demand to get on the witness stand and explain his innocence.

The consensus among most Georgians seemed to be that the lanky dentist was guilty, but survivors of the two dead women still worried about the possibility of an acquittal. Narda Barber kept going back to the what-ifs of a trial. The tenth anniversary of Jenn and Bart’s wedding had passed on September 1, but no one seemed to remember it or the joy and hopes Jenn had then. Her mother had been stunned to learn that Bart had been able to walk away from Dolly’s death and go on with his life, brushing Dolly’s memory off his shoulders as he would a shred of cobweb.

Would the same thing happen with Jenn’s death?

This wasn’t a television drama; this was real life. And the likelihood of some decisive evidence being discovered at the last minute was slim.

C
HUCK
R
OSS AND
I
NVESTIGATOR
B
OB
S
LEZAK
were absent from the courtroom activity on September 6. They had a date in Superior Court in Troy, Alabama. Ross had drafted a material witness order that he planned to present to a judge in that city. Court in Troy started at nine, and Ross and Slezak rolled out of Gwinnett County at 5
A.M.
, even before the sun began to lighten the sky.

Richard Wilson didn’t know what a “material witness” was, and he had consistently refused to leave his hometown. But now, he would have to. Ross’s testimony convinced the Alabama judge to issue the material witness order, a ruling that was an unpleasant surprise for Bart Corbin’s good friend.

What Porter and Ross would ask Wilson once they had him on the witness stand was still up in the air. Mike Pearson had never given up on tracking the revolver that had killed Jenn Corbin. He was just stubborn enough to keep trying. But he’d run out of options.

Pearson was about to get an idea from the investigator who shared his office, one of the many cubicles opening off the long hallways of the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office.

Jeff Lamphier might have been the only investigator in Danny Porter’s office who didn’t have a smidgen of a Southern accent. Lamphier was from New York State, and he was a natural. He didn’t have a college degree. He believed—and rightly so—that for him the best training came on the job. Lamphier signed on first with the DeKalb County, Georgia, DA’s office. After eighteen months, he moved to Gwinnett County. There they quickly began to call him “The Smartest Man in the World.”

Mike Pearson described himself as a “blabber,” who was always talking, while Lamphier spoke only when he had something important to say.

“Jeff was over there typing,” Pearson remembered.

“And we’re sitting back to back. I’m saying, ‘I know that guy in Alabama knows something, but I can’t prove the. 38 came from there. Everything points to Alabama.’”

As Pearson vented his frustration about his unsuccessful search to link Bart Corbin to the death gun, Lamphier whirled around from his computer, and asked quietly, “Have you tried this?”

“Tried what?”

“An off-line search.”

“No.”

“Has anyone else?”

Mike Pearson had done any number of traces—through the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), NCIC (National Crime Information Center), the GCIC (Georgia Crime Information Center), with no luck.

Now, Lamphier reminded him, “You have the gun, you have the serial number, and an off-line search goes back ten years. Try it.”

He handed Pearson the name of a young woman at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and said, “I hope it helps.”

They were so close to trial. They needed this badly.

Most legitimate gun buyers check with police departments to see if secondhand weapons have ever been stolen or used in a crime. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Georgia Crime Information Center can get access to those inquiries about guns by auditing the NCIC records over the preceding ten years.

“If any police department or police agency in the United States has ever checked a gun, it will show up on an off-line search,” Pearson explained. “It will show the day, the time, the place, and the officer who asked for the information—usually by radioing the dispatch operator to see what’s on record for a particular gun.”

Mike Pearson gave the woman at the GBI the information on the make, model, and serial number of the .38 that killed Jenn Corbin.

“By lunchtime, she called me back. She said that she had been able to go back ten years, and she hoped it helped. She had found six entries off-line on this gun.”

The first four weren’t useful. They were the inquiries that the Gwinnett County DA’s office itself had submitted.

But there were two more.

Pearson ran his finger down the page. There was a query in 1996 radioed in to the Montgomery, Alabama, Sheriff’s Office at 2
A.M.
That was ten years back, but at least it placed the mystery gun in Alabama.

“But the next one was from the Troy, Alabama Police Department—September 2002. Bingo! I thought I’d fall out of my chair!” Pearson recalled. “I couldn’t even talk at first because I was so excited. I finally yelled at Jack, “This gun’s been run in Troy!’”

Pearson and Jack Burnette made a phone call to the Troy Police Department and learned that the officer who asked for information on the .38 in 2002 had been a captain in their department, since retired. Mike Pearson called him and asked for details about the gun. The retired officer did his best to remember the circumstances on that morning in September, four years earlier. But the memory evaded him; he’d run so many guns off-line. It could have been during a traffic stop, but it might just as well have been for somebody who simply hailed him over.

Pearson asked about the 911 tapes in the Troy Police Department, knowing it was a long shot. It would take a massive search to find a tape four years back, and there was always the chance that its contents had been erased and taped over with more recent calls.