Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (8 page)

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

1964–1996

J
ENN
C
ORBIN GREW UP
as Jenni Barber, the second daughter of three, in a family so typical of middle-class America that their losing her to murder could chill the heart of any parent.

Thomas Maxwell “Max” Barber and his wife Narda both came from strict families. Max was born in Logan, West Virginia, the youngest of four handsome sons. His father was a coal mine engineer, who taught his sons respect toward their elders and gallantry toward women.

“My mother was a wonderful cook,” Max remembered, “but I always wondered if I would get enough to eat. My dad would serve my mother first, then himself, and then my brothers, starting with the oldest. Being the youngest, I always hoped there would be something left.”

It was a family joke, and Max Barber did get enough; he grew to be six feet three inches tall, a star athlete who was offered a basketball scholarship to Florida Southern University in Bradenton, Florida, where the elder Barbers eventually settled.

Although Max extolled Narda’s cooking, he would always tease her that she couldn’t equal his mother when it came to banana pudding and lemon meringue pie.

Narda Upton was the only child born to career Army Colonel William F. Upton and her mother, Sylvia. Her father was forty-five and her mother thirty-three when she was born. Home base for them was a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, but the service family traveled a great deal, and both Narda’s parents were assigned to the Pentagon when she was a small girl.

“My dad retired when I was quite young,” she remembered. “And then we really traveled. They bought an Airstream trailer and we went all around America, so I got to see a lot of the country. Eventually, they bought our home on Lido Quay in the Bay of Mexico off Sarasota, Florida.”

It was in January 1964 when Max first met Narda. He was two years older and about nine inches taller than the bubbly girl with lovely eyes and thick wavy hair.

“The first time I saw her, she was dancing with someone at a sock hop in Bradenton, Florida. I had a date that evening, and she was a friend of Narda’s and she introduced Narda to me. It was like magic immediately! The beauty, the voice, the composure she possessed. Narda, her date, my date, and I left the dance together. I believe we went to McDonald’s in Sarasota. I was the driver that night, and I deliberately drove Narda home last. I remember well walking her to the front door of her home and thanking her for the company. The following day, I had plans to drive to Tampa to watch the cars race at the Tampa Dragway, and I was already planning how to see her again.”

Narda had mentioned on the night of the sock hop that she would be taking the bus to St. Petersburg, where she was attending college.

“I wanted to know more about her,” Max said, “so I looked up her phone number and called her. When she answered the phone, we made small talk and then I asked if she would like to accompany me to the races and said I would take her to school from there. She told me that her parents would have to approve, and that she would ask them. They agreed to meet me and talk with me about driving Narda to school by way of Tampa.”

Narda’s father was very cautious about who his daughter dated. Max Barber remembered the grilling he got from the colonel, who virtually interrogated him military-style about his intentions toward Narda. Her father wanted to be sure Max was a safe driver, and an honorable young man.

Max barely remembered answering. “I was so smitten with Narda. As I recall, we had a wonderful day.”

Narda felt a strong attraction to Max from the moment they met, just as he was captivated by her. Neither of them wanted to date anyone else. They continued to date for several months before marrying, on January 28, 1964. They were young and the whole world lay ahead of them.

Max had a good job, and despite his gentle manner, his sincerity shone through, making him a great salesman. He moved up through increasingly prestigious positions at Sears—specializing in “hard merchandise,” big-ticket appliances like refrigerators, washers, and dryers. Sears transferred its managers frequently, and the Barbers would live in many cities: Sarasota, Florida; Augusta, Georgia; Bowling Green, Kentucky; High Point, North Carolina; Columbus, Cleveland, and Westerville, Ohio.

Shaun Rajel, their first daughter, was born in Sarasota in 1966. Five years later, Jennifer Monique arrived in Bowling Green. She was born on January 25, 1971, and then Heather Nicole came along in High Point, North Carolina, in September 1974.

After so many years and so many cities, the Barbers moved to Gwinnett County, Georgia, to a neighborhood of young families in Lawrenceville. Their split-level home was new, built with similar houses on what had recently been acres of woods. The lots there radiated from the center of a circle, most of them narrow in front, widening in back so that their backyard fences touched. It was an ideal place to raise children. The Barbers could talk over their back and side fences to four other families.

“We shared our good news and not-so-good news over our fences,” Narda recalled. “Our neighbors have always rallied around each other for years, some thirty years now.”

Pine trees, oaks, and poplars grew from saplings over those decades. Narda planted a garden every year, full of the sweet potatoes Max liked, along with peas, okra, tomatoes, and pole beans.

Kids in the area played in each other’s yards and swam in the country club pool just beyond their fences. It wasn’t a fancy and expensive country club—but it, too, represented the solidarity of longtime friends who grew older together, scarcely noting the years that passed.

Rajel was a brunette, and petite like her mother, but Jenn and Heather took after Max; they both grew tall enough to be models; their wavy hair was as thick as Narda’s.

Narda is an artist, and her paintings and other art projects were hung throughout the Barbers’ home. She had a studio at the rear of the property, where she experimented with many different techniques and media.

As most parents do, Narda and Max Barber cherished memories of their girls when they were small—especially Jenn. “She was sweet and kind—always—but there were moments,” Narda recalled. “One time, I had left several cans of spray paint on the back porch, and I warned the girls not to touch them. Of course, they all promised they wouldn’t. Well, some time passed and I heard Jenni sobbing her heart out. I went to check on her, but she wouldn’t look at me. When she finally looked up, I could see that she had sprayed herself in the face with red paint and her little nose was solid red. I think she thought it was going to stay that way forever.”

And then there was the episode with Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

“Max liked chocolate syrup on ice cream, and the girls all did, too. I explained to them that it was for special occasions, and that they weren’t allowed to take it out of the refrigerator without permission.

“One day, I went to get it, and it wasn’t there. Nobody admitted that they had taken it. I noticed that Jenni was wearing a jacket all zipped up the front—and it really wasn’t cold enough for a jacket. When I asked her why, and suggested she unzip it, she kept coming up with reasons not to. Well, she didn’t have a single drop of chocolate on her—not that I could see—but when we unzipped her jacket, that little girl had chocolate syrup from just below her chin down to her waist! It was hard not to laugh.”

A
LL OF THE
B
ARBER GIRLS
attended Central Gwinnett High School. Rajel graduated and married young, giving birth to a daughter who would be a decade older than her cousins born to Jenn and Heather. Rajel moved out west for a while, where she invited a small boy into her home after she realized he lived with a huge, motherless family in her California neighborhood. When Rajel and her husband had to move away, she knew she couldn’t leave Joey behind. He became part of the Barber family.

Rajel joined a congregation much stricter than the Methodist church her parents attended. Her life was quite different from those of her younger sisters, who were still teenagers while she was a married woman. It was natural that Jenn and Heather grew closer in their high school years. Both of them were recruited for the basketball team; at their height, they were the most sought after for the squad.

Jenn dated off and on in high school. She tended to be the loyal half of any relationship. The son of a couple who were close friends and neighbors of Max and Narda loved Jenn from afar for years, but they were never closer than buddies who had grown up together.

Jenn Barber took after her mother in artistic talent. While Narda was the professional artist, who painted with sweeping free-form technique, Jenn was far more precise, drawing and painting with exquisite balance and straight lines, angles and intersections that fit neatly.

When Jenn went off to college, she headed for Savannah, that picturesque and sultry city—rife with history and live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss—that sits far south of Atlanta, almost on the Georgia-Florida state line. Jenn enjoyed her years at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Established in 1978, SCAD, as it is commonly known, is a relatively new college, but the site harks back to the nineteenth century. The private college purchased and renovated many of the dilapidated red-brick edifices of another era that were located on the famous “twenty-four squares” of the old town section. Where there was once an armory for volunteers, cotton warehouses, and even coffin factories, classrooms blossomed.

Jenn Barber had wonderful years in Savannah. She wasn’t sure what she wanted as a career because she enjoyed and was interested in so many things. She liked photography, but she also was happy with interior design. One day she hoped to have her own house, and she knew it would be a masterpiece of balance and good taste. She loved anything that called for her creative side, and she was skilled in many areas. It was difficult for her to choose one.

When she returned to Gwinnett County, Jenn was still waffling a little about what she wanted to do. She stayed in touch with many friends she had met in Savannah, but in the end she signed up to take classes in pre-nursing at Gordon College. The one thing Jenn did not want to be was a housewife without a career. She was too confident and independent to walk a few paces behind a man. She did hope for love—romantic love.

But then, most women do.

Jenn thought she had finally found that when she was in her mid-twenties. She shared a small bungalow in the Virginia Highlands area of Atlanta with a man she had dated for months. It was the perfect house for romance, situated next to a charming little park. But their relationship didn’t last, and they both moved on without hard feelings.

After the breakup, Jenn moved home to Lawrenceville for a while. She didn’t intend to have her parents support her while she figured out her life. She took a job at Barnacle’s Oyster Bar in Duluth, Georgia, where she made good tips as a waitress and more as a bartender. She was known for her White Russians. The management noted her unfailingly gracious connection to patrons and her concern for their comfort. Jenn’s smile and her height made her a standout. More than that, her bosses saw how efficient she was and how quickly she learned the way the restaurant worked. She was soon promoted to shift manager.

Jenn wasn’t really looking for a permanent relationship. She dated casually, and she had many friends. She liked her job at Barnacle’s, content that whatever was meant to happen in her future would happen. Rajel was married, and Heather was off at college. The Barber family was in a good place.

B
ART
C
ORBIN HAD FINISHED
dental school. He filled in for Dr. Richard Huey in Huey’s dental practice in Lithonia in 1991 when the older dentist recovered from a hand injury. He was looking forward to having his own practice as soon as possible, but he had to work for several other established dentists until he saved enough money to open a dental clinic. For a few years, he volunteered his services one Friday a month at a free clinic for the indigent: the Ben Massell Dental Clinic, where Barbara Jones, the clinic supervisor, recalled, “We only saw his giving side here.”

One day far in the future, Jenn would ask her sister Heather, “Do you ever wonder about what your husband did or who he knew before you met him?” And Heather would answer, “No, I know what Doug’s life was like.”

“I don’t,” was Jenn’s reply. She knew virtually nothing about what Bart had done and with whom he might have been involved before she met him. It hadn’t seemed to matter at first.

In retrospect, it was easy to see what Jenn Barber saw in the man she fell in love with. Bart was handsome and muscular, with chiseled features, a man who knew precisely how to dress and how to approach women. As far as Jenn knew when she met him, he had had no serious relationships since he finished dental school. That was true enough—he had had no important public relationships. Sometime in his early career as Dr. Bart Corbin, however, Bart had begun a clandestine affair with a woman who worked in the business side of a dental practice where he occasionally moonlighted. It was a dangerous liaison. The woman was married, with two small children, and she was torn between her husband and Bart—who had led her to believe that she was very special to him, so special that he suggested that their lives would always be closely connected.

Jenn knew nothing about this woman when she first met Bart. Almost certainly, she didn’t know about a different woman decades older than Bart who some would say was also engaged in a physical affair with him.

No. Dr. Bart Corbin appeared to be a most eligible bachelor, and his meeting with Jenn Barber providential. He was a frequent customer at Barnacle’s; he made it a regular stop after he finished a day of treating dental patients. His younger brother Bobby worked at Barnacle’s as the doorman, and Bobby’s future wife, Suzanne, worked there, too. It was 1995 when Bobby introduced Bart to Jenn. She liked the fact that he was very tall. At six feet three inches, he could actually look down on her, something that didn’t happen very often.