Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (9 page)

Bart was sometimes a bit inscrutable, but that made him more interesting, and he was certainly fun to be around. Like almost everyone who described Bart’s best trait, Jenn was drawn to his wittiness. He could offer a quick and hilarious comment on almost anything that came up in conversation.

And Jenn knew that Bart stared at her when he didn’t know she was looking. That was nice.

They began to date, and Jenn was in high spirits. Bart appeared to be happy, too, and falling as much in love with her as she was with him. When Jenn brought Bart home to meet Max and Narda, they were pleased. Although he was seven years older than Jenn, she and Bart seemed to be a good match. Max Barber watched Bart’s interaction with Jenn, and he was gratified to observe that the tall dentist seemed to care a great deal for his daughter. That was the most important thing to Max, who was very protective of his three daughters. As many fathers would, he liked the fact that Bart was a dentist, a professional man. He would make a good living in a “helping” profession.

There was only one thing that Max found off-putting: Bart’s conversation was sprinkled with profanity. That wasn’t the mark of a gentleman, and it grated on Max. Still, as he came to know Bart better, he no longer noticed his swearing. He liked Bart as a future husband for his “Jenni,” and the two men had a lot of interests in common; they often went fishing or boating together.

Of course Jenn’s parents didn’t know about the other women in Bart’s life. He kept that side of himself completely obscured. But he certainly did not give up his younger paramour. As it turned out, the older woman wasn’t around long enough to cause any waves.

Jenn often confided in Narda, her father Max, and her sisters. But she tried never to tell them more than she thought they could handle easily. During her early courtship, there was nothing untoward to tell them.

Narda was anything but judgmental. After Jenn and Bart had dated for a few months, she assumed that Jenn had probably stayed over with Bart on occasion, spending the night. Although Jenn currently lived at home with Max and Narda, she had lived with her former boyfriend.

“Jenn was not a kid,” Narda recalled. “She’d been to college, tried nursing school, and now she was home with us and working a lot. She wasn’t a teenager—she was twenty-four when she began to date Bart. She had lived apart from us. All three of our daughters were constantly coming and going.

“Eventually, Bart had to go on a dental seminar that was held in a ski resort in Colorado, and he invited Jenn. But she was working and couldn’t go. Still, they stayed in very close touch all the time he was gone. When he came back, they saw each other more and more. Then there was another meeting that was built around a trip to Italy. This time, Jenn went, and they were together almost all the time after that.”

They went everywhere with another couple on the Italy trip, Mary and Gary Lands. Mary, six years older than Jenn, was a striking brunette, as friendly and warm as Jenn herself. Bart got along very well with Gary Lands. They would remain close friends after they got back to the Atlanta area.

After they had been back from Italy a few weeks, Jenn called her mother and said she needed to talk. “She asked me ‘Was I sitting down?’ And I told her ‘yes.’”

“Well, Bart and I have made a decision—and I’m pregnant,” Jenn said in a happy voice. “Bart and I have decided we’re going to get married and have the baby.”

Apparently they had considered other choices, including ending the pregnancy or adoption, but Jenn hadn’t wanted either of those alternatives.

Narda recalled being thrilled. “I had never seen—or thought of her—being a mom before. Jenn was more career oriented. But now she was asking me how quickly could we plan a wedding? Could they have a big wedding? Jenn wanted it. And somehow we did it in six weeks—an outdoor wedding at The Pottery in Commerce. Violins and all of that.”

Max and Narda were pleased about Jenn and Bart’s marriage, and they gave her that lovely garden wedding in Commerce, Georgia, on September 1, 1996. Jenn eschewed a traditional pastel color scheme for her wedding, and chose bridesmaids’ gowns of black and white instead. They carried red roses.

The new Mrs. Bart Corbin was radiant with happiness, and wasn’t at all disturbed when her gown swept the damp red clay of Georgia and the hem ended up smudged by the soil. Jenn and Bart made a very handsome couple. When she wore high heels—which she usually did—they were the same height, a few inches over six feet tall. When they danced cheek-to-cheek at their reception, they seemed such a perfect fit. He kissed her as they danced and they appeared to be in a world of their own. Many of the women in the crowd secretly wished they had a man like Bart in their lives.

Jenn looked absolutely beautiful.

They didn’t go away on a honeymoon. They spent the weekend at Max and Narda’s houseboat on Lake Lanier. As Jenn sometimes said, laughing, “We had already had our honeymoon—our trip to Italy!”

“It was great,” Narda remembered. “And we got a baby!”

PART TWO

Barton Thomas Corbin

“DR. BART”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

1963–1987

B
ART
C
ORBIN’S FAMILY BACKGROUND
was not nearly as tranquil as Jenn’s. Although Bart’s father, Gene Corbin, attended Bart and Jenn’s wedding, he and Connie were divorced by then, and he was living with another, much younger woman. While the Barbers had three daughters, Gene and Connie Corbin had three sons. Bart and his twin brother, Brad, who were born in Jacksonville, Florida, on December 22, 1963, were the oldest, with Bart arriving three minutes before Brad. They were fraternal twins. Bart was the more outgoing and popular, while Brad’s personality was quieter. Actually, Bart was often closer to his younger brother, Bobby Corbin, who was born four years after the Corbin twins.

Eugene Adams Corbin had once been a military policeman in the service and a police officer in Jacksonville. He was twenty-six when Bart and Brad were born, and Connie was twenty-three. She worked in retail sales. One woman who knew her said, “Connie Corbin’s entire conversation was about the bargains she scored. If I had to describe her in one word if would be ‘Shopper!’” The elder Corbins’ marriage had been fairly tumultuous, and their boys were all very supportive of their mother, particularly after Gene’s common-law wife became pregnant about the same time that Jenn did. Bart had both a son and a half brother the same age.

The Corbins had moved from Jacksonville when Bart and Brad were seven years old—first to Atlanta, and then to Snellville in Gwinnett Country. They settled for good in Snellville, about fifteen miles from Buford.

The Corbins’ home was also in a neighborhood used to the sound of kids shouting and playing. Snellville had a population of about 10,000 when Bart, Brad, and Bobby were growing up. Their house was a fairly large ranch-style structure built on a cul-de-sac. Old-growth trees shadowed the sidewalks and streets where they lived, and they had their own swimming pool, which was the envy of the neighborhood kids. When the Corbin boys were old enough, they spent a summer or two digging out dirt under the house so a basement and a recreation room could be added.

Gene wanted his boys to star in athletics. He donated money to the junior high school they attended for sports facilities, and at least one parent wondered out loud if he was trying to buy a first-string spot for his sons on the school’s teams.

B
ART
, B
RAD
,
AND
B
OBBY
all attended South Gwinnett High School in Snellville. It was a typical conservative Southern small-town school where the emphasis was far heavier on football and other sports than on sex education. Rather than discussing birth control and individual responsibility, Bart and Brad had a health teacher with decidedly puritanical views. They were taught that “girls don’t like sex,” and that if boys were thoughtful and considerate of the girls they liked, they would never cajole them with persuasive arguments or force them to have intercourse because, according to their health teacher, “They would hate it! No woman enjoys sex.”

It may have been a moot point for Bart Corbin, anyway. He didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. He acted in a play at school, while Brad was in the French Club. More important to their father, however, was that his boys excel at football, and he rode them pretty hard. They all turned out for the sport in high school and college. Concentrating on athletic competitions, combined with the “Do not touch girls” edict they learned in health class, they appeared to remain “good Southern boys” in high school.

When Bart went off to the University of Georgia in Athens, he was apparently a virgin. The young women who knew him then recall that he certainly acted like one.

Gene Corbin had his own company, called Gecor, and all of his sons worked for him during their school vacations. Even friends close to the Corbin family weren’t sure what the main product or service Gecor offered was. Some said that Gene had business “offshore,” and others believed it involved chemicals in some way. It wasn’t really that mysterious; Gecor manufactured common household chemicals used in everyday products like cleaning solutions and lawn fertilizer.

Gene ordered rather ugly blue “gimme” caps with his company logo on them and handed them out to employees, including his sons, and a young man who worked for him—Richard Wilson—who hung around with Bart. Bart never wore his cap.

The family business was successful enough that Gene could give all his sons cars when they went off to college. In Athens, Brad drove a secondhand Lincoln Continental, and Bart’s pride and joy was a yellow and white Chevy pickup with a massive roll bar on top and dual foglights above that. Bart added a screened Confederate flag across his rear window. Bart’s truck had the requisite gun rack, although it was empty.

Bart had already reached his full height, of six feet three inches, and he weighed about 240 when he graduated from high school in 1982. He didn’t have well-defined muscles then—he was actually a little chubby. Bart was a good enough defensive lineman at South Gwinnett High that he probably could have gotten a scholarship to a small college, but he and Brad chose the University of Georgia in Athens instead. Although the Corbins’ income from Gecor was substantial, Bart, Brad, and Gene Corbin occasionally gloated about their cleverness to acquaintances, saying that they had managed to receive considerable financial aid from UGA.

Athens was less than fifty miles from Snellville, but it was a new world to the Corbin twins. Both of them followed a pre-med curriculum, with the requisite heavy emphasis on science.

As he started college, Bart was a walk-on for the Georgia football team, the Bulldogs. He hadn’t been recruited by the coaches, and he certainly wasn’t a star, but he played all season and was rewarded with a letterman’s jacket and a watch. He gave the watch to his father.

The Corbin twins didn’t let athletics get in the way of their ambitious goals; Brad wanted to be a brain surgeon, and Bart wanted to go to dental school. He often said he had settled on being a dentist way back when he was a little boy watching
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. He had become fascinated with Herbie, one of Santa’s elves, whose ambition was to be a dentist.

Bart and Brad roomed together at Myers Hall on the UGA campus. They were big men who dwarfed the small room they shared, although they cleverly designed and built bunk beds with spaces for their desks to fit in below, and made the most of what space there was.

Despite his dentistry ambitions, Bart was not a particularly gifted candidate. However, he developed an enviable work ethic and studied hard to make up for whatever he lacked in natural ability and dexterity. When he wasn’t in class, at football practice, or studying, Bart hung out with other guys in his dorm. And he was popular. His sometimes scathing sense of humor made them all laugh.

There was no girlfriend back home for him, and he was apparently hesitant to approach coeds at UGA. Indeed, the Corbin boys didn’t trust women very much. Gene Corbin was said to be somewhat scornful of women, and he may have passed that attitude on to his sons.

Bart might not have started dating if a pretty brunette sophomore from a small town in New York State hadn’t made up her mind to meet him. That fall of 1982, both Bart Corbin and Shelly Mansfield
^*
were taking a required class in American history in a large lecture hall in the School of Journalism. Virtually hidden in the crowded auditorium, Shelly watched the tall, beefy freshman with the deceptively cherubic face, and she liked his dark eyes under their thick eyebrows. She decided she wanted to meet him. Despite his size, he seemed somehow innocent, like a junior high kid in a man’s body.

“He sat down in the front,” Shelly recalled a long time later, “and I can’t say exactly why, but I just thought he was cute.”

He seemed to be oblivious of her, but she was determined to change that. “Most days after class,” Shelly said, “I would let him leave before me, and then follow him to the elevator. I would always sort of look at him, and he would sort of look at me, but both of us were too shy to say anything. This went on all quarter and I never screwed up enough courage to talk with him. So the quarter was over and I figured I’d lost the opportunity to meet the cute boy in the camouflage pants.”

That freshman year, Bart and Brad turned nineteen during their Christmas vacation. Shelly had no classes with Bart during winter quarter. But she didn’t forget him, and she was happily surprised to run into Bart on a bus to the building where they would register for spring quarter.

“There he was!” she recalled, laughing. “So I kind of shadowed him when we got to the Registration Center and I found out what his name was: Barton Corbin. I was still afraid to say ‘Hi’ to him though heaven knows why—he was not intimidating.”