When the Gwinnett County patrolmen pulled up a few minutes later, they saw the bruise blooming on Jennifer Corbin’s foot, and took her to the emergency room. Although the injury to the soft tissues was painful, the X-rays revealed no broken bones in her foot.
Although Jenn was the one who had asked for a divorce four days earlier, Bart had already sought out an attorney and filed for divorce on November 29. Bart had instructed his attorney to file a petition seeking the divorce, preempting Jenn.
He wanted everything: the house, the furniture, full custody of Dalton and Dillon, his attorney’s fees, and a restraining order against Jenn. The only thing he was willing to split was responsibility for any marital debts. In his view, she should pay half of those.
Bart had also set about liquidating their bank accounts, and doing whatever he could to block Jenn from getting any more of what he considered his money. He took the largest cash advance he could on his main credit card—almost $40,000. Not only was he protecting his assets, he wanted to make if financially impossible for her to leave him. He remained unaware of the preparations she had made for her new life. Jenn had moved a few more things to her mother’s warehouse: lamps, flatware, a new medicine chest. None of it was expensive. Actually, it was quite utilitarian.
When Bart returned home after he’d run over Jenn’s foot, he found the house empty. Jenn and their sons were gone. She had taken enough clothes for herself and the boys to be away for a while. They had gone back to Heather and Doug’s house.
Bart was not arrested for assault; Jenn had declined to press charges, feeling it would just lead to more trouble.
Jenn told her sister that Bart had been harassing her constantly about the “person” she had written to online.
“Heather,” Jenn said with a sigh, “all this person has done is show me that I don’t have to be unhappy—that there could be a better life out there.”
Bart was on the phone constantly now—to Doug, and to Heather. He alternately begged for help to get his wife to come back to him, and expressed scorn that she would even try to leave him. “I’m going to make sure that she gets absolutely nothing,” he said. “I don’t know where she thinks she’s going to get the money to divorce me.”
“Well, Bart,” Heather finally said. “I guess she’s going to get it from us.”
Annoyed, Bart didn’t try to talk further to his sister-in-law; she was clearly on “Jenn’s side.” But he continued to call Doug for advice. Finally, Doug explained to Bart that he didn’t feel comfortable talking to him any longer since Bart’s conversation had changed from asking how he could mend his broken marriage to questions that were obviously phrased to gain private information about Jenn.
“Heather doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me to talk with you about Jenn anymore,” Doug said. “And I have to agree with her.”
After Jenn went to work, Heather phoned Bart’s brother Bobby. She was worried now about what Bart might be capable of, and she asked Bobby how he thought Bart was doing.
“Well, I’ve seen him a whole lot happier.” Bobby said.
“Do you know that Dalton told us that he is afraid his daddy is going to kill his mom?”
Bobby Corbin drew his breath in sharply, and Heather could tell he was shocked. She explained how Dalton would not leave Jenn’s side, and that he continually voiced his fear of what his father might do. Running over Jenn and racing off in nothing but a bath towel weren’t exactly the actions of a rational man. The boys had witnessed all of that.
Heather recognized that Bart needed someone to talk to, and she and Doug just couldn’t do that anymore, not after what Bart had done to her sister. Even so, there was something pathetic about her estranged brother-in-law, and she urged Bobby to get in touch with Bart.
Bobby said he was already trying to spend time with Bart. He thought Bart was also talking with some of his male friends, including Kevin Lyttle, who was the man they called “Iron”—both because he worked at an iron works, and because he was one of the more muscular men at BodyPlex, the gym where Bart worked out each morning. Brian Fox was another friend of Bart’s. Like most of the men Bart knew, Kevin and Brian weren’t his close pals but they could see he was having a rough time and were attempting to bond the way males do—drinking beer and watching football, usually at the Wild Wing Cafe in Suwanee.
While Heather had voiced her fears to Bobby, Narda called Bart’s mother, Connie, to tell her about what Dalton had been saying. Narda was so frightened for Jenn that she found herself in tears as she spoke to Connie Corbin, but she met with a blank wall. Connie said she wasn’t going to interfere. “I tried that before,” she said succinctly, “and I was told to mind my own business.”
Narda didn’t know what “before” meant. Bart hadn’t been married before; perhaps she was speaking of his twin, Brad, who had divorced. At any rate Connie gave no credence to Dalton’s warning that his father was going to kill his mother.
Narda and Heather tried to convince themselves that Dalton’s fears were groundless. He was a very worried little boy, but he was only seven, after all, and he’d seen too much arguing and violence in the last week.
Dalton refused to play with Dillon or his younger cousins, Max and Sylvia; he wanted to be right next to Jenn constantly, as if he could protect her from anyone who might try to hurt her. Jenn wasn’t that worried. She explained to Heather that no matter how angry Bart might be with her, he would never seriously harm her. “He wouldn’t do something so devastating to his own children,” she told Heather. “Even for Bart, that’s unthinkable.”
“I wish you were still in my neighborhood,” Jenn added. If only Heather hadn’t moved to Dawsonville, she and Doug would still be in the same school district as the Corbins and she could take Dalton and Dillon to school. Then it would have been easier for Jenn to get a full-time job.
Almost certainly, Jenn’s boys would adjust to a different school if they had to; Max and Narda had moved many times and their girls had been fine. But Jenn had always been the kind of mother who wanted her sons to have as perfect a childhood as she could provide.
ADVENT CALENDARS HUNG in homes and churches, their little doors opening as the days wound down toward Christmas. Jenn carried out the holiday activities she had planned for the youngsters at the Sugar Hill church preschool, helping them make presents for their parents.
On December 2, she and her boys were still safely ensconced at Heather’s. Doug and Heather took turns talking with Jenn, listening to her plans to “just get through the holidays.” Their home was a kind of oasis for her, and they urged her to stay. Seeing her sister wrapped in her old pink flannel robe made Heather feel as though, somehow, she could always keep her safe.
“I gotta go home, you know,” Jenn told her.
“I don’t want you to go back there.”
“Heather, no. I have to. If I don’t go back, he’s going to take my house.”
The sisters were both emotionally drained. They had talked about problems, solutions, new starts, closed doors that could never be opened again, what Bart might or might not do, and they had kept assuring each other that everything would work out for the best.
Heather and Doug Tierney had virtually put their lives on hold so they could help Jenn. They didn’t want her to move home, but they needed a little “time out” from her marital problems so they could concentrate on their own family. The last few weeks had been so up and down and disturbing. Maybe Jenn was right about going home. It was a moot point, anyway. Once she made up her mind, there was no talking her out of it, and she was determined to go back to Bogan Gates Drive and finish decorating her Christmas tree.
Even though Bart seemed to grow angrier and more hyper every day, she was no longer afraid of him. As long as he didn’t try to have sex with her, she thought they could get along in the same house. She had suggested he live on their houseboat until he found an apartment, but he complained that it would be too cold there at that time of year, and she relented.
> Jenn had confided in her sister that she felt she had never loved Bart and never had a satisfactory sex life with him. He cared only about his own sexual drive and didn’t bother with foreplay or romance. “Heather,” she once said, “when he touches me, I just shiver and go ‘ewwww’ inside.”
Heather didn’t know how to respond to that. It broke her heart that her sister who had always been the one who was “so comfortable to be around, who made people feel good, who was kind and nonjudgmental” could be this unhappy.
At 9 A.M. on that Thursday, December 2, Heather watched Jenn drive away. Thinking they would talk later, Heather turned to catch up on the chores she still had to do to settle into their new house. She and Jenn would have time to get together, drink coffee as they always did, and work things out.
IN THESE EARLY DECEMBER DAYS, Bart was usually in his dental offices, although moving his clinic to Hamilton Mill wasn’t drawing enough patients to keep it afloat financially. He was gone somewhere most nights after they ate supper—probably out drinking beer with his brother or his friends. Both Jenn and Bart had their own lives now. Most of the time, she didn’t know, or care, where he was.
One discovery, though, had puzzled her. When she was doing the laundry, she had found a parking lot stub in the pocket of one of his shirts. It looked to be from a library in Birmingham, Alabama, and it was stamped November 29. Bart had apparently made a quick trip there a few days earlier. She had no idea what for. Jenn mentioned it to her good friends, Juliet Styles and Jennifer Rupured. The drive to Birmingham and back would have taken him more than six hours.
She was only vaguely curious, just enough to tell her friends and then forget about it. Jenn’s biggest concern was the same as it always had been—that her sons were doing okay. She hoped she could keep Bart from yelling at them. Sometimes she wondered if she could ever find a way to undo the negative effect he had on Dalton.
ALTHOUGH BART RESENTED that Heather and Doug were supporting Jenn as she pulled away from him, he made one more phone call to Heather on Friday morning, December 3. “He kept asking me about why Jenn wasn’t with him,” Heather said, “and was she going to get a divorce? He kept saying he didn’t really want a divorce. He wanted to work it out with her.
“And then he said, ‘I can’t change who I am. I’m going to do what I have to do to protect myself—and I should have been doing it all along.’”
That was odd, Heather thought. He had always protected himself. She knew that a year earlier, when he was besieged by creditors, Bart had put all of his assets in Jenn’s name. And it was the third time he’d done that. They had barely any equity in their house—Bart had taken out a second mortgage. The juggling he had done, “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” according to his in-laws, was about to catch up with him because he refused to compromise on what he needed or wanted. Sure that he could trust Jenn, he made her responsible when his debts were called in. Now that he realized she was about to leave, he had taken back what he considered his, emptying his accounts of all the liquid cash he could take out, putting everything back in his name.
On that Friday, Jenn was scheduled to work with Narda. But first, she had a meeting with Angie Smith, who was president of the PTA at Harmony School; when she applied at Harmony, she had been encouraged to hear that she more than met their requirements.
Smith found her cheerful and upbeat. “Like a woman looking forward to her future.”
When Jenn arrived at her mother’s warehouse a little later, Narda saw that she was very happy, optimistic and positive about her life. Jenn had been to Target and spent almost $500. She had loaded up her SUV with her final purchases for her new home, wherever that was going to be. She was smiling as she stacked packages in the empty cupboards of Narda’s warehouse.
It was great to see Jenn so happy. Narda was planning to meet a couple of her women friends that evening for drinks and dinner and she asked Jenn to come along, but Jenn said she couldn’t; Dalton and Dillon had basketball games, and they wanted her to take them. Dalton was still saying to anyone who would listen, “Daddy’s going to kill Mommy,” and he didn’t want to go anywhere with Bart.
It was disturbing to hear Dalton talk like that, but Narda and Jenn agreed it was a phase. Earlier that afternoon, Bart had insisted on taking Dalton to the park to ride his bicycle, and that hadn’t turned out at all well. Dalton had stopped at a curb to wait for a car to go by, and apparently Bart had shouted at him, “Go!” He had come home very upset, saying his daddy tried to push him in front of a car.
Jenn had always told her sister and her mother that she would never keep Bart from seeing his sons after they were divorced. He was, after all, their father. But she still wanted to be sure that Bart stopped shouting at Dalton, and belittling him. That was something they would definitely have to work out. But she didn’t believe that he would hurt their children.
Narda would remember watching Jenn back out of her driveway. “She was smiling, and she was going to Star-bucks to get a Caramel Macchiatto and say hi to Rajel’s son, Joey, who worked there. I didn’t even hug her goodbye.”
December 3 was the first day in months that Heather and Jenn hadn’t talked—not even on the phone. “I was exhausted,” Heather would remember, her voice full of tears. “Jenn’s troubles were occupying so much of my time. I needed a break, and I didn’t call her. The last time I saw her was the morning before when she left my house, and I couldn’t stop her. I guess it was like giving a drunk driver car keys.”
And yet, Jenn hoped that she and Bart could just get through Christmas. They were so close to going their separate ways. Only three more weeks.
It was Friday night, December 3, 2004.
PART FIVE
The Investigation
GWINNETT COUNTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DECEMBER 4–10, 2004
EVEN AS HER FAMILY was bracing for her funeral, the probe into Jenn’s death was widening. Investigators had learned early on that the last few weeks of her life had been marked by dissension and shocking revelations. They knew that her mother had seen her on the late afternoon of Friday, December 3, and, according to seven-year-old Dalton Corbin, that the couple had eaten together with the kids in their home on Friday evening. Dalton, who was a very intelligent little boy, related that his father had gone out somewhere. He and his brother had watched television and gone to bed. They hadn’t heard anything during the night and slept peacefully until Saturday morning when Dalton discovered his mother dead in her bed.
It was vital now for detectives to find the locations of people who were part of Jenn’s life at the time she died. They knew that she had been emailing and phoning someone in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri—someone that even those closest to her had never seen. Actually, as far as anyone knew, Jenn herself had never seen this person who might be named “Christopher Hearn,” or was possibly named “Anita Hearn.” No one close to Jenn Corbin could say absolutely whether this person was, in actuality, a male or a female. Jenn had been secretive about her email correspondent—even with her sister. Was it possible that Jenn had been set up by a deadly con artist who had traveled to Georgia to harm her? It seemed outlandish, but then so did the idea that she had become so involved with a stranger.
Jenn and Bart had been locked in an ugly divorce and custody battle, so it was also very important to know where Bart Corbin had been in the early morning hours of December 4.
And there was another woman in the picture—Bart had had at least one mistress since before he was married to Jenn. Dara Prentice had apparently loved him for more than nine years, and the only obstacle between Dara and Bart had been Jenn. However, Dara didn’t seem to be a likely suspect; if she wanted Bart and was privy to most of the details about his personal life, she would have known that he was soon to be divorced. She wouldn’t have had to kill her lover’s wife so she could have him.
It appeared that Jenn had no real enemies. Her killing might have been a random thing. Perhaps she had wakened to
find a burglar in her home—and been shot when she surprised him. She was a striking woman whom men noticed. Although her sisters and her closest friends didn’t recall that she had spoken of being harassed or stalked by a man, Jenn herself might not have realized that someone was watching her and waiting for a time when her husband wasn’t home.
Steve Comeau had heard a truck coming down their street early Saturday morning—during the period that Medical Examiner Dr. Carol Terry estimated as Jenn’s time of death. He was quite sure that he had recognized the familiar sound of Bart’s pickup truck as it slowed and turned into the Corbin’s driveway close to 2 A.M. But Steve hadn’t actually seen either Bart or the truck. He could testify only to an almost subconscious impression—not as an eyewitness.
Marcus Head, leading the Gwinnett County Police Department’s detectives in the investigation, and Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter needed to follow up all possibilities and refuse to allow themselves to be locked into any one theory on who the killer they sought might be.
Most of the public still believed that Jenn Corbin had committed suicide, but insiders knew that the physical evidence gleaned from the shooting scene made that the least likely cause of her death.
The police detectives and the two dozen DA’s investigators working on various aspects of the Corbin case were very different from one another, a diversity that had worked well for them in case after case.