Bart was very hesitant to make love to Shelly at the start of their relationship, and she wondered why, because he seemed “like a healthy boy” to her, except for his caution about being intimate. She eventually learned about his Bible Belt sex education classes and his belief that all women were turned off by sex. She convinced him that she wasn’t breakable and that women could, and usually did, enjoy intercourse.
And Shelly, this dark-haired, pretty woman who Bart probably sensed was more intelligent than he was, was his first lover. She was sure of it. Shelly was convinced he was faithful to her. “We spent so much time together that he didn’t have time not to be.”
Shelly found Bart to be even-tempered, with no trace of the labile moods of his mother. He wasn’t jealous of the ex-boyfriend in New York who had preceded him. One night, however, Bart was upset when she accidentally called him by the other boy’s name. Fortunately, it wasn’t during an intimate moment. Shelly believed that, for the most part, Bart resented her former lover because he had treated her badly. “He knew that this other guy was a loser, and he didn’t like it that the guy had made me unhappy.”
She never recalled seeing a trace of rage or temper in Bart, and as far as she could remember they had only one fight during their years together, and she felt it was her fault.
“We were having some relationship ‘hiccup,’” she said. “I don’t even know what it was about, but I made some long statement about my feelings. He leaned toward me and said, ‘N’yah-n’yah-n’yah.’ I was so mad that I reared back and slapped him as hard as I could. So he was being a jerk, but I was the one with the temper. When I think back about his reaction to being slapped, all he evinced was shock. He handled it a lot better than I did, and it never happened again.”
In the fall of his sophomore year, Bart was once more a walk-on to the Bulldogs’ football practice, but he quit halfway through the season. It was an agonizing decision for him. He didn’t want to disappoint his father, but he knew he couldn’t keep up with his studies and turn out for practice, too.
Another decision he had made during the summer vacation just past had made him less effective as a defensive lineman, anyway. He knew he had no chance of being on the first-team squad; he was big, but he wasn’t “gigantic” like the star athletes at UGA were. And Shelly had encouraged him to lose weight over the summer. He managed to lose thirty pounds, and was striving to look less like a chubby kid from Snellville.
“He became quite confident,” Shelly remembered.
“He enjoyed dressing in a stylish way when we went out.”
Bart bought a white blazer—something that was very popular in an era when Miami Vice topped television ratings. Shelly bought him some Calvin Klein tank tops, and he looked good. He was no longer the slightly plump boy in the camo pants she had been attracted to a year earlier.
She was amused to see how often Bart looked at himself in store windows, flipping and patting his hair as he admired his own image.
And still, even though Shelly was only six months older than Bart, she was years older in sophistication. She loved him and they began to talk—if only tentatively—about marriage. Twice she took Bart to visit her family in western New York, and in 1984 they stood against the guardrails and watched the thundering power of Niagara Falls, and then rode on one of the Maid of the Mist boats that seemed actually to pass under the falls. They wore the slickers that all tourists do, and posed smiling for a photo.
Shelly’s parents liked Bart a lot and encouraged their romance. He seemed to love her, and he was a good-looking young man who was headed for a much-respected career.
Shelly was close to graduation when she began to think seriously about what it might be like to be married to Bart. They were headed that way, and she had actually picked out her stainless-steel pattern and bought one place setting. It was the very ornate “Michelangelo” from Oneida.
But then she began to question the wisdom of marrying Bart—not because of anything he had done, but because she realized their goals were so different. She never thought he would be anything less than kind to her as a husband. Nor did she think he would ever be unfaithful. But she felt too young to be married. She still had so many things she wanted to experience in her life.
Shelly had wanted to be a reporter since she was eight years old. If Bart was accepted into dental school, they would be living in Augusta, Georgia—a city some wiseguy students at UGA called “Disgusta.” And, try as she might, Shelly could not picture herself as the young wife of a dental student. “I did not get a degree to be someone else’s accessory,” she said.
Although Shelly had unconsciously put her ambitions to become a “Crusader for Truth” in the background during the years she spent with Bart, they hadn’t gone away. Now they began to resurface. She knew that Bart had no lofty humanitarian goals to achieve as a dentist. His goal was still to have “deep pockets” full of money. It was somehow an odd stance for a man who seemed so sensitive and easily hurt, but she suspected it was another thing that Bart had learned from his father.
Shelly accepted that she was sometimes heedless of Bart’s feelings. She knew she didn’t love him enough to sacrifice all the goals in her own life for him.
As a journalist, she wanted to place both sides of stories in front of readers so they could make informed decisions that would, hopefully, protect the democratic society she believed in. It was a lofty ambition, and it mattered terribly to her.
Again, marriage to Bart Corbin, whose goal was to make as much money as possible, would not permit that, nor could she imagine spending her life as a dentist’s devoted wife in some small Georgia town.
While Shelly wanted to help the disadvantaged, she also hoped to marry a man who was less frugal. Her parents had kept her on a fairly tight allowance in college, but she realized that she had been somewhat spoiled and not very careful with money. If something fun and interesting should come up, she wanted to be able to experience it, and Bart had shown her again and again how stingy he was. She sensed that would be a lifelong habit, no matter how much success he might one day have as dentist.
If she married him, her life would be spent “in distant suburbia,” and she would be bored. That wouldn’t be fair to either one of them. She realized she wouldn’t be happy if she married Bart Corbin.
Shelly began to move emotionally away from Bart, all the while avoiding a major confrontation. Her strategy was to gradually grow distant and hope he took the hint. Sometimes she deliberately picked fights with him about something stupid, deliberately being passive-aggressive, hoping he’d get sick of her. She wasn’t in the least afraid of him, but she didn’t want to hurt him. If he had only been “a jerk,” it would have been easier, but she still found Bart a good person overall, and she was afraid he would be devastated.
Her plan didn’t work. Bart didn’t react to Shelly’s backing away from him. It was if he didn’t notice. She felt that she was being a moral coward; she no longer loved him. Oddly—or perhaps not—she has no memory of the moment she told him that she wanted to break up.
She only remembered that he cried, and that he wasn’t angry with her.
Bart had seemingly let her go without a struggle. They often ran into each other on campus or elsewhere in Athens, and she was happy to see him. She never felt threatened, or that he was following her or stalking her. She didn’t even wonder about how they often seemed to be in the same place at the same time.
Bart Corbin had lost his first girlfriend, the first and perhaps only woman with whom he had ever been both physically and emotionally intimate. And he had swallowed any anger or overt signs of grief. Shelly began to believe that they had both dodged a bullet; it had been a great couple of years and they had successfully broken up without any lasting negative feelings.
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER they ended their romance, Bart learned that he had been accepted at dental school. Shelly was sunbathing by the pool of the apartment complex where she lived—and where one of Bart’s friends also
resided—when she heard footsteps crunching on the gravel path. It was Bart Corbin.
“He would have known where to find me,” she said.
“He was all excited that his hard work had paid off. And I am quite certain that, other than his twin, Brad, I was the first person he told—even before his parents.”
Shelly sensed that Bart wanted to impress her, and that seemed perfectly reasonable, but she was surprised that he had told her about his success almost before he had told anyone else. She had moved on from their relationship, and she assumed that he had as well. She was glad to see him, as a friend, and they set up a date; he would come to her apartment that evening—“just to hang out.”
They spent several pleasant hours together, and Bart never brought up the subject of their reuniting as a couple. But she knew he still had feelings for her. If she had suggested that they get back together, she was sure he would have wanted to.
“But I put the kibosh on that by rattling on about some guy I liked at the time,” she recalled. Later, she was ashamed of her own behavior, sorry that she had been mean to him. Once again, fearful of being tied down, she had hurt Bart and seen tears in his eyes.
He turned and left abruptly and she never saw him again. She had no idea what awesome forces may have been set in motion.
Shelly had hoped to work for a small-town newspaper for perhaps a year, and then move on to a big-city paper. When she graduated in 1987, she did work for a paper in Griffin, Georgia, for six months.
After that, Shelly worked as a journalist all over America, and then in another country. Her decision not to marry Bart allowed her to be true to what she believed in. She worked long hours and received positive feedback from both the public and her colleagues, but she was haunted by the fact that she wasn’t contributing to less fortunate people as she had once planned to do. She joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Thailand, where she found “meaning in my life again.”
She seldom thought of Bart Corbin. If she did, it was to remember the sensitive man she once cared for, and to feel guilty that she had hurt him enough to make him cry. She was sorry about that. Even so, she knew she had made the right choice.
Bart graduated from the University of Georgia in 1987. When he entered the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, he was beginning a new phase in his life. Shelly assumed that Bart was on the path to find what mattered to him. If he was angry with her, she didn’t know it. At least not for a very long time.
CHAPTER NINE
1987
WHILE SHELLY TRAVELED far away from Georgia on her adventurous life, Bart began dental school in Augusta. When Bart entered the Medical College of Georgia, he was a long way from both Snellville and Athens—not in miles but in the way his personality had changed. He was a bitter young man who had grown an invisible, impenetrable shell. His sense of humor was still on target, but now there was a meanness about it.
Those who started the first year of dentistry school at MCG would stay together until they graduated. Not surprisingly, the students in Bart’s class grew to know each other very well as they studied in a much more intense program than they had followed in undergraduate school. Just as his fellow students at UGA liked Bart, he was fairly popular at MCG.
But that was mostly with guys; women on his new campus were slower to warm up to him.
Bart struck some of women as a rather odd duck. One woman—Lee Reardon*—recalled knowing Bart during the years he spent at dental school, an acquaintance that came about because her brother, Corey*, had initially befriended him.
“He seemed to be a lot of fun,” she said. “Bart was very outgoing and always ready for the next party. He was a little rough around the edges, his hair was a little too long, he wore an earring, and his clothes weren’t preppy—which was the style at the time.”
Bart didn’t look like the students who belonged to a fraternity; he resembled a rock star or perhaps a gypsy. Initially, women on campus at MCG weren’t drawn to him. Bart looked very different from the time when he first met Shelly. He was still tall, of course, but he was very thin now. He parted his hair in the middle and wore it in a kind of shag that touched his collar. But without Shelly to help him pick out clothes, he certainly wasn’t very stylish. Sometimes he affected all black clothing.
He showed some interest in Lee Reardon, but he wasn’t her type at all. She considered herself fortunate when he stopped asking her out. Although Bart struck her as “happy-go-lucky,” her brother—who was also a dental student—warned her not to get involved. Corey Reardon had perceived two sides to Bart’s personality, one with “an edge.”
And there was a certain unpredictability in Bart, a sudden flare of anger at times. No one who knew Bart as an undergraduate back in Athens had ever mentioned his temper. Now he was known for having a very short fuse. Unexpected things could set him off. He would sometimes erupt instantly into a raging tantrum.
Bart had worked to his capacity in undergraduate school and succeeded by studying harder than most of his peers, but the demands of dental school challenged him more, and he was often impatient and testy. One dental student described him as having “an explosive temper,” and recalled a time when Bart was so frustrated that he threw one of his own projects against a wall, shattering it. But then they were all under a lot of stress, and most people didn’t find Bart’s outbursts that disturbing.
Some of his closest friends delighted in teasing him by doing impressions of “the angry Bart.”
He didn’t seem to mind.
In his first year at dental school in 1987, Bart dated a girl named Eden* briefly, but it wasn’t a serious relationship. One of Eden’s friends recalled that he was generally considered odd. For one thing, he didn’t believe in wearing deodorant, saying that to do so was unhealthy. Since Augusta was often hot and humid, people noticed his body odor.
“The one thing I remember about Bart,” she said,
“was that he considered himself superior to others. He seemed devoid of empathy or any capability of significant emotional attachment.”
This woman, who later became a dental hygienist, commented on Bart’s fixation with making a lot of money. She met him a few years later—after he had become a dentist—but before he married Jenn Barber. They happened to run into each other at a restaurant, and had dinner together, talking about dentistry as they ate. She spent just one day working for him, and found that he was still a cold and distant person, particularly with his patients. He was far more concerned with the financial aspect of his practice than he was with the clients in his chair.
“He was very egotistical,” she said. “To this day, I’m incredulous that he thought I was interested in him romantically. I was definitely not.”
Oblivious, Bart told her not to expect to date him. “He said he was looking for a different ‘caliber’ of woman. In particular, he hoped to marry another dentist.”
Bart Corbin’s imperious attitude was a turnoff for a number of women he met in dental school. Where he had been somewhat naïve and socially awkward at UGA, he had learned to hide his emotions inside. Gradually, he began to present a seamless façade. Few, if any, of his new friends had known Shelly Mansfield, and he didn’t mention her, nor their breakup.
He was still considered handsome and witty, and he made satisfactory grades in dental school in both classes and labs.
And before too long, Bart would meet a woman who would finally put his memories of Shelly Mansfield in the background. Her name was Dorothy “Dolly” Hearn. Dolly Hearn was one of the secret things that Bart Corbin never discussed with his wife, Jenn.
CHAPTER TEN
DECEMBER 4–10, 2004
CHRISTMAS 2004 was three weeks away, Jenn Corbin had been dead for less than a week, and the Corbin case was constantly at the top of the news in Atlanta. While there were whispered questions about what might have led her to commit suicide, there were also a lot of suspicions about her widower, particularly behind the closed doors of the Gwinnett County Police Dep
artment and the Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office. Bart Corbin wasn’t acting like a grief-stricken man who had just lost his wife; he was avoiding detectives and their penetrating questions.
Bizarrely, Corbin refused to give permission to Jenn’s family—who were still caring for Dalton and Dillon—to enter the house on Bogan Gates Drive to get clothes for the boys and pick up the Christmas presents Jenn had bought and wrapped for them. Where most families would have shared their grief, that was not the case here. Lines were drawn between the Corbins and the Barbers.
Somehow, Max and Narda Barber pulled themselves together for Dalton and Dillon’s sake, and Heather and Doug Tierney and Rajel Caldwell did their best to care for the boys, who, for all intents and purposes, were orphans. Their mother lay in a funeral parlor and their father hadn’t come to see them, nor had he consented to meet with Marcus Head and the other investigators into Jennifer’s death. It was very odd and disturbing. All of Jenn’s family, even the boys, had given statements to the detectives. Bart absolutely refused to be questioned.
Narda and Max went to the funeral home to arrange for Jenn’s service. But when Narda started to pick out a coffin, the funeral director told her that a coffin might not be needed. “Dr. Corbin has arranged to have Mrs. Corbin cremated,” he said.
“No!” Narda gasped. “We don’t want that. It’s difficult enough to explain to her sons that she’s gone forever. How on earth could we tell them that their mother is going to be burned up?”
“I’m sorry,” the mortician told her, “but that isn’t for you to decide. Legally, of course, Dr. Corbin is the next of kin, and he has already made arrangements. In fact, Mrs. Corbin is about to be cremated—in less than an hour.”