Deadly Divorces (5 page)

During one phone call she confessed to Heather that even her children had started to fear for her. ‘Dalton is saying he’s afraid Bart is going to kill me,’ she admitted. Heather was horrified: ‘Jennifer, do you think he will?’The answer was carefully thought out. ‘I don’t think he would because I don’t think he’d do that to the kids.’ Heather couldn’t believe they were even discussing this subject, much less that her beloved big sister was actually rationalising why her own husband would refrain from killing her. ‘Jennifer, that’s a bad reason,’ she told her.

And so the week passed. Who knew then that this would be the last week of Jennifer Corbin’s life? As they passed her in the grocery store rushing to get on with their day, or gave her a quick wave at school pick-up time, who realised this could be the last chance they’d have to talk to
this big-hearted woman? Or that so strong a life force could be extinguished so suddenly and so brutally?

On Friday, 3 December, Heather didn’t get a call from Jenn. She thought about calling her herself, but if the truth be told she was exhausted. As a mother of two pre-school children, she was finding her sister’s domestic traumas emotionally draining. She decided she couldn’t face dealing with it all that day, that just for that one day, she’d take a day off. What harm could it do?

There are some decisions you take so lightly, but weigh so heavily. Now Jenn’s friends and family are full of the ‘if onlys’ which are the deadliest legacy of a life rubbed out prematurely. If only they’d realised what Barton Corbin was capable of, if only they’d stopped to chat, if only they’d told Jenn to watch her back – to lock her door, to run, to get out. Because even then, while Jenn was shopping and doing school-runs, Barton was taking steps to get rid of his wife once and for all. He phoned an old friend – Richard Wilson – and told him that he was worried his wife was cheating on him and he might need a gun to protect himself. Wilson had just traded a used lawnmower for a revolver and now he offered it to his friend. After all, mates should look after each other, shouldn’t they? On 30 November, the day before Jenn phoned 911 accusing her husband of taking her possessions, Bart went to visit Wilson at home in Troy, Alabama to pick up the .38 calibre Smith and Wesson.

Who knows what went through his mind between 30 November and 4 December 2004? Did he pick up the gun in his hands, turning it over and over, wondering whether he really had the nerve to go through with this? Did his mind wander back to the other time he’d held a similar gun – how it had felt, and how it had all ended up? Did he think about his boys left alone without a mother, or Jenn’s mum losing a daughter? And what about the big hole he’d leave in the lives of everyone that knew and loved her? What goes through the mind of a killer before he gives himself permission to take a life? If we knew that then maybe we’d all have it within us to do what Barton Corbin did.

Just before 1.45am on Saturday 4 December, Steve Comeau was smoking a cigarette in his garage when he noticed Bart’s Chevy pick-up pulling up outside his house across the street. Just twenty minutes later he was gone again. Something about the briefness of the visit at this late hour disturbed Steve. ‘I hope he didn’t do anything stupid,’ he thought to himself, remembering the theft allegations of just a few days before. But what Barton Corbin had done went way beyond the worst things Steve Comeau could imagine.

The following morning Dalton Corbin stood shivering and crying in his underwear on the Comeau’s doorstep. ‘My Dad shot my Mom,’ he said. Unable to take in what Dalton had said, Kelly Comeau ran over the road to her friends’ house. It was a journey she’d made so many times
before – taking over freshly baked cookies, carrying home sleeping children – but this time everything was different. In the main bedroom she found Jennifer, dressed in her night-gown and lying on her side in the bed. There was a single wound to her head, a trail of blood coming from her nose and a gun tucked under the sheet, close to her hands.

How do you deal with a situation like that? One of your closest friends lies lifeless and bloody just yards from your home, her children traumatised, her husband missing. How do you stop the rush of emotions – grief, panic, shock, pity, horror from leaving you rooted to the spot? Kelly Comeau knew she had to get out of there. Fast. Scooping up 5-
year-old
Dillon Corbin, who’d been left in the house when his older brother dashed across the street, she ran back to her house and headed straight for the phone to dial 911. ‘My girlfriend’s dead!’ she gasped to the operator. ‘She’s been shot. Her son just ran over and got me.’ When the operator asked whether the victim could be helped, Kelly’s response was heartbreaking in its finality. ‘No,’ she whispered.

It was still early on a Saturday morning. Just a few miles away Jennifer’s sister Heather Tierney was starting her weekend blissfully oblivious to the events unfolding in Bogan Gates Drive. Anyone who has ever lost someone close to them will know how time automatically slices itself down the middle, dividing itself into ‘Life Before It Happened’ and ‘Life After’. Heather didn’t know it then but that Saturday as she listened to the excited babble of her
young children and opened the curtains on another new day she was enjoying the last few moments of Life Before.

How many times since has she tried to find her way back to those moments when the world was normal, when Jenn was alive and murder was something that happened on the news, something that happened to other people? Then came the phone call that would shatter her life like so many pieces of broken china. Sure, she would eventually glue it back together again for the sake of the children and her husband Doug but it would never be the same again.

‘Something’s happened to Jenn.’ Strange how four words can make a world stop spinning, freezing it in time and space so that one moment becomes an eternity. ‘Is she OK?’That glimmer of hope, of denial – how bad can it be? But then came the words that kill all hope dead: ‘She’s gone.’ For Heather, who’d looked up to her big sister from birth, admired and adored her and gone on to become her best friend, it was too much to take in. She felt as if the air was literally being sucked out of her body; she fell to her knees, screaming. Trying to dress herself, she found she couldn’t stop shaking. Away from her children, she screamed and stamped her feet, trying to make the nightmare stop. It was she who had to make the phone call to her mother – the call no sibling should ever have to make and no parent should have to receive. Hysterical, Narda in turn rang Max at the car dealer’s where he worked, making him the next heartbroken link in this most
tragic of chains. ‘I just hung up the phone and I drove straight to the house,’ Max recalled later. ‘I pulled up in the driveway behind a couple of Gwinnett County police cruisers. They wouldn’t let me see my daughter.’ Instead he went across the street to the Comeaus, where his two traumatised grandsons sat uncomprehending, their small bodies wrapped in blankets. Dalton was sobbing uncontrollably while Dillon just gazed silently around him.

Dalton talked in a rush about what had happened, about the fights he’d witnessed, about finding his mother. Mercifully he hadn’t seen what happened but in his 7-
year-old
mind he had no doubt about the true state of affairs: his Dad had shot his Mum. For the attending police officers, however, the case was less cut and dried. Here was a woman going through an incredibly bitter divorce. The divorce papers were found scattered on the bed, her hands over the gun that killed her. She’d been depressed, of course. Her husband had stolen a phone and journals that might be used against her in a custody battle. She stood to lose everything. Who wouldn’t start wondering if it was all worth it? Crippled by the emotional pain of a split, who wouldn’t think that they might be better off dead? Among the onlookers and emergency personnel the word ‘suicide’ spread like a forest fire.

For Jenn’s family the idea that this vibrant, loving woman who’d made her two sons the centre of her whole universe would take her own life was absurd. Jenn truly believed
every day with Dillon and Dalton was a gift and a blessing, so why on earth would she rob herself of the thousands more days which lay ahead of her, the thousands more gifts? It was, quite simply, unthinkable. They knew she had been killed and they knew exactly who had killed her – they just had to prove it.

When Max Barber got to Bogan Gates Drive on that black Saturday morning he was told that Bart Corbin was on his way. Three hours later he still hadn’t arrived. ‘I was the first family member there at about 5 minutes until 9:00. I waited — I was told by the authorities that Bart was on the way, would be there between 15 and 30 minutes. I waited for three hours. He never showed up. I went back to the authorities two or three times,’ recalls Max. ‘First I went back to get clothes for my grandchildren and then I went back a second time to find out when they expected Bart to show up at the home. He never came, never made a phone call.’

So here was Barton Corbin – respected community dentist, family man, devoted dad. His wife is dead, apparently suicide, her body found by their oldest child. Did he come rushing back to comfort his heartbroken son? Did he ask where the kids were, who was looking after them, how they were coping? No, he just stayed away. He was silent. And in this silence, the seeds of doubt were allowed to grow. What sort of a father abandons his children at a time like this? The police decided to look more closely into
Dr Barton Corbin’s life and past and what they found sent a shock wave through everyone who knew – or rather thought they knew – the 40-year-old dentist.

A few days after Jennifer’s death her mother received a phone call. The caller told her that Barton Corbin had been involved with a fellow dental student fourteen years previously who had ‘committed suicide’ in exactly the same manner. When she died she had also been trying to end her relationship with him. For the Barbers, who’d had no idea of the existence of this former girlfriend, the news was almost too much to take in. It was ‘enormous… beyond belief’, Narda would later recall.

Dolly Hearn had been a beautiful and vivacious
raven-haired
young woman when Bart Corbin first met her at dental college in Augusta, Georgia in the late 1980s. He was bowled over by her looks and charm and the way she connected with people – always using their name, always making them feel important. He wasted no time in asking her out. Dolly fitted perfectly into Bart’s ambitious master plan – she was attractive, well connected. With her by his side, he’d be well on his way to carving out a glittering career for himself.

A couple of times Dolly took her new boyfriend back to her parent’s impressive colonial home in Washington, Georgia. At first Barbara and Carlton Hearn were taken by Bart’s quick wit and intelligence but when he told Carlton – also a dentist – that he couldn’t wait to graduate so he
could ‘stick it to people’, the Hearns rapidly realised there was a very sinister side to this bright young man. When Dolly confided a few months into the relationship that she and Bart were having troubles and that she was planning to break up with him, her parents couldn’t help feeling relieved.

But like everyone else in Bart Corbin’s life, the Hearns hadn’t recognised the extent of his narcissism and instead attributed it to the typical arrogance of youth. Even the classmates at dental school who’d witnessed his petulant displays of anger when things didn’t go his way and his ‘explosive temper’ didn’t fully recognise the deep-rooted self obsession that lay behind his outbursts. They could have no idea then of how a narcissist reacts to rejection, of the rage stirred up when plans are thwarted or the mentality that views lovers as possessions and dictates ‘if I can’t have her, no one can’.

Soon after trying to end her relationship with Bart, strange, disturbing things started happening to Dolly Hearn. A set of denture casts disappeared from her cubicle at the dental school. Someone put hairspray into her contact lens solution, burning her eyes. A strange pink substance was poured into her gas tank and her tyres deflated. One day someone broke into her apartment and took Tabitha, her cat.

Dolly had no doubt who was responsible. She changed the locks and filed reports with the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, telling officers her ex-boyfriend Bart was
behind the campaign. Two weeks after Tabitha disappeared, she told police he’d confessed to having taken the cat and then made a big show of helping to find it. Dolly also went to the Medical College of Georgia with her complaints. The school investigated but concluded no evidence of wrongdoing. Dolly became scared and asked to sleep over at friends’ houses rather than stay in her apartment alone. Her anxious father drove to Augusta to tell a recalcitrant Bart to stop harassing his daughter. He also bought her a gun and her brother Carlton took her to the firing range to teach her how to use it.

But then, just as suddenly as it had started, the harassment seemed to stop. Perhaps Bart had finally got the message – or at least Dolly dared hope. Maybe he’d moved on with his life and put the past behind him. For the first time in weeks she stopped looking behind her every five minutes as she walked along the high street or checking the back seat of the car before driving off.

Dolly was back on form. Her smile –which her younger brother Gil described as being able to ‘light up a room’ and her fellow students just called her ‘Dolly Smile’ – was firmly back in place. Partway through his speech at his high school graduation, Gil glanced over at his sister to see her beaming in his direction. It’s a memory he treasures to this day. Free from the constrictions of Barton Corbin’s controlling nature, life was once again full of dazzling potential for Dolly Hearn.

Who knows what the bright, intelligent and attractive Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Hearn might have made of her life? An able student, she could easily have become the kind of dentist everyone dreams of having – the sort who provides reassurance, support, warmth and who doesn’t make you feel stupid for being nervous. She could have been a great mother – Dolly always loved children. She’d have been a fantastic auntie and a devoted daughter to her ageing parents. When a young person dies, all their future selves die with them. That’s what makes it so cruel, all that loss of promise.