Deadly Divorces (3 page)

‘It’s time for us to move on, but I want us to be friends for the kids.’

For the first time Paul dared to believe there might actually be some hope of an amicable divorce at least for
the children’s sake. Finally it sounded as if Rena was coming to terms with what had happened and realising she had no choice but to accept it.

By the next day, however, the pendulum had swung back and once again Rena was full of rage. Picking up the phone, Paul claims to have heard his wife once again threaten to kill Lorna.

‘You’ll never see your children again!’ she yelled.

Shortly afterwards Rena Salmon phoned a nearby locksmith.

‘My husband has been killed in a car accident,’ she explained. ‘We’re separated and all the insurance policies are locked up in his weapons cabinet and the keys have gone missing. They were with him when he died.’

Sympathetic, the locksmith agreed to open the cabinet. Of course he had no idea that there was no dead husband, no insurance policy. What Rena wanted was the
double-barrelled
Beretta she’d bought Paul for his birthday.

Rena knew all about guns. During her time in the army she’d got used to handling them, used to the weight of them and the way they made your body jolt as you pulled the trigger. For her, guns held no fear, no mystery. They were simply a means to an end. For the next few days, Rena Salmon hugged her secret close to her chest. Knowing the cabinet was open and that she had access to weapons any time she chose gave her a sense of security and purpose lacking in the last few roller-coaster months.

No one can be really sure what she was planning to do with her new power. Was she intending to use the weapon on herself, knowing she surely wouldn’t fail this way to finish the task she’d already tried? Or was Paul the intended victim; did she lie awake at night imagining how he’d look as he pleaded for his life, finally sorry for what he’d done, for what he’d driven her to?

Three days after the locksmith opened up Paul’s gun cabinet, Rena bumped into her friend Deborah Burke. Deborah was saddened to see how the trauma of her husband’s affair and the ensuing bitter marriage break-up had affected the once smiley woman.

‘I know you’re having a rough time,’ Deborah comforted her.

Everyone in the neighbourhood knew Rena was going through hell. Locally, there was a lot of sympathy for the mother-of-two who’d invested so heavily in her marriage only to watch it blow up in her face. No wonder she was acting so strangely, people said. You couldn’t blame her if she sometimes said or did things that seemed completely out of character. So when Rena told her friend: ‘I have a gun,’ Deborah Burke didn’t take her too seriously. ‘I’m not going to kill her –just shoot her here’ (Rena indicated her abdomen) ‘so she can’t have any more babies.’ It was the kind of crazy thing people say when they’re out of their minds with grief and anger. ‘You’re going to get through this,’ Deborah reassured her. ‘You’re tough.’ But Rena didn’t
seem to be listening. ‘If you see anything in the papers, it’ll be me,’ she said. Deborah laughed. ‘Well, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ She could have had no idea how soon those words would come back to haunt her.

Not everyone was taking Rena’s threats so lightly. Leone Griffin knew Rena had access to the gun cabinet and had talked to her husband Kevin about her concerns. Normally she wouldn’t have thought too much of it – after all Paul had always had firearms around the house, but Rena had been so unstable recently, talking about killing herself and even her children, as well as Lorna. Leone was worried the open gun case would prove too much of a temptation.

Kevin rang Paul, expecting him to be horrified, but he was astounded when the other man calmly told him: ‘I’m having dinner at the moment – I’ll sort it later.’ It seemed incredible. Here was a man being told his suicidal wife now had access to a gun and he seemed more concerned about finishing his dinner! Still, Paul knew his wife better than anyone. Maybe he knew these threats of Rena’s weren’t really serious. Who knows? Perhaps Rena had said this sort of things before and never acted on it. As everyone always says, you never really know what goes on behind closed doors in someone else’s relationship.

And so, in a quaint little English village where by rights Women’s Institute members should be meeting to discuss fundraising cake sales and rivalry limited to competition between different brownie groups, guns, suicide and
murder were the subjects on people’s lips. Still, no one really believed anything would happen. This wasn’t Downtown LA or Hackney’s Murder Mile: this was Great Shefford, where every other house boasted a conservatory and people still attended church on Sundays.

On 10 September, the day before Paul and Rena Salmon were due in court for a divorce hearing Rena woke up feeling like a rubber band stretched so far that it was at breaking point. Today something had to give; she didn’t think she could take any more.

There are days when you feel you’ve literally reached your limit. Sure, your rational self tells you that if you can just get through this one day, this one night, everything will work itself out somehow. Yet, to the other part of yourself where emotions run as thickly as blood, one day or night more seems unthinkable.

While her daughter was getting ready for school, Rena loaded the shotgun into her Mercedes. In her version of events, she was planning to drive to Lorna’s salon in Chiswick and shoot herself in front of her, hoping a death on the premises would cause her rival’s business to nosedive. The version put forward by the prosecution in her trial asserted that it was always Lorna and not herself that was the target. In either case it’s a scenario almost too chilling to imagine. The new school year has just started. Uniforms are still virtually pristine, smart new pens nestle in virgin pencil cases. A loving mother drops her 10-year-old daughter at
the school gates knowing that the boot of the car holds a shotgun and that at the end of the school day, someone will be dead and Mummy won’t be coming home.

In those circumstances how do you say goodbye? Do you dwell on a face, trying to memorise each beloved feature? Or is the adrenaline rush too strong and too urgent to allow space for emotions? Does the need to get going and do what must be done overpower the maternal urge to linger and caress? If a woman – even fleetingly – allows herself to think like a mother, can she really go ahead and do what Rena Salmon did?

Chiswick in west London is conveniently placed for easy access from Berkshire. That was one of the reasons why Lorna Stewart had been able to successfully combine running a beauty salon with being a mother. It didn’t take Rena long to drive the 60 miles there and find a parking space. Getting out of her car, she casually reached into the boot and pulled out the shotgun. Walking calmly past an electrician working on the salon – a respectable, relaxed-looking 40-something woman who just happened to be carrying a shotgun – she barely merited a raised eyebrow. Obviously there had to be a good reason for the gun, he reasoned, perhaps it was a fake or an amateur dramatics prop.

‘Don’t shoot!’ he joked, raising his hands in mock terror.

If only Rena Salmon had heeded that advice.

Instead she made her way down the salon stairs. Lorna
Stewart was in the office with her bookkeeper Lindsey Rees. The two were chatting together as they went about the normal day-to-day chores that running a business entails. Lindsey was writing a cheque while Lorna – with her back to her – crouched on the floor looking through papers. It was a typical, slow weekday and the two women had no reason to suppose anything out of the ordinary was going to happen.

Hunched over the chequebook, Lindsey heard Lorna say ‘Hello Rena’ in an unemotional tone. She could have been greeting the mailman or a familiar client. Glancing up, Lindsey saw someone in the doorway. Then Lorna spoke again, using the same calm almost monotone voice.

‘So you have come to shoot me?’

The reply came back in the same chillingly calm, controlled manner.

‘Yes.’

Would things have happened differently if Lorna had used a different greeting? If she hadn’t put the idea of murder out there so it danced tantalisingly in the air between them. Was it suggestion, invitation or statement of fact?

‘What about the children?’ Lorna asked.

Rena was momentarily thrown. ‘What about
your
children? You have left them in Australia,’ she said, uncomprehending. It was left to Lorna to explain as if Rena herself was a child.

‘What about
your
children?’ she asked.

If this was a plea for her life, a desperate attempt to get Rena to reconsider, Lorna Stewart was certainly being very cool about it. Faced with the woman who’d threatened her life on numerous occasions and now stood in front of her holding a loaded gun, she never raised her voice, never became hysterical. And Rena seemed to follow her cue, remaining unnaturally calm, completely focused on Lorna, never looking anywhere else.

‘They will be looked after by Paul,’ she replied.

Then, as if there was nothing more to say, Rena fired the gun.

As Lorna toppled over and fell to the floor, Lindsey Rees jumped to her feet and ran out of the office and up the stairs. As she reached the top, she heard another shot.

Downstairs Rena Salmon walked calmly over to Lorna and took her by the hand. She maintains Lorna was still alive at this point and, as she squeezed her hand, they reverted to the close friends they’d once been – two best friends facing death together.

Rena reached for her phone and dialled 999, telling the operator: ‘I’ve just shot my husband’s mistress.’

‘Do you want to give yourself up?’ she was asked.

‘Yeah,’ came the reply. ‘I’m sitting with her.’

When the operator asked the caller’s name, there was the same unhurried and almost casual air about her reply: ‘Rena Salmon – Salmon as in the fish. Right, got to go.’

After that, Rena smoked first one cigarette and then a
second as she sat next to Lorna Stewart’s now motionless body. While she waited, she sent a series of text messages.

‘I’ve shot Lorna, you pushed me to it,’ read the one she sent to husband Paul.

Then she sent a message to Leone Griffin: ‘I’ve shot Lorna. Look after my daughter for me.’

At first Leone couldn’t take it seriously.

‘I hope it’s a joke,’ she messaged back.

When she got no reply, Leone rang Rena. ‘What have you done?’ she demanded. ‘I hope you’re joking.’

But this was no joke. In the same calm voice, Rena said, ‘No, I’ve shot her. Once in the back and once in the side, and she’s lying on the floor.’

By this time Paul Salmon had received the harrowing text from his wife and was on his way to the salon. He rang Rena from his car.

‘What have you done?’ he yelled.

‘I’ve shot Lorna,’ Rena repeated.

‘Is she dead?’ Paul demanded, trying to keep control of his emotions as he drove to the scene.

‘I don’t know,’ came the answer.

There’s nothing more surreal than being in a familiar place where something cataclysmic has taken place. All the physical surroundings are the same – the grey streets, with the odd bit of litter blowing in the gutter, the same shop fronts, the same peeling posters, and yet something fundamental has shifted so it’s as if you are seeing it all for
the first time. Everything is different and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Paul Salmon pulled up in front of the salon on 10 September with his heart pounding. It was as if he was in a film, as if it was all happening to someone else. Unfortunately, this was one movie he couldn’t pause or switch off, or walk out of. By the time he arrived, the police were already there: Lorna Stewart was dead and it was all over; it was all too late.

After a 9-day trial in which her defence team sought to prove that she was a devoted wife who was traumatised by an unhappy childhood and pushed to the brink of insanity by a cruel and unfaithful husband, on 16 May 2003 Rena Salmon was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court was then told that Lorna had been two months’ pregnant at the time she was killed. Rena’s worst fears had been on course, after all.

In the fallout from one violent death, many lives can be radically altered. Paul Salmon, who went on record saying he had ‘no regrets’ about his affair with love-of-his-life Lorna and no guilt about cheating on Rena, was divorced a month after the trial ended. Six months later he was engaged to his new girlfriend.

Both the Salmon and the Rodrigues children are
growing up without a mother and Keith Rodrigues, who never stopped loving his wife, knows there’ll always be an empty space at special family occasions no one else can fill.

As for Rena Salmon herself, faced with a lifetime of imprisonment she has had all the time in the world to think about what she did and all the time in the world for regrets. She knows she will miss her children growing up; she’ll miss being there when they rip open their exam results and miss waving them off on their first day of university. She won’t be there to wipe their tears when they experience the first heartbreak of young love, nor will she share their everyday fears and frustrations, their disappointments and their triumphs.

Rena has told friends that Lorna haunts her and she would do anything to swap places with her. She may be eligible for parole in 2017, but even then she will take her past with her: things that are done can never be undone.

When a marriage breaks down in bitterness there are no winners and when the fetid entrails of a life together are spilled out on the pavement for all the world to see there can be only losers.

It’s something Rena Salmon knows only too well.

W
hen Kelly Comeau’s doorbell went at an hour verging on the uncivilised one Saturday morning early in December 2004, she was mildly irritated but not unduly alarmed. Bogan Gates Drive in the Sugar Hill district of Buford, Georgia, is the sort of leafy,
upper-middle
class street where an early knock on the door on a weekend morning in December most likely heralds the arrival of the postman carrying an extra-large, early Christmas present. Or it might be an over-zealous charity collector trying to catch folk’s Christmas spirit before wallet-fatigue sets in.

City folk from downtown Atlanta disdainfully refer to Sugar Hill and its neighbouring suburbs as OTP – Outside
the Perimeter – but by and large its residents believe they are well and truly living the American Dream. With its spacious, attractive houses, neatly planted gardens, golf courses and friendly local schools, it’s the white picket fence version of Modern American life. Children tear round the quiet streets on bikes or play Little League baseball in the park while their mothers bake cakes for church fundraisers or sit on neighbourhood committees. It’s the kind of place where couples present a smiling united front to the world while their marriages unravel secretly and privately behind firmly closed doors. As you cross the Dekalb/Gwinnett City Line on your way to the Sugar Hill area the sign on the Water Tower reads ‘Success Lives Here’ and with success in residence, anything less just isn’t tolerated. Among the shiny, polished-on-Sundays estate cars and living rooms adorned with poster-sized, studio-posed family photos there’s no place for self-doubt, failure or dysfunction.

Yet that Saturday morning something new and uninvited moved into Bogan Gates Drive, something pervasive and unpleasant that no quantity of disinfectant wipes or collective prayers at Sunday service could ever cleanse or dislodge. Evil came snaking in down the quiet suburban street, into houses with the curtains still drawn against the early morning light, up wide carpeted staircases and along hallways lined with framed homilies and family snapshots. Evil came calling and nothing there would ever be the same again.

Standing on the Comeau’s doorstep at 7.40am that Saturday morning, 4 December, was little Dalton Corbin, one of the two boys who lived across the street. Neighbours for the past few years, the Comeaus and the Corbins were extremely close and forever in and out of one another’s houses. They shared babysitting, dinner and barbecues. The Comeaus had even willed their estate and care of their child to the Corbins in the event of their death. While the Corbins’ relationship had recently been going through a rocky patch, Bart Corbin, the boys’ dad, spent at lot of time at the Comeaus’ house to escape for a while the tensions of home. That’s how close the two families were. But young Dalton Corbin’s early morning visit, this cold December morning, was far from a normal social call.

Wearing just his underpants, the 7-year-old was shivering in the biting winter wind and gulping back hysterical tears. What he had to say would shatter the peace of that quiet neighbourhood for years to come and destroy the lives of two families:

‘My Dad shot my Mom.’

On the surface of things, the Corbins looked as if they had it all. Mum, Jennifer, was a tall, attractive blonde with a smile that came right from the soul. A pre-school teacher
at the church, she was heavily involved in the local community and devoted a large chunk of her boundless energy to helping on neighbourhood committees and organising children’s sporting teams. She was just one of those rare people who love to give. You know how some people commit selfless acts for selfish reasons – to look good or because they think it’s what they’re supposed to do? Well, Jennifer Barber-Corbin wasn’t like that. Whether it was time, money or love, she gave because it was what came naturally and it would never have occurred to her to do anything else. Her sister, Heather Tierney, recalls supermarket shopping with Jennifer and being baffled when she bought a pre-baked chicken, then left it behind at the check out desk. It turned out Jennifer – or Jenn as she was known to her many friends – had spotted a local homeless man in the shop and had bought the chicken for him, making sure the cashier would quietly hand it to him as he left. That was the kind of person she was.

While Jenn Corbin cared about everyone around her, when it came to her immediate family, her generosity and capacity for love knew no bounds. She showered her two small sons – Dalton, and his 5-year-old brother Dillon – with affection, inventing games for them, turning ordinary moments into adventures. The boys were her work in progress and to this deeply religious woman they were her gift from God. Dalton was bright, outgoing and inquisitive while Dillon was dreamier and quieter yet both
represented her investment in the future, the embodiment of her dreams and hopes.

Family was immensely important to Jenn. She and her two sisters, Heather and Rajel Caldwell, had grown up in a home where money was sometimes tight but love was limitless. Their parents, Max and Narda Barber, were so close to their offspring that even as adults the girls couldn’t bear to move far from one another or from their mum and dad. Each birthday or anniversary was an excuse for a family get together and the whole clan enjoyed holidays together, boating on Lake Lanier.

Back in the early nineties when Jenn first introduced new boyfriend Barton (Bart) Corbin to her family the Barbers immediately welcomed him. She’d met him through his younger brother Robert – who was working for the same seafood chain of restaurants – and was instantly drawn to him, as were her family. ‘He cracks me up,’ Heather told Jenn approvingly. ‘He’s so funny.’And with his dark hair, chiselled features and piercing brown eyes, Bart was no slouch in the looks department either. His
self-contained
dry wit was a perfect counterbalance to Jenn’s larger-than life exuberance and zest for living.

Jenn was never very materialistic but it didn’t hurt that as an up-and-coming dentist with a burgeoning practice in nearby Dacula and a fiercely ambitious streak, Bart Corbin would also be able to provide handsomely for her and any children they might have. For the Barber family, Bart
Corbin seemed a great choice for their precious Jenn. Sure, he might use more colourful language than Max and Narda were used to but he slotted right into the family and in no time at all was sharing weekends with Jenn’s sisters and holidays with the whole clan. When the couple married in September 1996 in a beautiful garden ceremony, everyone agreed it was one of the most uplifting weddings they’d ever witnessed. Later, when Dalton and Dillon came along, two years apart, Barton’s place in the family was well and truly secured. Sometimes when Max and Narda looked around at their kids and grandkids in the middle of a family gathering they felt a huge swell of pride. Not only had their daughters turned into such fine people but they’d introduced equally interesting and decent partners into the family mix, too. How lucky they were!

What the Barbers didn’t know was that their perfect new son-in-law was carrying round a terrible secret, a secret that had the power to blow their whole happy family world to pieces. If Max and Narda had realised what dark shadows lurked in Bart Corbin’s past, they would have scooped up their big-hearted Jenn, size 9½ feet and all, and her two tousle-haired boys and run to the farthest corner of the earth. If they’d seen past Bart’s pleasant, respectable exterior to the depths of his contorted soul, they’d never have let Jenn go home to 4515 Bogan Gates Drive, where she would close the curtains against the night and double lock the front door thinking she was keeping the bad
things away. Sometimes, just sometimes, the stranger you should most fear turns out to be the person you know best.

So when did it all start to fragment, this perfect
all-American
family life? When did the first cracks begin to thread their snake-like way across the fragile glass surface of the bright, shiny Barber-Corbin façade? Could anyone have spotted the early warning signs? Might they have prevented what happened from occurring? That’s the problem with death, isn’t it? It sentences those left behind to a lifetime of ‘should haves’ and ‘what ifs’.

Throughout 2004 there was a gradual build up of tension in the house on Bogan Gates Drive. Bart, who’d always had a strong controlling streak, started to lose his temper more readily with Jenn and the boys. His work kept him away for long periods of time and, unbeknown to anyone else, he had become embroiled in a long-term affair. All Jenn knew was that even when he was home Bart seemed distant. It seemed that nothing she did was good enough any more; nothing made him happy.

Increasingly isolated and depressed, Jenn started to look for distraction on the internet, staying up long into the night after her children had gone to sleep and exchanging jokes with strangers in chat rooms or playing the hugely popular online role-playing game EverQuest. Sometimes she’d switch on her computer and lose herself so completely in the fantasy game – which involves teams of four players working together on various missions – that
she’d suddenly realise with a jolt that hours had passed since she’d first sat down. Still, at least it kept her mind busy and stopped her from thinking too much about how unhappy she was becoming in her marriage.

For Jenn, part of the enjoyment of online game playing was ‘meeting’ so many new people. To the uninitiated, online gaming can seem like a solitary pursuit but for many players it provides access to a ready-made support group, an instant community of like-minded ‘friends’. So what if you never get to meet them in person? For many, hiding behind usernames and pseudonyms is a kind of release. You’re free to reinvent yourself, to become the person you always dreamed of being. For Jennifer Corbin, devoted mother of two, volunteer at the local church, wife of a successful, well-respected dentist, the anonymity afforded by the internet meant that for once she no longer had to pretend to be living an enviable perfect life with the perfect husband. For a few hours a day she got to shake off the dual shackles of keeping up appearances and of living up to other people’s expectations; she was free to be herself.

Sometime over the course of 2004 Jenn struck up a conversation online with someone called Christopher. Although they knew nothing about one another, there seemed to be an instant connection between them. Christopher got her sense of humour and he was interested in the same things. Before long, the two were chatting as if they’d known each other all their lives and Jenn was
sharing some of her frustrations about the state of her marriage. Although she had plenty of friends locally, Christopher was different. He was far enough removed from her everyday life that she didn’t feel like she was being judged and was consequently more able to talk freely. Not only this but he also had an uncanny ability to instinctively understand how she was feeling. Before long the online friendship had strengthened into something much deeper and the two were exchanging increasingly intimate and romantic messages. For Jenn it was like a new beginning – a lifeline in the increasingly stormy waters of her marriage.

Then Christopher dropped a bombshell. It seemed he was not who he said he was. In fact, he was not even a ‘he’. Christopher turned out to be Anita, a Missouri woman, who’d also turned to the internet in a search for comfort and in the hope of finding a soulmate. At first Jenn was heartbroken. Just when she thought she’d found someone special, someone who understood her, who supported her when everything looked so hopeless, it was all snatched away from her. In an increasingly bleak situation this had been her one ray of happiness and now it had gone. Was she destined to feel lonely all her life?

As the shock waves began to ebb away and Jenn had time to absorb what had happened, she began to reconsider her earlier outrage. Did it really make a difference who or what ‘Christopher’ was if ‘he’ made her feel good? If you were lucky enough to find a soulmate, shouldn’t you hang
onto them no matter what? Soon Jenn and ‘Christopher’ were exchanging emails again and before long, they’d started talking on the phone – warm, involved conversations that often went on into the night.

‘All she’s done is show me that I don’t have to be unhappy for the rest of my life,’ explained Jenn to her sister, Heather. ‘Don’t I deserve that?’ But no one could have begrudged Jenn, who always put herself out so much for everyone else, this chance of companionship with someone who cared.

If you’ve ever lain awake at night beside someone you no longer love while resentment lies in between you like a third person or if you’ve ever stayed up late in the hope that your partner would be asleep by the time you got to bed, or gone up early feigning a headache; if you’ve ever leaned against the closed door of the en suite bathroom running the tap to cover the sound of your wretchedness, you’ll know something of what Jennifer Barber-Corbin went through those last few months of her life. Look into your heart. Imagine being in that cold place gazing at a turned back, searching the silences for hidden meanings. Could you blame her for seeking out friendship wherever she could find it, for turning towards the warmth of someone who understands?

Perhaps it was the strength she gathered from her new companion that helped Jenn to resolve finally to bring an end to her increasingly unhappy marriage. ‘Mom, I do not
love Bart,’ she told her worried mother, Narda. ‘I have loved him because he is the father of our children but I’m ready to leave and I’m ready to get on with my life.’ No parent ever wants to hear that their child is thinking of divorce and particularly when they’ve taken their son-
in-law
into their family and their heart. Narda and Max Barber knew their daughter, however, and they were certain she wouldn’t have given up on her marriage without having exhausted every option for staying together. Besides they’d also grown slightly alarmed at the way Bart sometimes snapped at Jenn or the boys. He seemed to want to orchestrate everything they did and grew irrationally irritated if they deviated from his plans.