Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (10 page)

But Bart’s twin, Brad, was with him in the registration lines, and Shelly didn’t want an audience if she approached Bart and he rejected her. She went back to her dorm, Creswell Hall, and pondered what she could find out about Bart now that she at least knew his name. Shelly was a “Northerner,” six months older than Bart, and she had considerably more dating experience than he had.

“What I did,” she remembered, “was look up his address in the student directory and I sent him a note, telling him I thought he was cute.”

She scribbled that she would like to meet him, and added her phone number to the note. Of course, once she had done that she regretted it, sure that he would think she was weird, and would never phone her.

But he did, and Shelly was relieved to find him quite friendly on the phone, even though she realized that he had no idea who she was. “I’ve never liked talking on the phone,” she said, “to anyone that I can easily see face-to-face. We arranged to meet the following evening in the lobby of my dorm.”

Shelly was a very pretty young woman, with abundant long, almost-black hair. She was about to become Bart Corbin’s first serious girlfriend, and she would have a great impact on his life, more than she could possibly realize. One might even say that Bart would hold any woman who came after her up to Shelly’s image.

Shelly had no aspirations toward marriage. She intended to become a writer or a reporter. She was remarkably bright, although she was a somewhat capricious student who sought out only those classes that interested her, and even then didn’t mind playing hooky from time to time.

More than two decades later, she would recall meeting Bart in her dorm lounge in vivid detail. “It’s funny,” she commented, “how I can remember that night like it was just a few months ago. I was wearing a ruffled, hot pink minidress that accentuated the tan I had already, despite the fact that it must have been only March. I was leaning against a pinball machine when he walked up. We just clicked right away. I thought he was really sweet and funny. We sat in the lobby and talked, then went outside and sat on one of the planters between Creswell and the dining hall.

“We were there a long time, yet the hours just flew by. Despite the strange circumstances of our introduction, we were immediately comfortable together, chatting away like old friends.

“We had a couple of beers, and by this time I had a bit of a buzz. I was sitting in his lap, and my skirt kept hitching up. He was very careful to smooth it back down—repeatedly—and preserve my dignity.

“Most nineteen-year-olds would not have been so chivalrous. It really made an impression on me. I thought he really was the ‘Southern gentleman’ that we coeds were always hearing about—but not seeing much evidence of. So we just started dating, and it was totally natural.”

Bart was soon entranced with Shelly. Three months later, at the end of his freshman year, the men in Myers Hall voted him “Most Likely to Fall in Love Through the Mail” at their year’s-end party.

Shelly was in love, too. They had both fallen hard very rapidly. It was spring, and they spent all their free time together during the week as well as on weekends, if Bart didn’t go home. Very early on, he bought Shelly a bright yellow T-shirt at the Kmart in his hometown, with “Where the Hell is Snellville?” emblazoned on the front. When Shelly went home to New York State, she wore that T-shirt proudly, although no one in her hometown had any idea—or any interest in—where Snellville was.

During the school year, Shelly had worn Bart’s letterman’s jacket on campus. It was a status symbol as well as a reminder of him.

Their relationship grew closer. Early in their courtship, Shelly had once asked Bart why he wanted to be a dentist, joking that “I think it’s gross to stick your fingers into somebody’s mouth to make a living!”

“I’m not doing it for any altruistic reason,” he said.

“My interest is in the deep-pockets theory.”

“You mean for money?”

He nodded. “Dentists get paid a lot of money.”

His avarice didn’t bother her at the time. She knew money was very important to Bart, and she was caught up in the first, nonjudgmental stage of being in love. When they went out, they went Dutch. Shelly didn’t view Bart as stingy in a mean-spirited way, but she admitted to herself he was definitely parsimonious.

The Georgia Bulldogs–Florida Gators football game was arguably the biggest event of every school year at UGA. The game and attendant celebration in Jacksonville, Florida, was famous for being “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.” Between the rivalry that grew each year and the opportunity to socialize, every student in both colleges wanted to attend.

“Most of us would have sold our blood for plasma and the family silver to be part of that,” Shelly recalled.

“And we could have gone the year Bart was a sophomore! I would have been thrilled if I’d known that Bart had actually won the student lottery for some prime tickets.”

But Bart didn’t tell Shelly he’d won until after he sold the tickets for a steep price. “I almost blew a gasket,” she said. “And he knew I would. That’s why he didn’t tell me until it was too late. He said that it was just too expensive to go, and he didn’t even think about what a once-in-a-lifetime experience it would have been for both of us, something beyond price. I thought his decision was idiocy, and I didn’t forget it even though I forgave him.”

The money from those tickets was the most important thing to Bart then, just as money would almost always come first with him. Indeed anything he owned belonged only to him and he would let it go only when he was ready.

Later, Shelly reasoned that Bart’s parents were probably struggling to put three sons through college at once, even though she knew the sons were getting financial aid from the school.

The elder Corbins lived well—but not lavishly. She had seen that. Bart began taking Shelly with him when he went home to Snellville, and she got to know his family. She really liked Bobby, the twins’ younger brother, who enrolled at UGA as a freshman when Bart and Brad were sophomores. She found Bobby to be unfailingly good-natured and always smiling. Shelly watched the family interaction and deduced that Bobby was the family favorite—at least with Gene Corbin—because he was the son who was outstanding in football. She never felt close to Bart’s twin, and suspected Brad was a little jealous of the time Bart spent with her. Or it might have been because she and Bart were in love, and Brad didn’t have a girlfriend.

“Gene was nice enough to me,” Shelly recalled. “I think he was amused that Bart was dating a ‘Yankee’ from New York. He seemed to feel that I was a phase that Bart would grow out of.”

Gene’s patronizing attitude didn’t bother Shelly. Connie Corbin, however, was another story. Bart’s mother struck Shelly as a very moody woman, and Shelly never knew what kind of a reception she would get from Connie. If Gene thought his son’s dating a Northerner was just a phase, Connie seemed to view Shelly as “The Enemy,” even though she occasionally surprised her by being friendly. “She could be nice,” Shelly said. “Once she showed me how to cook chicken planks—which is Southern for tender breast strips that are dipped in batter and deep-fried. Then they serve a bunch of different sauces with them. Bart liked them a lot.”

On most visits, however, Connie was “icy,” and during one weekend when Shelly came home with Bart, his mother refused to speak to either of them for the two days they were there. Neither had any idea what had made her angry.

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.