Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (26 page)

It was a horrible afternoon. Besides their own family, some of Doug Tierney’s relatives had also been invited for dinner, yet Bart made no effort to be civil to anyone. It was impossible not to notice that he was furious about something. He downed two bottles of wine, pacing back and forth in the basement, and then sat on the back deck, glowering. The more he drank, the blacker his mood became.

Usually, Bart would have spent time visiting with Max, and talking to Jenn’s mother and sisters. But on this Thanksgiving he was avoiding everyone, and he looked like a thundercloud, his jaw clenched as he grew steadily more intoxicated.

They all sat down around the dining room table, and ate the turkey dinner, but their conversation sounded tinny and self-conscious, and they often lapsed into awkward silences. Dessert hadn’t even been served when Bart stood up and announced that he was going home. He ordered Jenn and the boys to get their coats and get in the car. Dalton and Dillon pleaded to stay longer to play with their cousins, but Bart ignored them. Jenn had no time even to make apologies. She hurried after Bart.

They were no sooner outside than Bart began shouting at Jenn. Everyone inside could hear him.

“Slut!” he shouted at her. “Are you going to tell me what you’ve been doing on the Internet? What sordid little game have you been playing? You might as well tell me because you know I’m going to find out all about it.”

White-faced, Jenn urged him to keep his voice down. She touched her finger to her lips in a “hushing” motion: “Not in front of the boys. We can talk about it when we get home.”

As always, she tried to protect their children from seeing them argue. But this was far beyond an argument. She lifted the boys into the backseat and drove off, still begging Bart to lower his voice. When Bart saw her shake her finger at him, he erupted. He no longer cared if his sons heard him. When Jenn turned toward him, he hauled off and hit her square in the face. She was shocked; as cruel as some of his verbal taunts had become, he had never struck her.

“I never touched you,” Bart sneered, anticipating that she would tell someone. “It’s your word against mine.”

Now the car was silent except for the sound of Dalton sobbing. Amazingly, through all of this Dillon had fallen asleep in the back seat. The boys had heard their father shout and swear before—but neither of them had ever seen him hit their mother. Jenn attempted to stifle her own tears, trying desperately not to scare Dalton any more than he already was. She watched the road ahead. It was dark out and visibility was poor. All she could think of was getting Dalton and Dillon home without anything worse happening. Bart was so out of control that she was afraid he might grab the wheel and send them plunging off the road.

Jenn was relieved when they finally pulled up into their own driveway. Bart stalked into the house, leaving Jenn to follow with the boys. She didn’t try to talk to Bart until she had Dalton calmed down. Then Jenn called Heather and told her what had happened.

“Call Dad,” Heather said.

Jenn did call her father, who urged her to grab the boys and what clothes she could, and drive back to Heather’s house. He didn’t think she would be safe if she stayed in her own house.

“Take the back roads,” Max warned her. “Don’t come the way you usually do, in case he decides to follow you.”

Bart made calls, too, using his cell phone to call the Tierneys to explain his side of the fight. He spoke to Doug, and denied adamantly that he had hit Jenn, telling his brother-in-law that she was only being dramatic.

“She might get the boys to say they were witnesses,” Bart complained. “But they’re children. No one would believe them over me.”

Bart had an explanation for what had happened. He said that Jenn had been trying to choke him, and he had hit her accidentally as he tried to get her hand off his throat.

Jenn’s parents and sisters and their husbands had never known Bart to be any danger to her. But they had all been concerned from the moment he’d walked into the Tierney’s home that afternoon. He had acted so strange all day. This was an ugly ending to Thanksgiving.

Jenn scrambled hurriedly to get pajamas for the boys. As she ran out to her SUV, Kelly Comeau called out, “Happy Thanksgiving!”

Kelly would remember that night. “Well, Happy Thanksgiving to you, Kelly,” Jenn called back bleakly. “Bart just punched me in the face.”

Kelly ran across the street and helped Jenn get the boys in her car, and she drove off before Bart could stop her. Bart told Kelly, too, that Jenn had been trying to choke him and he’d had no choice but to try to get her hands off of him. He swore he hadn’t meant to hit her.

Jenn drove the back roads as Max suggested but kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if he was following her. Fortunately, he was nowhere in sight. But they had passed through a safety barrier into a kind of insanity. And nothing would ever be the same again. As frightened as she was, Jenn Corbin had no idea what lay ahead.

I
T TOOK QUITE A WHILE
for Jenn to get Dalton and Dillon settled down for the night, at the Tierneys’ house. Finally, exhausted, they dropped off to sleep. Jenn sat on the couch, talking quietly to Doug. She was very upset, but she seemed resolute that she was going to leave Bart. She told her brother-in-law how frightened Dalton had been when Bart hit her in the face, and that he had screamed and cried. Even Dillon, awakened when they got home, caught the panic of the moment.

Now, Jenn didn’t seem afraid—only disappointed at the path her life was taking. She told Doug that she just didn’t love Bart anymore.

Their marriage had been going downhill rapidly since midsummer, Jenn explained. Bart was jealous of the time she spent on the Internet, and increasingly suspicious. Their home life had become unbearable, Dalton and Dillon sensed the tension, and Jenn said she was finally at a place where she didn’t want to try to patch up her tattered marriage. There was nothing left to save.

In fact, she confided that Bart had been sleeping upstairs in a bedroom next to the boys’ room for a month. Jenn said she’d moved all his clothes up there to their guest room.

Feeling safe in Doug and Heather’s house, Jenn finally relaxed enough to be able to sleep.

I
N THE MORNING,
the sun came out and nothing seemed quite as awful as it had the night before. Jenn told Heather that she was going back to her own house; she didn’t want to have to sleep on someone else’s couch or live in a tiny apartment. She felt she could figure out a way to make a new life with her sons. Despite her sister’s misgivings, she packed up her boys and drove home.

In his business as a computer expert, Doug worked with a number of legal firms, and he gave Jenn the name of a divorce lawyer to call: Judy King. When Jenn replied that she had no money to pay an attorney, Doug told her that he would give her $5,000 to help with a divorce if she decided that was best.

Heather assured her sister that she could share their home. There was plenty of room in the new Dawsonville house that they’d moved into only two weeks before. The whole basement could be fixed up as an apartment. Even so, the Tierneys and the Barbers still hoped that there might be the possibility of a reconciliation between Bart and Jenn.

For the next six days, Bart went to his clinic, but returned home every night. Jenn kept up her part-time job at the Sugar Hill church preschool, and she saw to it that their house was as neat as always. The family ate dinner together each night, but mealtimes were stressful, with Bart and Jenn usually exchanging harsh words. Most things rolled off Dillon’s back, but Dalton had become Jenn’s shadow, with his eyes darting constantly between his father and mother; he was only seven, but he took on the job of protecting his mother. As frightened as he was of his father, Dalton had become a small but stubborn force. He would not allow anyone to hurt her—not even his father. That annoyed Bart even more.

Bart was now his own private eye. He was obsessed with discovering everything he could about Jenn’s life. He stole her cell phone from her purse and methodically called every number listed in its directory, hoping to connect with the “Chris” in Jenn’s emails.

Most of the calls he made connected him to someone he knew, and he made excuses for why he’d phoned—usually telling people he was “reprogramming Jenn’s phone for her.”

“He even called me at work,” Narda said, “and he felt kind of foolish when he realized he’d dialed one of my numbers.”

W
HEN
B
ART GOT A NUMBER
that rang and rang without an answer, he jotted it down and kept calling.

In between checking on Jenn’s secret life, Bart called friends and relatives to learn what he could. He phoned Heather, wanting to talk about Jenn. “She just wants my money,” he complained. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Heather thought that was classic Bart; with him, it was always money, money, money.

“Bart. You punched Jenn in the face—and Dalton saw it.”

“Yes,” he argued, “but I didn’t hit her hard.”

“I saw how red her face was,” Heather snapped.

When he realized that Heather wasn’t on his side, Bart switched tactics and began to call Doug Tierney more often. He acted now as if Doug were his close buddy, and he expected his brother-in-law would pass on any information about Jenn. Bart also consulted Doug as a computer expert.

“He wanted to know where he could take the hard drive in the computer that Jenn had used,” Doug recalled.

“He was looking for all the emails she had written or received.”

Doug did his best to avoid referring Bart to a technician who could do that, but as Bart kept hounding him, he finally mumbled the name of a small firm in Norcross, Georgia. Doug hoped Bart wouldn’t pursue his almost pathological curiosity. But Bart was fanatical as he tracked Jenn’s every movement.

B
ART CONTACTED A NUMBER
of people he had met during his marriage, and a very few he knew before he met Jenn. He was building an increasingly complicated network of those who had the potential to help him unveil all of her secrets.

One couple—Jenn Grossman and her husband, Rob—had considered themselves close friends of Jenn and Bart Corbin for more than five years. In 1999, Rob Grossman had a satellite-dish company and he installed one at the Corbin home. Rob and Bart quickly became friends, and they soon bartered back and forth, with Bart providing dental care to the Grossmans in exchange for satellite dishes on his houseboat and in his dental offices. The two Jenns got along well, too, and the couples started spending time together on a regular basis, having dinner at one another’s house and going out to restaurants on birthdays and holidays.

As for Jenn and Bart’s relationship, it seemed like a typical happy marriage to Rob and Jenn. Certainly, they never fought or argued in front of the Grossmans.

Jenn gave Jennifer Grossman the baby clothes and equipment that she’d saved after Dillon’s birth. With Bart’s vasectomy, she knew there would be no more babies for her.

Jenn Grossman had noticed that Bart swore a lot when he was working on her teeth, but thought he was simply more relaxed around her and Rob because they were personal friends. In the fall of 2004, they had a falling out with Bart regarding a dental bill, and stopped talking, although the Grossmans assumed that sooner or later, they would work it out.

To his dismay, Max Barber had inadvertently revealed information to Bart about an item on the Corbins’ credit record. Despite his financial problems, Bart didn’t hesitate to spend money on things he wanted. In the fall of 2004, he bought himself a classic 1978 yellow Mustang convertible, and, as always, he had gone to Max to handle the sale. What Max didn’t know was that, unbeknownst to Bart, Jenn had taken out a single credit card in her name alone. The card had only a $2,000 limit. It showed up on the couple’s joint marital credit record and Bart’s finger stopped as he traced down his family’s report.

For a man who demanded that his wife account for every item on her grocery list, the information about a credit card he didn’t recognize had to have been jolting.

“This is a mistake,” Bart said. “It isn’t mine.”

He asked Max to check to see if the surprise credit card had incurred a legitimate debt. Unaware that he was giving away his daughter’s secret, Max ran the card through again, and told Bart that the charge was accurate.

Max could read Bart’s reaction as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head. He started to speak, but his son-in-law was already dashing out the door.

Jenn hadn’t bought anything even vaguely incriminating with the card, only household items. But they were duplicates of things that already existed in the house on Bogan Gates Drive. On Monday, November 29, when Jenn arrived in Lawrenceville to work with Narda, she asked her mother if she could store some things in the Lake Arts warehouse.

“She had wiped out the balance on that credit card,” Narda recalled. “She backed her car around and unloaded things she thought she and the boys would need if they had to leave their home: towels, dinnerware, salt and pepper shakers, a vacuum cleaner, even Band-Aids and aspirin tablets—just the very basic stuff she might need to set up a house. I don’t know where Jenn planned to go—maybe she didn’t either. She had taken a $500 cash advance from that card—that’s about all. She knew that she was welcome with Max and me, and with Heather and Doug, but we all lived in a different school district, and she didn’t want to take the boys out of their school.”

Bart continued to call every number stored on Jenn’s cell phone, trying to find out whom she might be talking to that he didn’t know about. Once Anita had confessed her real identity to Jenn, they had exchanged phone numbers, although Jenn wasn’t sure what, if anything, would happen in their future. When Bart stole Jenn’s cell phone on Thanksgiving Day, Anita’s number was in it—albeit without a name. Jenn alerted Anita not to answer any calls from numbers she didn’t recognize or blocked numbers—just in case.