Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (32 page)

Fox told the grand jurors that Bart had brought up his marital situation a couple of times, but that both he and Lyttle had told him they didn’t want to know his personal business. “We told him,” Fox said, “we just want to relax, blow off a little steam, watch a ball game.”

Neither man knew Jennifer Corbin any more than to wave hello to her once in a while.

Investigator Kevin Vincent had obtained a copy of the bar tab from the Wild Wing, a $35 bill Brian Fox paid with his Visa card. The three men left the café at 1:07
A.M.
Over their three hours there, they downed fourteen bottles of Miller Lite beer. Kevin Lyttle, who was to have been the designated driver, testified that he had had one beer, Brian Fox admitted to eight, and said that Bart had had about six before they switched to water.

“I wouldn’t consider myself very intoxicated at all,” Fox testified. “Or him” (meaning Bart).

Nevertheless, they had agreed that Bart would stay at Kevin’s house rather than drive on to Bogan Gates in Buford. As Kevin Lyttle took the wheel of Bart’s Chevy pickup, he realized he was out of coffee for breakfast, and he and Bart had stopped at the Wal-Mart in Hoschton to buy some. By the time they got to Lyttle’s house, it was 1:35
A.M.

But Bart had changed his mind. He didn’t want to spend the night at Iron’s house, and no amount of arguing from his old friend would dissuade him.

“I took his keys so he wouldn’t drive,” Lyttle told the grand jury. “It wasn’t that he was sloppy drunk or nothing. He had more than one beer—so he’s probably gonna get a DUI or something. I took his keys and he wanted to leave. I went into the master bedroom and put his keys in my dresser, so he wouldn’t get up and leave—and I went to the bathroom. And he was—the whole time—he was ‘I wanna go, I need to go.’ I told him to stay on the couch, and I was going to bed, and then I went to the bathroom. As I was coming out of the bathroom, I heard him say he had his own keys—another set of keys.

“And he left.”

A
S THE GRAND JURY HEARING
continued, the timeline was narrowing. Jenn Corbin had probably died somewhere between 2 and 3
A.M.
that morning. Steve Comeau had heard the sound of what he thought was Bart Corbin’s pickup truck approaching close to 2
A.M.
, and then heard a truck leaving about fifteen minutes later.

Bobby Corbin was next. He was more expansive than the men who had gone to the Wild Wing Cafe with Bart, and more at ease on the witness stand. He recalled that he had met Jenn first—at Barnacle’s where he was the doorman and she was the bartender. “She kind of met Bart through me when he came to see me.”

Bobby said he lived in Auburn, Georgia. He gave his place of employment as a car dealership in Braselton, a job he’d held for nine years.

Danny Porter hastened to inform the grand jurors that he and Bart’s younger brother knew each other, and Bobby agreed that he and the prosecutor were members of the same gym, although they were mere acquaintances.

Bobby said he was close to Bart, although they didn’t see each other as often as he would like. They played golf, watched football games—usually at Bobby’s house. He had been aware of the difficulties in Bart’s marriage, and he had talked to Heather about it. Both of them had wanted to be sure that Dalton and Dillon were okay, but he hadn’t wanted to meddle in someone else’s marriage.

“She [Heather] said when she listened to Bart, then she was mad at Jenn, thinking she was being an idiot, and then next time she was talking with Jenn and [then] Bart was being an idiot. I told the same thing to Jennifer when she told me they were not talking. I said, ‘Bottom line is you either want to fix it or you don’t—if you want to fix it, you need a third party because neither one of y’all are opening up in any shape or form.’”

Bobby testified that as far as he knew, Bart had never stayed away from his home overnight, not even as he filed for divorce. And Bart told him he needed to move his truck to Bobby’s house because it was in his company’s name, and he didn’t want it sitting in the driveway at Bogan Gates. “So I came by before work, picked him up, went to get his truck, and drive it over to my house, and she happened to drive back up.”

There had apparently been nothing ominous about that encounter. He had asked Jenn how she was, and she said “Okay,” and that she was doing fine, and walked inside the house. Bobby had never seen her again.

“When did you learn that Jennifer Corbin had been killed?” Danny Porter asked Bobby Corbin.

“That would have been the 4th, I believe, between 8:30 and 9:00
A.M.
Mama called me.”

“Where was Bart when your mother called?”

“Sitting across from me at the breakfast table.”

“When your mama called, what did she tell you?”

“She was a little upset, obviously, and she said ‘They are calling you,’ and I said, ‘Who is calling me?’

“Steve, which is the neighbor across the street. He said that Jennifer was dead—that she had been shot and they were saying that Bart did it. I said, ‘Well, he is sitting right here with me.’”

Bobby Corbin said he had been “flabbergasted,” and didn’t know what to say, that he and Bart had just been talking about going to Dalton’s basketball game at eleven that morning.

“I looked at my brother and asked, ‘You have something to tell me,’ and he says, ‘No,’ but I knew something wasn’t right.”

Bobby told Danny Porter that he had asked his wife to take his children upstairs, and then he called Steve Comeau.

“I said, ‘Steve, what is going on?’ and he said, ‘Well, Jennifer is dead.’ [And I said] ‘Yeah, my mama said that, but what is going on?’”

There was little question that things had been chaotic in Bobby Corbin’s house. Bart had run upstairs, and was vomiting, something he always seemed to do when he was upset. Bobby testified that his own plan was to drive with Bart over to the house on Bogan Gates, but then Heather called and accused Bart of shooting Jenn. And then Doug Tierney called, and asked where Bart was.

“Right here.”

“When did he get there?”

“Early this morning.”

“How did he look?” Doug asked.

Bobby said he had looked fine.

Danny Porter said, “Let’s talk about that. What time did your brother arrive at your house on the morning of December 4th.”

“My dog barked, and that is when he probably got there. My wife said about 2:30. I cannot look at the clock, and say when he came in.”

“Did you even get out of bed?”

“Initially, no.”

“He came into the house?” Porter pressed.

Bobby explained that Bart hadn’t come in at that point. He could have entered the garage, because since the problems with Jenn had escalated, he’d given Bart the code to his garage door so he always had a way to get in, but he apparently couldn’t unlock the door to the house itself because he didn’t know where the spare key was.

“He said he went around back to see if another door was open, and that’s when the dog barks again. He told me he didn’t want to wake me up, so he was going to sleep in my Suburban, which was parked in the garage. When it started getting cold, he called me on my cell and I went down.”

“About what time in the morning?” Porter asked.

“The phone call was at 3:23.”

“He called you on your cell, you woke up, and where was he?”

“When I came down, he was at my garage door.”

“Did you let him in?”

“Yes.”

“And what would you describe as his demeanor at 3:23 in the morning?”

“He had been out with the guys, but he wasn’t—I mean—walking—staggering. I mean his demeanor was fine. He’d had a few beers, but that was about it—nothing drastic.”

“He didn’t seem agitated or upset?”

“No—no.”

Bobby said he had pointed toward a recliner, given Bart a blanket, and gone back to bed. They both slept until about seven. Except for the fact that Bart had shown up in the middle of the night, everything was normal until Steve Comeau called. Bart was calm until he heard Bobby’s voice change when he heard the news about Jenn. Then he had begun to shake, and Bobby was afraid he was going into shock. He wasn’t sure which of them had decided not to go over to Bart’s house and talk to the police, but once Bart heard that his sons were with Steve and Kelly Comeau, he felt they were okay. The more the brothers discussed what they should do, the more reluctant they were to go to Buford. Feelings were running high, and Jenn’s family were already pointing fingers at Bart by then.

“W
HERE DID YOUR BROTHER
tell you he was between 1:40 in the morning and 3:30 when he showed up at your door?” Danny Porter asked.

Bobby repeated his earlier testimony about the two times his dog had barked, and Bart’s explanation that he couldn’t find the spare key. As far as Bobby knew, Bart had slept in the Suburban in his garage until he got cold. He wasn’t sure about when Bart left the Wild Wing Cafe or parted from Kevin Lyttle.

“So,” Porter pushed. “In other words your brother has not discussed the specifics of that event with you that night? Your brother denied to you that he had any involvement in the death of his wife?”

“He said he had nothing to do with it.”

“But his only story is that he left Kevin’s and drove to your house?” Porter continued.

“Um, hum.”

Asked to estimate the time it would take for Bart to make that drive, Bobby said his brother had a “lousy sense of direction,” and would likely have taken the long way from Kevin Lyttle’s house to his own. “Probably about thirty minutes.”

Then where was Bart during the almost two hours when no one saw him in the wee hours of December 4? Any convincing alibi virtually depended on his whereabouts when Jenn was shot. The investigators would have to chart time and distance precisely. It was certainly possible that Bart had gone directly to Bobby’s garage, and, half-drunk, had crawled in the Suburban and gone to sleep. Maybe Steve Comeau had heard a stranger’s truck at 2
A.M.
, just before Jenn died.

And maybe not. Comeau was frank that the only sense he used that made him believe it was Bart had been aural; he had heard, but he hadn’t seen.

Now, when Danny Porter asked Bobby Corbin if he knew the name “Dolly Hearn,” he replied that he had read it recently in the newspapers.

“You were not aware your brother had a girlfriend that died under mysterious circumstances?”

“I am aware of it—I just didn’t know her name. I never met her. If I met her, it was only once and I don’t remember.”

“Have you ever discussed that circumstance with—”

“I was down there,” Bobby cut in. “I mean I was called down there. I got a call from my dad, I believe. Old memories here. And he [Bart] was depressed and upset about the fact that this had happened. So I went down there and stayed with him through his medical boards.”

“Did he ever discuss the circumstances, or how this happened?”

“No—any other than the fact that he thought it was suicide—that was the only thing we knew, as I can recall.”

B
OBBY
C
ORBIN HAD BEEN
extremely considerate of his older brother’s feelings, never pressing Bart about where he had been when Jenn was shot, never speculating on what might have happened. He hadn’t asked much about Dolly Hearn’s apparent suicide, either.

If Bobby’s approach was hands-off, Brad Corbin, Bart’s fraternal twin, had been even further removed from what had happened eleven days earlier. It appeared that the connection among the three brothers was almost unemotional, more like that of casual acquaintances. Perhaps they had been raised to respect each other’s privacy.

Or perhaps they didn’t ask questions because they didn’t want to know the answers.

Brad told the grand jurors that he and Bart had shared a “womb and a room” for twenty-three years—until they went in different directions after they left the University of Georgia in Athens in the late ’80s. Like Bobby, Brad recalled having a friendly relationship with his sister-in-law. He had been quite fond of her. The last time he’d seen Jenn was on November 12, when she and Bart came to Connie Corbin’s birthday party. Brad said he was aware that Jenn and Bart were having some marital troubles and knew that both the Corbin and Barber families supported their getting counseling. Brad continually stressed in his testimony that he wasn’t an expert on emotional problems—even in his own family.

“It seemed like they were at least trying,” he said.

“[Jenn] said basically she didn’t know what she was going to do—that she had not been out in the work place before.”

“So she really expressed,” Porter asked, “that she didn’t know how she was going to support herself and the children, and how she and the children would go on? And when you had a conversation with Bart about the divorce, what did he express?”

“The same. I mean I think it was a combination of sadness, remorse—again I don’t want to sit here and say I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Did he ever express to you specifically the reason he was pursuing the divorce?”

“He did not give me the details, but he did say she might be having some sort of Internet affair—some sort of Internet gaming thing, possible addiction, as far as that goes.”

Brad said he knew that his twin had taken the hard drive from his computer to find out what was on it. He didn’t know what—if anything—Bart had learned about that. Brad recalled that he had not seen Bart on Friday evening. He hadn’t learned of Jenn’s death until about nine on Saturday morning, when his mother called him. He had gone to his mother’s home and “walked around in a fog” like the rest of his family were. They had all been in shock, including Bart.

He described Bart’s demeanor as “disheveled, numb—blank.”

“Was he agitated?”

“No.”

Danny Porter asked Brad if he had ever asked his twin about Jenn’s death. No, he hadn’t at that time, nor later in the day when he and Bobby had accompanied Bart to the police station for the gunshot residue tests on Bart’s hands. By that time, Bart had hired an attorney.