Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (36 page)

Sandra had never been to Dolly’s apartment, and had to ask a neighbor where it was. When she knocked, Dolly, carrying Tabitha, opened the door, and said, “Come on in!”

“Oh no—I just need a favor,” Sandra demurred. “If I could borrow your office key—”

But Dolly urged her to come in, insisting two or three times. Sandra stepped inside, just far enough so that the door would close. The TV was turned to a soap opera. Sandra saw that the bathroom door under the stairway was slightly ajar. As she glanced at it, she could see a man through the crack where the hinges were. She told Scott Peebles that he appeared to be quite tall, had brown hair cut in layers, and he was bare-chested.

The man had been standing very still, and he said nothing. Sandra wondered if he was watching her in the bathroom mirror. Dolly didn’t mention the man or glance in his direction. She seemed to take a lot of time retrieving her Lucite key ring, and then took several more minutes to remove two keys, commenting that she wasn’t sure which one worked in the office door.

Sandra told Scott Peebles that Dolly was very eager to have her stay and visit, even to the point of acting as if they were old friends.

“She didn’t seem stressed, and she wasn’t really acting strange—just overly friendly.”

Sandra said she had been worried about being late to work because she’d only recently started her job. While Dolly chatted with her, she was anxious to leave, and hadn’t even sat down.

And the man in the bathroom hadn’t moved at all. Surely Dolly must have known he was there. If he was a welcome boyfriend, why had she wanted to chitchat with Sandra? He was half-dressed, so it wasn’t likely he was a stranger. He just stood there, apparently listening. Peebles wondered why.

When Sandra was finally able to slip out the door, she said she had expected she would hear from Dolly during the afternoon. Sandra knew she was anxious to get more of the material she needed to finish her work for Stanfield. Yet Dolly didn’t call even once.

Sandra told Peebles that when she heard late that afternoon that Dolly was dead—shot in the head—she did not believe it was suicide. She wondered if Dolly might have been trying to persuade her to stay in her apartment because she was afraid—because something was wrong.

But Sandra hadn’t known Dolly well enough to pick up on some signal Dolly was sending. And she had never seen the brown-haired man’s face.

Bart had undoubtedly been at the Wintergreen section of the apartments that day. He had admitted it himself. But he’d insisted he hadn’t taken a shower there, and said he’d only sat on the couch and talked to Dolly. Why then had his shirt been off?

Peebles suspected that Bart hadn’t expected a witness to his visit to Dolly. Most of the other residents in the front row of apartments facing Parrish Road had been away in the early afternoon of June 6.

Only one, Russell Leffler, who lived in the first apartment, had been home for lunch that day. When someone knocked on his door, he had looked through the peephole in his front door and recognized the man as someone he had seen with Dolly Hearn. Although he had seen him drive a gray “Camaro-ish” car before, he hadn’t seen the car in the front parking lot that day. The man outside his door was leaning against it as if he was listening to see if anyone was home.

When Peebles showed him a photo of the way Bart looked in 1990, Leffler said he was sure it was the same man. Just as he was about to open the door, Leffler’s phone rang—and he had turned away to answer it. When he came back, the man was gone.

Shortly after that, a woman had knocked—asking where Dolly lived. Peebles knew that would have been Sandra.

Dr. Lindy Steinhaus and his wife, Sue, who were close neighbors of Dolly’s, were very aware of the sometimes strained relationship between Dolly and Bart. In the last few weeks before her death, the Steinhauses had noticed that Bart often visited Dolly’s apartment on the weekends when Angela Garnto was away. They suspected Angela didn’t know. Whether Dolly was happy to have Bart there was debatable. When Sue commented to Dolly that she was very thin, Dolly said she had lost twenty-three pounds.

“She said it was because of ‘boyfriend problems,’” Sue told Scott Peebles.

The walls in their apartment house were thin, and they had often heard Bart yelling loudly, but never heard anything that would indicate physical violence. As Steinhaus pulled into the parking lot shortly after 5:00 on June 6, Angela Garnto had come running up the driveway, screaming that Dolly had shot herself, and was dead. She asked him to go into their apartment and take her pulse to be sure. He had done that, but he knew she had been dead for hours; her skin had been very white and very cold, and her massive blood loss had dried. He had seen the gun in her right hand at that time, and noted that the coffee table had been moved away from the front of the couch.

Both Sue and Lindy Steinhaus told Peebles that Dolly was a woman who was always smiling, not someone who would have killed herself. Her neighbors had gathered together that night in 1990, trying to understand what had happened. Like Angela and the Steinhauses, none of them believed she had killed herself, and several remarked that they had asked her if she was still dating Bart Corbin.

“Kind of,” she had answered obliquely. “Until he goes away to residency.”

There had been almost the sense that she was playing it safe, biding her time and trying not to set off Corbin’s volatile side. He would be gone soon enough.

The Steinhauses knew that Dolly’s parents had given her the gun that killed her, and remarked that she surely wouldn’t have used their gift to kill herself. Those who had known Dolly well didn’t think it odd when one woman added: “And she never would have shot herself in front of her cat. When they wheeled her body out on the gurney, Angela was holding Tabitha, and that cat just went nuts when the stretcher passed.”

Scott Peebles knew that Tabitha was still alive after all the years between the Richmond County sheriff’s two investigations. That aging cat was probably the only living witness to Dolly’s death. But Tabitha couldn’t say what she had seen—not then and not ever.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
N
INE

DECEMBER 2004 AND SPRING 1990

A
S
S
ERGEANT
S
COTT
P
EEBLES
continued to interview people who had never forgotten Dolly Hearn, he was particularly interested in a statement that one of Bart Corbin’s closest friends, Dr. Eric Rader, had given to Sarah Mims, the Hearns’ private detective. Like almost all of Corbin’s friends from his days at the dental school in Augusta, Rader was married. Bart appeared to have sought out happily married couples, and was apparently anxious to be in a similar situation himself. Moreover, when his fragile emotional state began to disintegrate, he found his married friends and their wives were sympathetic listeners—even when he called late at night.

Eric Rader had, of course, been Bart’s office partner at MCG, and they spent a lot of time together at the dental school. Peebles noted that it was Rader who had insisted that Bart admit to Dolly that he had stolen her cat and show her where he’d dumped it off.

Sarah Mims had caught up with Dr. Rader on October 18, 1990—some four months after Dolly Hearn’s death. The Hearns’ private investigator had found Rader most informative. Eric Rader told Sarah Mims that Bart had complained to him that Dolly was so busy that she wasn’t paying enough attention to him. But when Bart asked Rader for advice, his friend and office partner Rader shook his head, insisting that it was none of his business and he didn’t want to be involved in Bart’s romance. Rader remembered that, shortly afterward, Bart had broken up with Dolly, later admitting that he had done it without thinking it through. Bart had been very upset when he discovered Dolly wasn’t taking it very hard.

“He thought she would be heartbroken,” Rader said,

“and she apparently wasn’t.”

Eric Rader said he had realized early on that Bart Corbin had a negative and unstable self-image. Bart told him that he’d been fat in high school, and that, in college, he’d made conscious efforts to lose weight, work out, wear the right clothes, and have a nice car. A beautiful girlfriend was necessary, too, to bolster his confidence.

Sarah Mims’s report quoted Eric Rader’s comment that, after Bart broke up with Dolly, he regretted it. Eric recalled being with Bart and their fellow dental student, Tony Gacita, at the Tip-Top, a popular college nightspot, when Dolly arrived with a number of her classmates, mostly males. Bart had grumbled and started swearing, but he and Tony were able to persuade him not to approach her that night.

The next notation on the Rader report made Scott Peebles sit up straight. According to Eric Rader, there was a night during the late winter or early spring of 1990 when Bart confessed to him that he had come close to killing Dolly. “He said he waited in the parking lot of Dolly’s apartment,” Rader recalled. “And he had a gun. He told me he was planning to shoot her.”

Moreover—although this was hearsay—Eric Rader had heard from Tony Gacita that Bart had told him he had planned “the perfect murder.”

Both of these admissions had come out during one of Bart’s tearful sessions with his trusted friends.

While Eric had driven Bart around, trying to comfort him, on the night Dolly’s body was discovered, he could not help but notice that Bart didn’t seem as distraught as one would expect. Bart had taken pains to point out that Dolly committed suicide with a gun her father had given her for Christmas.

Of course, Scott Peebles knew that Bart had told Lieutenant John Gray and Scott’s father, Ron, that he didn’t know Dolly had a gun, and that he’d never been upstairs in her apartment. But Peebles figured he had known full well that the .38 revolver was in a box under her bed.

Eric Rader had subsequently told the 1990 team of detectives that Bart had indeed known about the gun. He also said that when Bart found out what Eric had revealed about that gun to the Richmond County sheriff’s investigators, he’d been really angry with him. But Rader’s tip about the gun had apparently gone unheeded by the detectives, who were convinced that Dolly’s death was a suicide.

The Hearns’ PI had phoned Dr. Tony Gacita in Pennsylvania to ask him about Bart’s brag that he knew how to commit the “perfect crime.” Gacita verified that Bart made the remark during a weepy 3
A.M.
call on February 24, 1990, during Dolly’s date with Jon Everett—when she was so terrified by Bart’s pounding on the door that she had finally called the police. And Bart had kept Tony Gacita on the phone for two or three hours until just before dawn. He had asked Tony to come over, and when he arrived he had found Bart holding a gun, threatening suicide.

Bart had sobbed that he had “cheated his way through life,” and wanted to die. He said his friends didn’t know him, and he couldn’t live with that. Gacita recalled to Mims that Bart was all over the place emotionally, suddenly switching gears and saying that he knew how to “commit the perfect crime.”

Gacita had managed to get the gun away from Bart and he later hid it—and a second gun—at his own house. He took Bart home with him to spend the rest of that night in February 1990, and Vicky, Gacita’s girlfriend and soon to be his wife, had arranged for Bart to see a psychologist.

Three and a half months later, Bart had come for his guns on the night Dolly died, but the Gacita-Martins hadn’t given them to him. Instead, they had taken them to Bart’s father, who was staying at a nearby motel.

Tony Gacita had told Sarah Mims that Gene Corbin was angry with Bart for admitting to police that he had been at Dolly’s apartment on the day she died, and had admonished his son for being stupid—telling him that people had been convicted of murder with nothing more than “circumstantial evidence.”

Scott Peebles felt that there
had been
ample circumstantial evidence in 1990 incriminating Dr. Bart Corbin in the murder of Dolly Hearn, and now, in mid-December 2004, with DeWayne Piper’s blood pattern evidence that proved someone had moved Dolly’s body after her death, there was physical evidence, too.

Peebles located Dr. Eric Rader at his dental clinic near Atlanta, and phoned him. He asked the dentist who had once been Bart’s officemate in med school if he remembered making a statement to Sarah Hargett Mims. He did, indeed.

“Was her report accurate—where Bart told you he waited in Dolly’s parking lot, planning to shoot her?”

“Yes,” Rader said. “I remember distinctly that he told me that.”

Next, Peebles faxed a copy of Mims’s report on her interview with Dr. Tony Gacita to Gacita’s dental clinic in Pennsylvania. Gacita, too, agreed that his statements about Bart’s early-morning phone call were accurate. But, after fifteen years, he was a little unsure of every detail that led up to Bart’s claim that he knew how to commit the “perfect murder” or the “perfect crime.”

Tony and Vicky Gacita said they had spoken to Bart only once after he left Augusta. He had called them late one night in September 1990, but they told him they could not talk. Like many of the people who had known him when Dolly Hearn died, they had become a little afraid of him.

D
ANNY
C
RAIG WAS
the district attorney of Richmond County, an affable, intelligent man who seemed completely comfortable in his own skin. His job sometimes put him at risk, however, and after threats were made on his life, the county provided him with a car that he could unlock and start with a remote key from many yards away. His supporters didn’t want him to have to fiddle with a car door when he encountered sudden danger. He and his counterpart in Gwinnett County, DA Danny Porter, had both been threatened; it was something they shared, just as they shared the same first name. Each had enraged opponents who were either crooked, delusional, or who didn’t care where their income came from. Whether the death threats were real or meant to intimidate them, they didn’t want to hang around and find out.