Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (42 page)

In October 2005, Jack Burnette, preparing for the upcoming trials, had assigned his newest investigator, Mike Pearson, to help track the .38 revolver. Pearson, a former military policeman, had been an investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for ten years before he’d joined the Gwinnett County DA’s office only a month earlier. It looked then as if there would be a trial in January—and in Augusta. If the judge there agreed to similar transactions, they wanted to be ready with information about where the .38 had come from.

Mike Pearson lived up in “the mountains” outside of Atlanta. They would have been called foothills in Colorado or the Northwest, but it was beautiful country and Pearson didn’t mind the long commute to Lawrenceville. He was a easygoing man whose humorous façade often disguised the tenacity with which he followed the trail of a suspect or a vital piece of evidence.

Kevin Vincent and Mike Pearson drove back to Troy that October 2005. Even though Bart remained behind bars, Richard Wilson had consistently refused to talk about the gun that killed Jennifer, always claiming he knew nothing about it. They wanted to confront him again in person.

They found Wilson was just as cordial as he had been on Vincent’s first visit, but he didn’t want to leave his property. They talked to him on the sidewalk outside. Maybe he was afraid they were going to grab him and “abduct” him to Georgia.

Wilson explained once more that he didn’t want to “take sides,” and Pearson said, “If you know something, you should tell us.”

It seemed a wasted trip. But Vincent and Pearson stopped by the Troy Police Department again and distributed pictures of the murder gun, and also took some by local pawn shops.

Twice in the next few months, Mike Pearson phoned Richard Wilson. “I just wanted him to know that we were still interested in talking with him. They were only five-minute conversations, and he was still stonewalling us. We knew the gun was ‘born’ at a Smith & Wesson factory, went to a distributor in Birmingham, and then to a pawnshop in 1957,” Pearson recalled. “But that’s where its trail ended. We needed to know where it had been over the prior forty-eight years.”

When Pearson got Wilson on the phone, he continued to deny even talking to Bart Corbin about a gun, and “hemmed and hawed” when he was asked a specific question. It wasn’t, Pearson felt, that Wilson was telling an outright lie; some code of ethics was preventing that, but he was dancing around the edges of questions. “I don’t want to be involved,” he said firmly. “Not then—and not now.”

“You’re not being fair to Jennifer,” Pearson said, pressing him. “You owe the truth to the kids.”

Pearson realized that the mention of Jenn Corbin struck a nerve with Wilson, but he still would not budge. Wilson’s memory grew hazier.

“Mr. Porter wants you to know you’re gonna come to Georgia—and you’re going to sit on the stand—”

Wilson took a deep breath, and sounded offended. “You’re threatening me,” he complained.

“No,” Pearson said. “It’s the truth.”

But that was all Pearson was going to get. He was making headway, but not nearly enough.

After yet another trip to Troy, Mike Pearson stopped in Montgomery and Birmingham on the way back to Atlanta. He was determined not to go home without finding something—anything—about the deadly .38. He had the pictures of that gun whose lineage so far eluded him. He knew the serial number by heart: 397676. He stopped in pawnshops, knowing that the chance he would find a receipt matching that serial number was infinitesimal.

In Birmingham, one of the pawnshop owners opened up his attic to Pearson. It was the storage place for decades of prior records—possibly thirty or forty years’ worth. The attic was hot and dusty as Pearson pored through box after box of gun sale receipts. The law said that gun records had to be saved for thirty years; he hoped that these might go back even further.

From 8:30
A.M.
to noon, he crouched in the pawnshop’s attic, searching for what—for him—would be buried treasure. He might need to go back fifty years to find what he needed. And he was perfectly willing to do that.

But, as he opened the last box of files, Pearson’s heart sank. They only went back to 1971: thirty-four years.

“If you had only been here last year,” the pawnshop owner said sympathetically. “We purged everything before 1971 then.”

Disheartened, Pearson drove back to Gwinnett County. There had to be another way or someplace else to look for the trail of the Smith & Wesson .38, 397676, and how it might have ended up with Richard Wilson.

Mike Pearson had little doubt that Wilson had given the murder weapon to Bart Corbin on November 29,2004. But no jury would be convinced of that just on Pearson’s say-so. Danny Porter and Chuck Ross thought the way Pearson did. The gun was the missing link. They were prepared to go ahead without it, counting on circumstantial evidence, the cell phone tracing that Russ Halcome had done, and the maps he had made of where Bart was.

Bart Corbin’s attitude after Jenn’s death would work for the prosecution; he hadn’t behaved like a grieving widower who was concerned for his children. He had told lies. They felt he was the kind of defendant who would insist upon testifying in his own defense, even though his attorneys would probably throw their bodies in front of his to keep him off the stand. And that would be to the prosecution’s advantage.

The Gwinnett County District Attorney’s Office and the Gwinnett County Police Department was prepared to go to trial, and confident that they would get a conviction.

But they still wanted the gun. Just in case.

Richard Wilson did not want to come to Georgia, and he particularly did not want to become involved in the search for Jenn Corbin’s killer. He seemed confident that as long as he stayed in Alabama, there wasn’t any way the Georgia detectives could get to him.

They had to find a way to convince him otherwise.

The January 2006 trial date, and the April 2006 trial date had come and gone, with more trial delays. Bruce Harvey and David Wolfe, stunned when Judge Clark agreed to the “similar transaction” testimony, had asked the Georgia Supreme Court to rule on whether that was legal. Clark agreed to that—as long as the higher court would put the question on a fast track. They had waited long enough for trial.

Once more, the defense team lost, but they seemed only moderately concerned. They had other issues to bring up.

It looked, however, as if there would finally be a trial in September 2006. It was now the second summer since Jenn Corbin’s death. She had been gone for twenty-two months.

Mike Pearson wondered if Wilson believed he didn’t have to worry much about the district attorney’s men because they were from Georgia. He seemed convinced that he could not be forced across the state line to testify. Maybe if Mike could bring in somebody impressive from Alabama, Wilson would sit up and pay attention.

“I had a friend in Alabama who had certainly made an impression on me,” Pearson said. “His name was J.D. Shelton and he had an Alabama badge because he worked for the Attorney General’s Office there. J.D. was a big, burly guy who worked out. He fit the angle I had in mind exactly. I ran my problem by him, and asked him if he would take a ride with me down to Troy. He said ‘Sure,’ and the next morning we headed for Troy.”

Once more, Mike Pearson, now accompanied by J.D. Shelton, walked into Wilson’s shop. Mike made the introductions and he thought he saw a little more concern in Wilson’s eyes. Early in their conversation, J.D. asked Wilson if he and Bart had ever smoked marijuana together.

Wilson stood up indignantly, and said, “I am a Shriner and a Mason. We don’t do that.”

Pearson filed that information away in a corner of his mind. Maybe it would turn out to be useful.

Pearson had written out a list of all the cell phone calls Bart had made to Wilson’s home, office, and cell phone, and drew lines on it, showing the connections between the two men—especially on November 29 and 30,2004.

“I showed it to Richard Wilson, and I said, ‘You are involved—I want you to acknowledge that Bart Corbin called you on November 29, 2004.’”

Wilson said no again.

“That’s no longer an acceptable response from you,” Pearson said, holding out the page of phone connections. “Here’s where he calls you. Here. And here, and, late at night, here.”

Pearson wasn’t expecting any sudden confession about the gun, but he hoped to have Wilson simply acknowledge that Bart had been there at his house, or that they could at least talk about the phone calls. But Pearson felt Wilson slipping away, finding him vague and reluctant to give up any specifics. They were beginning to go nowhere again.

Pearson pointed out that Wilson had clearly talked to Bart long after his August birthday party, and before Bart called him to tell him that Jenn was dead.

Backed into a corner, Wilson finally conceded that was true. But when he’d talked to Bart, it wasn’t about a gun.

“He said he had problems.”

“What problems?”

Wilson wouldn’t answer, and Pearson moved closer.

“Look, this isn’t a poker game. I’m showing you everything I have. Was he here that day?”

Wilson half nodded.

“Why was he here?”

“Well, probably he needed to get his weed eater fixed.”

That was patently ridiculous, and Pearson and Shelton stared back at him, unconvinced.

“That’s a $10 job,” Pearson said. “I don’t buy that. Who needs a weed eater bad enough in the winter to drive all the way from Atlanta to Troy?”

Wilson only shrugged.

Pearson and Shelton headed out of Troy, without having gained the information they had come for. Once more Pearson drove back to Gwinnett County disappointed, but far from ready to give up.

D
ANNY
P
ORTER’S STAFF
huddled to discuss a different approach that might work with Wilson. Pearson mentioned that Richard Wilson was interested in squirrel-hunting dogs. And so was Jack Burnette, although Jack seldom hunted; he just liked the dogs. Burnette was a Mason, and so was Wilson, and very proud of it.

“It was Jack’s turn at bat,” Mike Pearson said. “And he was game.”

Investigators from Porter’s office had practically worn a rut in the road between Gwinnett County and Troy, Alabama. Now Mike and Jack headed down that road again. Pearson hoped that the sly fox of the DA’s office could establish some rapport with Wilson because they had “so much in common.”

Burnette and Wilson exchanged the secret handshake, and Wilson was perfectly willing to talk about squirrel-hunting dogs and the Masonic Lodge, but, other than that, Burnette “hit a brick wall.”

If anything, Richard Wilson was even more cagey, still secure in his belief that he could not be forced to appear in court in Georgia.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
F
OUR

SUMMER 2006

T
HE DETECTIVES,
investigators, district attorneys’ staffs, and even Judge Michael Clark were looking forward to seeing Bart Corbin stand trial for murder. Partly it was because this promised to be a precedent-setting case, and for those who loved the law, a fascinating one. And, realistically, it would be a chance to observe—and hopefully listen to—a defendant who had resisted all efforts to question him. From the very beginning, Corbin had maintained an arrogant attitude, figuratively thumbing his nose at those who sought the truth in the death of his wife. The curious public was also anxious to see what a trial would bring. Gwinnett County had a reputation for catching some of the more bizarre cases in America, but the tangled story of Dolly Hearn, Jenn Barber Corbin, and Dr. Bart Corbin surpassed them all.

The families of the dead women viewed the upcoming trials with dread. They had gotten a glimpse of the defense case in pretrial hearings, and they were horrified. Bart’s attorneys had demonstrated their mesmerizing skill, and Jenn’s family knew they would work to paint a picture of her that wasn’t at all like her.

It would be hard enough to sit through testimony and look at photographs of crime scenes, location of wounds, and autopsies. It would be agony to hear their beloved daughters’ names besmirched, and to hear the defense case that was undoubtedly choreographed to suggest that both Jenn and Dolly had been unstable enough to commit suicide. Narda Barber lost sleep worrying about how the defense team would use the hundreds of emails exchanged between Jenn and Anita Hearn. She hoped that both jurors and court-watchers would understand that, except for the last fifteen days of her life, Jenn had believed that she was writing to a good, honest, man who loved her—a man who was going to take care of her and her sons. “Christopher” had helped her get through the last year of an impossibly painful marriage.

“Jenn was intelligent and kind,” Heather said. “But she was totally naïve. Sometimes, as much as I love her, I still get mad at her for being so dumb! I tried to warn her—we all did, but she kept believing. She could have lived another sixty years if she just hadn’t been so trusting of someone she didn’t know—and if she had only realized how dangerous Bart was.”

Narda hated the thought of sitting in the courtroom in Lawrenceville, but it would be harder on her to stay away. Max would be there with her, along with Rajel, Heather, and other family and friends. She didn’t know if she would be testifying or not. Narda didn’t want to cry on the stand, or get confused by questions from Bruce Harvey or David Wolfe.

In the summer of 2006, as the first trial lay just ahead, Danny Porter and Chuck Ross met with the potential prosecution witnesses to see how they might come across on the witness stand. Narda’s emotions were probably too close to the surface, but they thought Heather and Doug Tierney could maintain their equilibrium. It was going to be rough, but victim/witness advocates in Gwinnett County were helping Jenn’s family cope.

During one witness orientation day, there was an unfortunate meeting in one of the DA’s conference rooms. Narda’s interview lasted longer than they expected, and she had to walk by Dara Prentice—who she firmly believed was Bart’s longtime lover. Dara apparently didn’t realize that Narda could not forgive her for having an affair with her daughter’s husband, and she greeted Narda brightly. But Narda sailed on by, her face set in stone.