Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (7 page)

The manner of her death was odd. Even if fatally depressed, few females kill themselves with a gunshot to the head. They want to look attractive when their bodies are discovered, whereas males don’t seem to care. Women tend to take their own lives with sleeping pills or by cutting their wrists. Many even put on makeup and wear their prettiest outfit or nightgown.

But Jennifer had worn an old sleeveless green satin shortie nightgown. Both its straps were torn off in the back, and she had them secured with safety pins. It was the sort of quick patching job that women do on clothes that no one is going to see. Underneath, she wore pink panties. Dr. Terry noted that they were in place with no sign that anyone had tried to remove them.

The clothing and possessions worn by the dead are somehow more “alive” than the body shell left behind, and tell their own small stories. The jewelry on Jenn Corbin’s body seemed intact: clear, square diamond earrings; a “brownish-red” teardrop-shaped pendant on a thin gold chain encircling her neck, with a ring that matched it on her right hand; a gold nugget bracelet on her right wrist; a gold wedding ring and an engagement ring with a rectangular diamond; an Aquatech watch with a digital display reading 6:42:21. The watch display did not change as real time passed—the battery had apparently failed a few hours after she died. On her right wrist, Jenn wore a white and pink beaded bracelet with the beads spelling out “Kylie.” The childish bracelet was in support of a friend’s child who was fighting cancer. The “brownish-red” stones in Jenn’s necklace and in one of her rings were garnets, her favorite semiprecious stone, which she had worn constantly for many years after her late grandmother, “Nana,” gave them to her.

Jennifer Corbin had a small tattoo on her right ankle—the familiar mask of tragedy and comedy. She had been a true fan of the group Mötley Crüe, and the masks were from the cover of one of their top albums.

Forensic Technician Zubedah Mutawassim, Assistant DA Tom Davis, and DA’s Investigator Kevin Vincent joined Ray Rawlins and Marcus Head to observe the postmortem exam. Perhaps Dr. Terry would find something that would end this death investigation once and for all. More likely, there would be small things that didn’t mesh with suicide.

Jenn Corbin was a good-sized woman, but not at all overweight. She lacked perhaps a half-inch of being six feet tall, and she weighed just over 170. Jenn would have been capable of putting up a good fight had she had any warning at all of danger. But the investigators at the death site hadn’t noted anything that suggested a struggle—no overturned lamps or chairs, nothing broken. When the brown paper bags that covered her hands were removed, Dr. Terry found not even a minuscule cut or scratch. If Jenn had been murdered, she would have to have been taken by surprise or she might even have been asleep.

If
she was murdered. That was the biggest if. All the suspicions in the world wouldn’t help in a courtroom unless the Gwinnett County detectives and prosecutors could prove their theories to a jury.

The woman before them was wearing a little makeup: pale pink lipstick. She had three piercings in each ear, although she wore only the two small square diamond earrings now. They were removed along with her other jewelry, her greenish-blue satin nightgown with the black “frog” fastenings, and her pink panties, and bagged into evidence. Someday, they might be used as evidence in a trial, or if not, they would be given to her family.

The single, fatal bullet wound was to the right side of her head—behind her right ear. The wound path was from the right side of her head to the left, and upward. The bullet had effectively cut her brain stem in half and fractured her skull in several places.

Death would have been instantaneous.

The entrance wound was round and only three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter. There was soot from the gun barrel near the wound, but no stippling—the tiny burned specks that “tattoo” the skin around the hole where a bullet fired from a short distance goes in. The edges of this entrance wound were not seared or torn by the force of the heated gas in a gun barrel. A contact gunshot wound usually leaves a “stellate,” or star-shaped, wound. This was not a close-contact wound.

After establishing the path and angle of the deadly wound, Dr. Terry carefully examined the other organs in Jenn Corbin’s body. Was it possible that she was suffering from some fatal disease—something that no one who loved her knew about? That could have been a motive for suicide. But the forensic pathologist found every indication that Jennifer Corbin had been in excellent health.

Somehow, normal findings in an autopsy make the subject’s death more tragic. That was true in this case. All things being equal, Jennifer Corbin would have lived to be a very old lady. Her lungs, heart, arteries, liver, kidneys, and reproductive organs were all completely normal. Sometime in the past, she had had her gallbladder removed, and surgical clips remained—which was a normal procedure. She had a small bruise on the right side of her lower abdomen, but it had faded into the yellow-greenish hue of a healing contusion. It was probably not significant; mothers of small boys often have bruises from riding herd on them and usually can’t even remember when they got them.

Jenn Corbin’s last meal had included green beans. When that information was added to her body temperature when she was found, and the degree of rigor and livor mortis now, it would help to mark the time of her death. In some instances, pinpointing the exact time a victim died isn’t important, but in others it can be vital. This would be one of those cases. Jenn’s death had probably occurred between four and five hours before her body was discovered: somewhere around 2 to 3
A.M.

The official cause of her death was listed at the beginning of the “Summary of Findings” derived from her autopsy. It read: “Penetrating gunshot wound of head. Loose-contact range entrance wound on right side of head (posterior to right ear, in right posterior temporal/anterior occipital region).”

The observers at the autopsy looked grim. This was definitely not a contact wound where the gun’s barrel had been placed against her head. There was no muzzle impression, no tears around the edges of the wound itself, and no stippling. The gun would have to have been fired from several inches away. While it was remotely possible that Jenn Corbin could have twisted her right hand into an awkward position that would have allowed her to place the gun barrel against the skin behind her ear, it wasn’t likely. And it was clearly impossible for her to have held the weapon inches away from the entry point behind her right ear. Her arm was simply not that long.

Nevertheless, the first media reports in the Atlanta/ Gwinnett County area would report that autopsy results were “inconclusive,” reinforcing the impression for many viewers and readers that Jennifer Corbin had committed suicide.

The news that Jenn Corbin’s husband had filed for divorce would have been a great shock, except, perhaps, to those who were close to her. The information that she had died violently by her own hand was almost impossible for her friends and co-workers to absorb. And for her immediate family, it continued to be unthinkable.

J
ENNIFER
C
ORBIN
’
S SECRETS
would be opened up for the world to see, but, inevitably Bart Corbin’s own private life would also be held up to the light—all of his secrets, his misdeeds, his past, and his present. That’s what a murder investigation was, is, and has to be—an ongoing invasion of privacy, not just for the victim and the suspect, but for those who worry about friends on both sides of a case, strangers who have some kind of connection, and witnesses. The net spreads out and they are all caught in it, their private thoughts and actions explored relentlessly.

It’s the only way a death investigation can proceed. When a life is stolen prematurely, truth is the one path to justice.

Jenn and Bart Corbin’s scrapbooks and picture frames were full of happy family photographs: the two of them dancing at their wedding, looking totally in love; Jenn and Bart rafting through a deep canyon; Jenn, happily exhausted after Dalton’s birth; Bart holding Dalton minutes after he was born; Bart helping two-year-old Dillon blow out the candles on his birthday cake; a tan Bart, bare-chested and broad-shouldered on their own houseboat on Lake Lanier, and proudly holding two-month-old Dillon; the couple, both a little heavier than at their wedding reception, dancing somewhere at a charity dinner; all four Corbins posing happily at Disney World; Bart and Jenn beaming happily at a Corbin family wedding. And so many photos of Bart and Jenn with her family, usually laughing with Narda and Max, Heather, Doug and Rajel.

It seemed perhaps too perfect, happy moments caught forever on film but somehow evaporating in real life.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

DECEMBER 6, 2004

A
T THIRTY-THREE
, J
ENN
B
ARBER
C
ORBIN
was the personification of what most young wives and mothers strive to achieve. She wasn’t conventionally or “cookie-cutter” beautiful, but she had lovely and expressive brown eyes, golden-blond streaks in her thick hair, and a voluptuous figure.

Jenn was always smiling, no matter what troubles she might be dealing with. It was that luminous personality that people remembered about her now.

Jenn’s part-time job as a preschool teacher allowed her time to take care of Bart and her little boys. She worked a few hours on weekdays at the school in the Sugar Hill United Methodist Church. On Sunday her family attended services there.

“Before any of this happened,” Jenn’s good friend and fellow preschool teacher Jennifer Rupured observed, “I would have said Jenn would have made a great character in any other type of book [rather than a true crime book].” Rupured listed possible books that were more in Jenn’s genre: “‘Martha Stewart Cannot Outclean Jenn Corbin!’ or ‘Mom of the Year: How to Bake Six Pies and Clean House at the Same Time You Drive Your Kids to Baseball.’ Or even ‘Die-Cutting with a Passion: How to Create Preschool Bulletin Boards Using Only 700 Handprints Individually Cut Out.’

“Jenn had the kind of a personality an author could absorb and understand because it was so large and lovely,” Jennifer Rupured said, remembering how Jenn had dug little pots of shamrocks on St. Patrick’s Day for her students, and kept “lucky” pennies to hand out when someone needed to have a wish come true.

No matter how busy she was, Jenn Corbin would stop and listen to someone who needed an attentive ear, having that rare ability to focus entirely on the person who was speaking. That was undoubtedly because she truly was interested, and she did care about other people—whether it was one of the preschoolers she taught or an adult friend. Or even a virtual stranger.

But she was definitely not a sweetie-sweet kind of woman, and she was known to use four-letter words on occasions that called for them. Her sense of humor could be ribald at times. Neither she nor her sisters nor their mother fit into the stereotype of the genteel Southern belle. Still, there remained in Jenn a suspension of disbelief that made her have faith in happy endings, no matter how many times life rose up and smacked her in the face.

If Jenn had flaws—and of course she did because she was, after all, only human—one was that she trusted people too much before she fully knew them. That would include those on the periphery of her life and even a few who were part of her innermost circle. She had forgiven much, overlooked things that most women would not, and always tried to keep her own problems to herself to spare her family worry. At the time Jenn died, she was struggling with seemingly insurmountable decisions. She who had always believed in marriage wanted nothing more than to break the vows she had made eight years earlier.

She had fallen in love with someone else.

But very few people knew about it. In most people’s eyes, Jenn Corbin was a paragon, above reproach, incapable of reaching out for the happiness that might be achieved only by flouting conventional morality.

“She was a wonderful teacher, fabulous mother, and true friend,” one of her students’ mothers wrote about her.

“There was no way she would have committed suicide. She was not the type. And she lived for her boys, whom she completely adored! She had a great support system of family and friends and would never have left them of her own accord. She loved her boys with her whole being and all the kids she taught, too. She would never have let them [her sons] find her with a bullet in her head. She was upbeat, fun, and someone everyone wanted to be around.”

This opinion was repeated over and over as reporters and detectives fanned out to learn everything they could about her. And even while Georgia media outlets carried the news that Jennifer Corbin had apparently committed suicide, forensic pathologists knew that ballistics and physical evidence ruled out the possibility that she had shot herself. And those who knew her in life believed in their hearts and guts that someone had deliberately wanted her dead.

To bring her the justice she deserved, events in her life would have to be peeled away layer by layer, exposing what should have been her secrets, her dreams, and her hopes for the future. There is perhaps no human being without undisclosed desires and even sins—or things they consider sinful—that they would never want others to know about. What things would Jenn Corbin have been hiding?

Her life was gone in an instant, snuffed out by a single bullet. And now Jenn’s inner world would be put under a microscope and picked over for possible clues. No one was eager to do that, not the Gwinnett County police nor District Attorney Danny Porter, and certainly not her family.

Now that the Gwinnett County investigators knew Jenn’s marriage had, for all intents and purposes, ended, they understood why Bart Corbin might not have been in their home when she was found. That was to be expected.