Deadly Divorces (7 page)

On Friday, 15 September Barton Corbin faced a judge and the two families whose lives he’d destroyed and listened impassively as the details of the murders were outlined by the District Attorney. Then it was his turn to speak, which he did in a voice devoid of emotion.

‘I’m Barton Thomas Corbin. 12.22.63 is my date of birth. I’m 42 years old.’

‘Do you fully understand all of the charges against you in the case?’ He was asked. ‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘Has anyone used force or threats against you to plead guilty against your will?’

‘No,’ was his curt response.

Then came the exchange everyone had come to hear: ‘Did you in fact commit the offence of malice murder to which you are now pleading guilty as it is outlined in the indictment?’

This was the moment the families had been waiting for – the Barbers for 2 years, the Hearns for 16 – but would he actually go through with it? Would this arch manipulator and most calculating game player finally put an end to their torment or would he change his mind and drag it out, even if it meant risking his own life in the pursuit of ruining theirs? Their answer came in just one short glorious word.

‘Yes.’

It was over. The sentence was to be two life terms served concurrently.

Asked in the courtroom whether he had anything to say, Corbin declined but his victims’ families took the chance to address the court and the world’s media that had become engrossed in this case. ‘Bart Corbin has disgraced his profession and has stolen from mankind,’ said Dolly’s brother Carlton Jnr. ‘16 years of silence, 16 years of pain.’

Jennifer Corbin’s father Max Barber clearly struggled with conflicting emotions as he faced the man who had robbed him of his daughter yet would be forever linked to the family as the father of his two small grandsons and the son-in-law he’d once loved. ‘The broken hearts of the Barber family, the Hearn family and the Corbin family
can’t be measured,’ he told Bart. ‘The hearts are going to mend. I can’t speak about your heart… what’s going to happen to you. God might forgive you – I never will. I speak for my family when I say I just virtually hope you burn in hell.’

On Bogan Gates Drive nestling between two houses there now stands a small park where children play and their mothers sometimes picnic on hot summer days. The granite marker in one corner of the park reads ‘Dedicated in loving memory of our friend and neighbour Jennifer Barber Corbin’.

Are the dead really gone when so much of them remains in all they leave behind – in the laughter of their children, in the hearts of their families, in the very grass of the park that now bears their name? Barton Corbin hated the thought of divorce because he loathed the idea of losing anything he considered ‘his’. The irony is that in seeking to exercise the ultimate control over his wife, he ended up setting her spirit free while he himself faces the rest of his life locked up in a cell, a prisoner of his own ruthless ego. It is, after all, some kind of justice.

W
ith his large, tortoise-shell framed glasses, dark suit, crisp white shirt and solemn demeanour, 44-
year-old
Garry Malone looked every inch the anxious husband as he made an impassioned television appeal for information regarding his missing wife, Sharon. His voice cracked with emotion as he entreated Sharon to get in touch, if not for his sake at least for their two young sons. ‘The boys are asking for Mum,’ he said, looking directly into the television cameras. ‘Please contact the police or your Dad and put our minds at rest.’

It was December 1999 and 28-year-old Sharon – a trainee teacher – had disappeared from the family home in Cranborne Crescent, Potters Bar one month before. No
one had heard from her since. No wonder Garry was frantic with worry. His eyes welled with tears as he sat behind the press conference table, flanked by police and Sharon’s father, Harry Clinch, and begged for an end to his family’s nightmare. With his expensive-looking gold watch and his well-groomed, closely-cut hair, Garry was doing what any respectable, loving husband would do in the same situation – except that it was all a sham.

Even as he leaned across towards the TV microphones and pleaded with Sharon to come home, he was well aware that there was no chance of that ever happening. Because Garry knew exactly where his wife of six years was – lying dead in a dried-up stream bed in a Hertfordshire country park. It’s hard to imagine how a husband who once proposed marriage and who held his wife so tenderly after she gave birth to their beautiful babies could put on such a performance all the time knowing the truth about the terrible thing he’d done to her. How could a man who’d faced the same woman at the breakfast table every morning for the past few years, who lay beside her every night hearing her breathing softly, appeal so sincerely for her to get in touch, knowing that no one would ever hear from her again?

Partners who have affairs are often surprised how easy they can compartmentalise their affair from their normal life so the two remain separate and guilt is kept at bay. Perhaps this is how Garry Malone managed to look straight at the TV cameras and send a heart-felt message to
his wife without betraying any hint of the horrors that must still have lurked in his memory. Or perhaps, as the papers at the time decided, he really was devoid of a conscience and when his gaze met that of the TV audiences, we were all staring straight into a remorseless void in which ruthlessness, rage and greed echoed without hope of redemption.

It was certainly a side of Malone that Sharon wouldn’t have believed possible when she first met him as an impressionable teenager. Garry was a karate instructor at Queen Elizabeth Girls’ School in Barnet and, like many a young male teacher in the rarefied atmosphere, he suddenly found himself the focus of much giggling speculation. For a solid, average-looking man with the heavy jowl look of someone a lot older, the attention was an ego boost and he enjoyed giving classes and chatting to his young pupils, including 14-year-old Sharon.

At the time Garry was married and for a few years the relationship between awkward teenager and her older instructor remained a platonic friendship. They chatted about martial arts, about things that were going on in the school. But that all changed after Garry’s divorce. What had started out as an oddly paired friendship deepened into romance and finally, in 1993, to marriage. A 16-year age gap can cause problems in a marriage, however. Where one partner has so much more life experience than the other, then the balance of power between the two can get
permanently skewed. Where one partner grows up within the confines of the relationship, the potential for growing apart increases. There’s a danger of one being forced into the role of parent and the other being the errant child. It’s not a healthy basis for an equal, loving relationship.

Did that happen with Garry and Sharon? No one can be sure but the relationship was tricky almost from the start. Garry Malone had never really been what you’d call
career-minded
. After teaching karate he’d gone on to buying and selling rare guitars and had built up a valuable collection. Then he’d got a job for under
£
12,000 a year selling water coolers. Often he was overdrawn at the bank and owed money on credit cards. Yet he showed no real motivation to get a better-paid job to try and pay off some of his debts. ‘There’s nothing that’s really “right” for me,’ he’d complain.

Even though she’d always been far more ambitious than her husband, Sharon had chosen to give up her job as a fire research scientist to train as a teacher so that she’d have the school holidays free for her children. She was OK with that decision but it meant that she too wasn’t able to contribute much to the family coffers. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a partner who supported you so it didn’t matter if you were working or not?’ she’d fantasise to friends.

Lack of financial security invariably creates problems in a marriage. Is one partner spending too much? And is the other holding on too tightly to the purse strings? Should one have made more provisions for saving, should the other
not have insisted on buying the house or the car, or the gym membership? Relationship experts cite money as one of the greatest sources of conflict among couples. Garry and Sharon certainly had their share of arguments about it.

There were other factors too in the Malones’ marriage that point to a relationship in trouble. Garry had problems completely trusting his much younger wife. Sometimes when she went out he’d drive himself crazy thinking about where she was, often quizzing her best friend Paula Fiddes about what she’d been up to. ‘I don’t know why you get so wound up about it,’ Sharon would tell him. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong.’ But her protestations did little to reassure Garry’s naturally suspicious mind.

Though both Garry and Sharon adored their two sons – Adam, born three years into the marriage, and Robert, who came along two years later – the boys’ births couldn’t stop the cracks in the relationship from deepening. Sometimes children can bring a splintering couple closer together. Other times their births are like a sticking plaster applied to a severely wounded relationship. It might just hold it for a time but if it’s bad enough then sooner or later the wound will just open up again.

By summer 1999 Garry and Sharon Malone both knew their relationship was in big trouble yet neither of them wanted to upset the children or deal with the financial nightmare that dismantling a family entails. ‘We can’t keep going on like this though,’ they both acknowledged. They
decided on a trial separation. For Sharon this was a chance to look more closely at the marriage and find out what had been going wrong. But for Garry it was an opportunity to consider something (or someone) else entirely: Paula Fiddes, Sharon’s supposed best friend.

Garry used time off from his marriage to immerse himself in an affair with Sharon’s old school pal. One thing he was very clear about, though: his wife must never, ever find out. The open-ended separation provided the perfect smoke screen in which the affair could flourish undetected. It was great to be able to admit to Paula how unhappy he was in his marriage. ‘I’ve told Sharon we’d both be better off if one of us was dead,’ he confessed. Before too long, however, the Malones had changed their minds about separation and decided to reconcile. This was around the time that Sharon’s mother died. Garry had been a big support during her mother’s illness, even giving shiatsu massage to the ailing woman. So naturally, Sharon turned to her estranged husband following her bereavement. Garry went back to the marital home and the relationship with Fiddes was effectively over.

Yet infidelity plays subtle tricks on a marriage. The things you once thought were solid and measurable turn out to be illusions, lightly sketched holograms of real beliefs and emotions. Back home in Cranborne Crescent, Potters Bar, Garry Malone couldn’t quite settle. After more than a decade with Sharon, he’d rediscovered what it was like to
feel desire again, and to be desired. He’d had a taste of freedom and he liked it. But Garry was nothing if not realistic. He knew that divorce from Sharon would mean the end of life as he knew it. The house wasn’t exactly a palace but it was a nice area where kids played outside. The fact that Potters Bar Golf Course was just over the railway line at the back and the George V playing fields were a short hop away in front gave it a countrified feel, too. Divorce would put an end to all that.

Garry was in a difficult position. He knew he wanted out of his marriage but he hated the thought of being plunged into poverty and maybe forced to get an apartment somewhere, seeing the boys only once in a while. If only Sharon would be reasonable, he thought. If she’d just agree things weren’t right between them and accept perhaps around
£
45,000 as a divorce payment – half the value of their home – they could work out a way through this mess and forge a new kind of relationship. Sharon, however, had other ideas.

She’d also been thinking about divorce and talking to friends. According to her calculations, a figure of
£
100,000 was far more appropriate to her situation. And if Garry claimed not to have that sort of money, why he could just sell off a few of his precious guitars. He was always droning on about how valuable they were. Well, here was a chance to prove it. Except that Garry had already made it impossible to cash in on his guitar collection. The year
before he’d put in an insurance claim, saying thieves had stolen the collection and claiming a massive
£
360,000 in compensation. In reality he knew where the guitars were stashed but it wasn’t as though he could auction them off – not unless he wanted to be done for insurance fraud.

Garry Malone felt as if he was caught between a rock and a hard place. He’d had a taste of bachelor life during his separation and he’d loved it. His marriage, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. The air in the Cranborne Crescent house was dense with resentment and untold secrets. Garry had never confessed to Sharon about his relationship with Paula Fiddes but still the affair inhabited the house like an uninvited lodger, getting in the way of any attempts at reconciliation and leaving a sour atmosphere in its wake. After an affair is discovered, the betrayed partner will often feel almost a sense of relief. ‘I knew something was up,’ they’ll say. ‘There was just something different about them, something alien.’ The adulterer may feel that they’re behaving perfectly normally, but still something will rankle and jar, creating permanent tension in the relationship.

Garry knew his marriage couldn’t survive much longer but he also knew he’d be facing financial disaster if Sharon pushed through a divorce claim. Even worse, he risked losing custody of the boys who had always lit up his life even in the darkest days of his marriage – and things would only get worse if his affair with Paula Fiddes ever became public knowledge.

The relationship curdled in the air around the warring couple. On 27 November, Sharon met up with a friend and confessed she wished she’d never agreed to try again. ‘Going back to Garry is the biggest mistake I’ve made,’ she confided, obviously angry with herself for having weakened.

Imagine what an emotional pressure cooker the Cranborne Crescent house must have become. Imagine how the bitterness – suppressed for the sake of the boys – must have built up. Who knows what it was in the end that finally sparked the fire that had been building up in that dried-up tinderbox of a relationship all those months and years. Did Sharon find out about Garry’s affair? Did she tell him she’d finally had enough and was going to file for a divorce settlement that gave her and the kids the kind of financial recompense she felt she deserved? No one except Garry Malone will ever know what took place in the bedroom of that Potters Bar house one Sunday night. All that’s certain is that Sharon Malone, fitness fanatic and devoted mother of two, disappeared from the world’s radar on 28 November 1999. The next time anyone would see her, she would already have been dead for months – bludgeoned around the head with a blunt object and left to rot in a dried-out stream.

Over the days following Sharon’s disappearance, Garry gave a bravura performance as the concerned husband. In the first act of this carefully choreographed drama, he played a man whose wife has walked out on him. Everyone knew they’d been rowing and no one would be surprised
if Sharon wanted a bit of time on her own away from her disintegrating marriage. After waiting a day or two, he rang Sharon’s teacher training college. ‘I just wanted to know if Sharon has turned up?’ he asked, just as a slightly anxious husband who’s had a row with his wife might do. ‘I haven’t seen her for a couple of days and I’m starting to get worried.’ Of course, the answer was no. With mock humility, he told police that he thought Sharon had left him. Things hadn’t been too good at home, he explained. They probably saw this type of thing all the time.

But as the days went on with no contact from the missing woman, Garry shifted his performance up a notch. Now he was no longer the deserted but resigned husband but instead he played the actively worried citizen. He hinted heavily that Sharon had owed money to some ‘nasty people’, which is why she’d disappeared. To reinforce his argument, he persuaded Paula Fiddes to tell police that she’d met up with Sharon on the night she disappeared and handed over a bag she’d held for safekeeping, which contained money, a passport and ‘something squidgy’. Paula later claimed she hadn’t liked lying, but she thought that Garry was, in her words, a ‘nice, gentle bloke’ and she wanted to help him out if she could. The fabricated story didn’t wash with anyone who’d known bright, sporty Sharon Malone, but it bought Garry Malone more,
much-needed
time.

In December 1999 Garry gave the performance of his
life at an emotional press conference where he pleaded for his missing wife to come home. The hearts of TV viewers everywhere went out to him as he struggled to keep his emotions under control in front of the cameras. No wonder he had struggled to hold down a career – he’d obviously missed his true vocation: acting. That same month a police search of the Cranborne Crescent house unearthed letters, purportedly from a private investigator, providing evidence that Sharon was responsible for the disintegration of the marriage. The letters later turned out to be written by Garry himself.