Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (18 page)

E R A S E D

(no physical evidence of a crime was found in part because none

was sought) is typical of many deaths labeled suicide. Although her

family made attempts to investigate the case on their own after the

fact, the handling—or mishandling—of the investigation in the first

twenty-four hours gave this eraser killer all the extra advantage he

needed to get away with murder.

Q

Fourteen years later, on December 4, 2004, Jennifer Corbin, the

woman Bart Corbin married in 1996, was found dead under almost

identical circumstances: sitting up in her bed, a single shot to the

head, a gun resting under her hand. Their seven-year-old son, Dalton,

found his mother when he got up in the morning and ran next door

screaming, ‘‘My daddy shot my mommy.’’ He hadn’t actually seen

or heard anything, but he assumed that’s what happened based on a

frightening incident he’d witnessed the week before. In the car on the

way home from Thanksgiving dinner with Jennifer’s family, Corbin

punched his wife in the face in front of their two children.

Corbin had discovered that his wife had fallen for someone she had

met in an Internet game room—someone Jennifer initially believed

to be a man named Christopher, but who eventually revealed herself

to be a woman named Anita Hearn (no relation to Dolly Hearn). The

woman lived in Missouri, and she and Jennifer had never even met.

But after discovering explicit e-mails the two had exchanged, Bart

was enraged—despite the fact that he had been having an affair of

his own throughout his entire marriage, a relationship he continued

after Jennifer died.

He was determined to prevent his wife from enjoying any of the

fruits of their marital union. So extreme was his narcissistic rage

that on the Monday after Thanksgiving, he filed for divorce, asking

the court to grant him their house, custody of their two children,

and child support, even though he was the primary wage earner

in the family. A few days later, Jennifer called 911 after she caught

her husband taking several items from her purse, including her cell

phone and journal.

Neither Jennifer nor Dolly had gunshot residue on their hands,

although the test for the presence of soot and particles expelled when

the person fires a gun is not always accurate. More suspiciously, there

were no fingerprints at all on the gun next to Jennifer.

Hiding in Plain Sight

1 1 3

Bart tested negative for gunshot residue as well, but he didn’t take

the test until a full day after the shooting. The reason for the delay

was that on the day they found Jennifer, Corbin refused to come to

the police department, to take a telephone call, or even to collect his

two traumatized children. He hid out at his twin brother’s home in

Auburn, Georgia, and refused to give any statement to investigators.

His brother would try to provide him an alibi, claiming that Bart

was at his house the night Jennifer died. But Bart’s cell phone records

would show that he was, in fact, near the murder scene at the time

the medical examiner estimated that his wife died.

As investigators began looking into this second mysterious death,

ugly facts and hidden truths emerged about his relationship with each

of the dead women. After the second killing, several people finally

came forward who had withheld potentially damning information

about the Hearn case for fourteen years. Corbin had begged a dental

school classmate not to tell police that he knew Dolly’s father had

given her the gun that was found in her lap. Corbin had admitted to

another friend that he had been at Dolly’s apartment and argued with

her the day she died. Dental school classmates recalled his explosive

temper. He had seemed to be most angry about the fact that Dolly

was not as aggrieved by their breakup as he was.

A few weeks after Jennifer died, authorities in both jurisdictions

brought murder charges against Corbin. Forensic experts who reex-amined photos of Dolly Hearn believed that the pattern of blood

spatter showed that her body was repositioned after she was shot. (At

the time of the killing, no one on the force had expertise in spatter

analysis.) Investigators came up with eyewitnesses who were able to

place Bart Corbin at Hearn’s apartment the day she died.

‘‘The motive is clear,’’ said Danny Craig, Gwinnett County district

attorney. ‘‘You don’t break up with Barton Corbin. If you do, you

pay with your life.’’

Q

Corbin was scheduled to stand trial first for his wife’s murder

in Gwinnett County, Georgia, then in Richmond County for the

killing of Dolly. The Gwinnett DA asked the court for permission to

introduce information about the previous killing in his case under the

rarely invoked but well-established legal principle known as ‘‘similar

transaction evidence.’’ Information on a separate offense is usually

1 1 4

E R A S E D

inadmissible, but the prosecution argued that the staged suicides of

Jennifer and Dolly were so similar that they revealed an unassailable

pattern pointing solely to Corbin.

The defense launched a full-court press of motions, first and

foremost to try to prevent the jury from learning about the other

case. Corbin’s lawyers argued that introducing evidence that he

had previously killed another intimate partner would be ‘‘highly

prejudicial.’’ They attacked the search warrants served on his home

and the wiretap placed on his phone— which picked up Corbin coldly

referring to Dolly Hearn as ‘‘that Augusta bitch.’’ They charged that

Jennifer committed suicide because she feared losing her kids in a

custody fight because of her romantic relationship with a woman.

They filed a motion arguing that charges should be dropped in the

Hearn case because too much time had passed and witnesses had

changed their statements, evidence had been lost, and the defense

could not examine the crime scene. In one motion, dripping with

sarcasm that verged on contempt, they asked that the trial be delayed

another fourteen years so that the recollections of witnesses could

complete an ‘‘evolutionary epoch’’ and evolve back into the ‘‘truth.’’

Corbin had done everything he could to avoid ever being charged

with murder, and now he was complaining that the delay in prose-cution was preventing him from getting a fair trial.

As the first trial drew near, the prosecution had built a fairly

strong circumstantial case. The Georgia Supreme Court refused

to block the trial judge’s decision to allow the similar transaction

evidence, meaning that the jury would hear evidence about both

deaths. According to the state’s forensic experts, Jennifer’s injury

was inconsistent with suicide. Judging by the angle of the wound,

they stated that it would have been difficult if not impossible for

Jennifer to have shot herself. The medical examiner also determined

that Mrs. Corbin would have died instantly, dropping the weapon.

Yet both Jennifer’s hand and the gun were tucked partially under the

covers. How could that have happened if she had killed herself? More

likely, Corbin killed Jennifer while she was asleep, then propped her

up in a sitting position and rearranged the covers.

Interestingly, the divorce papers Corbin filed were on the bed

next to her. The defense claimed that this fact supported the suicide

theory, that Jennifer was so distraught at the thought of potentially

losing her children that she decided to end it all right then and there.

However, Jennifer had never been served with those papers. If Corbin

Hiding in Plain Sight

1 1 5

placed them there, one could interpret that as further staging of his

suicide scenario or as a coup de grace: Madam, you have been served!

The most damning piece of evidence against Corbin, the fact that

clinched the case, did not fall into place until jury selection had

already commenced.

For two years, authorities had been attempting to link Corbin to

the gun that killed his wife. Police had long suspected that Richard

Wilson, a good friend of Corbin’s, had given him the gun, but Wilson

denied it and refused to testify before the grand jury. They were

unable to compel him to testify because he lived out of state, in Troy,

Alabama, and police did not have strong enough evidence to exercise

jurisdiction over him. Investigators leaned on Wilson time and time

again, but the answer was always the same. He did not see Corbin

any time around the murder and did not give him a gun. On the eve

of trial, after an exhaustive search by multiple police agencies, they

finally managed to trace the gun—to Troy, Alabama, where several

years before police had run a check on the gun at the request of none

other than Richard Wilson.

Once again, Corbin was betrayed by his cell phone records, which

showed that he was in Troy the day after he filed for divorce and just

five days before Jennifer died. On the second day of jury selection,

the DA asked Troy’s police chief to take a run at Wilson. At long last,

Wilson broke and admitted that Corbin had come to see him that

day and asked for the gun, saying that his wife was having an affair

and that he needed a weapon for protection.

Of course, if Corbin had simply wanted ‘‘protection,’’ he could

have bought a gun in Georgia, which is one of the easiest states in

the country when it comes to purchasing firearms. Unless Corbin

was planning something illegal, there was no reason for him to spend

eight hours on the road driving to Alabama and back to acquire

something that was available right where he lived.

Wilson’s begrudging admission was, in the words of prosecutors,

‘‘the straw that broke the camel’s back.’’ They had managed to put

the gun in Barton Corbin’s hand. The defense made a last-ditch effort

to try to keep the friend out of court, filing a motion to quash an

order allowing prosecutors to call Wilson as a material witness. But

an Alabama judge ruled that Wilson would have to testify.

Corbin knew that if he was convicted of killing Jennifer, he

could face the death penalty in the Hearn case. (The murder con-viction could then be used as an aggravating factor in arguing for

1 1 6

E R A S E D

execution in the second case.) He agreed to a deal, taking death off

the table in exchange for life in prison for both murders, with the

possibility for parole in fourteen years.

In entering his formal plea in court on September 15, 2006,

Corbin simply answered yes when asked by the judge if he committed

murder. He offered neither an explanation nor an apology, in classic

eraser-killer fashion expressing no remorse even when pleading

guilty. His lawyer said on the record that Corbin made the decision

‘‘for many reasons, the most important one being not to have his

children relive all of these things’’—children he clearly cared so little

about that he had allowed them to find their mother’s body and

then refused to comfort and console them after the life-shattering

experience.

Q

In committing his eraser crimes, Barton Corbin relied on the

perception that women are likely to become despondent and suicidal

when a relationship breaks up, regardless of whether those women

have promising careers, new love, or children to live for. By sheer force

of Machiavellian will he believed that he could commit cold-blooded

murder, not once but twice, without anyone ever noticing. It seems

hard to believe that anybody could be so presumptuous, so confident

in his ability to manipulate everyone around him like characters on

a stage. Yet his plan worked perfectly . . . once. Every time an eraser

killer wields such godlike power over others it reinforces his belief

that he can do anything he wants, that he is immune to the laws of

man and nature.

Justin Barber was so convinced of his ability to defy nature

that he was confident he could control the path of a bullet.

On August 17, 2002, the thirty-year-old business analyst shot his

twenty-seven-year-old wife, April, in the face and also shot himself

in the hand, both shoulders, and right chest—telling police that a

mugger had attacked them as they took a romantic moonlight walk

along a deserted beach near Jacksonville, Florida, after going out to

dinner to celebrate their third wedding anniversary. Whereas April’s

single wound was fatal, none of those to Justin was life threatening.

The chest wound was a glancing one that did not even require surgery.

The beach was in an extremely secluded location, behind sand

dunes in a state park that was closed to visitors at night. It was a place,

Hiding in Plain Sight

1 1 7

according to Barber, they came to on special occasions, reminiscent

of their beachfront wedding in the Bahamas.

Barber claimed he struggled with the gunman, blacked out after

the first shot, and woke up to find his wife floating in the surf. He

said that he tried nine different ways to carry her to their car, from

throwing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes to dragging

her by the waist of her pants, but was unable to get very far in his

weakened state, and abandoned her at the foot of a boardwalk a

hundred yards from the water’s edge.

He did manage to make it to the car on his own and then drive ten

miles before flagging down a passing motorist. His wife’s cell phone

was in the car, but he claimed he couldn’t find it. He also passed

countless homes and businesses, and presumably other motorists,

in those ten miles, but did not stop to ask for help. He claimed to

detectives that he hadn’t wanted to wake people if their lights were

out, but there were gas stations and fast-food restaurants and other

twenty-four-hour businesses open along the route. Did he drive a

good distance to give his wife time to die, and give himself time to

get rid of the gun?

Barber’s story never made much sense. Although he claimed

that the phantom stranger had demanded money, he admitted that

nothing was taken from either himself or his wife, even though both

were allegedly unconscious and unable to resist after the attack. And if

three of his wounds were incurred after he passed out, as he claimed,

why were they so superficial?

More disturbingly, the pattern of blood flow from his wife’s

injuries, which ran directly down the side of her face in one direction,

and the absence of blood anywhere else on the beach belied his

description of having transported his wife in so many different

positions. The medical examiner determined that April was shot

where she lay on the walkway, not where Barber claimed the attack

had occurred. Prosecutors theorized at his 2006 trial that he first

incapacitated his wife by holding her under the water until she lost

consciousness, then carried her to the walkway and shot her. White

foam, from inhaling salt water, was pooled below her nose and mouth.

Q

Justin Barber was having an affair with Shannon Kennedy, his

‘‘tennis partner’’ at the time of the murder, a woman he met at a

1 1 8