Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal (18 page)

Gray: Was he there?

Corbin: He was in and out. He had patients. I’m through with my patients.

Gray: So he was in and out, and saw you there. Some of the names you gave us are actually students?

Corbin: Yeah, all the ones I mentioned are students in my class.

Gray: You stayed until about noon and what did you do then?

Corbin: I left with John Harpers to go down to Atlanta Dental to pick up some denture teeth that I needed for my state Boards. After that, I went home, got my car, drove to Rally’s, got some lunch, and I went back to school—left probably at 12:35 and got back about a quarter to one, I reckon.

Gray: So you ran and quickly got a hamburger and ate it between the car and the school?

Corbin: Well, I got home and ate it.

Gray wondered how Bart Corbin could have accomplished all those errands in forty-five minutes, but he didn’t comment on it.

Bart said that he had a lot of things to do at the dental school. He was sorting through things he didn’t need anymore and throwing them out, and he was sterilizing and organizing his instruments to prepare for Boards.

Gray: So you stayed finishing up a few loose ends until about when?

Corbin: 2:00—then I walked home and took a shower and made a couple of phone calls, and then came back to school.

Gray: Who did you call when you got home?

Corbin: I called Dolly. Do you want to know what we talked about?

Gray: Yeah.

Corbin: We just discussed that I could not make the party that she wanted me to go to with her that night and that I would try to communicate with her later that night.

Gray: Did she answer the phone?

Corbin: No, she didn’t. I talked to the answering machine. There was a party but we did not have a date with each other.

Gray: Was it the kind of situation where both of y’all were simply invited or what?

Corbin: Yeah, that’s what it was.

Bart said he couldn’t remember the name of the person who was giving the party. “Teddy…something.” But he obviously wanted John Gray to know that this phone message had to have been left for Dolly between 2:00 and 2:30
P.M
. His memory for the afternoon Dolly died was remarkably precise. He had called another girl to see if she was coming to his graduation, and then returned a phone call to a male friend who had said he couldn’t make their weight-lifting session at 3:30
P.M
. He figured he’d made this call at 3:30—or closer to 4:00.

Since his weight-lifting partner couldn’t come to the gym until five, Bart said he’d decided to get a haircut, and he called his hair stylist and made an appointment.

Corbin: It was at Accent on Hair with Wanda Wood. It was at 3:15—I had to rush to make it.

Gray: And you went and got your hair done and came back. Is that right?

Corbin: Right. It was about four. I went to my house. I don’t have a parking permit so I park at my house and walk to school. I basically hung around and talked to some people there and bulled, and just didn’t really do anything and then left about ten to 5:00 to go stretch out before we worked out at 5:00.

Gray: And who did you work out with?

Corbin: Scott Silliman—he’s a senior dental student. We worked out until 5:40–5:45.

Gray: What did y’all do then?

Corbin: Drove to my house where I called a young lady I was supposed to be seeing that night to see if she was gonna want to go to the party. She was not at home, so I decided to go on to the party with Scott. He had already left so I drove over to his house as soon as I could grab a towel. I got to his house about ten to 6:00.

John Gray switched gears. Although some of his estimates overlapped, Bart Corbin had just accounted for virtually every minute of his time from noon to 6
P.M
. Dolly Hearn had likely died during those six hours.

Gray: Basically you and Dolly had been dating about how long?

Corbin: About a year and a half.

Gray: What was the context of your relationship. I mean was it real serious, or was it—

Corbin: It was real serious.

Gray: Had y’all discussed marriage?

Corbin: Yes, sir. It was my idea.

Gray: In the last few weeks, how has the relationship been?

Corbin: It’s been off. I’m graduating and I can’t stay around for just a girlfriend. I told her that.

Gray: And what was her reaction?

Corbin: It depended on the day. Sometimes it upset her, and sometimes she understood. Her moods would change from day to day. I mean she always projected the same mood [publicly], but in private, she varied.

Gray: How had her mood been within the last week, as far as personality and everything?

Bart Corbin seemed relaxed, and appeared to almost enjoy discussing Dolly’s state of mind. He became more voluble, now.

Corbin: [She was] less upbeat that she has been. Instead of talking about what was possible, she talked about things in terms of dreaming. She said what she was going to try to accomplish was probably just dreams, anyway. She told me a few days ago. It was about general practice residencies or oral surgery residencies. And for her to be realistic is for her to be down.

John Gray asked Bart to go over the prior day again. Bart continued to insist he had not seen Dolly for two days—and particularly not on “the day of the incident.” He hadn’t stopped by yesterday to see her. He was sure of that.

“What kind of car do you drive?” Gray asked.

“A silver Monte Carlo, 1988, with a black T-top, license plate KD 982 and a black ‘bra’ on the front of it.”

T
HE INTERVIEW
continued.

Gray: What were you wearing yesterday?

Corbin: At school, I was wearing a royal blue knit shirt, beige shorts, and Docksiders. When I got my hair cut, I was wearing my weight-lifting clothes that I changed into after my shower.

Gray: Do you own a gun?

Corbin: I don’t think it’s in my name or not. I have like a .25 caliber my father gave me.

Gray: Have you ever seen Dolly’s gun before?

Corbin: No, I have not. I didn’t know she had one. She never mentioned it to me.

Gray: In other words, you have never seen or never touched that gun, have you?

Corbin: I’ve never been near any kind of weapon. I didn’t think she carried one.

Bart was growing nervous again.

Gray: Do you have some keys to her house?

Corbin. No, I do not. She has keys to my house. I do not have a key to her apartment. When we originally broke up, I’d given her key back. She just never had another one [key to her apartment] made up to give [back] to me.

Gray: She had her locks changed, didn’t she?

Corbin: That’s what I understand.

Gray: To keep you out?

Corbin: That’s what I understand.

John Gray asked to see the keys on Bart’s key ring, and Bart painstakingly explained what each one was—from his mailbox key to his car keys, to the key to his father’s apartment, to his dental school keys. Even though he had admitted to Dolly and Angela that he was the one who stalked them, he would not admit it now; instead he replied noncommittally. He stressed that he had given Dolly the chance to marry him, and she had chosen not to—and that had been the end for them. He had loved her, but he was moving on.

“Well, I mean,” Bart said, “that there comes a time in a relationship you’ve got to decide where you’re going to go. Either it’s going to go further, or you ain’t gonna go with it at all. And it was not going at all, so it was time for me to go. I was burnt out on trying.”

If he and Dolly managed to see each other to say goodbye in the three days they had had left, it would have been nice—but he insisted they had made no plans to do that. After Boards he would be pulling out of Augusta.

Asked to recall the night before when he heard that Dolly was dead, Bart said all of his close friends had gathered at Eric Rader’s house so they would be there for him when he found out. And then Vicky Martin told him Dolly was dead.

“I didn’t believe it,” Bart told his interviewers. “I don’t think she would be making a joke about anything like that, but I didn’t believe it. Even if I did believe it, I didn’t know how Dolly could have done it. I still don’t.”

Bart guessed that Dolly must have been very depressed because she was “down in her grades,” and she had had such high aspirations to be an oral surgeon. “She’s always been tops at this and tops at that. She just used to think that she could get things done without having, necessarily, the grades, and maybe she just realized the bottom line was you had to have them. I don’t know.”

T
HE INTERVIEW ENDED
, and after Bart left, John Gray and Bruce Powers sat there silently for a few minutes. Corbin had seemed remarkably in control of his emotions for a man whose longtime love had died violently less than twenty-four hours earlier. A skeptic might even have sensed a glint of “I told her so” in his eyes as he talked about Dolly’s alleged failure in dental school—a “failure” that would prove to be totally untrue. She had not only made up her fall quarter’s deficit, but she had sailed through the spring quarter. She had been on her way.

Could anyone—anyone—recall his entire day in fifteen-minute segments as Bart Corbin had just done?

Or was he, perhaps, hiding something?

B
ART
C
ORBIN WAS BACK
in the Richmond County CID offices the next evening. This time Detective Ron Peebles joined Lieutenant John Gray. Gray explained that he needed to ask a few more questions that would help him better understand Corbin’s relationship with Dolly Hearn.

Bart nodded.

Once more, Gray asked Bart if he was absolutely sure he hadn’t seen Dolly on June 6, the day she died. And this time Bart admitted that he
had
gone by to see her.

Corbin: Yes, sir, I did. I went by—close to one o’clock.

Gray: What was the purpose or occasion to stop by her apartment?

Corbin: Same as it had been on previous occasions, to see how she was doing, to see if we could possibly have dinner that night like we tried to do before she got sick.

Gray: Okay. What did you do? Did you go up there and knock on the door and she responded to that?

Corbin: Yes, sir.

Gray: Okay. When she came to the door, what was she wearing?

Corbin: Black shorts, I think—and a gray and white striped shirt.

Gray: So she let you in the apartment and you came in? What happened then?

Corbin: We just sat down and talked and she was watching her soap operas. We were sitting on the sofa.

Gray: What was basically the conversation?

Corbin: Small talk. We talked about that party that she had mentioned that she was considering going to, this party [inaudible] that I had been talking about earlier, sending her an invitation and me an invitation.

Gray: Okay. Now, you stayed for how long?

Corbin: Thirty minutes.

Gray: Did anyone come over?

Corbin: Yes, some girl from the office where she’s working at came by.

Gray: Did she see you?

Corbin: I don’t think so. I heard her come up when I was heading toward the bathroom at that time, and I went to the restroom. By the time I got out, she was leaving.

Gray: Did you go anywhere else before you came up to Dolly’s house—when you pulled up to her house?

Corbin: I knocked on the end door of the apartment [units]. When you’re facing the door, the farthest door on the left.

Gray: Why?

Corbin: Because—um—our state Boards, we need certain patients for certain lesions, and she, Dolly, knew these people, and I was trying to get people in to screen them, which means we take a couple of X-rays and see if they, you know, got any lesions. It doesn’t cost them anything, ’cause we’re sort of desperate for patients, that we have to have to get our license.

Bart couldn’t recall if he had knocked on the neighbors’ door before or after he visited with Dolly because he had been to their door twice before during the week, and found no one home. They hadn’t been home on June 6, either. He didn’t know if Dolly knew them or not, but she knew several people in the complex, although probably not those at this apartment. “She didn’t hardly associate with those people.”

After seven years of college, Bart Corbin occasionally slipped into “country” grammar, and it sounded odd coming from his mouth. But that wasn’t what fascinated John Gray and Ron Peebles. Each of them had been surprised by the changes in Corbin’s recollections. Thirty hours earlier, he had given a very different description of his movements on June 6. Had he perhaps realized that someone had seen him at the apartments on Parrish Road, and felt the need to revise his recall? Or had he been so shocked and saddened by Dolly’s death that he hadn’t been able to remember his movements accurately yesterday? Gray and Peebles asked him about Dolly’s mood on the afternoon she died.

Corbin: [She was] sort of…um…non—I don’t want to say nonchalant, I mean, I don’t know. I mean just sort of normal, I guess I would say. (Inaudible.) She was busy, and she was still complaining about the guy she was working for on the last few days, because he’d been jerking her around about getting the hours she needed to work that he had promised her.

Gray: Was that the apartment manager?

Corbin: Yeah.

Gray: Did she need money?

Corbin: She said she needed money.

Gray: Did you know if she was in any type of financial debt?

Corbin: I don’t think so, because her daddy gives her most anything and pays for everything. I didn’t know her to be hurting for anything.

Gray: Okay. What was your mood when you went by to see her that day?

Corbin: Ah, say, I guess sort of busy, fairly upbeat, I remember.

Gray: Okay. All right. Did you have a lot to do that day?