Reader's Digest True Crime vol 2: Tales of Murder & Mayhem

INTRODUCTION

Evil fascinates us. Criminal masterminds intrigue us. Crime fighters amaze us with their expertise, intelligence, and determination to figure out whodunit and why.

For these reasons, riveting true-crime stories have long been a staple in Reader’s Digest. Well before true-crime podcasts became the craze, we curated the best tales and exposed America to its darker side. We’ve covered stalkers and scammers, burglars and kidnappers. We’ve written about spouses who murder their partners and brilliant con men who are as charming as they are devious. And, of course, we’ve shared spellbinding stories about the most terrifying criminals of all—serial killers.

To create this second volume of Reader’s Digest True Crime, we mined our vault for seventeen of the very best crime reads ever published, the ones that even today—in some cases decades after the case was resolved—brilliantly entertain, shock, and even frighten us. For example, how did a terrorist cell start in a quiet North Carolina town, and what did illegal cigarette trafficking have to do with it? Then there’s the alarming case of a sniper on the loose in a suburban town who is shooting people at random from his car. Could the mysterious killer be your regular-guy friend? Or consider the group of senior citizen ex-burglars who decide to have one last go at a London bank, despite arthritis, achy joints, diabetes, and other health problems. Even though they’re the bad guys, you might just find yourself rooting for their age-defying pluck. And finally, get ready for the roller-coaster ride of tracking down infamous serial killers, such as Ted Bundy.

Whatever the crime, whoever the criminal or victim, this carefully selected collection of the best crime stories makes for gripping reading, each story another strand of evidence uncovering our fascination with evil—and its opposite.

DOUBLE DECEPTION

by Ann Rule

from the book Too Late to Say Goodbye

Jennifer Corbin was one of those people almost everybody liked, probably because she liked everybody. Tall, blond and pretty, the 33-year-old mom thought of others before herself. She did everything she could to keep her small sons happy.

Married for nearly nine years, Jenn and Bart Corbin appeared to have everything: two healthy children, a lovely home in Buford, Georgia, a good marriage, admired professions (Bart was a dentist, while Jenn taught preschool part-time at a Methodist church). But tiny threadlike fissures had been creeping through the foundation of their marriage. By the fall of 2004, a divorce was in the works, and Bart was sleeping in a separate bedroom.

At 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, December 4, 2004, Steve and Kelly Comeau, who lived across the street, were startled to hear someone knocking at their front door. They were still in bed. When Steve answered, he looked down to see Dalton Corbin, age seven. His face was red, his cheeks streaked with tears.

My mom isn’t breathing, Dalton said, standing there in his pajamas. My daddy shot my mommy. I need you to call 911.

Skeptical, Steve Comeau nevertheless called 911, while Kelly followed Dalton to check on her friend and neighbor. She doubted that Dalton had actually seen what he described.

The Corbins’ overhead garage door was open, so Kelly hurried inside. She found the door to the kitchen unlocked, and headed down the hall toward the master bedroom, with the two boys trailing her.

In the bedroom, she could see Jenn lying diagonally across the bed. It was an odd position. Feeling a shiver of alarm, Kelly reached out to touch Jenn’s right shoulder. Could she be sleeping? Kelly pressed harder. There was no reassuring thrum of blood coursing there. The flesh was cold.

Jenn wasn’t breathing. Kelly saw a trickle of blood coming from her nose and a few bright red stains on the bedclothes. She glimpsed what looked like a pistol butt poking out from a coverlet. Feeling as if she were in the midst of a nightmare, Kelly backed away, careful not to touch anything.

She was way gone, Kelly later recalled to an investigator.

Jenn had been healthy and vibrant. There was no reason at all for her to have a handgun in her bed. As shocked as Kelly was by what she saw, her thoughts turned quickly to the two little boys. They were Jenn’s biggest concern, always. Now Dalton and Dillon had no mother. Kelly’s heart constricted.

She ran back to her house, taking the two boys with her, and soon heard the shriek of sirens. Only then did Kelly realize, as she tried to comfort the children, that she might have been in danger herself when she entered the Corbins’ house. She realized something else. There had been no sign of Bart.

One day well into her marriage, Jennifer Corbin had asked her sister and close confidante, Heather, Do you ever wonder what your husband did or who he knew before you met him?

Heather answered, No. I know what Doug’s life was like.

I don’t, said Jenn about her own husband’s life.

She had met Bart in 1995, when he was 31 and she 24, but she knew virtually nothing about his personal or romantic life before then. Whenever she asked him about his past, he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

It didn’t seem to matter at first. Handsome and dark-haired, Bart was tall—six foot three to her six-foot frame—which she liked. He was a practicing dentist and seemed a most eligible bachelor. They’d met at Barnacles oyster bar in Duluth, where she was working temporarily as a waitress and bartender while figuring out what to do with her college degree.

Like almost everyone else, Jenn was drawn to Bart’s wittiness. He could offer a quick and hilarious comment on almost anything. They began dating, and Jenn was in high spirits. When she introduced him to her parents, Max and Narda Barber, they were pleased, observing that he seemed to care a great deal for their daughter. Max found one thing off-putting: Bart’s conversation was full of profanity.

A few weeks after Jenn and Bart traveled to Italy for a romantic getaway, Jenn called her mother and asked if she was sitting down. As Narda remembered it, Jenn told her, Bart and I have made a decision—and I’m pregnant. She added, We’re going to get married and have the baby.

Narda expressed delight. Jenn said she wanted a big wedding. And somehow we did it in six weeks—an outdoor wedding. Violins and all of that. The couple were married on September 1, 1996.

What neither Jenn nor her family knew was that Bart had been seeing a married woman with two children—a woman he’d met through his dental business. He was also rumored to be seeing a woman 20 years older than he was. He continued seeing the younger woman all during his marriage. Another thing Jenn didn’t know: While studying dentistry at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, in Richmond County, Bart had stood out for having a very short fuse. Fellow students said that he was unpredictable, that anything could set him off. One even recalled Bart throwing his own class project against a wall, shattering it.

Students also remembered an imperious attitude. Bart considered himself superior to others, said one. He was very egotistical. His attitude was a turnoff for a number of women he met. But not for Dolly Hearn, who was a year behind him in dental school.

She had exquisite features, beautiful eyes and thick black hair, and was one of the secrets Bart kept from Jenn. Bart and Dolly had dated for about two years, but when she tried to end the relationship, Bart stalked her, not wanting to accept defeat. Though she contacted the police for help and reached out to others as well, Dolly’s life went downhill drastically.

On June 6, 1990, it ended abruptly. Dolly was found dead in her apartment of a gunshot wound to the right side of her head. It was an apparent suicide.

Bart was questioned in depth. He had a recent history of harassing her, including breaking into her apartment and vandalizing her car. Dolly’s father, Dr. Carlton Hearn, told investigators that Bart Corbin had caused his daughter a great deal of trouble in the last nine months of her life. It would be wise to check him out, said Carlton. He and his wife, Barbara, fully expected that Dolly’s cause of death would be changed to malice murder as the probe went on and that Corbin would be charged with the crime.

But that was not to be. In 1990 the Richmond County sheriff’s office had no blood-spatter experts. The gun used to shoot Dolly had been moved before any crime-scene photos could be taken, making it almost impossible to reconstruct the scene. Though questions remained, Dolly’s case was officially closed, leaving suicide as the method of death listed by the sheriff’s office and undetermined by the medical examiner.

Dolly’s parents hired a private investigator to continue looking into her death. And the investigator found a number of people who had heard Bart Corbin talk about hurting Dolly after she broke up with him.

On the morning of December 4, 2004, two patrolmen swept the Corbin home, then waved the EMS team inside. The teams entered the master bedroom and found it just as Kelly Comeau had reported. The woman who lay across the bed had what appeared to be a single gunshot wound behind her right ear. The palm of her hand rested very close to the butt of the .38-caliber revolver. Medics checked her for signs of life. They found none.

Patrol Sgt. E. T. Edkin joined his officers and immediately saw that there was nothing they could do for the blond woman. At first look, it appeared that she had killed herself. Still, with his years of experience working homicides, Edkin questioned whether this was, in fact, a suicide. With crime-scene tape, Edkin set up a perimeter around the house and yard, and then briefed homicide detective Marcus Head, who took charge, about his suspicion that this death was not what it seemed.

Kelly Comeau now approached and asked if someone could get clothes for Jenn’s two boys—they were still in their pajamas. Officer Michelle Johns went upstairs and grabbed pants, shirts, shoes and socks from what was obviously the children’s bedroom. Glancing into another bedroom on the second floor, she saw the clothes of an adult male hanging neatly in the closet.

Crime-scene investigators from the Gwinnett County police department and forensic staff from the medical examiner’s office began arriving. All sudden and/or unattended deaths were worked first as homicides, next as possible suicides, third as accidental, and only then as a natural occurrence. Nobody yet knew where the dead woman would fit. A search warrant was being obtained; detectives were trying to locate relatives of Jennifer Corbin.

Neither Kelly Comeau nor her husband, Steve, knew where Bart was. Kelly managed to find a number for his mother, Connie Corbin, who lived nearby. Steve called her at 8:45 a.m. Jennifer’s been shot, he said.

Connie then called her younger son, Bobby, and told him what had happened. He said that Bart was with him and he would break the awful news. Steve Comeau also called Heather, Jenn’s sister, who lived about 25 miles away. Heather collapsed in tears, crying out, Jenn’s dead!

We ran through the house, collecting our kids, recalled Doug Tierney, Heather’s husband. They headed for Max and Narda’s house. In the car, I called Bobby back and said, ‘Where’s Bart? Is Bart with you?’ and he said, ‘Yes, he’s here, but he’s really, really upset.’

Doug asked if he and Bart would be on their way over to the Corbin house. Bobby avoided answering. Heather kept saying, ‘Go! Go! We have to take care of the boys.’ Doug asked Bobby Corbin again, Are you on your way? There was no response.

Doug couldn’t believe it. Surely Bart realized that Dalton and Dillon needed their father? Meantime, fighting panic and disbelief, Max Barber got in his car and drove as fast as he could to Jenn’s house.

Detectives at the scene kept expecting Jenn Corbin’s widower to drive up any minute. They assumed he would be crying and upset but that, like most fathers, he’d pull himself together and race to his children in a crisis. It was eight hours before Bart called the detectives back.

By then he had lawyered up, according to Marcus Head. He agreed to meet at police headquarters to be tested for the presence of gun residue, but he would answer no questions—not even about securing his home.

Marcus Head spoke briefly to the young boys, who remained at the Comeaus’ home until their extended family could arrive. Dalton told the detective he had gone to wake his mother to fix breakfast and he had seen blood coming from her mouth. He had also seen the gun.

I tried to call 911 from our phone, he said, but it didn’t work. So I ran to Kelly and Steve’s to get help. The boys were questioned again later at police headquarters. When a detective asked Dalton if he wondered why his phone wasn’t working, the boy replied, Maybe my dad cut it off.

Arriving at his dead daughter’s house, Max Barber parked in the driveway for a very long time, waiting to talk to his son-in-law. Heather, who was still at her mother’s house, called 911. She was urgently hoping someone could help get Bart to the scene. She had her suspicions.

The woman who answered at 911 was already convinced that Jenn had killed herself, Heather recalled. "I kept trying to tell her that Bart did it, and she kept saying, ‘But, ma’am, you don’t understand what happened.’

And I knew I did understand and she didn’t, said Heather. Jenn had confided that she was beginning to be afraid of her husband.

Heather recalled that while having coffee together once, the two couples had discussed the TV coverage of the Scott Peterson trial. They had been transfixed by the seeming smugness of Peterson during the trial for the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, and their unborn child.

We all talked about it, Heather remembered. I said something about Scott Peterson and how awful it was. And Bart replied, ‘Scott Peterson only got caught because he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’ That conversation stuck with me.

Though Jenn tried hard over the years to make her deteriorating marriage work, in 2004 she made little pretense about how empty it was. Bart was emotionally abusive, and she wanted to be free of him, if only she could figure out a way that wouldn’t hurt the boys. Her best friend, Juliet Styles, knew of her struggles, as did her neighbor and friend Kelly Comeau and, of course, Heather. They were all pulling for Jenn to find some happiness.

Bart himself acknowledged that the marriage was unraveling. Jenn would not sleep with him, which distressed him. He’d always prided himself on being a good lover. He made pathetic, sometimes desperate, calls about the problem to others, including Heather and Doug, and his wife’s parents.

Sometimes Jenn talked to her mother about the issues with Bart. One day she told Narda forcefully, Mom, he gives me the creeps. He makes my skin crawl. I cannot bear to have him touch me.

No longer the self-assured husband who had spent years cheating on her with other women, Bart now clung tightly to Jenn. He would not allow a woman to leave him. When Jenn brought up the subject of divorce in early October 2004, he seemed to have expected it. But he begged her to stay in the house through Christmas. Couldn’t they have one more Christmas as a family, something to remember?

For the first time, Bart apologized to Jenn, saying he was sorry if he’d hurt her. She agreed to stay over the holidays. That would mean two more months. She didn’t know how she was going to manage.

Only one thing gave her a bit of joy. Desperately lonely, she’d begun exchanging e-mails with someone named Chris Hearn, whom she’d met over the Internet on a game site. When she told Heather about this virtual friendship, her sister warned her, You have no idea who this really is!

But Jenn seemed to find comfort in it and exchanged literally hundreds of e-mails with Chris. The last name of this person—Hearn—meant nothing to Jenn, because she’d never known about Dolly Hearn, Bart’s earlier girlfriend. But when Bart found the e-mails and started reading them, he assumed Jenn had stumbled on Dolly’s suspicious death. He became enraged. After Thanksgiving dinner at Heather and Doug’s house, when he barely said a word to anyone, Bart unleashed his anger at Jenn during the car ride home. He hauled off and hit her in the face.

Their seven-year-old, Dalton, cried hysterically. But Dillon somehow managed to sleep through the whole thing.

Jenn fled to her sister’s house and went ahead with divorce plans, but on December 3 she told Heather, I have to go home or I’ll lose our house. Bart filed his own divorce papers. He was behaving erratically, according to his brother and his friends. He’d tear off in the night in his car. Evidence would also show that he made a secret drive to Alabama—returning with a gun.

As Jenn’s family braced for her funeral, the probe into her death widened. Investigators had been learning about the terrible dissension that marked the last weeks of her life. They spoke with many people close to Jenn and Bart. Friends, family and neighbors told stories of fear, upset and a marriage going downhill fast.

While the Gwinnett County detectives worked to determine how and why Jennifer Corbin died, Richmond County sheriff’s detectives Scott Peebles and DeWayne Piper carried out a parallel probe into Dolly Hearn’s death, now 14 years in the past. Atlanta-area media that were keeping abreast of the Jenn Corbin case had quickly reported information about the Hearn case. Detectives in both jurisdictions noted similarities and started connecting the dots. The public also knew that young Dalton Corbin had blurted out that his father had shot his mother, though District Attorney Danny Porter of Gwinnett County didn’t feel that the seven-year-old’s certainty would be enough yet to order an affidavit for an arrest warrant.

Despite the circumstantial evidence in Jenn’s death, there was still no proof of murder. The gun found in her bed had been wiped clean of any fingerprints, as had the murder weapon in Dolly Hearn’s case.

Two days before Jenn’s funeral, Kevin Vincent, an investigator with the DA, drove to Bart Corbin’s dental office in Dacula to search for information. The office was closed. A sign said there had been a death in the family.

An attorney whose office was next to Bart Corbin’s told Vincent that he’d last spoken to Bart on Friday, December 3. The lawyer said that Bart occasionally bartered dental work for legal advice. The lawyer knew from personal experience that Corbin had a volatile temperament, and he often heard Bart shouting at his staff right through the walls.

The attorney said that Bart had asked him nervously on the afternoon before his wife was shot about which of them would be legally responsible for paying the mortgage on their house if he and his wife divorced. I told him that it would be the one of you who could most afford to pay. That would be Bart, who earned more as a dentist than Jenn did as a teacher.

The lawyer observed that Bart had been acting strangely that afternoon. He said to me, ‘Everyone told me not to marry her. I should have listened, but it will all be over soon.’ At the time, the lawyer thought that Bart was speaking about the upcoming divorce.

Investigators made a door-to-door sweep of the Corbins’ closest neighbors. Bart’s explosions of temper were well known. A nearby neighbor said that on one occasion he had even felt it necessary to step in to protect Dalton from Bart’s anger. Investigators also learned that even though he’d filed for divorce, Bart seemed consumed with pain and rage in the days before his wife died. If they needed to find someone with a motive for murder, Bart was a likely