The evil dentist who staged the suicide of two of his partners 14 years apart
Having just one person in your life whose death comes through suicide is one of the worst possible things imaginable to live through. For a short amount of time, it looked like Dr Bart Corbin of Gwinnett County, Georgia, had the most heartbreakingly bad luck of anyone you’re ever met.
Corbin was a respected man about town. A dentist known to his local community as a friendly, funny character, a great dad with a storybook relationship with his wife, Jennifer. One that seemingly had the most horrific, senseless end that any relationship can have on December 4th, 2004.
The eldest of their two children, Dalton, aged just seven, had woken up early on the day and found his mother, Corbin’s wife, dead in her bed, with a gunshot wound in the back of her head, the gun still in her hand.
He had sprinted across their neighbourhood trying to find someone who was awake to call the police, though on the surface, there really wasn’t anything to look into. Once Corbin had been contacted (the neighbour who called the police first tried to call him but couldn’t get through to him) testified that his marriage to Jennifer had soured under the idyllic surface, and he had filed for divorce. According to him, this must have pushed her over the edge and led to her suicide.
This must have been horribly familiar to Corbin, as nearly the exact same thing happened to him when he was in college 14 years before. At that time, Corbin was dating a woman called Dolly Hearn, who had also taken her own life – an unimaginable horror for anyone to deal with, except that the more you looked into it, the more it remained an unimaginable horror, but for a very different reason than you might expect on the surface.
You see, the more that the police looked at Jennifer’s alleged suicide, the more that the details didn’t add up. The vast majority of women who take their own lives don’t do it with a gun. Moreover, it’s also unusally for people to take their own lives by shooting themselves in the back of the head. While, yes, the relationship of Jennifer and Bart had been on the rocks for a while now, there was no history of suicide or mental illness in her family. Her friends had seen no sign of depression in her either.
Then, an anonymous tipster contacted the police and recommended that they reopen the Dolly Hearn case. They looked into it and discovered a mirror image of Jennifer’s suicide. Hearn was discovered in bed, with the same kind of gun in her hand, having shot herself in the back of the head. This also came after a period of strife within the relationship, except in this case, it was Corbin pressuring Hearn into accepting a marriage proposal that she refused to do.
Suddenly, Hearn turned up dead via an apparent suicide. The only reason that Corbin hadn’t been arrested for murder was the fact that he’d had an airtight alibi, and there was no evidence that linked him to the scene of the crime. As the investigation went on, however, it was found that the angle at which both Hearn and Jennifer had supposedly shot themselves couldn’t be achieved by a normal suicide. Something was up, and the dentist was at the heart of it.
Thus, the police doubled their efforts to get to the bottom of what happened to Jennifer Corbin, and further investigation revealed that both Jennifer and Bart were engaged in affairs at the time. Bart was carrying on with his dental hygienist, and Jennifer was engaged in an emotional affair with someone she met online, but the real smoking gun came when the police investigated the cell signals from Bart’s phone.
His alibi had always been that on the night of Jennifer’s death, he had been at a restaurant with his brother, then stayed over at his place afterwards. However, cell tower data placed Bart’s location not at his brother’s house that night, but within 15 miles of his own house. Considering that the time of death was established between midnight and 3am, this gave Bart ample time to return home and fake his wife’s suicide.
Bart was indicted for Jennifer’s murder soon afterwards and was offered a plea deal. The death penalty would be taken off the table in exchange for confessing to the murders of Jennifer and Dolly, which he accepted. He is currently serving two life sentences for his crimes.