Too Late To Say Goodbye

- A True Story of Murder and Betrayal -


If you like crime drama, - and what American doesn’t, it seems, - then you are already familiar with Ann Rule and her excellent treatment of true crime. She has the ability to put together a captivating picture of a crime that readers are unable to put down til they’re reached the last page.

Her reputation is such that she is now in the enviable position of having people contact her to suggest real-life murders. They know if she decides to write about a crime, it will be presented in a most readable and gripping manner.

Too Late to Say Goodbye is no different. Page after page, the book yields the story of an incredible absorbing crime that almost went unsolved! It is a tangled story of betrayal, treachery and jealousy, and how a seemingly idyllic marriage can be terribly misleading.

The story begins a few weeks before Christmas 2004, in the upscale suburban community of Sugar Hill, Georgia. Jenn Corbin and her dentist husband, Bart, appeared to be a happy, loving couple - the parents of two young boys Dalton and Dillon. Bart was building his dental practice and Jenn was a preschool teacher and all seems right with their lives.

But as is so often the case, appearances can be very deceiving.

Bart Corbin was a guy who was far different in private than in the public eye. In addition to his controlling personality, he was also a womanizer. This combination was too much for Jenn to live with and eventually, though no one else knew it at the time, they separated. Shortly after Thanksgiving 2004 Jenn left their home and a divorce appeared to be imminent.

So when young 7 year old Dalton Corbin found his mothers body and ran to a neighbors for help, it wasn’t hard for investigators at the scene to believe they had a suicide on their hands with the way the scene was laid out in front of them. Everything about it pointed to a self-inflicted gunshot wound as the cause of death.

But even though Jenn’s death had all the ear marks of a suicide, the case dragged on and appeared to be headed to the cold case files of the Gwinnett County Police Department. The investigators were tenacious however and stayed with the case.

To their surprise, their investigations led them to another woman, Dorothy (Dolly) Hearn, who had been involved with Bart Corbin 14 years before and had met her death too, in circumstances remarkably similar to Jenn’s.
While one suicide could perhaps be explained, the odds of two women, romantically linked to the same man and taking their own lives were as remote as one person being struck by lightning on two separate occasions.

Not only that, but if a women chooses to end her life, she just doesn’t tend to shoot herself in the head. Statistically, it is not a mode many women choose to commit suicide. The red flags went up and the case stayed open.

But it doesn’t end with that. Was there a connection, or was there some answer to be found in a secret and even more dangerous relationship Jenn was having outside the marriage? In true form, Ann Rule interviewed virtually everyone in any way related to the story; the victims' families, police investigators, prosecutors, and sources stretching from Georgia all the way to Australia to uncover the truth behind the headlines of these two sensational deaths. And what emerges on the pages of this book is an incredible story of jealous rage; of mind-boggling circumstantes and a glut physical evidence that runs from the seductive to the macabre and to the almost unheard of forensic techniques.
Eventually we are led to the tragic and ironic discovery that motivated the killing - the absolute unraveling of one of the strangest murder investigations of our time.

Ann Rule has truly outdone herself with this one – she has topped what has been stellar work to date with another unequivocally great crime story.