Deadly Divorces (4 page)

All the family had witnessed Bart losing his temper with Jenn or the boys. Heather had been horrified when Dalton had struck out at a Little League baseball game and Bart had yelled at him from the stands, calling him an idiot and a loser. It was hardly a bolt from the blue to hear that Jenn had had enough. But over the autumn of 2004, as the humid heat of the Georgia summer gave way to cooler, fresher days, Jenn’s attention was increasingly distracted – not only by the computer but also the demands of two active young sons, a large home and a full social calendar. Meanwhile her husband was growing more watchful and more thoughtful.

Bart Corbin was a man used to being in control. After an unremarkable childhood in Snellville, Georgia, where his
father was a military policeman and his mother a bank teller, his life so far had followed the path he’d always intended – good job, attractive wife, sporty kids. He could move around the area in which he lived knowing that people were looking at him with admiration and even envy. He had the plush office, the beautiful brick house; he was a man of standing, a man to be reckoned with. Divorce didn’t feature anywhere in his carefully constructed view of himself. A public marriage break-up would mean a drastic change in his standard of living. He would probably lose his home and he would miss out on precious moments with his sons but more than that he would have to admit failure into his life. His perfect existence would turn out to be flawed just like everyone else’s. No longer would people look at him as a man who has everything, no longer would he command total respect. His grand design would be thwarted and he would be just like anyone else. And it would be all Jenn’s fault.

Where do you start to chart the timeline of the disintegration of a marriage? Is it the first argument or the first doubts? Maybe it’s the first time he forgets her birthday or she falls asleep without curling into his back. In the end it doesn’t matter where the rot starts, what matters is how it finishes. And once the unravelling begins, the finish comes all too quickly.

Thanksgiving 2004 was an uncharacteristically tense affair for the Barber family. As usual the whole clan were
gathered together – this year at Heather’s house in nearby Dawsonville, with its motley zoo of pet animals and fenced-in back yard with the grass worn bald in the places where the kids particularly liked to play. Although the family enjoyed spending time together and watching all the small cousins racing around and stuffing themselves with food when they thought no one else was looking as usual, there was an edge to the atmosphere as never before.

Usually urbane and convivial at these occasions, Bart seemed ill at ease and withdrawn. Unusually, he spent much of the day on his own, out on the porch or in the basement. When he did join the family, he was sombre and out of sorts. At 6pm he got to his feet and announced his family was leaving. ‘Aw, no!’ protested the boys. ‘Why do we have to go so early?’ But Jenn knew better than to antagonise her husband. She told the boys that if their father was determined to leave, they’d better start getting ready to go. The others tried to talk them into staying. Family occasions just weren’t the same without everyone there. Besides there was something about Bart’s manner, something about the tight set of his mouth and the suppressed anger in his eyes that concerned them. They’d all witnessed Bart’s displays of temper and wanted to keep Jenn and her kids safely with them.

But Jenn knew her husband and she understood that the longer she delayed leaving, the angrier he would get. Better to get it over with now then at least her family would be free to
enjoy the rest of their day without the constant undercurrent of friction. Besides, maybe it would all blow over. Perhaps it was one of Bart’s sudden mood swings that would be forgotten by the time they got home. Unfortunately this was one mood that wasn’t going to go quite so quickly. You see, the ever-wary Barton Corbin had decided it was time he started to look into exactly what his wife was doing all those long hours spent online with her long, capable fingers
tap-tapping
over the keyboard, her unruly blonde hair pushed behind her ears. What he discovered incensed him beyond reason. Not only had his wife developed an intense and intimate friendship with a stranger online but she was also divulging details of their marriage. For the privacy-loving dentist, this was the grossest betrayal.

There are some occasions where you know before you even get into the car that this is going to be a nightmare journey. Those are the times when you drag out the goodbyes at the kerbside or linger while filling up the boot of the car with children’s toys and empty dishes long since cleared of the food you lovingly prepared for the family feast. These are the times when you fuss unnecessarily about strapping your protesting children into the back seat and take a deep breath before opening up the passenger door. The times when you prepare yourself for the blast of barely repressed anger that hits you like a sledgehammer before you’ve even sat down. And the drive home from Heather’s house was such an occasion.

Barton Corbin was fuming. All day long he’d allowed his rage and resentment to build up, stifling it behind a façade of family togetherness and idle chat. All day he’d watched his wife laughing and joking with her sisters, heaping praise on the food, goofing around with the children without betraying a hint of her double life. Oh, she gave a very good impression of being such a perfect wife and mother. What would her family think if they knew how she was opening up their private life to strangers on the net? Or maybe they were already in on it; maybe she’d already whinged to them about how miserable she was in her marriage and how she was planning to leave her nasty old husband. The same husband who bought her a beautiful house in the best neighbourhood and made sure she had enough for nice clothes and fun vacations. Oh yes, Barton was mad all right. He’d worked his behind off for this woman and this was how she repaid him – by forming inappropriate relationships online and spilling the secrets of their private life to strangers. Well, she had another thing coming if she thought he was just going to lie down and accept it. No one ever called Barton Corbin a pushover.

As soon as Jenn got in the car, he started on her. Who was this person she’d been sending so many emails to? She was a slut, Barton yelled. ‘Not in front of the children,’ Jennifer pleaded. ‘We can talk about this at home.’ But Barton had had all day to stew and he wasn’t about to start being reasonable now. They hadn’t driven far before things
got very heated within the cramped confines of that car. Bart Corbin, the man who prided himself on his
self-control
, for once allowed his guard to drop and rage to take over. Who did she think she was, arguing with him? How
dare
she? Impulsively, he reached out and punched his wife in the face. Jenn gasped in disbelief, her hand flying up to touch her stinging cheek. ‘I never touched you,’ snarled the deranged dentist. ‘It’s your word against mine!’

The line had been crossed. From that point on there would be no going back. Never again would the Corbins appear to the outside world as the perfect family. She’d suspected it before, but now Jenn knew beyond all doubt that beneath her husband’s charming, educated veneer lurked a sinister violent streak. He was not going to let her get away without a fight. But what she couldn’t have known and would never have believed was that it would be a fight to the death – her own.

An hour after leaving her sister’s house, Jenn was on the phone to Heather, recounting the sickening details of the scene in the car. Heather couldn’t believe it. ‘Come right back here,’ she begged her sister. Not long after Heather picked up the phone to her distraught sister, her husband Doug’s mobile rang. It was Bart, still seething and determined to put his side of the story across. ‘Whatever she says, it’s a lie!’ he yelled, adding that Dalton was too young to testify. Meanwhile, Jenn was now on the phone to her father, who told her to grab her things, take the kids
and get out of the house. Clearly alarmed by the violent turn the relationship had taken, Max even warned Jenn to take a different route back to Heather’s house to make sure she couldn’t be followed.

Within an hour Jenn and the boys were back on Heather’s doorstep. Needing to be surrounded by people who loved her, she stayed the night. Her boys were clearly traumatised by the scene they’d witnessed in the car and Dalton refused to leave his mother’s side even to sleep. By now there was no disguising the fact that this was a marriage in meltdown. ‘You have to leave him, Jenn,’ urged her worried family. After all, if Barton Corbin was capable of punching his wife in the face in front of their children, how much worse might things get when they were on their own?

Alone in the family home, Barton had plenty of time to brood on the situation. So his wife wanted to leave him, did she? She’d soon discover that he wasn’t someone to be messed with. Jennifer would get a big shock if she thought he was just going to waltz off quietly, leaving her to carry on her pathetic little internet ‘relationships’ while his sons were sleeping upstairs in his home. No, sir! This would not happen.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Barton was round for dinner at his friends and neighbours, giving the Comeaus his version of what had happened. Stuck awkwardly in the middle, Kelly and Steve did what any mutual friends do in this situation – they tried to give support, while remaining
neutral. ‘You’ll be OK, Bart, after all this is over,’ Kelly Comeau reassured him. But Barton was far from OK: he was furious. A man given to obsession, he kept going over and over the injustice of what had happened – and what was still happening. He had provided for his wife, he had given her two children and a great life and now she wanted to end the relationship, to throw him away like yesterday’s newspaper. How ungrateful could you get? Well, he’d show her.

On 29 November 2004 Barton Corbin filed for divorce in Gwinnett County Superior Court. On his list of demands were the Bogan Gates Drive house, the furniture, his attorney fees, child support and custody of the boys. The battle lines were well and truly drawn.

There’s truly no prison more terrifying, no situation more lonely or oppressive than a marital home where a couple is at war. Jennifer Corbin knew she had to go back to Bogan Gates Drive to maintain her legal rights over the house and to re-establish some degree of normality for her boys but doing so was like plunging into a waking nightmare. All that week she went about her daily business – taking the kids back and forth to basketball practice, cooking meals, buying the odd Christmas gift – but the whole time she had a shaky feeling in the pit of her stomach that things were going very, very wrong. Barton had moved out of their bedroom and into another part of the house, but his presence hung in the very air of that home like a dark, smothering cloud, leaking out droplets of bitterness and hatred.

Jennifer started to plan her escape, opening up a separate bank account and buying a secret mobile phone. In some ways it was exciting to think of starting over again with a clean slate and no more arguments but at the same time it was also terrifying. By this stage Jenn was 33, not old by any means but still a long way from the carefree art student she’d been when she first met Barton Corbin. It was daunting to think of being on her own again particularly when she felt so emotionally drained by the current situation.

As was her habit, Jenn confided many of these fears in her personal journal. This was her way of dealing with the internal conflicts and worries that she didn’t want to burden other people with. Somehow just the act of getting them down on paper made her feel as if a weight had been taken off. Seeing her problems written out sometimes enabled her to look at them more clearly and even made them less threatening. Plus of course a journal was the ideal place to write about her most private thoughts and feelings, including those about her deepening online relationship so you can imagine how she felt when she walked into her room early in the morning on 1st December. She had just finished her early morning session on the treadmill downstairs when she found the contents of her handbag strewn over the floor and several items missing, including her new mobile phone and her journal. She knew beyond doubt that it was Barton who’d taken her things and she realised he’d try to use whatever he found in the journal
against her if it came to a custody battle. She felt violated. How could he do something like that? How low would he go? She had to get her things back.

Furious, she rushed off to confront her husband. ‘You give me my stuff back!’ she demanded. Barton refused, and wearing only a towel wrapped round his waist, he fled from the house to the car and drove over Jenn’s foot in his haste to get away. Sobbing, she dialled 911 to file a criminal complaint against her husband. ‘He’s probably gonna take them and use them as evidence against me,’ she told the operator she said as she reported the theft of her things. ‘We’re in the process of going through a divorce.’

When the police arrived she was still distraught and reluctant to go back into the house but the attending officers could see no compelling reason to arrest the well-respected dentist. After all, people do a lot of crazy things in the heat of a marriage break-up. If they went round arresting every divorcing man who had a vicious row with his wife, they’d never have time for anything else. But Jenn was shaken to the core. She had known that Barton wouldn’t give her up without a struggle but now she was beginning to get some idea of the lengths to which he was prepared to go to get what he wanted – or, perhaps more accurately, to make damn sure she didn’t get what she wanted.

It’s scary, isn’t it, how quickly love can turn to hate; how the person you once cared the most for can so rapidly become the person to whom you wish most harm? The sad
truth is that lovers make the worst enemies and Jenn Corbin was gradually realising this. For the sake of the two boys, she maintained the façade of everyday life although she wasn’t able to shield them from the worst of the fighting but inside her heart felt like it was slowly constricting. How on earth were they going to get through Christmas? Every day she spoke to her parents and sister to let them know she was OK and to talk a bit about what was going on. Now they all knew Barton was capable of violence, but Jenn counted on the fact that with a divorce pending he wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardise his chances of getting what he wanted.