UBC: Rule, Too Late To Say Goodbye

[truepenny]

Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm drawn to true crime in part because I love puzzles and mysteries--which means I'm especially drawn to cold cases. So the part of this book that dealt with the investigation and re-investigation of Dorothy Carlisle "Dolly" Hearn's death in 1990 was fascinating. The murder of Jennifer Barber Corbin in 2004 was just sad, as the murder of a woman trying to get out of a pitcher-plant marriage is always sad, every goddamn time it happens.

What's worst about both Dolly and Jenn's murders (aside from the simple destruction of good people) is that their murderer, Barton Corbin, is about as empty a shell of a human being as is possible to imagine. There's nothing there. Other obsessive stalker-murderers that Rule has written about--Thomas Capano in And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer or Brad Cunningham in Dead By Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer?--are monsters, but they're also men with, well, rich inner lives (in Cunningham's case, his inner life and delusions of grandeur were far richer than his outer life). Corbin is just nothing. He became a dentist to make money off his patients. His brothers and his friends--it becomes clear--know him only in the most superficial, stereotypical, guy-on-guy way, where you drink beer and watch sports together and are therefore friends. He spent and over-spent on status symbols. He cheated on his wife (and, of course, as this kind of guy always does, went ballistic at the thought that she might be interested in a man that wasn't him). He was so verbally abusive to his elder son that the child, at the age of six, would beg his mother not to make him go anywhere with his father, and after Jenn's murder, the two little boys never asked for their daddy--which is just as well because he certainly never made the least attempt to see them. The only things that seem to inhabit Barton Corbin are rage and greed. He's one of T.S. Eliot's hollow men and it is simply vile that he murdered two women for simple dog-in-the-manger jealousy. He couldn't stand the fact that they might have lives--that they might even go on living--after they left him. And if he hadn't murdered Jenn, he would almost certainly have gotten away with murdering Dolly.

Corbin most recently lost an appeal in 2014.



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