Love And Lies

Murder Exposes The Secret Lives Of A Suburban Couple

(CBS) 
Five days later, 33-year-old Jennifer was dead. As for those papers found near Jennifer's body, Det. Head says, "As it turns out those papers were actually a divorce filling in Gwinnett County Superior Court. And that was under her shoulder."

What Bart didn’t know was the true identity of Jennifer's online lover. Jennifer herself had only learned the truth shortly before she died-and she had never told anyone.

For Head, Jennifer's Internet affair was certainly unusual. But it took on new meaning when he learned this person was one of the last to speak to Jennifer alive.

"We know through phone records and witness accounts that she was on the phone until about 12:30 a.m.," Head says.

The night she died, while her two sons were sleeping, Jennifer and her online friend spent almost four hours talking, first on the phone and then exchanging e-mails.

Records show that they communicated until about 1:40 a.m.; minutes later, a bullet killed Jennifer.

After just one day into his investigation, Head was pretty sure Jennifer didn’t kill herself. "There was obviously some tough times goin' on in the marriage and tough times here at the Corbin home," he says. "And I'm thinkin' there's definitely more to it at this point."

And a few days later, he received a shocking phone call that convinced him to follow his hunch: out of the blue, a woman called him with a tip. The caller thought there might be a connection between Jennifer's death and the suicide of another woman, 14 years earlier, named Dorothy "Dolly" Hearn.

Head immediately phoned the sheriff's department in Augusta, Ga., 150 miles away, to find out more about Dolly's death.

In a remarkable coincidence, Scott Peebles, who answered the phone in Augusta, knew who the lead detective on the 1990 investigation was: his father, Ron, now retired.

"And he remembered it right away. I think that he was very uneasy about this case being a suicide, but at the same time was not able to prove otherwise," Peebles says.

He dusted off the old case files and got to work. He learned that on June 6th, 1990, his father had responded to a 911 call after someone had been shot.

"He saw Dolly on a couch as soon as he walked in the front door. And she was leaned over. And she had a gunshot wound to the right side of her head," Peebles explains.

When the autopsy report came back a few days later, the medical examiner ruled that Dolly, a 27-year-old dental student, had killed herself.

But for Dolly's family, it all had to be a mistake. They had seen Dolly just three days before she died at her brother Gil's graduation. And they remembered? her being happy and excited to see friends and teachers that she had known in the past.

The Hearns hired their own pathologist to give them a second opinion. And he, too, concluded that Dolly had committed suicide. But her family held on to their belief that Dolly did not take her own life. They were certain she was murdered.