Love And Lies

Murder Exposes The Secret Lives Of A Suburban Couple

(CBS) 
After all these years, the Hearns had found an unlikely ally in Scott Peebles: he was looking for a connection between Dolly's and Jennifer's deaths. And when he read through his father’s old case files, one name jumped off the pages: Bart Corbin.

Bart, also a dental student in 1990, had been Dolly's on-again, off-again boyfriend. And at the time of her death, they were off-again, for the very last time.

When Peebles called Det. Head and told him about Bart Corbin’s link to Dolly Hearn, Head says it was an "overwhelming" moment. "We knew we were on the right track by thinking this was not a suicide," he says.

What were the odds of two women committing suicide in one man’s life? And both women had died shortly after ending their relationship with Bart.

Investigators now believed there was only one explanation: Bart had tried to stage his wife’s suicide, after apparently getting away with the same crime 14 years earlier.

That's all it took for investigators on both cases to realize they were after the same man.

But Scott Peebles, working Dolly’s case in Augusta, knew he had his work cut out for him because Bart had been cleared of her murder once before. Back in 1990, investigators let Bart Corbin go, even though he admitted he had been at Dolly’s apartment on the afternoon she died.

So Peebles knew he had to find something more if he ever was going to arrest Bart for Dolly's murder. He decided to take a second look at the death scene photographs.

"I'm not an expert in blood spatter analysis. But I knew that this field was something that had grown quite significantly," he explains. So he asked Dewayne Piper, a blood spatter expert, to take a look.

"There was no blood on her hand, where you would expect to see it," says Piper. "There was no blood on the weapon at all."

It was that lack of blood, in areas it should have been, that convinced Piper that Dolly didn't die from a self-inflicted gunshot.

And a blood smear on Dolly's thigh convinced Piper someone had moved Dolly after she had been shot. "There’s no way she made this stain. There’s no way. So you know, somebody else had to be there," he says.

Piper told Scott Peebles that he believed Dolly's body had been repositioned.

It wasn’t much to go on, but since Bart was at Dolly’s apartment the day she died, Peebles hoped it was enough. "And the grand jury was quite passionate about seeing that Barton Corbin be arrested immediately," Peebles recalls.

Fourteen years after Dolly's death was ruled a suicide, Barton Corbin was charged with her death; two weeks later, he was also charged with the murder of his wife, Jennifer.

Jennifer's trial was scheduled to begin first. But as it inched closer, investigators still hadn’t found what they wanted most - a link between Bart Corbin and the gun that killed Jennifer.