Love And Lies

Murder Exposes The Secret Lives Of A Suburban Couple

(CBS) 
Danny Porter, Gwinnett County’s district attorney, was building his case against Bart. The first thing he hoped to prove was that Jennifer did not commit suicide.

Porter said he would show that Bart tried to stage his wife’s death to look like suicide, just as he had 14 years earlier with Dolly.

"First was the fact that it was a close range gunshot wound to the head and the weapon was there on the bed with the body. The other thing was there was no sign of a struggle or forced entry into the house," Porter says.

But Porter still hadn’t figured out how to link Bart to that gun, which was last traced to Troy, Ala.

Porter did know that Bart had a good friend, Richard Wilson, who lived in Troy and he had evidence that Bart went there just four days before Jennifer died. But when Porter’s investigators met with him, Wilson said he didn’t want to get involved.

"We sort of talked about obstruction of justice and perjury and whether or not he could go to jail. And he didn't react very well to that. We went down one other time. And that's when he got mad and wouldn't talk to us anymore," Porter remembers.

Porter did think he could show jurors Bart had a motive: both Jennifer and Dolly were leaving him and that was something, the prosecutor says, Bart Corbin simply couldn’t accept.

Danny Porter also said he could punch holes in Bart's alibi for the night of Jennifer’s murder.

He doesn’t dispute that Bart left home around 10 that night, to meet friends for drinks. "According to the bar receipt, he probably had six or seven beers in the time period," Porter says.

But Porter doesn't believe that Bart drove to his brother's house at 1:35 a.m. to spend the night. Instead, the prosecutor says, Bart made a deadly detour.

And he had the witness to prove it: friend and neighbor Steve Comeau.

Comeau had just pulled into his own garage when he noticed Bart arriving home, across the street. He guesses it was 1:30 or a quarter to 2:00 a.m. at the time.

"And I noticed the truck pullin' in the driveway," Comeau recalls. "But I didn't pay much attention to it and I went in the house."

According to phone records, that was right around the time Jennifer sent her last e-mail to her online friend. "We know that she was on the phone and using the e-mail system up until 1:40 that morning. So she was awake," Porter says.

Steve Comeau says he heard Bart’s truck again, just before 2 a.m.

Porter says during that 15 or 20 minute period, Bart killed his wife, and then left, even though he knew that one of their two boys would find their mother. Porter says “that says more about Bart Corbin than almost anything else in both of these cases.”

But it was all the more chilling the next morning. Not only did Dalton and Dillon see their mother’s dead body, they also said they knew who shot her. When Dalton ran across the street for help, and Kelly answered the door, the first words out of his mouth were "my dad shot my mom."

During a police interview, Dalton told police he had not seen or heard the shooting. But if they hadn’t witnessed a thing, why would two young boys jump to such a disturbing conclusion about their own father?

"That just goes to show you what went on when the doors were closed for two kids to pick up on something like that," argues Jennifer's sister Heather.