Love And Lies

Murder Exposes The Secret Lives Of A Suburban Couple

(CBS) 
Jennifer had never met Anita, not even seen a photograph, but 48 Hours tracked her down at her home in Missouri, where she spoke publicly about Jennifer for the first time.

Anita acknowledged she used the name Chris and presented herself as a man online. Asked why she did that, Anita told Van Sant, "Because at first we were just pretending. We were playing."

Anita kept her secret for the first two months of their online love affair. When things started getting intense, she decided to tell Jennifer the truth.

"I told her, 'My name isn't Chris. My name is Anita,'" she recalls.

Jennifer's response? "She logged off," Anita recalls.

The next day, Jennifer sent Anita some angry e-mails. And later that day, after the two spoke by phone for the very first time, Jennifer wrote back that she was still in love with this person, male or female. "I love you no matter who you are," she wrote.

Corbin’s defense attorneys claim that Jennifer knew that her online love affair, and the graphic content of some of her e-mails to Anita, could cost her everything.

"She stood to lose her marriage," Bruce Harvey argues. "Her home, her children."

"We'll be able to clearly show that this whole scenario was a recipe for suicide," Harvey argues.

But Anita says that while Jennifer was maybe stressed, she was not depressed or suicidal. Anita claims that Jennifer was planning a future with her, having asked her to think about moving to Atlanta.

But Jennifer’s family says that Anita lied. They say she lied about who she was and she manipulated Jennifer at a time when she was lonely and vulnerable.

Heather says she knows Jennifer better than anyone and doubts her sister was planning a new life with Anita. "I don’t think that’s the path, in my heart, that Jen would’ve taken. But it would have been o.k. if it had," she says.

Asked to talk about the night Jennifer died, Anita says, "We talked about a lot of things. She talked about getting an attorney to get Bart out of the house."

"She told me she wanted me to know something. Just in case we never met. And I said, 'What do you mean if we never meet?' She says, 'If your plane crashes on the way out here, or if my husband kills me,'" Anita tells Van Sant.

Anita never heard from Jennifer again. And after two days of worrying, Anita asked her sister to contact the family, posing as Jennifer’s friend. That’s when Anita learned what happened.

Anita says the moment she learned Jennifer was dead was "heart-stopping."
Anita says her future had been destroyed.

Although Bart didn’t know there was a new woman in Jennifer’s life, prosecutor Danny Porter believes the online affair enraged him and led him to murder.

With the trial set to begin, Bart's attorney, Bruce Harvey, was confident he could show jurors both Dolly and Jennifer had motives for suicide. The stakes were high, because if convicted for the murders of both women, Bart Corbin could face the death penalty.

In Sept. 2006, with jury selection underway, Porter was hoping to convict Bart, even though he couldn’t tie him to the murder weapon. Porter was prepared to try Bart, despite missing a key witness: Richard Wilson, the man the prosecutor is sure gave Jennifer's husband the gun that killed her. Wilson still wasn't talking.

"This is a case that a jury's gonna have to put together out of small pieces and reach conclusions from 'em," Porter says.

But all that would change on day two of jury selection, when an investigator came into the courtroom and handed Porter a note. Porter says the note read, "'Come out of the courtroom now.' And now was underlined five or six times."

"And he said 'Richard Wilson just copped to the gun," Porter remembers.