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

girlfriend, the first and perhaps only woman with whom he had ever been both physically and emotionally intimate. And he had swallowed any anger or overt signs of grief. Shelly began to believe that they had both dodged a bullet; it had been a great couple of years and they had successfully broken up without any lasting negative feelings.
     
    S EVERAL MONTHS AFTER they ended their romance, Bart learned that he had been accepted at dental school. Shelly was sunbathing by the pool of the apartment complex where she lived—and where one of Bart’s friends also resided—when she heard footsteps crunching on the gravel path. It was Bart Corbin.
    “He would have known where to find me,” she said.
    “He was all excited that his hard work had paid off. And I am quite certain that, other than his twin, Brad, I was the first person he told—even before his parents.”
    Shelly sensed that Bart wanted to impress her, and that seemed perfectly reasonable, but she was surprised that he had told her about his success almost before he had told anyone else. She had moved on from their relationship, and she assumed that he had as well. She was glad to see him, as a friend, and they set up a date; he would come to her apartment that evening—“just to hang out.”
    They spent several pleasant hours together, and Bart never brought up the subject of their reuniting as a couple. But she knew he still had feelings for her. If she had suggested that they get back together, she was sure he would have wanted to.
    “But I put the kibosh on that by rattling on about some guy I liked at the time,” she recalled. Later, she was ashamed of her own behavior, sorry that she had been mean to him. Once again, fearful of being tied down, she had hurt Bart and seen tears in his eyes.
    He turned and left abruptly and she never saw him again. She had no idea what awesome forces may have been set in motion.
    Shelly had hoped to work for a small-town newspaper for perhaps a year, and then move on to a big-city paper. When she graduated in 1987, she did work for a paper in Griffin, Georgia, for six months.
    After that, Shelly worked as a journalist all over America, and then in another country. Her decision not to marry Bart allowed her to be true to what she believed in. She worked long hours and received positive feedback from both the public and her colleagues, but she was haunted by the fact that she wasn’t contributing to less fortunate people as she had once planned to do. She joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Thailand, where she found “meaning in my life again.”
    She seldom thought of Bart Corbin. If she did, it was to remember the sensitive man she once cared for, and to feel guilty that she had hurt him enough to make him cry. She was sorry about that. Even so, she knew she had made the right choice.
    Bart graduated from the University of Georgia in 1987. When he entered the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, he was beginning a new phase in his life. Shelly assumed that Bart was on the path to find what mattered to him. If he was angry with her, she didn’t know it. At least not for a very long time.

C HAPTER N INE
    1987
    W HILE S HELLY TRAVELED far away from Georgia on her adventurous life, Bart began dental school in Augusta. When Bart entered the Medical College of Georgia, he was a long way from both Snellville and Athens—not in miles but in the way his personality had changed. He was a bitter young man who had grown an invisible, impenetrable shell. His sense of humor was still on target, but now there was a meanness about it.
    Those who started the first year of dentistry school at MCG would stay together until they graduated. Not surprisingly, the students in Bart’s class grew to know each other very well as they studied in a much more intense program than they had followed in undergraduate school. Just as his fellow students at UGA liked Bart, he was fairly popular at MCG.
    But that was mostly with guys; women on his