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

new campus were slower to warm up to him.
    Bart struck some of women as a rather odd duck. One woman—Lee Reardon*—recalled knowing Bart during the years he spent at dental school, an acquaintance that came about because her brother, Corey*, had initially befriended him.
    “He seemed to be a lot of fun,” she said. “Bart was very outgoing and always ready for the next party. He was a little rough around the edges, his hair was a little too long, he wore an earring, and his clothes weren’t preppy—which was the style at the time.”
    Bart didn’t look like the students who belonged to a fraternity; he resembled a rock star or perhaps a gypsy. Initially, women on campus at MCG weren’t drawn to him. Bart looked very different from the time when he first met Shelly. He was still tall, of course, but he was very thin now. He parted his hair in the middle and wore it in a kind of shag that touched his collar. But without Shelly to help him pick out clothes, he certainly wasn’t very stylish. Sometimes he affected all black clothing.
    He showed some interest in Lee Reardon, but he wasn’t her type at all. She considered herself fortunate when he stopped asking her out. Although Bart struck her as “happy-go-lucky,” her brother—who was also a dental student—warned her not to get involved. Corey Reardon had perceived two sides to Bart’s personality, one with “an edge.”
    And there was a certain unpredictability in Bart, a sudden flare of anger at times. No one who knew Bart as an undergraduate back in Athens had ever mentioned his temper. Now he was known for having a very short fuse. Unexpected things could set him off. He would sometimes erupt instantly into a raging tantrum.
    Bart had worked to his capacity in undergraduate school and succeeded by studying harder than most of his peers, but the demands of dental school challenged him more, and he was often impatient and testy. One dental student described him as having “an explosive temper,” and recalled a time when Bart was so frustrated that he threw one of his own projects against a wall, shattering it. But then they were all under a lot of stress, and most people didn’t find Bart’s outbursts that disturbing.
    Some of his closest friends delighted in teasing him by doing impressions of “the angry Bart.”
    He didn’t seem to mind.
    In his first year at dental school in 1987, Bart dated a girl named Eden* briefly, but it wasn’t a serious relationship. One of Eden’s friends recalled that he was generally considered odd. For one thing, he didn’t believe in wearing deodorant, saying that to do so was unhealthy. Since Augusta was often hot and humid, people noticed his body odor.
    “The one thing I remember about Bart,” she said,
    “was that he considered himself superior to others. He seemed devoid of empathy or any capability of significant emotional attachment.”
    This woman, who later became a dental hygienist, commented on Bart’s fixation with making a lot of money. She met him a few years later—after he had become a dentist—but before he married Jenn Barber. They happened to run into each other at a restaurant, and had dinner together, talking about dentistry as they ate. She spent just one day working for him, and found that he was still a cold and distant person, particularly with his patients. He was far more concerned with the financial aspect of his practice than he was with the clients in his chair.
    “He was very egotistical,” she said. “To this day, I’m incredulous that he thought I was interested in him romantically. I was definitely not.”
    Oblivious, Bart told her not to expect to date him. “He said he was looking for a different ‘caliber’ of woman. In particular, he hoped to marry another dentist.”
    Bart Corbin’s imperious attitude was a turnoff for a number of women he met in dental school. Where he had been somewhat naïve and socially awkward at UGA, he had learned to hide his emotions