Ending a case that riveted Georgians for two years, a suburban Atlanta dentist pleaded guilty Friday to the murders, 14 years apart, of his wife and his dental-school sweetheart.

Barton Corbin, 42, struck a deal with prosecutors four days into jury selection in Lawrenceville, Ga., for what was to be the first of two murder trials. By pleading guilty to two counts of malice murder, Corbin acknowledged shooting Dorothy "Dolly" Hearn in 1990 and his wife, Jennifer, in 2004 and staging the crime scenes as suicides.

In exchange for his guilty pleas, Corbin was sentenced to two life terms to run concurrently. He will be eligible for parole. If convicted at both trials, he could have faced the death penalty.

The plea provided a conclusive answer to the question of whether Corbin was a serial killer of women who try to dump him or a serial dater of women who take their own lives.

Before the plea, he had insisted that he was an innocent victim of a statistical anomaly and was being judged "guilty by coincidence."

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Jennifer Corbin was found dead in the couple's home Dec. 4, 2004, shortly after her husband learned she was having an Internet affair and filed for divorce. The 33-year-old preschool teacher was sprawled across the couple's bed, a single gunshot to her head and a revolver by her side.

The death had the appearance of a suicide, but there was no note and her parents and sisters insisted she was not depressed. Tests of Jennifer Corbin's hands were negative for gunshot residue.

Bart Corbin, who claimed to have been sleeping in his brother's garage at the time of the murder, refused to submit to police questioning. Detectives in Gwinnett County soon learned of Hearn's mysterious death years earlier in Augusta.

The 27-year-old dental student died shortly after she broke off her relationship with Corbin, a classmate at the Medical College of Georgia.  She was found slumped over a gun on a couch in her apartment. Her parents insisted she was psychologically healthy and would not have taken her own life, but pathologists said they could not rule out suicide as the cause of death.

Although the trial about to get under way in Lawrenceville concerned only Jennifer Corbin's shooting, jurors also were to hear evidence of Hearn's death. In a decision hotly contested by the defense, Gwinnett Superior Court Judge Michael Clark ruled last spring that the circumstances of the two shootings were alike enough as to constitute a "similar transaction" and were, therefore, admissible as evidence.

Corbin was likely to encounter a similar situation in Augusta, where he was to stand trial after the conclusion of the Gwinnett County case.

In court, prosecutors in both jurisdictions hinted at strong evidence tying Corbin to both crimes. New forensic tests found blood spatter at the scenes inconsistent with suicide. Neighbors of the women also placed Corbin at their homes about the time of the shooting.

Hearn told friends she suspected Corbin had vandalized her car, stolen her cat and burglarized her apartment. Jennifer Corbin told relatives her husband punched her in front of their two boys after he found racy e-mails she had exchanged with a woman in Missouri.

"You don't break up with Barton Corbin. If you do break up with Barton Corbin, you pay with your life," Augusta district attorney Danny Craig said last fall.