THE TIM CORBETT FILE

WHO HE IS

By February 2007, Tim Corbett was commander of the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit — the multi-agency unit that worked the county’s killings — and a national trade publication was quoting him in that chair. He held the command for more than a decade. In January 2025, asking a school board to hire him, he told the trustees he was in his 50th year of working as a police officer. The public paper trail located for this file begins in 2007; the first three decades of the fifty are documented nowhere a record of them can be found — no first department, no academy, no start date.

His command ended sometime around 2019–2020. No public record located explains it: no retirement announcement, no reassignment, no separation story. The unit he commanded was disbanded on January 1, 2022. In April 2022 he surfaced in the Mishawaka Police Department’s volunteer cold-case unit — billed in some coverage as a “former Mishawaka detective,” a description that sits uneasily beside the South Bend record everywhere else, and that no record located resolves.

Then, on January 30, 2025, the South Bend Community School Corporation’s board hired him as an outside investigator. His own assessment of his qualifications, delivered to the board that night, is in the record:

Between the command and the contract sit the two things this file is mostly about: fourteen years of litigation over a set of police recordings, and a set of accusations from inside the county jail. Both are in the paper. Here is the paper.

1 · THE TAPES

For years, the South Bend Police detective-bureau telephone line ending in 6031 was recorded. The names tied to that line in the court record are Capt. Brian Young, who supervised it; Commander Tim Corbett; Dave Wells; Steve Richmond; division chiefs Scott and Sheldon; records supervisor Karen DePaepe, who copied the recordings; and civilian employee Sandy Young. What was on them became the most expensive question in South Bend government: allegations, never publicly adjudicated on the recordings themselves, of racist remarks and talk of illegal activity. The recordings surfaced in 2012, in the fight that cost Chief Darryl Boykins his chief’s rank; Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s office maintained its staff learned of the recordings in February 2012.

One more entry belongs in this section, because its absence is the fact. Across fourteen years of tapes litigation — the depositions, the trials, the appeals — no deposition or trial testimony by Tim Corbett appears in any record reviewed for this file. The man at the center of the case never had to answer questions under oath in it, so far as any public record shows. The deposition index that would settle even that is demanded (Section 8).

What the fight cost: reporting puts the City’s total legal spend on the tapes above $3 million. That figure rests on a single published account; the City’s own invoices, which settle it to the dollar, are demanded (Section 8).

2 · THE DISCIPLINE

The only formal discipline of Tim Corbett’s career that any public record located contains is a five-day unpaid suspension in May 2012. It grew out of the tapes investigation itself: a contentious recorded call between Corbett and South Bend Officer Jack Stilp about the federal investigation. The Metro Homicide Board reviewed the call and ruled Corbett’s comments were not a threat. Prosecutor Michael Dvorak imposed the suspension anyway.

The coda cuts the other way, and this file prints it: in September 2012, interim Chief Chuck Hurley recommended a ten-day suspension for Stilp — for leaking the internal investigation report before the prosecutor released it (contemporaneous reporting).

Beyond the 2012 suspension, no complaint, sustained finding, or further discipline against Corbett has been located in any public record. His complete internal-affairs file is demanded (Section 8); until it is produced, this file states only what the public record shows — one suspension, in the spring of the tapes.

3 · THE LAWSUITS

His lawsuit: Corbett v. Sims

On March 10, 2021, Corbett sued Mario Sims, the former mayoral candidate and pastor, claiming Sims had torpedoed his applications for two South Bend school-district jobs — security director at Riley High School, and director of safety and security — and had defamed him in letters (the “White Supremacy Klan Meeting” letters) circulated about him. He asked for damages and a permanent injunction. His pleading says he applied for the jobs and was rejected; nothing outside his own pleading corroborates the rejections.

The case ran five years. It ended on May 19, 2026, when Judge David Francisco granted Corbett’s own motion to dismiss his complaint, with prejudice, and denied Sims’s motion for sanctions the same day. It is printed in this file exactly that way: the case did not end in a verdict for either man, and no court ever reached the claims. It ended because the man who filed it moved to end it. Sims, for his part, had alleged in his own pro se filings that a clerk’s-office employee helped Corbett with the complaint — an allegation, never a finding, and printed here as one.

The suit against him that failed: Sims v. Buttigieg

Sims also sued Corbett — with Mayor Buttigieg, the mayor’s chief of staff, the county and the city — alleging a conspiracy reaching back to Sims’s 1994 convictions: planted evidence, racial slurs, perjury. Those are allegations from a pleading, and this file prints them as nothing more. The courts disposed of the case on claim-preclusion grounds: dismissed with prejudice on February 18, 2022, affirmed on appeal, certiorari denied. No court made any liability finding against Corbett, then or ever.

The Davis suit

On August 9, 2012, South Bend Councilman Henry Davis Jr. wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice accusing four officers — Young, Wells, Richmond and Corbett — of racially based misconduct. On May 14, 2014, the four sued Davis for defamation and wiretap violations, claiming he had listened to the tapes or received their contents. A trial judge threw the case out under the Indiana Tort Claims Act; on August 4, 2015, the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed and sent it back, holding the officers’ claims could proceed (71A04-1501-CT-26).

And there the public record stops. What happened after the remand — settlement, trial, judgment — appears in no public source located. A broadcast report describes a 2019 summary judgment for Davis; this file could not verify it against any docket or order, and prints it as unverified. The clerk’s complete file, which settles it, is demanded (Section 8).

4 · THE INFORMANT ALLEGATIONS

Terrance Peterson is a jailhouse informant. In WNDU’s April 24, 2026 investigation “Trial by Snitch,” Peterson claimed that investigator Tim Corbett and then-prosecutor Christopher Fronk — now a judge — fed him information about cases so that he could testify to it. Peterson has admitted lying under oath in two murder trials, those of Shyheem Jones and Tyre Bradbury. After Peterson’s recorded confession, both convictions were vacated and both men went free. (One caution this file owes the reader: the 2015 appellate opinion in the Jones case spells a key name “Terrence Patterson.” Whether that is the same man as WNDU’s Terrance Peterson is unconfirmed.)

The allegation reached a courtroom on February 2, 2026, in the post-conviction case of Jermaine Munn — serving 130 years for a 2013 murder, challenging his conviction on claims of coerced jailhouse witnesses. Munn’s public defender, Mark Koselke, told the court:

That is an advocate’s charge in an open case. Against it, the answer of record, from the special prosecutor handling the State’s side of the Munn case:

The prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the closed Jones and Bradbury cases and has never admitted misconduct in any of them. No judge has found that Corbett coached, fed, or altered anything. And the court record carries a limit in the other direction too: no record located shows Corbett as the case agent or a testifying witness in the Jones, Bradbury or Munn trials, and the appellate opinions in those cases never name him. What is documented is institutional: the murders at the center of those cases, in 2013 and 2014, were investigated by the unit he commanded. Proximity is documented. Participation is not. The Munn case remains open; no ruling in it had been located as of November 4, 2026. Any written credibility determination about Corbett in the prosecutor’s files is demanded (Section 8).

5 · THE SCHOOL-BOARD CONTRACT

On January 30, 2025, in a special meeting at the Brown Administration Building, the South Bend Community School Corporation’s board voted 5–2 to hire Tim Corbett and Joe Speybroeck as outside investigators, charged with examining allegations of illegal or unethical conduct by administrators and board members over the previous five years. Trustees Greene and Lee voted no. The same night, on a 4–3 vote, the board hired attorney Pete Agostino as board counsel — the man to whom the investigators’ contract says they report (his own file is File No. 4 in this series).

Corbett did not come empty-handed. He brought a binder of more than 300 pages of statements from people inside the district — and told the board the binder had been paid for by an anonymous member of the district, and that he would give it to the board free if hired. The funder’s name has never appeared on any public record. It is demanded (Section 8). Trustee Mark Costello, who had proposed hiring an investigator, had estimated the cost at $100,000 or more; on the night of the vote he allowed the figure “may be higher than reality, but it won’t be cheap.”

One member of the public spoke against the hiring, on the record, and his name will be familiar from Section 3: Mario Sims. “If I were you, I’d be very, very cautious about entertaining an investigator who may be subject to some serious ramifications for things that are on the tape,” Sims told the board. Corbett answered the tapes point in the same meeting — the statement printed in Section 1.

The contract itself, executed February 2, 2025, runs to Corbett Investigative Services, LLC, and its terms are these: $90 per hour; no cap on hours or total; no end date — it runs until either side ends it on 15 days’ notice. He is an independent contractor. He reports his findings to the board attorney. And under Section 5 of the contract, everything he produces is the school corporation’s property — which is why, twenty-one months in, no written report of his has ever been confirmed public. No evidence that the contract was competitively bid has been located. One of its central assignments was to hunt the district’s own bidding violations: the investigators’ Brown Building probe fed the May 2026 State Board of Accounts audit that faulted the district for exactly that.

The work, as the board attorney described it in November 2025, runs in seven categories: grade changes, busing, access to PowerSchool, Brown remodeling funding, ECF funds, financial issues, and personnel misconduct. On April 28, 2025, the team gave its first public update, presenting figures it attributed to its grade-changing inquiry: at least 2,500 grades it said were manipulated across the district’s high schools over three years; 295 credits awarded to students who scored below 58 percent; 1,812 credits awarded after less than two hours in a semester-long course. Those are the investigators’ presented figures, and this file prints them as theirs: Agostino cautioned the same day that no final conclusions had been drawn and the teachers involved had yet to be interviewed. The grade-changing probe later ended, around February 2026; no public findings from it have been located. The engagement itself, on the contract’s own terms, has no end date at all.

6 · THE LICENSE QUESTION

The school contract affirms, in its own text, that Corbett is “a duly licensed and authorized investigator” in Indiana. Here is what the State of Indiana’s own records show, stated precisely, because precision is the whole of this section.

Indiana does not license individual private investigators. Under Indiana Code 25-30-1, the Professional Licensing Agency licenses private-investigator firms. So there is no individual license in Tim Corbett’s name — there is no such license for anyone. The one license in his firm’s name is PI21900007: Corbett Investigative Services LLC, classified “Private Investigator Firm Secondary,” status Active, issued March 21, 2019, expiring October 1, 2027. The owner and licensee of record on that license is not Corbett. It is Danielle Renee Lacopo (PLA database, consulted October 16, 2026; the complete license file is demanded, Section 8).

The business paper under it: Corbett Investigative Services, LLC was formed on September 26, 2018, with Timothy J. Corbett as registered agent and Corbett and Lacopo as its members (Indiana Secretary of State). An earlier corporation of the same name, formed in 1992, was administratively dissolved in 2000.

7 · THE MONEY

Read the table the way this file reads everything: the two SBCSC figures are both real, both attributed, and both stop in the spring of 2025. Everything since — in an engagement with no cap and no end date, still running on its own terms — is not on any public record located. That is not an accusation. It is a hole in the paper, shaped exactly like the invoices that would fill it, and those invoices are demanded.

8 · RECORDS DEMANDED — WHAT IS NOT PRODUCED

A file like this one is only ever as strong as its missing paper. These are the records that would settle what this page cannot — in both directions. When the productions land, they will be added to this file at this address, whichever way they cut.

THE QUESTIONS THE RECORD LEAVES OPEN

Put the whole file together and it comes down to a short list of documents. Who paid for the 300 pages that got him hired? Why did a decade-long homicide command end without one public word of explanation? What is on the cassettes, and is he on them — the officers’ complaint and the one person who listened to them all point in opposite directions, and the transcript that settles it sits in a court file nobody has produced. How much public money has the school engagement paid in total, in an arrangement with no cap, no end date, and a licensing affirmation the state’s own database answers with somebody else’s name? And how did his lawsuit against Henry Davis actually end?

On the informant allegations, no on-record response from Corbett himself appears in any record reviewed for this file; the denials of record are the prosecutor’s office’s, and they are printed in Section 4 beside the charges. His only two public statements on the tapes in all that paper are the ones in Section 1: in 2015, the claims about the tapes were “fallacies”; in 2025, he was not on them. Both are printed. Neither ends the questions, because the documents that end them have never been produced.

This file is a living file. When the records land — the settlement agreement, the license file, the invoices, the transcripts — they will be added here, at this address, whichever way they cut.