What US police think really happened in the run-up to Jason Corbett’s killing

Jason Corbett had less than five hours to live. He and his wife, Molly, were standing in the livingroom of a Meadowlands neighbour, Melissa Sams, around 10.30pm on August 1st, 2015.

Sams (40) was a strikingly glamorous lawyer with 14 years’ experience in child custody law. Sams knew the secrets of the Corbett marriage. She and Molly were acquainted through a book club in Meadowlands, the suburban North Carolina golf community that is home to lawyers, accountants and other professionals.

But the two women were not close before Molly claimed in confidence to Sams one night in January 2015 that Jason was “physically and verbally abusive”.

This was eight months before Molly and her father, Thomas Martens, a former FBI agent, beat the Limerick man to death in his US home, a crime for which the father and daughter were sentenced to between seven and 30 additional months in jail on Wednesday for his manslaughter.

What US police think really happened in the run-up to Jason Corbett’s killing

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Truth about why Jason Corbett died is obscured in a maelstrom of high emotion

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Thomas Martens will be out of prison by the summer, predicts lawyer

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This narrative is sourced from statements to and testimony in the US court hearings and interviews with people connected with the case, including law enforcement officials.

Sams told the Davidson County Superior Court that Molly wanted to leave Jason but she had no rights to what she saw as her children, Jack and Sarah, Jason’s children by his first wife Mags Fitzpatrick, because the Limerick man refused to allow Molly to adopt them.

Sams advised her – as a friend, it seems, rather than as a paid counsel – that there was one way: she could apply for an emergency custody order. To do so she would need to show that Jason was a domestic abuser, or a drunk, and the children were in danger. She advised Molly to start documenting the abuse.

Molly said Jason checked her phone all the time, so she and Sams devised a system of code words. Not long after their meeting that January, Molly began sending Sams surreptitious recordings described in coded text messages as “audio books”. Sams would reply how she “loved Molly’s audio suggestions” and she would add them to her audio-book collection.

By the night of Corbett’s killing in August 2015, Molly and Sams must have had quite a collection – there were recording devices in multiple locations throughout Jason and Molly’s home. Detectives believe Sams inadvertently planted the seed in Molly’s mind in January 2015. Molly now had a plan and she pursued it with a purpose. She put recording devices in the kitchen, livingroom and master bedroom.

[ Molly Martens felt ‘deranged entitlement’ to Jason Corbett’s children, guardianship judge found ]

The District Attorney’s Office estimated there could be as much as 150 hours of recordings, but they were only ever provided with three, despite requests made under discovery. Assistant district attorney Alan Martin said the remainder of the tapes appeared to have been destroyed.

By February 17th, 2015, Molly must have thought she had struck gold, given the weight her lawyers later gave to an event that happened that day as part of her defence. Jason left for work every day at 6.30am and would return after 12 hours. On February 17th, he had told Molly he was really looking forward to having a family meal with Jack and Sarah. Instead, Molly took advantage of unexpected snowfall and went sledding with Jack, Sarah and other children in the neighbourhood.

When Jason got home she said she had already had dinner with the children and she didn’t have time to make him anything. Jason is heard shouting on the tape, his anger and frustration audible. When the argument continues, he slams the table, and Sarah and Jack both try to intervene. The “Pancake Tape” – so called because it was recorded on Pancake Tuesday – was one of the “audio books” sent to Melissa Sams.

On August 1st, 2015 - the evening before the killing - Molly and Jason had arrived at Melissa’s house to pick up Jack. He had been celebrating the 10th birthday of Melissa’s son Jay, his friend. Molly drove Jason’s Honda Pilot home, while Jack later said he told his dad about the Adam Sandler movie, Pixels, they had seen in the Palladium in High Point. They had pizza in Mario’s and ice cream from the Cold Stone Creamery. After the movie, they all played Justice League on Jay’s Xbox before going outside for a game of Slenderman. “It’s like a mixture of Hide and Seek and Bulldog. One guy’s on. If Slender catches you, that’s game over.”

“Wow, hide and seek was a bit different in my day, Jack,” Jason said. “Sounds like a really cool day, buddy.”

Jack was surprised to find Molly’s parents, Thomas and Sharon Martens, in the livingroom that evening when he got home. Jason was just as taken aback when they showed up out of the blue at 8.30pm on the night of his death on August 2nd, 2015, according to a statement later given by a neighbour. Jason had been drinking beers in the Saturday afternoon sunshine with his neighbour, David Fritzsche. Molly had collected Sarah from horse-riding and they both joined Jason at the Fritzches.

Molly was heard asking Jason: “How would you feel if my parents just arrived?” Ten minutes later, they did.

Thomas and Sharon had suddenly dropped everything, changed dinner plans, and made an impromptu five-hour drive with their two dogs from Tennessee to North Carolina. Phone records show there were 15 calls or messages between Molly Martens and her mother throughout that journey. Thomas had one of his son Stewart’s old baseball bats in the boot of his car. He said he brought a tennis racket for Sarah but the police never could locate that. The baseball bat is in an evidence bag.

Jack chatted with Molly’s parents about the usual stuff: school starting back soon, how Jack was getting on with swimming. He had won five “MVP” (Most Valuable Player) awards for swimming, but now Molly was demanding more. Molly wanted him to eat 25 baby carrots a day and chew his food 13 times before swallowing. That was the type of sacrifice Molly had made to represent the college swim team at the prestigious Clemson University.

Nobody could doubt this because Molly put it on marketing flyers, which were dropped into every house in Meadowlands, where she was a part-time swim coach at the community pool.

It had been a year since Molly’s last miscarriage, and she was desperate to have a child of her own. Jason had paid $25,000 for fertility treatments. At Molly’s request, he had a sample of his sperm frozen and retained in a sperm bank in Kernersville.

Jason had risen through the ranks to become an executive at a packaging firm called MPS, having joined the company as a general operative at 19. Yet even on his healthy salary, he was struggling to contain Molly’s spending. He paid all the credit card bills, but she never listened when he complained about household bills not being paid on time or lights being left on. Often Jason would come home and find the front and back door of the house open, lights on, fans going and no sign of his children.

Molly made mojito cocktails using mint that Sharon had brought from Knoxville. Thomas had a sip but he thought it tasted awful, he later told police. Jason drank one. Molly gave Jack two pills to take and he said goodnight and went to bed. Jason walked off to the master bedroom. Jack returned downstairs 10 minutes later to say goodnight to his father. Molly was in the basement talking fast and loud with Thomas and Sharon.

Jason was watching Japanese golf on television. The small television was sitting on a faux-antique, two-door radio cabinet that Molly’s parents had gifted Molly and Jason. Sharon insisted on calling it an armoire. She said it was the perfect complement to the other darkwood furniture she had chosen for their bedroom.

The rocking chair on Jason’s side of the bed was a gift from Selin Warnell, a close friend of Thomas’s and a former spy chief with the CIA in Korea. Molly would rock in the chair and dream of babies. She was obsessed with being a mother, and taking Jack and Sarah from Jason.

In the months leading up to the killing, Molly suggested - according to evidence given by several witnesses - two books at the Meadowlands book club, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, about the slow infiltration of a family by a woman posing as a nanny, and Gone Girl, a story involving fake pregnancies, life insurance scams and a wife who enlists the support of neighbours with fake stories about her husband’s abuse.

Molly and her mother spoke every day. Sharon was still sending her only daughter “half-birthday” cards every six months when Molly was 31, with enquiries about whether Molly was eating properly. Molly would often throw up after meals and she taught Sarah to do the same. Sharon knew Molly was spiralling. She had seen it so many times over the years, ever since Molly was diagnosed as bipolar at the age of 14.

Sharon may have picked out the bedroom furniture but like everything else in 160 Panther Creek Court, Jason had paid for it. When Molly convinced Jason to leave his family, friends and job in Ireland and marry her at the appropriately named Bleak House in Tennessee, Jason sent Thomas Martens $40,000 to pay for the lavish wedding that Sharon and Molly demanded. Before Jason walked up the aisle, his best friend since childhood, Paul Dillon, had begged him not to go through with it saying: “It’s not too late.”

Within two weeks of the wedding, Molly had already consulted a divorce lawyer. A forensic psychologist, Dr David Adams, believed Molly’s plan all along – from soon after she arrived in Ireland to work as an au pair – was to marry Jason, adopt his children, divorce him and take his kids.

Jack said goodnight to his father and never saw him again. Molly came up from the basement and into the master bedroom. Detectives think she found out he was leaving her and she brought her father to be a witness to whatever she had planned that night. They believe Sarah did wake up with a nightmare and that precipitated an argument where Molly grabbed the brick and smashed Jason across the head, but he didn’t die; he made it out of bed and stumbled towards the bathroom with her chasing him with the brick. He tried to make it to the master bedroom door.

A bloodied handprint is visible on the door, sliding downwards.

The next day, Sams met Molly who told her: “It was him or me.”

Then, she asked for a lawyer who could make the emergency custody order.