Molly Martens feared Jason Corbett killed first wife, counsel tells US court, amid plea deal

Molly Martens believed that her husband Jason Corbett had killed his first wife and was fearful that the same fate would befall her, a court in North Carolina has been told.

The claim was made by Douglas Kingsberry, defence counsel for Ms Martens, at the beginning of a hearing to determine the sentences that she and her father, Thomas Martens, will receive in relation to the killing of Mr Corbett in 2015.

On Monday the court was told that Molly Martens and Thomas Martens had agreed a plea deal with prosecutors to accept a lesser manslaughter charge over the killing of Mr Corbett.

Molly Martens entered a no-contest plea on a charge of voluntary manslaughter in relation to the death of her husband.

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Thomas Martens pleaded guilty to a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

Prosecutors said that as part of the plea agreement the state of North Carolina would dismiss the charge of second-degree murder which Molly Martens and her father had faced in relation to the killing of Mr Corbett in 2015.

The plea agreement means there will not be a retrial in the case which was ordered by the supreme court in North Carolina after it upheld an appeals court ruling that quashed earlier convictions.

The sentencing hearing could run for several days.

Mr Kingsberry said in his opening statement there would be evidence that his client had confided to multiple witnesses about her growing concerns about the death of her husband’s first wife, Margaret, in 2006.

[ Sharon Martens’s story finally heard as family waits to learn its fate ]

He said there would be evidence that Mr Corbett’s first wife had not died from an asthma attack.

He suggested there was a possibility that there had been a homicide from strangulation.

Mr Corbett’s family have maintained in the years since his death that Ms Martens and her father had not only killed him but also sought to blacken his name.

Prosecutors are expected in the sentencing hearing to argue that there was an aggravating factor in that Mr Corbett’s children were present in the house on the night he was killed.

Defence lawyers are likely to maintain there were mitigating factors that should be taken into account.

The judge said a defendant with the worst record could face up to 204 months or 17 years in prison.

He suggested sentences in this case could range, depending on whether he found ultimately there were aggravating factors or extreme mitigation, from imprisonment to probation.

Molly Corbett and Thomas Corbett have maintained they acted in self defence in hitting Mr Corbett and that they feared for their lives.

Assistant district attorney in Davidson County in North Carolina Kaitlyn Jones told the court on Monday that Mr Corbett (39) had died in the master bedroom of his home in Panther Creek, North Carolina, on August 2nd, 2015.

She said the postmortem had found he had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

She said Thomas Martens had told police he had hit Mr Corbett with a baseball bat.

Molly Martens said she had hit her husband with a landscaping paving brick that had been in her bedroom.

Thomas Martens had said he had awoken during the night to hear a commotion in the master bedroom. He said he had entered the room and saw Mr Corbett with his hands around his daughter’s neck.

Jay Vannoy, counsel for Thomas Martens, told the court in his opening statement that there would be “an extraordinary amount of mitigating factors”.

He said his client did not deny he had hit Mr Corbett. He said the question was why this had happened.

He said Mr Martens had lived “an exemplary life”. He had qualified as a lawyer and then joined the FBI, where he had served for 30 years. He said he had climbed the ladder and had received top-secret clearances.

“I can’t really explain what it is like seeing your daughter being strangled,” he said.