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In dramatic testimony before the Davidson County Superior Court, five witnesses have come forward, various friends or neighbours of Molly Martens in the Meadowlands community where she and Jason Corbett lived with Jason’s children, Jack and Sarah.
The court heard of a 1am phone call where one neighbour’s phone rang and all she could hear was heavy breathing and in the background the sound of Jason and Molly shouting and screaming.
Other neighbours spoke of Jason being controlling and coercive, never allowing Molly to be alone with other men, telling her to change her clothes if he thought they were too revealing, or constantly harassing her with texts and phone calls demanding to know where she was at all times.
Molly and Jason’s $350,000 (€326,000) home at 160 Panther Creek Court was part of the Meadowlands golf community, home to lawyers, accountants and executives whose children shared the yellow schoolbus to Walburg Elementary in Winston-Salem, and then played Little League baseball on the weekends. In summer, many children went to camps organised by the local church. Families got together for barbecues and Super Bowl or “cornhole” parties. Many residents owned golf buggies to take them to and from the communal Meadowlands golf course, the community swimming and tennis club, or the Meadowlands’ 50-acre nature park with its walking trails and lake.
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If safe, middle-class, Conservative America was soft wind chimes in the porch light, then Meadowlands saluted that flag.
But behind the closed doors of 160 Panther Creek there was a volatile marriage which split the opinions of neighbours and, in some cases, even families.
On Friday morning the court heard from Shannon Grubb, a neighbour who had previously testified as to Molly being a super mom during a guardianship hearing two weeks after Jason was killed by Molly and her father, ex-FBI agent, Tom Martens in August 2015. Ms Grubb’s evidence in the guardianship hearing ultimately did not help, as custody of Jack and Sarah Corbett was granted to Jason’s sister, Tracey Lynch, and her husband Dave.
The Lynches, Jack and Sarah, watched on as Ms Grubb, a college instructor who lived on Red Hawk Lane diagonal to the Corbetts’ home, took the stand and told of how she and Molly became great friends because Ms Grubb’s two children were the same age as Jack and Sarah. The children carpooled together to sports events like swimming and gymnastics. Shannon Grubb and her husband, Charlie, became close friends of Molly and Jason, and even vacationed together.
At 1.01am on October 12th, 2014, Ms Grubb’s phone rang. Molly’s name came up. “It was the middle of the night. I heard heavy breathing then in the background arguing and screaming going on between Jason and Molly. I woke up my husband and put the call on speaker phone. I tried to figure out was it one of the kids calling because I could hear breathing but nobody answered when I said their names, Jack and Sarah.
“Jason was very angry and Molly was screaming ‘Please don’t do this to us.’ I considered calling the police,” Ms Grubb said. Instead, she disconnected the call after listening for about four minutes. When Ms Grubb next met Molly, she was “embarrassed”.
“I just said she needed to get some outside help.”
Ms Grubb agreed that Molly didn’t want to leave the kids.
At another social event, they had hired a limo for the occasion and Ms Grubb said Molly got out on one side of the limo and this seemed to anger Jason. “He grabbed her and yanked her to the side and there was a disagreement about something. I asked what it was about and she said he feels that she got out of the car to the side where other men would be noticing her in her dress. He was just very jealous.”
Ms Grubb then recalled another occasion where Molly turned up wearing a form of head dress over the top of her head and ears and she took out a blood-soaked tissue from under it and replaced it with a new clean one.
“She was visibly bleeding. I asked her what had happened and she said that they fought before they got here. I thought this can’t continue. She’s going to get hurt worse than that if this behaviour progresses. She wouldn’t leave the kids.”
Ms Grubb said Molly called her on a separate occasion and asked her to bring shoes for Sarah. She said she had a fight in the house and didn’t want to bring Sarah back into the house to get her shoes for school. When I met her in the park to give her the shoes, Sarah was hysterical, crying. She didn’t want Molly to go back home without her.”
Then, there was an incident at Shady Grove vacation bible school when Ms Grubb met Molly, who was wearing sunglasses and crying. “Jason had car trouble. Molly was in the car beside me and Jason reached in my window and grabbed the car keys from her. That was the first time that I saw his anger.”
Molly’s neighbour said Molly getting up at night to the kids would lead to arguments. “He would say he didn’t want her going up and I think the word he used was ‘coddle’, he didn’t want her coddling the kids. They would fight about it.”
She also appeared to corroborate why Molly had a brick in the bedroom. She said they would paint bricks and stepping stones.
Under cross-examination it emerged Molly had been enraged when Shannon and Charlie Grubb gave statements to detectives. Molly told a mutual friend and neighbour – Sarah Neeves – that Ms Grubb was just naive and that her statement made no sense. The court did not hear what Ms Grubb had said in her original statement which annoyed Molly, but in any event Ms Grubb and her husband contacted detectives to say that they wanted to change their statement as what they said had not been properly documented.
Assistant district attorney Melissa Parker said detectives had taken statements from about 50 people, many of whom were in Meadowlands, but of those 50 statements, the only people to question the detectives’ accuracy in taking statements were the friends of Molly, four of the five who had come to court on Friday to paint a picture of Jason Corbett as a jealous husband.
Under cross-examination, Shannon Grubb said she had never seen slapping or hitting and had merely heard yelling. She denied ever being present when Molly abused Jason in social situations, calling him “fat” and “meatloaf”. She said she was not aware that Molly lied – she lied about being on the swim team at Clemson University in flyers distributed around Meadowlands.
Ms Parker said Molly had invented a sister who died from cancer: “She lied to her bridesmaids that she was Jack and Sarah’s birth mother. In Bible Club she lied about how complicated the birth of her daughter was. She claimed she helped care for Jason’s first wife. She claimed Mags told her that she was dying and she wanted Molly to take on the role as mother to the children. So all those were lies. Do you have any concern for Molly’s truthfulness?”
The witness replied: “I do not.”