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

At the end of the eight-day sentencing hearing for Molly Martens and her father, Tom, the truth of what happened the night of Jason Corbett’s death – not the how, but the why – is as obscured as ever in a maelstrom of high emotion and competing narratives.

During those eight days, three parallel narratives emerged to account for how the Limerick man came to be lying dead on his bedroom floor, his skull so badly smashed in that it had virtually disintegrated.

The first is the official account presented by defence lawyers and accepted by the judge despite what he characterised as “holes” in the story. In this version, Molly Martens was in fear of her life and her father’s when she picked up a decorative paving brick she happened to have on her night stand – she planned to use it in a craft project – and struck her husband with it. For this version to have been accepted – and it mostly was, despite the judge’s reservations that parts of it made “no sense” – the court must accept the plausibility of Molly Martens’ account of herself as a vulnerable victim of domestic abuse. Tom Martens opted for what an investigator called the hero defence: hearing noises, he came to his daughter’s aid carrying a baseball bat. When he saw what was happening, the FBI operative and trained attorney didn’t call 911, he bashed Jason Corbett’s head in.

This narrative also involved a secondary assault on the memory of Jason Corbett, and his first wife, Mags Fitzpatrick. Experts were brought in to suggest that her death was not due to an asthma attack but strangulation. In one of the strangest moments of a surreal hearing, one expert claimed it wasn’t just possible but “likely” she had been strangled.

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

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Molly Martens continuously professed how much she loved Jack and Sarah Corbett; evidently not quite enough to let their mother rest in peace.

And this brings us to the second narrative: that intense, all-encompassing, suffocating love for those children, a love perhaps better characterised by the words of a guardianship judge as a “deranged entitlement”. The notion of her as mother driven to desperate measures by love might have evoked public sympathy for her, but it presented a problem for the defence: if you believed that she would have done anything for those children, you might have begun to ask whether some premeditation was involved. The charge to which she had pleaded no contest as part of a plea bargain deal was voluntary manslaughter; there could be no premeditation.

Still, it was Martens herself who repeatedly put the thwarted love hypothesis in the public domain in the years since her conviction for second degree murder was overturned. Speaking to a journalist with Elle magazine in 2021, she said she instantly “fell in love” with the feeling of being needed by the children. Despite what she claimed were years of abuse at the hands of Corbett, she planned to stay until they were old enough so that a judge could ask them what they wanted in a custody battle.

“You have to pack the lunches and you have to clean the kitchen, and so you’ve convinced yourself that oh, I was strangled last night, but I’m okay,” she told the journalist in a sympathetic interview, which was enhanced by sunlit photos of Molly with Tom.

It was on the final day, when the Corbett children stood up to deliver powerful and dignified victim impact statements, that the third narrative emerged. This one offered another, much darker version of Molly Martens, and what being loved by her meant.

For Jack, now 19, being loved by the woman he thought of as his mother meant having his private texts to her shared on her social media, even though he pleaded with her not to. For Sarah, who is 17, being loved by Martens meant being taught how to vomit and how to shoplift and being denied food. “She just wouldn’t feed us if we did something wrong like, for example, not swimming fast enough in our heat,” Sarah said in her excoriating victim impact statement. “I was abused by Molly Martens in every way you can imagine and then some,” Jack said in his.

Judge David Hall had sympathy for the children, and questions about the holes in the Martens’ evidence, but he also had a “lot of respect” for the FBI man. He imposed sentences of 51-74 months on Molly and Tom Martens, to be reduced by the 44 months they have already served.

In another of those strange parallels thrown up by the trial, elsewhere in North Carolina this autumn a woman was appealing her conviction for second degree murder. Wendy Dawn Lamb Hicks was convicted of murder after she shot dead her partner, Caleb Adams, who had arrived at her home on a morning in June 2017. Like Martens, she said she had been attacked and was acting in self-defence; like Martens she didn’t show any evidence of injury. And like Martens, there were inconsistencies in her statement.

Unlike Martens, she didn’t have a co-defendant who was not just a doting father, but a former FBI agent. Unlike Martens, she didn’t make for a particularly photogenic killer. Unlike Martens, she did not have the resources for multiple expert witnesses. She was initially sentenced to 15-19 years; in September, she lost her appeal at the North Carolina Supreme Court. Meanwhile, lawyers for Molly and Tom Martens are confident between time already served and good behaviour, they will be out in seven months.

If there is any solace for Jack and Sarah Corbett in the trauma and grief they so vividly described, it is that they managed to tell their story with dignity. Of the three competing narratives, theirs is the one that will stick.