Prosecutors didn’t want to risk that Molly Martens and her father Thomas Martens would be found not guilty of murder.
And, as Molly put it in the Netflix documentary ADeadly American Marriage, she didn’t want to chance it that her dad would spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted.
So, though Molly said she “had no interest in taking a plea,” in 2023 she pleaded no contest and Tom pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for the August 2015 killing of her husband Jason Corbett. They were sentenced in November 2023 to 51 to 74 months in prison.
Because the pair had previously spent several years in prison for murder—convictions overturned on appeal in 2021—they were both released the following June.
And with that, everyone affected by Jason’s death was left to pick up the pieces of their lives and move forward.
But as chronicled in ADeadly American Marriage, the question of what really happened between Jason and Molly depends on who’s answering, with Molly maintaining her father grabbed a baseball bat to defend her from an abusive husband, while Jason’s family—including his children Jack Corbett and Sarah Corbett—contend that he was an innocent man who was mercilessly beaten to death.
“Her husband has horrific injuries,” Davidson County Sheriff’s Lt. WandaThompson, one of the investigators who was called to the Corbetts’ North Carolina home that night, said in the doc. “[Molly and Tom] don’t appear to have any…They have a right to defend themselves, but are they the victim or is he the victim?”
And that is the disturbing mystery Deadly American Marriage tries to unpack:
Who was Jason Corbett?
Jason Corbett spent most of his life in his native Ireland, close to his family in Pallaskenry County, Limerick. He married Margaret “Mags” Fitzpatrick and they welcomed two children, Jack Corbett and Sarah Corbett.
When Mags died of an asthma attack in June 2006, as remembered by family and friends in the Netflix documentary ADeadly American Marriage, Jason was devastated. He would write letters to his late wife and leave them at her grave site, his sister Tracey Lynch recalled.
“My dad was an amazing person,” Sarah, now 18 but only 11 weeks old when her mom died, said in the documentary.
How did Jason Corbett meet Molly Martens?
Jack was 3 and Sarah 18 months old when Jason advertised for an au pair in 2008.
Jason hired Molly and, before long—as remembered by his sister Tracey and others in the doc—it was obvious they were more than employer-employee.
“He was charming, funny,” Molly said in the doc. “He made me feel very special.”
An email from Jason to Molly from that time, shown in the Netflix show, indicated that Jason didn’t want to rush into a relationship, not wanting the kids to get hurt if it didn’t work out between them.
But the 32-year-old business manager got a job transfer and moved with Molly, Jack and Sarah to Winston-Salem, N.C.—specifically to the Meadowlands, a planned residential and golf community where the houses were big and the lawns manicured—in 2011 and the couple got married.
When did Jason Corbett’s family become suspicious of Molly Martens?
They were in North Carolina for the wedding, Tracey said in ADeadly American Marriage, when she found out from Molly’s maid of honor that Molly had been telling people that she had been a childhood friend of Jason’s late wife Mags and had gone to Ireland to be Jack and Sarah’s godmother, and that’s how she and Jason fell in love.
“Why would anyone create this fabricated story?” Tracey recalled thinking.
Molly did not address this in the doc, but her father Thomas Martens said that making up a story didn’t mean she was guilty of anything else.
What happened to Jason Corbett?
On the night of Aug. 2, 2015, Tom Marten called 911.
“My son-in-law got in a fight with my daughter,” he told the operator, per a recording played in ADeadly American Marriage. “I intervened and I hit him in the head.” Asked with what, he replied, “A baseball bat.”
Davidson County Sheriff’s Lt. Wanda Thompson said she got the call to go to the Corbetts’ house at Panther Creek Court in the Meadowlands at 3 a.m.
She walked into the couple’s bedroom, she said in the doc, and “it’s pretty horrific. It’s one of the bloodiest crime scenes I’ve seen in a long time.”
According to autopsy findings as relayed by Davidson County Assistant District Attorney Alan Martin in the doc, “Jason has abrasions on his forehead, under his eye, his shoulder blades, and then we get to his head…He had so many blows to his head that the pathologist couldn’t count them because they overlapped, and a chunk of Jason’s skull fell out onto the table. It takes an incredible amount of force to cause that kind of injury.”
What did Molly Martens and Tom Martens say happened on the night of Jason Corbett’s death?
Molly told investigators, as seen in interview footage in ADeadly American Marriage, that she and Jason “were fighting” after Sarah had a nightmare and he was woken up.
“He choked me,” Molly said, “first with his hand pressed really hard right here [motioning toward her throat].” He then “let go for a second,” she continued, “and I screamed really loud.”
Tom, a retired FBI agent, said in a separate video interview with authorities that he heard “arguing and thumping” from upstairs that “sounded bad.” So he grabbed the bat and ran upstairs. Jason’s had “Molly by the throat like this,” Tom said, demonstrating choking, then “he goes around the throat like this [miming a chokehold].” When Jason started dragging Molly toward the bathroom, Tom said, “I hit him.”
Then Jason grabbed the bat, Tom said. In her police interview, Molly said that Jason took a swing at her dad but “he might have missed.” Then Tom got the bat back, he told investigators, and “I can’t tell you how many times I hit him, can’t tell you how many times he shoved me…It was a battle.”
Molly also admitted to picking up a brick paver from her nightstand and hitting Jason with it. The doc shows a photo of the stone splattered with blood and hair.
Tom and Molly also told investigators, per the interview footage, that Jason was drunk. The autopsy findings, according to Alan Martin, noted that Jason’s blood alcohol level was only .02. Moreover, the prosector said, Jason had the tranquilizer trazodone—which Molly had a prescription for—in his system, and it was impossible to know if he had taken it voluntarily or not.
What did Jason Corbett’s children say about their father after he was killed?
On Aug. 6, 2015, then-10-year-old Jack Corbett and 8-year-old Sarah Corbett told a social worker in recorded interviews conducted at the Dragonfly Child Advocacy Center that they had seen their father yell at Molly. Sarah said she saw her dad hit her mother once. (Both she and Jack referred to Molly as their mom.)
“He just got very mad about simple things,” Jack said, per the interview footage. He said Jason “would physically and verbally hurt my mom.” Asked by the interviewer if he’d ever witnessed his dad being violent, Jack said, “once or twice…punching, hitting, pushing.”
When were Molly Martens and Tom Martens arrested for murder?
In Deadly American Marriage, Molly said that Jason had become possessive and jealous, always quizzing her about where she was going and who she’d be seeing. She said that she placed hidden recorders around the house to shore up her case to seek custody of the kids if she divorced Jason. She feared for her life, Molly alleged, and in no way did she think that Jason would be the one who ended up dead.
At the time and in the doc, Jason’s family vehemently pushed back at Molly’s abuse allegations. Moreover, Jack and Sarah—who moved back to Ireland to live with their aunt Tracey and uncle David, Jason having appointed his sister and brother-in-law the kids’ legal guardians in his will—recanted their statements about witnessing abuse nine months after their dad died.
They both said in the doc that Molly coached them, telling the kids that they’d be taken away from her if they didn’t lie. (She did challenge Tracey and David’s guardianship in court in North Carolina, but the judge ruled in the couple’s favor.)
“Molly made me lie to the people who were interviewing me,” Jack told investigators in 2016 in a video interview from Ireland.
Sarah said in the Netflix show, “I said what Molly told me to say.” At the time she “didn’t want to lose anyone else…so I lied.”
Martin, the prosecutor, said in the doc that forensic evidence showed Jason “was being hit in the head while he was down” on the floor. Blood on the back of the bedroom door, he continued, indicated that he was “the victim of deadly violence” even before Tom got upstairs.
Molly and Tom were arrested and charged with second-degree murder. They both pleaded not guilty and were each released on $200,000 bail.
What happened at Molly Martens and Tom Martens murder trial?
Molly and Tom were both found guilty of second-degree murder on Aug. 9, 2017.
She didn’t testify during the trial, but in her first statement in court before being sentenced, Molly said, “I did not murder my husband. My father did not murder my husband.”
Molly and Tom were subsequently sentenced to 20 to 25 years in prison.
“It was a brutal merciless killing,” Tracey told reporters after the verdict was read, per NBC affiliate KTVB 7. “My parents lost their child and we lost the most wonderful brother and friend.”
In the doc, Sarah recalled feeling “so free and empty, in a good way,” and finally able to settle into family life “properly” with Jack, Tracey, David and her cousins.
“Obviously he’s extremely upset,” Tom’s attorney David Freedman told reporters after court in 2017, per KTVB 7. “But the one thing he does say is that if he had not taken the actions he did that night, his daughter would not be here and he would never trade anything for that.”
Why was Molly Martens and Tom Martens’ murder conviction overturned?
Tom and Molly immediately set out to appeal.
First order of business, as remembered by lawyers Doug Kingsberry, Jay Vannoy and Jones Byrd in Deadly American Marriage, was shoring up the evidence that corroborated Molly and Tom’s explanation of events.
A pretrial ruling had excluded Jack and Sarah’s statements about witnessing their dad abusing Molly in the house—which also meant that there was no way to bring up the kids recanting, either.
So a priority, the lawyers explained in the doc, was getting Sarah and Jack’s original statements back into evidence, because the attorneys were also ready to argue that they were coerced into changing their story by family members back in Ireland.
“They appear to be brainwashed,” Tom said in the doc of the kids’ 2016 interviews with prosecutors.
On Jan. 31, 2019, the attorneys presented their case to the Court of Appeals—and won. The judges ruled that Jack and Sarah’s original statements shouldn’t have been thrown out and that Jason was the aggressor in the altercation that left him dead.
Prosecutors appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled in the Martens’ favor, paving the way for a new trial. The high court said in its March 2021 opinion, reviewed by E! News, that the “trial court committed prejudicial error in excluding evidence that went to the heart of defendants’ self-defense claims.”
The dissenting justices countered in the opinion, per court documents, that there was “overwhelming” evidence to convict and neither the children’s statements nor subsequent recantations were “relevant to defendant Martens’ state of mind.”
“It was exhilarating,” Molly recalled in the Netflix documentary of finding out she was going home. She and Tom were released on April 1, 2021, according to online incarceration records.
Why didn’t prosecutors retry Molly Martens and Tom Martens for murder?
Expert witnesses were ready to testify for the defense, based on the audio recordings Molly made, that there were signs Jason had been at least verbally abusive. Defense attorney Kingsberry also detailed new evidence his team found: There was a cut on the left side of Molly’s neck below her ear and a urine stain in the pajama bottoms she’d been wearing.
The prosecution had maintained there was no injury to Molly’s neck, Kingsberry said, but that cut was “a nail dig, what happens during manual strangulation.” The stain was also an indication Molly had lost consciousness or otherwise lost control of her faculties that night, the lawyer said.
“Claims Jason strangled her isn’t the sort of thing we’d want in front of the jury,” prosecutor Martin acknowledged in Deadly American Marriage. He said that Jack and Sarah were both anxious to testify, convinced their testimony would “fix everything,” but it could’ve “still gone sideways.”
On Oct. 23, 2023, Molly pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and Tom pleaded guilty to the same charge.
“I had no interest in taking a plea,” Molly said in the doc. “I was ready to go to trial, I was ready for the truth to prevail and I was ready to fight back. But the possibility of us losing at trial and my father being incarcerated for what would be the rest of his life, I couldn’t handle that responsibility.”
What did Jack Corbett and Sarah Corbett say at Molly Martens’ sentencing hearing?
The Nov. 8, 2023, sentencing hearing for Molly and Tom ended up being the only time Sarah and Jack would be able to have their day in court.
The doc shows Tracey and David driving them to the hearing. “Time for crying is over, now it’s time to get angry in there,” David told the kids in the car. “Head up, shoulders back, f–k these people.”
In a victim impact statement he read in court, Jack said, “Don’t be fooled by this mask of civility of Molly Martens. She systematically broke me down and fed me untruths. I want to be clear, I have never witnessed my dad hit Molly Martens, ever.”
Sarah told the court, “What Molly and Tom Martens took from me, I can never get back. I’ve seen my father’s bloody handprint on the door of his bedroom. There was nothing voluntary about his death. He didn’t choose to leave us, he was taken from us. He was the victim.”
Molly and Tom were each sentenced to 51 to 74 months in prison, so four to six years. But including credit for the four years they had already spent behind bars, they only served another seven months—Molly at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh and Tom at the Caldwell Correctional Center in Lenoir—and walked free on June 6, 2024.
“Our Family is disappointed with the news,” Tracey told the Irish Mirror about the pair’s early release. “The sentence was and never will be sufficient. They are and will remain killers.”
Where is Molly Martens now?
After their release from prison, Molly, 41, and Tom, 75, had another year of post-release supervision ahead of them, to be completed in their home state of Tennessee. According to the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, their Probation/Parole/Post Release Status remains active.
Molly and Tom maintained in Deadly American Marriage that they were only fighting for survival the night Jason died.
“I was going to save her life or die trying,” Tom said, “and I have no regrets.”
Molly said that she never saw Jack and Sarah again after Tracey and David took them back to Ireland, and she’s not allowed to have contact with them now.
“I did not emotionally or physically or in any way abuse my children,” she said in the doc. “The children have been used as tools of evil. They have been weaponized against me, and they wanted to hurt me and they did.”
But, Molly added, she’ll always feel like the mother of “Jack and Sarah who existed in another lifetime.”
Ahead of the May premiere of A Deadly American Marriage, Molly’s brother Connor Martens told NBC affiliate WBIR in Knoxville, Tenn., that dad Tom was “doing really well” and was “just so grateful for all the small things in life,” such as spending time with wife Sharon Martens and their grandchildren.
“Molly definitely has elements of that but it’s harder for her,” Connor said, noting that his sister was close to finishing her college degree. “She’s in kind of the thick of her life and she’s not retired, and there’s been a lot more media scrutiny and harassment and she struggles a little bit more with the trauma, but overall I think she’s really grateful and she’s doing really well, all things considered.”
Where are Jack Corbett and Sarah Corbett now?
Jack and Sarah firmly pushed back against the accusation that they’d been brainwashed in any way.
“I understand how a lot of people could say, ‘He’s been around a lot of people who loved his dad for eight years, that’s why he’s saying those things,’” Jack said in the doc, “but I was always left to come up with my own decisions, my own opinions. My dad was my hero, someone I looked up to. He was my best friend.”
Added Sarah, “My dad loved me and Jack, we were his everything, and I know that. I’m really proud to say I’m Jason Corbett’s daughter.”
She and Jack, 20, now go by the surname Corbett-Lynch, and are moving on with their lives in Ireland. Sarah has released a memoir, A Time for Truth: My Father Jason and My Search for Justice and Healing.
On what would have been her mom Mags’ 50th birthday May 8, Sarah posted several photos of her parents on Instagram, writing, “I know you’re with us in spirit, Mam, with Dad holding your hand. I can feel that today you would be doing something meaningful right here with me, Jack, and everyone who is still here supporting us.”
And on May 10 she wished her aunt Tracey a happy birthday, calling her a “wonderful woman who has always had my back and always made me feel loved. Thank you for being my mom.”
