At 10.23am on Monday, August 3rd, 2015, Shelly Lee was assigned case file 37698.
The social worker with Davidson County’s department of social services in the US state of North Carolina opened the homicide report of Jason Corbett, an Irishman beaten to death the previous day in his family home.
Lee had 72 hours to assess the welfare of Jason’s children: Jack, aged 10, and Sarah, aged eight. Both had been asleep upstairs during the killing. Detectives wanted to interview them about allegations of domestic violence in the home.
There was a complicating factor, however: the children were Irish citizens from Jason’s first marriage to Margaret ‘Mags’ Fitzpatrick.
Mags, who owned a creche in Limerick, died suddenly in 2006, aged 31. At the time of her death, Jack was two and Sarah was 11 weeks.
Molly Martens left her home in Tennessee for Limerick in March 2008 and became the children’s au pair. She and Jason became romantically involved and were married in 2011 at Bleak House, Knoxville, in Martens’s home state.
Four years later, Jason was dead.
Corbett‘s killing and the subsequent trials of his wife Molly and her father Tom, a retired FBI agent, over his violent death have gripped audiences.
A new Netflix documentary about his killing, A Deadly American Marriage, draws on previously undisclosed material, from case notes by social workers to detailed reports by police detectives and emergency responders, from criminal trial exhibits to transcripts and legal papers in court proceedings.
In 2017, Martens and her father were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to at least 20 years. In 2021 their convictions were overturned following an appeal. Two years later, they reached a plea deal on the charge of voluntary manslaughter. Both received shorter sentences and were returned to prison for seven months. They were released in June 2024.
In the end, each served a total of four years and three months in prison for the killing of Jason Corbett.
The Netflix documentary centres on Corbett, his marriage to Molly, his killing in 2015, and how his two children, Jack and Sarah, were affected by the eight-year legal battles between those seeking justice for their father’s killing and those claiming the Martenses were victims of a miscarriage of justice.
Within hours of their father’s death on August 2nd, 2015, the orphaned children found themselves at the centre of an international custody dispute between their stepmother, Molly, and Jason’s Irish relatives.
Less than seven hours after Corbett‘s killing, Molly and Tom Martens were allowed to take the two children, even though Molly had not adopted them. Jason’s will named his sister, Tracey Lynch, as guardian.
Twenty minutes after opening the file, Lee, the social worker, received a call from Lynch, who detailed her concerns for Jack and Sarah’s safety. Lynch informed Lee of Molly’s mental health issues and the “strong medications” she was taking for bipolar disorder. Molly, she said, was denying access to the children. The detail is contained in an extensively documented Department of Social Services case file, which outlines all of the children’s interactions with social workers after their father’s killing. Molly’s lawyers sought the case file under discovery, in advance of the 2017 murder trial, and drew on its contents when successfully appealing their second-degree murder convictions in 2021.
Next, on that morning of August 3rd, 2015, an Irish consular official warned Lee that Molly was trying to cremate Jason’s body before Tracey arrived in the United States. Lee then spoke to Lieutenant Wanda Thompson, who was leading the investigation. The 72-hour response time was upgraded to “urgent”, the case file said.
Police and social workers needed to speak to the children, but Molly controlled access. Three days after the killing, Molly was granted emergency custody for 15 days, pending a full guardianship hearing.
What happened in those 15 days would shape Jack and Sarah’s lives.
During that time, both children told social workers they had not witnessed the events of August 2nd, 2015, but they said they had seen their father hit, shove and verbally abuse Molly in the past. This supported the account given by Tom and Molly on the night Jason died. Molly (31) told police she had previously sought medical care for injuries caused by Jason. She admitted to hitting Jason with a brick from her bedside table – once, to protect her father.
Tom (65), a retired FBI agent, told 911 operator Karen Capps, according to a transcript of the call, that he struck Jason with a baseball bat. “He’s bleeding all over, and I may have killed him ... He was choking my daughter. He said: ‘I’m going to kill her.’”
Capps believed Martens and her father were faking CPR, even as Molly cried out: “I think he’s still alive.” Capps told this to the judge in the 2017 murder trial in ‘voir dire’ testimony – where a witness is questioned in the absence of the jury. The judge, however, ruled that the jury should not hear Capps’s “opinion”.
When paramedics arrived, Jason’s body was cold. The blood on the carpet had congealed. The room was so bloody, one responder thought Jason had been shot and he asked Tom and Molly where the gun was, according to official notes on the case.
The weapons – a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and a concrete brick – were feet away in the darkened room. Jason lay naked, his feet toward the bed, his head near a bloodied vacuum cleaner.
Blood spatter expert Stuart James later said in a report submitted to court as evidence that the blood on the vacuum cleaner defied physics. Blood had dripped sideways on the vacuum cleaner, suggesting the scene had been altered. He noted blood impact spatters descending along the wall, ending with Jason struck inches from the floor. A partial bloody handprint was found on the bedroom door, suggesting that Corbett might have been trying to escape. Neither Molly nor Tom had blood on their hands.
A review of the crime scene video and autopsy photos shows Jason had been struck at least 12 times in 10 locations. Two areas, both at the back of the head, showed overlapping impacts. This had the effect of obscuring which weapon – the brick or the bat – had caused the initial wound.
In his interview with police, Tom claimed to have no knowledge of the bloodstained brick in the bedroom. He had not seen Molly hit Jason with it.
Whichever weapon was deployed, Jason’s skull was crushed. He was declared dead at 3.24am.
Despite blood spatter on her clothing, Molly showed no signs of a struggle. A fragile bracelet on her wrist remained intact, as photos taken of her on the night of the killing show. The fact the bracelet was fragile and intact was raised in the 2017 criminal trial.
Tom’s hands were also clean, as seen in police photos taken on the night of the killing, though he claimed he had supported Jason’s head to clear his airway per 911 instructions, according to the transcript of that call.
Detectives noted how Tom tried to control his police interview, repeatedly emphasising his “state of mind”, according to Lieut Thompson, the investigating officer. A former lawyer and FBI expert in crime scenes and interrogation, Tom knew that self-defence hinged on convincing a jury that he and Molly feared for their lives.
According to the transcript of his police interview, Tom told detectives that Jason’s first wife had died in mysterious circumstances – by asphyxiation, not asthma, as Jason claimed. Detectives noted that Tom had now alleged two choking events: one ending Mags’s life and one that would have ended Molly’s had he not intervened.
It would take years before the full significance of those statements became clear.
After 15 days in Molly’s custody, a judge awarded guardianship to Tracey Lynch. Jack and Sarah cried and begged to stay with Molly – the only mother they remembered.
Back in Ireland, with counselling and time, the children recanted, telling the prosecuting district attorney over the following years that they had lied to social workers in 2015 about their father being abusive. They now claimed Molly was the abuser. Martens and her father were charged with second-degree murder.
At the 2017 trial, the judge excluded the children’s initial claims, made during their 15 days with Molly. Without the children’s abuse allegations, the defence had no proof of domestic violence. Tom and Molly were convicted and sentenced to 20 years.
They appealed. The court ruled the children’s statements should have been heard. The convictions were overturned.
Jack and Sarah were devastated. Their initial allegations had helped free the people who killed their father.
They vowed to tell the truth in a retrial. But Tom’s lawyers fought back, claiming Tracey Lynch had brainwashed Jack and Sarah. The Martenses hired experts to review Mags’s autopsy report. The experts argued Mags had not died from asthma, as previously believed. One expert said it was “probable” she had been manually strangled.
The district attorney’s expert agreed Mags had not died of asthma, but dismissed strangulation as speculative. There was, he said, no scientific basis to show strangulation from Mags’s autopsy findings. Still, the district attorney, Garry Frank, decided it was too risky to retry the case.
A plea deal was reached. Tom pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Molly entered a “no contest” plea. She refused to say the word “guilty”.
At sentencing in November 2023, Molly’s lawyers accused Jason of killing his first wife. They played the children’s interviews accusing their father of violence.
Jack (now aged 19) and Sarah (17) had to sit silently as words they uttered as severely traumatised young children were used to tarnish their father more than eight years after his killing. Molly and her father turned their own sentencing hearing into Jason’s trial – portraying the victim as the killer.
In response, Jack and Sarah gave powerful victim impact statements. They called Molly a “monster” who manipulated them and abused their father.
“The charge they now accept is voluntary manslaughter,” said Sarah.
“I’ve seen my father’s bloody handprint on the bedroom door. There was nothing voluntary about his death. I know he tried to leave that room. He didn’t choose to leave us – he was taken. He was the victim.”
In the Netflix documentary, Tom and Molly stuck to their story.
They agreed to be interviewed because they were adamant Corbett was a domestic abuser, that Molly was the victim of his abuse and that, on the night of August 2nd, 2015, her father acted to save her life and his own.
Looking directly into the camera, Tom said: “My daughter’s not a liar. I’m not a liar. And if you think we are, go ahead – prove it.”
Brian Carroll was co-producer on the Netflix documentary and has written a book, A Deadly Marriage, on the killing of Jason Corbett that will be published in August.
