‘DAD’S KILLERS MADE ME LIE’
Daughter makes heartrending plea after killers Molly Martens and her father get a retrial
MURDERED Jason Corbett’s young daughter has spoken out to tell her killer stepmother: ‘You took my Dad’s life, you destroyed mine, you coached me to lie.’
Teenager Sarah Corbett posted a powerful message after murderers Molly Martens and her father Tom were granted a retrial in America.
And it emerged that they may depend on statements made by Sarah and her brother Jack to escape justice, statements made when she was just eight years old and Jack was only 10.
Sarah published the powerful statement , which addresses the people who killed her father as she slept nearby, across three social media platforms yesterday.
Her former stepmother Molly and Molly’s father, former FBI agent Tom, are locked up in prison in North Carolina after they battered Jason to death and even waited for him to die before they called emergency services. However, the US state’s Supreme Court has decided to allow a retrial for the
daughter and father. Jason Corbett was beaten to death in August 2015 in the family’s suburban North Carolina home. Sarah wrote, in a Facebook post: ‘You took my Dad’s life, you destroyed mine, you coached me to lie and told the world it was the truth. How can people in power not see this?’
She added: ‘I was an 8 year old who was told lies about my Dad behind his back for years and now you get to suck all the oxygen out of my world again.’
Molly, who grew up in Tennessee, married Jason Corbett in 2011. She first worked as the children’s nanny in Limerick, after the death of Jason’s first wife, Margaret Fitzpatrick.
Molly and her father, retired FBI agent Tom Martens, were convicted in 2017 of second-degree murder. Jason was beaten with a baseball bat and a paving stone, in the couple’s bedroom in an upmarket home in a North Carolina golfing community.
Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued a 4-3 retrial decision centering on statements provided by the Corbett children, blood-spatter questions and evidence that there may have been jury access to news reports and social media.
Jason Corbett’s family successfully won a battle for custody of the two children from Molly, following their father’s death. Sarah and Jack have been living with the murdered man’s sister Tracey Corbett Lynch and her husband David Lynch since.
Sarah has written a children’s book centred on the theme of coping with loss. Her aunt Tracey did not respond yesterday to a request for comment on Sarah’s social media posts, but the family previously expressed their dismay at the supreme court’s ruling for a retrial.
Tracey and David Lynch said they were horrified following the retrial decision – and the ‘unrelenting smear campaign’ that had been waged against Jason.
‘We are so disappointed and distraught that the Supreme Court of North Carolina has decided to grant a retrial to Tom and Molly Martens, who admitted killing our beloved Jason, a father, a brother, a son and a loyal friend, who is dearly missed by all who knew and loved him,’ they said. ‘Neither of the convicted defendants has ever expressed remorse for Jason’s killing.’
However, the Martens defence lawyer David Freedman told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The Supreme Court has now said, when you look at all those things together, we didn’t receive a fair trial.’
He said the retrial decision was granted on the fact that the children had given statements to the Department of Social Services and to a child advocacy centre called the Dragonfly House, which is ‘actually run by the state and it is set up specifically to obtain and preserve statements of children that are potentially subject to some sort of abuse, whether sexual abuse or physical abuse or emotional abuse. And those statements were given both to a doctor and to law enforcement’.
He added: ‘And we tried to get those in, because they had some very critical evidence in there, and the court ruled it didn’t come in – and the Supreme Court said the jury should have heard that.
‘In addition, there was blood-spatter testimony from an expert who did not follow his own protocols and violated his own protocols... and then there were statements made during the confrontation that the court kept out, we believe should have come in.’
However, Jason’s family remains resolute that it was a ‘cold and calculated murder, designed to give Molly custody of Jason’s children, and the financial benefit of an insurance policy’.
Mr Freedman said he would be using the Corbett children’s statements in a retrial but it was unclear whether they would be asked to give evidence.
‘You get to suck all the oxygen out of my world’