How do the families of victims cope with such public grief?
THIS week has shown how utterly challenging the justice system can be for families, parents, children, siblings and partners of loved ones whose unlawful deaths become the central issue in a full-blown criminal trial. It’s nothing if not harrowing. At the Central Criminal Court in Dublin the most heartrending evidence emerged during the the Ashling Murphy murder trial at which the jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict against Josef Puska on Thursday. The proceedings were characterised by a flood of distressing detail about how Puska dragged the 23-year-old primary school teacher into the briars beside the Grand Canal at Cappincur, Tullamore, in January of last year and repeatedly stabbed her in an unexplained, random and murderous attack.
Such violence, described as ‘incomprehensible’ by Ashling’s brother Cathal after the jury’s verdict, is every family’s worst nightmare. In a display of fortitude and dignity, Cathal Murphy, who is obviously still burdened with the intensity of his own personal grief over the loss of his sister, expressed concern for others. Thanking the jury he said: ‘Sitting through the harrowing evidence was not an easy task and we’ll be forever grateful for their patience and resilience.’
Next Friday the trial judge Tony Hunt will hear victim impact statements before Puska, whom he described as ‘evil in this room’, receives his mandatory life sentence.
MEANWHILE, across the Atlantic in North Carolina the agony endured by the extraordinarily courageous children of 39-year-old Limerick man Jason Corbett – killed by his second wife Molly Martens and her father, a former FBI man, Thomas Martens in a brutal assault in his North Carolina home in 2017 – was also laid bare under the glare of wrap-around media coverage.
The wonder of it all is how families and children of victims manage to cope in circumstances of such overwhelming grief, paraded in public? Where do they get their strength when the rest of us would admit to breakdown if it were our daughter, son, parent or loved one that all those legal arguments and detailed evidence was about?
But from somewhere deep inside they find resilience, they find the power to keep going, to make some kind of sense of it all.
Jason Corbett’s wonderful children Jack and Sarah were just aged 10 and eight when they had their dad cruelly taken away from them.
Even before that they’d been enveloped in enough sadness for one lifetime with the death of their mother Mags Fitzpatrick Corbett in an asthma attack at the end of 2006 when the family lived just outside Limerick. And now their father was gone as well, his life ended in an frenzy of violence, battered with a paving brick by his American wife and repeatedly struck by his father-in-law using a metal baseball ball. An implement of fun and entertainment turned into a lethal weapon, to kill a defenceless man.
Then, at the sentencing hearing in North Carolina – following their guilty pleas to manslaughter – the Martens launched another wilful attack on Jason Corbett whom they knew, again, could not defend himself; the last time they destroyed his life and now they sought to destroy his reputation.
Martens’ lawyers attempted to show that Mags Fitzpatrick Corbett may have died of strangulation, instead of asthma. In short they were saying that Jason Corbett was an abuser, with the potential to have attacked his first wife, effectively causing her death.
First the Fitzpatrick family rubbished this outrageous and baseless deception by denouncing the Martens for their attempts to tarnish the love that Jason Corbett and his first wife Mags had for each other. But then came the testimony of Jack and Sarah, striking for its clarity, compelling for its integrity.
Describing the woman who killed his father as a monster, Jack Corbett told the judge: ‘I want to be clear; I have never witnessed my dad hit Molly Martens, ever.’
SARAH Corbett followed, similarly impressive. She told Judge David Hall that her life is filled with anniversaries of deaths. ‘The Martens have made me an orphan.’ The Corbett children told how they were coached by the Martens after their father’s killing. ‘What I said is what I was instructed to say. She (Molly Martens) taught me how to lie.’
Then in a devastating dismissal of her father’s second wife, Sarah Corbett said: ‘I never once said I don’t love Molly Martens. I am saying now, I do not love Molly Martens; she is not my mother.’
By sentencing the Martens to a further seven to 30 months prison, with 44 months already served, Judge Hall’s decision means that these father/daughter killers will be out again before the middle of next year. In the meantime the judge ordered Molly Martens undergo a psychiatric examination and be put on suicide watch. Well he should, considering the scale of the evidence that she suffers significant psychiatric disorder, which combined with an uncontrollable desire to have Jason Corbett’s children as her own, was almost bound to end in disaster.
The Corbett children and family, and the family and friends of Ashling Murphy, will return to the lives they’re now rebuilding within the love of their families.
The challenges they have faced in the way justice is administered are glaring. Criminal justice procedures are necessarily, and rightly, in the open, but more than sometimes they lack sensitivity by virtue of the circumstance. The strength and courage displayed by these victims of terrible violence against somebody they loved underscores the firmness of their character. Having already endured the worst, they’ve maintained the most admirable dignity.