You have a disturbing notion of love, Molly
ONE of the terms of Molly Martens’ $200,000 bail, when she appeared in handcuffs before a North Carolina court this week, was that she would ‘cease all contact’ with Jason Corbett’s immediate family – including his two children Jack and Sarah. It’s not uncommon for murder suspects to be warned off contacting the family of their alleged victim, but in this case the warning looks especially pointed.
Because Jack and Sarah aren’t just the family of the man that Molly Martens is accused of killing – they are also the children she claims as her very own with a fervour that borders on the obsessive.
They are the children to whom she calls herself Mom and whom she fought tooth and nail to keep in the days after their father was battered to death.
They are the children she has stormed social media to reach, posting daily Facebook messages of love and endless photographs of their happier times, often including her private phone number and email address.
They are the children she says she raised from infancy – Sarah was just 12 weeks old when her mother Mags died suddenly – and to whom she claims bonds stronger than blood.
She reminds them, in these messages and posts, of the fun they had on birthdays and Christmases, baking cookies, taking holidays, doing fun runs dressing up for parties. A few months ago, she tried to hire a plane to fly a birthday greeting over the home they now share with their father’s family in Limerick.
On Facebook, she describes their bedrooms, their Christmas tree, their favourite food and clothes, and she wonders what she could have done to be ‘a better mom’ to the children.
Her tone, though, seems rhetorical rather than bewildered: in Molly’s eyes, and in the eyes of the ‘friends’ applauding her Facebook posts, those two children were blessed to have her as their mother, and there was little more she could have done to make their lives perfect.
But ‘perfect’ moms don’t usually end up being charged with murdering dads, and the awkward fact remains that those two children have lost their father in violent circumstances, and that she is accused of his killing.
And for all the sympathy she has for herself and her plight, her public pronouncements appear lacking in pity for two children, who she professes to love and who have been orphaned by a brutal act.
You don’t need to be a relative, let alone
‘I’ll end the scandal of patients on trolleys,’ Enda Kenny’s campaign literature promised us five years ago. This week, Health Minister Leo Varadkar ruled out trying to peddle the same porkies this time out: ‘I think anyone who makes those kind of promises doesn’t understand the complexities of what we face.’ Or, to put it another way, ‘We didn’t realise what a mess the last lot had left until we got in.’ Or, in other words, the stock excuse for broken political promises since old God’s time.
a self-appointed ‘mom’, to feel huge compassion for two distraught siblings who have lost both parents in early childhood.
With that in mind, Molly’s endless posts of pictures and messages and inspirational witterings take on a more alarming tone. Nowhere in any of the photographs does the children’s father get a look-in – his job must have been just to hold the camera while Molly posed with his kids.
And the pictures are all beautiful, a Madison Avenue vision of the all-American family.
Even Molly’s account of their day-to-day lives could have come straight from a Disney fantasy, baking cakes for Halloween and Christmas, singing in the car, shopping in Chicago, snuggles and stories, reindeer food on the lawn, prayers round the table… nowhere, in this brittle, spunsugar scenario is there a hint of the everyday, the mundane, the reality of a normal family life, much less the darkness that she now alleges in her defence.
THE absence of any public display of sadness at Jason’s death, of mentions of him in her memories, suggests a disturbing, possessive fixation with these children, to the exclusion of others, particularly their father.
They are hers, she insists over and over, they all look so beautiful together, they made such a pretty picture and she wants them back. She had tried to persuade Jason to let her adopt them, she had even consulted lawyers about her entitlements to their custody before her husband’s murder, but she had failed in all efforts to become their legal mom.
She says she loves them and her Facebook postings certainly suggest a profound infatuation with Jack and Sarah.
But if Molly was the perfect mom, if she was as positive and healthy a force in their lives as she claims, then why did a US court say that she would be facing jail, for breach of her bail terms, if she tries to contact them?