The pretty and troubled femme fatale who could never match her parents’ exalted expectations
She floundered, had several jobs, all casual
THE pretty blonde with the cute dimples stared at the camera with a look of child-like innocence. It was 2001. Molly Martens, dressed in a dark swimsuit emblazoned with an anchor, stood at the end of the fourth row of the bleachers and posed for a picture with her Farragut High School classmates.
She had made it onto the school swim team and although not as talented as her peers, in her own mind, she was a champ.
Like her brothers, having a ‘winning’ mentality was drilled into her from a very young age. Her mother Sharon was a doctor of mathematics who had attended the prestigious Emory University in Georgia and her father Tom, an FBI agent, was also a trained attorney.
In the barometer of success in life, everything was measured by achievement. Described as ‘pillars of society’ by those who knew them, the Martens aspired to a life of prestige and affluence, complete with children who fitted perfectly into that very same mould.
The only problem was that Molly didn’t quite fit. And when she failed to live up to expectations, her parents were going to make sure nobody knew why.
Molly Paige Martens, the only daughter of Sharon and Tom, was born into a life of privilege on September 28, 1983.
The Martens family, the quintessential embodiment of the American success story – white, educated and rich – finally had a little princess.
They lived in the township of Farragut, a town in East Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s less than an hour’s drive away from the Great Smoky Mountains, a place steeped in Southern Appalachian history, mountain culture and hillbilly ways. But Farragut, by compassion, is a million miles away from the BBQ-finger lickin’ county music lovin’, trappings of the Smokies.
Ranked as one of the top ten richest places in Tennessee, the town is renowned for its swanky restaurants, lavish homes and seasonal festivals.
As a young girl, Molly’s childhood home was in a sprawling residence on Lindenhall Circle, in a neighbourhood known as Andover place.
Tucked away in the rolling hills of Smith Road, just minutes away from central Farragut, residents have access to a pool staffed with trained lifeguards and a community clubhouse.
Former neighbours remember Molly as a ‘shy’ girl who was good a swimming but often missed a lot of school. ‘She was just a normal girl,’ said one neighbour.
‘She was shy and quiet. There was nothing remarkable about her. She was very good at swimming but she had physical health problems and she missed a lot of school because of that.’
After about ten years in Andover place, the Martens made the 8minute move to the Fox Run neighbourhood, another salubrious subdivision in west Farragut.
It was seen as a slightly more desired location to live, with easy access to nearby marinas and Concord yacht club. Residents enjoy the exclusive use of private community pools, a walking trail, a sports field, tennis court and a large modern club house.
Homes are nestled along beautiful tree-lined streets and some have breath-taking views over Tennessee’s mountains. On average, the homes are about 10-years-old, ranging in price from about $300,000 to $700,000.
The Martens residence, a fourbed, five-bathroom house on Comblain Road, was set back from the road and had more privacy than the family’s last home.
By now Molly was in Frarragut High School, having started as a freshman in 1999, but was struggling to keep up with her peers. Her mental health, rather than her physical ailments, was disrupting her education.
In order to keep up appearances, Tom and Sharon decided to keep it in the family and few knew what was going on. Molly attended a weekly youth group attached to St John Newman Catholic school, were attendees remember her ‘issues’ being the subject of whispers among her peers.
‘She started crying over something one day,’ said Rita Stallard.
‘When some asked what was going on her friends said she had some issues and that she didn’t like to talk about it.’
After her junior year, Molly allegedly had more time off school.
‘She never finished,’ said one neighbour. ‘Everyone was told it was because of her foot.’
However, Molly seems to have secured a place in Clemson, one of America’s prestigious colleges, in 2003.
She was pictured in the Clemson University yearbook as a freshman, but there is no record of her after that.
Unlike her brothers, wildly successful in both academia and sport, Molly was floundering.
She had several jobs, all of the casual variety, but she never earned enough money independently to keep her in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed.
By 2004, she had a job as a receptionist in Visage hair salon in downtown Knoxville.
Her former boss Monty Howard remembers her as a ‘good worker’ who got along with staff.
‘She worked for me for about a year and a half,’ he said.
‘She answered the phones, took bookings and greeted clients, that sort of thing. I always found her easy to deal with. There were no problems.’
Visage was where she met Jeremiah Taylor, a hair stylist who also worked at the salon. Mr Taylor, 36, went out with Ms Martens for a year and a half from 2004 to 2005. He remembers her as a ‘talented dancer’ who had extensive ballet training.
‘We just hit it off and eventually got together,’ he told the Mail.
‘She was pretty cool and easygoing. We hung out a lot, mainly with each other’s families. She was a gifted dancer… really something else.’
‘It was nice. I spent a lot of time in their home with her parents.
‘I even went to her brother Bobby’s wedding in Puerto Rico. Her father was working for the FBI at the time.
‘I am very involved in my faith, my mother is a preacher, and I talked about this a lot with Molly.
‘She was starting to share the same views and her parents were not happy and made that clear,’ he added.
The couple, who moved into an apartment in nearby Oakridge, haven’t spoken since the split, despite parting on amicable terms.
‘There was no real reason,’ he said.
‘We just went our separate ways. I was travelling and lived in Miami for a long time and I only recently got back.’
Mr Taylor – who appeared on a reality TV programme called The Dukes Of 2Squareabout two men who leave their jobs to become guerilla graffiti artists – said that, apart from the usual ‘girl’s stuff’, Molly had no major issues.
‘She did suffer a lot with health problems to do with her foot,’ he said.
‘She had some condition that required a lot of surgery and it meant she was off work a lot.’
Sometime after her relationship with Jeremiah ended, Molly became romantically involved with Keith Maginn.
By then she had tried her hand at modelling, but steady work wasn’t forthcoming as a result.
On February 22, 2007, almost a year before she met widowed father-of-two Jason Corbett, Keith and Molly went on their first date.
They had connected via a dating website and after a few introductory emails and several marathon phone sessions, he decided to meet Molly in person.
‘I was floored when I met her in person,’ he recalled in an interview with the Mail.
‘She was absolutely drop dead. My first thought was, “Wow, she is way out of my league.” I brought some presents for her beloved cat, which went over well with pet and owner. We drank wine and picked up our conversation again like we’d known each other for years. The two of us connected so fast that it seemed like something out of a movie. We eventually went out for a late Mexican dinner and everything went perfectly. The whole night seemed magical, surreal.’
Back then Molly was 25 and living in a two-bedroom condominium owned by her parents on Berlin Drive in West Knoxville, Tennessee. She was working as a nanny and teaching young children how to swim.
Keith, originally from Cinncinati in Ohio, had moved to Knoxville several years before and was working for non-profit organisation Habitat for Humanity. According
to him, they hit it off immediately and were ‘inseparable’ after their first date. She had a unique ‘zest for life’, he recalls, and was happy and fun to be around.
‘We fell in love fast and hard,’ he said. ‘She was happy, fun, beautiful and free-spirited. Molly had a zest for life I hadn’t encountered before. She was unique, special.’
A serious relationship quickly developed, with Keith moving into Molly’s apartment a month after they met. Soon afterwards, she confided in him about her mental health struggles.
At the time Keith was himself suffering from chronic fatigue and depression, which he says provided a common understanding for them as a couple.
‘To her credit, Molly told me early on in the relationship that she is bipolar,’ Keith told the Mail.
‘I didn’t think much about it because medications had her stabilised and everything was blissful and bright. A month or two into our relationship, she got a staph infection. The infection medications she was given overrode her bipolar medications and knocked everything out of balance. Like someone flipped a light switch.
‘Molly was the saddest person I had ever been around. She would cry in bed for hours. Seeing the person I loved suffering so much was a very trying situation. I did everything I could, but nothing seemed to help.’
Unable to continue her job as a nanny, Molly stayed at home while Keith earned rent money for them both. ‘It was paid to her parents just like you would pay rent to any landlord,’ he says.
‘Molly couldn’t work any more so it was down to me. I was supporting us both. We were paying rent to her parents. I think if she was on her own they would have helped her more [financially].
‘But knowing that she was in a relationship they were kind of like, “You guys need to make this happen.” They would have paid for anything major that came up, but for the most part she was financially dependent on me. I paid the rent, bought groceries, paid the bills. You don’t make much money working for a non-profit. We were scraping by on my salary.’
At the beginning, the relationship was ‘amazing’. According to Mr Maginn, they both genuinely cared about each other and because they were both struggling, had a mutual respect and tenderness.
‘Once her depression took over, things were stressful,’ he says. ‘Heartbreaking, actually. I never knew what mood Molly would be in when I got home from work. I walked on eggshells much of the time, trying my best to keep things stable. But things were usually tense. We were both going down on a sinking ship. For better or worse, mental illness has such a negative stigma and Molly didn’t want people to know the truth of the situation... I finally swallowed my pride and sought out a therapist.’
As the relationship came under increasing strain, Keith became concerned by the ‘plethora’ of drugs Molly was taking. At one point, he claims, she was taking 16 prescribed medications a day and another ten to be used ‘as needed’.
‘Most of the stuff she was taking was for bipolar or manic depression,’ the self-help author says.
‘So she was taking some serious drugs. They were prescribed, it wasn’t like she was doing it on her own. She was insomniac, so she sometimes would be up all night. She was taking stuff for that. She had a tremendous amount of stuff on her plate.’
Against this turbulent background, Molly’s relationship with her parents, Thomas and Sharon, became tense, according to Keith.
After years spent trying to deal with Molly’s many problems, he says they too had become ‘exasperated’ by her behaviour.
‘Her parents were very much aware of her mental health issues,’ he says. ‘They are well aware of the many doctors, the medications she was taking. They knew about it all. They did try to help. They lived relatively close and they would come over. I don’t know how much they actually helped but they tried to. I felt that they were at times overwhelmed and frustrated about the whole thing.’
In a bid to preserve his girlfriend’s delicate state, Keith surrendered to Molly’s ‘pleas’ to get engaged.
On her birthday, he arranged for the couple to return to Pelancho’s, the Mexican restaurant in downtown Knoxville where they had spent their first date. In his book he says he couldn’t afford a decent ring, so picked out a ‘for now’ ring on Overstock.com for less than $150.
‘It was completely her idea to get engaged,’ he told the Mail. ‘She really thought being engaged would make her happy. She thought that was going to be the cure. I knew it was not but I thought it would help for a while. It worked for like one day. The next day she was back. She was superhappy for a day and then the next day she was crying. I had no intention of marrying her until she got better but I was okay with being engaged just because I thought it might help.’
When getting engaged failed to give Molly a lift, she turned to other ways of finding fulfilment.
‘She was always saying that kids would make her happy,’ says Keith. ‘She ended up getting pregnant. I was terrified because I knew how many medications. I was terrified.’
On September 16, 2007, Molly suffered a miscarriage.
‘She woke up one day and said she’d had a dream that she miscarried,’ says Keith.
‘She wasn’t feeling good so we went to the hospital. Her parents came. They said that she had miscarried very early on in the pregnancy. She was heartbroken. I honestly was relieved.
‘I thought it was better for everybody that it did not work out.’
Five months later, in February 2008, with no improvement in her condition, Molly checked in to a ‘medical rehabilitation centre’ in Atlanta, Georgia. The hospital fees for her stay in the one-hall monitored ward of Emory Hospital were paid for by her parents.
‘The psych ward in Atlanta was a last-ditch attempt to try and get her medications right,’ Keith told the Mail.
‘It was to try to get her off all the stuff she was on and get her on the one or two things that could make her stable. It was very heartwrenching. The people that were in there… It was hard to recognise them as human sometimes. The sounds they were making, just staring at the walls. Having the person you love in that situation was terrible. I believe her doctor suggested she go there. It was very expensive and her parents paid for it. That’s what I believe happened.’
After spending four days receiving treatment, Molly returned to Knoxville with Keith and the couple tried to continue their relationship.
Then one night, ‘out of the blue’, according to Keith, Molly said that she wanted to go to Ireland to nanny. ‘It was very odd,’ said Keith.
‘She literally turned to me one night and said, “I want to go nanny somewhere in Europe.” I was, like, “Oh, here we go.”
She sometimes came up with these ideas and I was always like, “This is not the fix.” So she was like, “I want to go to Europe,” and I was like, “Okay, Molly… whatever.” I went to bed, she stayed up, which was pretty normal.’
One morning soon after, Molly told Keith she had found a nannying position in Ireland.
‘I was like, “How did this happen so fast?” She said, “I’m going to go very soon.” So I was quite taken aback. I was used to her not following through on things that she was planning, so I didn’t think it would happen.
He felt if she wasn’t well enough to go to the store to get groceries, how is she going to Ireland and nanny for a family?
According to Keith, his fiancée initially told him she was going for
She became ‘obsessed’ with the children Molly was seen ‘glammed up to the nines’
a week, then she said she would be away for ‘several’ weeks.
‘I literally thought she was going to be gone for a few weeks,’ he said.
‘I heard her on the phone right in front of me talking to a friend and she told her friend and said she was going to be gone for a month.
‘Later she was on the phone to someone else saying two or three months, literally two or three months. When she got off the phone I was like, “What’s going on? You told me you were going for a few weeks.” She was like, “I am, I’m just…”.
Ultimately, she would squirm out of giving a definite answer, he said.
After she left to go to Ireland, Keith never saw Molly again.
Back in Limerick, Jason Corbett, who was 30 at the time, had been widowed by the death of his first wife Mags after she died suddenly from an asthma attack in 2006.
Sarah Corbett was two and her brother Jack was just 11 weeks old at the time of their mother’s death. At the time Mr Corbett was working for packaging company Chesapeake and was also part-owner of a crèche run by Lynn Shanahan, also from Limerick.
‘After Mags died, we had the two children with us in the creche every day and got to know them so well,’ said Ms Shanahan. Molly Martens came to Limerick in March 2008 to work as an au pair looking after Jack and Sarah.
Jason and Molly started a relationship and, according to Mr Corbett’s friends, decided to move to the US with his children when she said she wanted to return home. The couple got engaged in 2010.
A year later Chesapeake arranged to transfer Mr Corbett to its Lexington plant in North Carolina. That same year the couple tied the knot in a lavish ceremony in Molly’s home town of Knoxville, Tennessee, where both Jack and Sarah had starring roles in the bridal party.
The move saw Mr Corbett purchase a luxury house in the sought-after Meadowlands area. The development boasts an 18hole Hale Irwin-designed golf course, clubhouse, pool, tennis courts, playgrounds and parks, as well as more than 40 acres of natural area.
The Corbetts’ 2,545 sq ft house, set on 0.58 acres of land, was paid for in cash. Its estimated value is $350,000.
Like their neighbours, Jack and Sarah were enrolled in nearby Walberg Elementary School, the yummy-mummy option of choice for the allimportant pick-up and drop-off at the gates.
The couple had two cars – Molly drove a BMW SUV while Jason opted for a more practical Sedan. They quickly adapted to community life. Jason joined the local golf club and Molly took up a role as a swimming coach. While the men on the street gravitated towards him for his sociable spirit, the women marvelled at Molly’s ability to bake cakes and keep a supermodel figure. She was athletic and well groomed. He was gregarious and welcoming. They appeared to have it all.
‘They were the most loved-up couple you would ever see,’ said a neighbour. Always holding hands, always kissing and laughing. They just seemed very, very happy.’
But all was not well in the marriage. Jason had been resisting persistent attempts by his wife to adopt his two children. Sources say she became ‘obsessed’ with them both, in particular, Sarah.
Molly had led neighbours in the area to believe that she was their biological mother, even describing her pregnancy with Sarah to one.
To add further strain to the marriage, Jason was deeply unhappy in the United States. He was incredibly homesick and missed his friends and family.
He had become down on life and had started to gain a lot of weight. Molly goaded him about putting on the pounds. The night before the killing, the couple were at a gathering at a friend’s house where she made a remark about his weight in front of them. Jason left early.
The following night, August 2, 2015. Molly and her father beat Jason to death.
After they were charged, it was back to a life of privilege and protection in Farragut.
From the comfort of her hometown and the added protective shelter of her childhood home, she quietly began ‘moving forward’ with her life.
In a change from her previous incarnation as a ‘stay-at-home mom’, she has enrolled as a student at Pellissippi State College, where she took up a course studying interior design. Her mother Sharon, who teaches in the college maths department, would never be far away.
In a photo posted on a social networking site associated with the course, Molly can be seen striking a sultry pose next to her classmates after winning a prize for ‘best presentation’.
There were field trips to IKEA, were Molly playfully posed for the camera lying across a bed, and social outings with friends where she was spotted ‘glammed up to the nines’, seemingly without a care in the world.
Outside her studies, the former swim coach threw herself back in to the world of swimming, taking part in the Tennessee Open water series last summer. In a series of pictures of the event the blonde can be seen swimming alongside competitors at a swim meet.
Waiting close by on the jetty at Kingston Waterfront Park, after ferrying his daughter from their luxury Knoxville home, her father, ex-FBI agent Tom, passed the time watching the action.
Few knew that both were facing second-degree murder charges and those who did knew not to mention it.
Throughout the trial Molly would retreat home to Tennessee at the weekends under the watchful eye of Tom and Sharon, carrying on with life as normal.
But this time they couldn’t cover up the ugly truth.
Yesterday, as they were laid away in handcuffs, the gig was finally up.