Deadly American Marriage: The Shocking Death of Jason Corbett 

When police arrived at the Corbett house following the 911 call, they found Jason Corbett’s bloody body on the bedroom floor. He had been beaten to death.

In fact, a pathologist who performed the post-mortem later testified that Corbett’s skull was so badly shattered that he couldn’t say how many times he was struck, but he estimated that it was at least 12 times, with a baseball bat and a brick that Molly Martens had lying on her nightstand.

“The kids and I,” she later explained to the police, “we were going to paint–paint these bricks and flowers around the mailbox.”

So, the question of who had killed Jason Corbett was never a mystery—the mystery was why.

According to Thomas Martens, Molly’s father, he had been staying in the Corbett house when he heard a scuffle upstairs. He went up to find Jason Corbett with his arm around Molly’s throat.

“He sees me coming and he goes around her throat like this,” Thomas Martens later told the police, claiming that Corbett said, “I’m gonna kill her.”

A law graduate of Emory University, Thomas Martens had worked for the FBI for decades and, according to reporters, “knew exactly what to say.”

Did Thomas Martens and his daughter stage a domestic disturbance in order to murder Jason Corbett? That was for a jury to decide…

While the authorities who investigated the case had seen violent crime scenes before, some later attested that they had never seen anything like what greeted them when they arrived in Jason Corbett’s bedroom that night. 

Blood was spattered throughout the room, on walls, the floor, the bed, and elsewhere, and Jason’s body was soaked in it.

When paramedics arrived less than 10 minutes after the 911 call, they found Corbett’s body already strangely cold, as they later testified before the jury.

So brutal were the blows to Jason Corbett’s skull that one juror became ill when post-mortem photos were shown during the trial, forcing a brief pause in the proceedings.

Claiming that they had been acting in self-defense, Thomas and Molly Martens attempted to paint a picture of Molly’s late husband as an abusive man with anger problems—claims that were initially supported by statements from Corbett’s two children, then just seven and 9 years old.

After all, what motive would Molly Martens have had to kill her husband? The prosecution suggested several, with custody of the children being chief among them.

Neighbors later attested that Molly had claimed that the children were hers, and grew angry with Corbett when he contradicted her. 

Corbett’s family suggested he had been planning to move back to Ireland with the kids, and that the murder was a way to try to prevent that and snag custody.

The two children largely corroborated this, eventually retracting their statements about Corbett’s abuse, saying that Molly Martens had coached them.

At the trial, a victim impact statement written by then-13-year-old Jack Corbett was read aloud, in which he said that Molly Martens would never be a part of his family and would “always be remembered as a murderer.”

On August 9, 2017, Molly and Thomas Martens were both found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to no less than 20 years in prison. “There was no doubt in my mind,” one juror later said, while another described Molly Martens as “very manipulative.”

However, in March of 2021, the North Carolina Supreme Court disagreed. The North Carolina Court of Appeals had ruled to quash their initial convictions due to certain statements being excluded from evidence, and the Supreme Court upheld their decision.

Both of Jason Corbett’s children, now teenagers, agreed to testify against the Martenses if the case went to trial again.

Instead, the Maretenses accepted plea bargains, which dropped the charge to manslaughter and reduced their sentence to a mere 51 to 74 months, much of which had already been served.

“I’ve had to bite my tongue,” said Sheriff David Grice, who was one of the officers involved in the investigation, alleging that the pair “spent enough money on appeals until the courts got worn down and accepted their last appeal.”

Sarah Corbett agreed that her father’s killers had gotten off easy, and that had they faced a second trial, she was “confident they would have been found guilty, evident by their acceptance of the plea deal.”

Instead, they were released in 2024. “I am no longer a child that can be manipulated,” Sarah Corbett said upon their release.

“Despite serving their sentence, the repercussions of their actions will have a lasting impact.

The truth, known by all involved, will eventually come to light for the world to see.”

While the whole truth may always remain known only to those involved, deeper explorations into the circumstances surrounding Jason Corbett’s death continue.

In May of 2025, Netflix released a documentary titled A Deadly American Marriage that explores the events of that deadly night, including interviews with both Susan and Jack Corbett, as well as Thomas and Molly Martens.

Will it be the final word in this tragic case? Only time will tell…

Featured photos from “A Deadly American Family” via Netflix