After Judge David Hall called a 10-minute recess, Molly Martens rushed from the court, heaving in tears. Casting aside her uncle Mike Earnest’s attempts to calm her, she ran off down a hallway outside Courtroom No 6 to be alone with her thoughts.
Molly had just viewed, along with everyone else in the courtroom, a video of her police interview shortly after 6.45am on August 2nd, 2015, less than four hours after she and her father, Tom, called 911 after killing Limerickman Jason Corbett (39).
In the 2017 criminal trial, where Molly and her father, Tom Martens, were convicted and sentenced to 20-25 years for second degree murder, this police interview was not shown to the jury. Molly Martens did not take the stand in that trial, and so she could not be cross-examined about the dramatic scenes which unfolded in Interview Room No 2 at Davidson County Sheriff’s Office.
On Wednesday, the full interview was played before a hushed courtroom, which included Jason Corbett’s children, Jack (19) and Sarah (17), and their guardians, Jason’s older sister, Tracey, and her husband David Lynch.
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At 6.45am, Lt Wanda Thompson, head of the Criminal Investigations Division of Davidson County Sheriff’s Office, began the interview. Though Lt Thompson had last seen Molly’s husband lying dead on a gurney in the back of the advanced life support unit, she used the present tense when asking Molly about her husband’s name, date of birth and occupation. If Molly was confused as to whether Jason was still alive, she did not seek any clarity on the matter.
Lt Thompson assured Molly that she was not under arrest and could leave at any time: “If you want to stop this or you want to leave, all you need do is tell me.”
Molly was severely agitated, repeatedly crossing her arms and wrapping them around herself, alternatively hugging herself or hunching forward and back in apparent discomfort. She kept rubbing her neck, wringing her hands and clasping her throat. Wearing a black fleece top over her blue pyjamas, she had brought a brown fur blanket from home and draped it over her legs, but still, she seemed cold sitting in the austere white-brick walled surroundings of the windowless interview room.
When Lt Thompson asked Molly to explain what happened, she said she and her husband had been fighting, and that this was a normal thing.
“So there’s a history of domestic violence at the house?” Lt Thompson asked. “How long has that been going on?”
Molly put her hand around her throat and whispered: “Forever.”
Lt Thompson asked if Molly had ever made a complaint to the police or gone to the hospital over this. Molly said she had been to the hospital a “couple of times”, but she did not tell the doctors about the alleged abuse. She said she had gone to a hospital in Kernersville around May 2015 after Jason had “hit her head against the headboard of their bed”.
She did not tell the doctors about the alleged domestic abuse but said she had been experiencing headaches and thought she might have “swelling of the brain” and might need an MRI. The assistant district attorney, Kaitlyn Jones, said the doctors found no injuries on her head, refused her an MRI and sent her home.
Avoiding eye contact with Lt Thompson, focusing on the floor while she wrung her hands, Molly described how on the night of the killing, Sarah, then aged eight, had woken with a nightmare, thinking the fairies on her sheets were insects and crawling spiders. Molly got up and changed the sheets and when she came back down, an altercation occurred.
“She [Sarah] woke up, so he was angry that he was woken up. And then a dog barked, and he was angry that the dog barked. I said she’d just had a nightmare. He choked me. Told me to shut up. I screamed.”
Lt Thompson sought more specifics on where she was in the master bedroom when Jason started to choke her. She appeared confused, at one point saying she was lying on the bed, at another point that she was sitting up in the bed, and on another occasion, that she was standing at the end of the bed.
This discrepancy could be significant as a blood spatter expert for the prosecution has said the altercation started in the bed as there was blood spatter across the underside of the quilt, but Tom has consistently said he went into the room and found Jason standing at the end of the bed with his hands on Molly’s neck.
After Lt Thompson asked Molly repeatedly where she was when the incident started, Molly’s voice rose to a high pitch: “Sitting down and standing up. Maybe he was standing up by the end of it. I don’t know. Can we stop? Please stop.”
She kept rubbing her neck furiously, and Lt Thompson had to tell her to stop. Molly said she could not remember when her father entered the room, but he hit Jason on the head with the bat, and then Jason managed to get the bat.
“He tried to hit my dad and missed, and I hit him on the head with a brick.”
She explained that the brick was on her nightstand because she and the children intended to paint brick as a garden decoration.
Molly then depicted Jason, a packing executive with MPS, as a drunk. She said he would binge drink on Friday nights when they lived in Ireland, going to the pub after work and not coming home until 2am.
Lt Thompson then remarked: “I know the Irish people are known for drinking.”
The interview was under way 45 minutes before Wanda Thompson said: “You know your husband did not survive his injuries?” Molly, without emotion, replied: “I didn’t think so.”
When told that she should inform Jason’s family about the death, Molly started heaving and weeping saying she was worried “they would try to kill her” and that they would “take away my children”.
When Lt Thompson told her it was a distinct possibility, Molly sobbed: “But I raised them.”
Molly then asked if the house was going to be clean when she returned. Lt Thompson said there was a lot of blood and it was not the sheriff’s responsibility to clean the scene.
Molly then asked if the police could inform Jason’s family.
After Molly wrote her 109-word statement, Lt Thompson told her that she would bring the case to the district attorney and he would decide, but “at this point, having talked to your dad, and talked to you, it looks like this is going to be self-defence, okay? I don’t think there’s going to be any issue with that.”