Subscriber OnlyCourts

Death of Jason Corbett’s first wife put under the microscope as her children look on in court

Legacies of Corbett and Mags Fitzpatrick subjected to public autopsy as prosecution and defence argue over manner of deaths

Children of Jason Corbett, Jack and Sarah Corbett, arriving at Davidson County Superior Court in North Carolina with their aunt and Jason's sister Tracey Corbett-Lynch and husband David Lynch on November 2nd. Photograph: Scott Muthersbaugh

Brian Carroll in Lexington, North Carolina
Tue Nov 7 2023 - 06:00

They are the ghosts of this trial, two young lovers who met at a 21st birthday party, stayed up all night talking, fell in love, married, bought a home together and had two children.

In courtroom six of the Davidson County superior court, Jason Corbett and Mags Fitzpatrick are the deceased, their lives and legacies subjected to a public autopsy as the prosecution and defence argue over the manner of their deaths.

On Monday, expert witnesses for the defence and the prosecution each put the death of Mags Corbett, née Fitzpatrick, Jason’s first wife, under the microscope as her children, Jack (19) and Sarah (17), watched on without any outward show of emotion, a signal more of their inurement after six days of their parents’ lives being dissected, than of their real emotions.

Molly Martens and her father, former FBI agent and counter-intelligence officer Tom Martens, sat in the well of the court with their four lawyers, less than 10ft in front of Jack and Sarah. The Martens’ relatives sat on the left hand side of the court behind convicted felons, Tom and Molly Martens, whose innocence is no longer in question in this hearing. Tom has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and Molly has pleaded no contest – which, Judge David Hall said, will be treated as a guilty plea.

READ MORE

This hearing is just about sentencing, and the amount of further time in jail the Martens will have to serve, having spent 3½ years in jail before being released from the 20- to 25-year sentences imposed after their conviction on second-degree murder charges in 2017. They were ordered to be released after winning their appeal before the North Carolina supreme court in 2021.

[ Follow The Irish Times WhatsApp Channel for breaking news straight to your phone ]

Molly Martens walks into the Davidson County courthouse on Monday October 30th. Photograph: Jerry Wolford

In the normal course of events, the sentencing hearing for a guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter would last less than 30 minutes, according to legal experts in North Carolina, but this case has been scheduled to last two weeks. The Martens are using every minute of that time to tell this story: Jason was choking Molly on the night, Tom intervened, and together they beat him to death with a baseball bat and a brick in self-defence. They need to use the two weeks of this sentencing hearing to establish extreme mitigating circumstances that would persuade Judge Hall to ignore the district attorney’s calls for a nine-year sentence, and instead reduce the sentences for each, or apply the probation act and let both walk free. The central plank of this mitigation argument is that they believed Jason had killed his first wife, and so their fear and consequent actions were both justified.

Jack was two years old, and Sarah 12 weeks old, when their mother, Mags, died. An Irish pathologist found she died due to complications following an asthma attack which left her unable to breathe. Experts – on both the prosecution and defence side – agree that she did not die of an asthma attack. The Irish pathologists reported that Mag’s lungs and heart were examined and she reported that there was nothing unusual about them. The experts at this sentencing hearing say an ashtma attack causes the lungs to inflate like balloons because the oxygen goes in but the asthma sufferer cannot breathe out. If Mags Fitzpatrick had died of an asthma attack then there would have been physical indicators – the lungs fill and there are mucus plugs visible under microscopic inspection. Neither of these were found, so the argument is: she must have died of something else.

Two defence experts say that one possibility is homicide by manual strangulation. One of those experts has gone further and said this scenario was “likely”.

The prosecution say Mags had a long history of asthma and had been hospitalised and used a home nebuliser. She took medication for it. And in the weeks before her death, she had gone to a GP and complained of chest pains, and a pain down her left arm – an established symptom of potential cardiac arrest.

Assistant district attorney, Alan Martin, tends to avoid the dramatics or grandstanding. He put it to the experts that yes, manual strangulation is one possibility, simply because there is no determined cause of death, so there are many possibilities. However, he said there is no scientific or physical evidence from the autopsy to make a homicide even remotely probable. Both of the experts for the prosecution agree that manual strangulation is “far from probable”.

Martin suggested a much simpler explanation: Mags took her asthma medication – Albuterol – when she was struggling to breathe, and this medication has an instant effect, it speeds the heartrate. This, aligned with Mags complaining of chest pains and pains down her left arm, could indicate cardiac arrest is a possibility. But the heart was not examined sufficiently at autopsy, Martin said, so we will never know.

The ghosts of their parents are everywhere in this trial for Jack and Sarah, but neither will rest until the truth outs. Later this week, Jack and Sarah will have their say through victim impact statements. Regardless of the sentence imposed, they will return and visit Jason and Mags at Mungret graveyard in Limerick where the two young lovers who met at a 21st birthday party are now buried side by side.

LATEST STORIES