Aftermath of Jason Corbett’s killing: Thomas Martens, ex-FBI, knew just what to tell police

In Davidson County, the sun was coming up on August 2nd, 2015. For Thomas Martens, it was a new day and a new life.

Three hours earlier he left his son-in-law’s skull with multiple fractures from at least 12 blows of an aluminium Louisville Slugger baseball bat that was 28 inches long, weighed 17 ounces, and had a 2½-inch barrel.

Martens knew his daughter Molly Martens, had hit her husband too – with a brick she kept by her bed – but he was calm.

Over the course of his 30 years at the FBI, Martens had what his defence counsel Jay Vannoy called a stellar career. He ran violent crime taskforces and the FBI’s offices in Knoxville and Cincinnati. Earlier, on assignment in Washington, DC, he had helped jail two mafia bosses from New York. Then he moved into counter-intelligence work for the FBI.

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Aftermath of Jason Corbett’s killing: Thomas Martens, ex-FBI, knew just what to tell police

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Thomas Martens looked across the table at Detective Michael Hurd, who was preparing to interview him. The older man would be a match for the novice , who had only been in the criminal investigation division for 10 months.

[ Molly and Thomas Martens sentenced to up to 30 additional months in prison over Jason Corbett killing ]

A law graduate from Emory University in Georgia, Martens had a legal expertise that was highly sought-after in the FBI. He trained FBI and DEA officers deployed on special operations in how best to conduct interviews with detainees and how to spot evasive tactics. He knew exactly what say to Hurd and his fellow detective, Brandon Smith, and precisely what not to say. After all, there are two sides to every story.

He knew, for example, that it would be hard to tell just how many times Molly had hit her husband, Jason Corbett, with that brick, especially as the injuries to the 39-year-old Limerick man’s skull were covered over by the blows of the bat.

Of the 12 separate points of impact on Jason’s skull, four were struck repeatedly, crushing the back left and right sides of the skull. Eight of the blows were sufficient to have rendered Jason unconscious, and four of these were individually sufficient to have killed him.

As Martens sat in the windowless interview room , waiting for Detective Smith to come back with the coffee he ordered, he chatted with the detective sitting opposite him. Wearing a black T-shirt with “Sheriff” printed in white, bold letters across the back, Hurd had a gun holstered to his right hip and a sleeve tattoo down to his right elbow. Martens was not a fan of tattoos – they reminded him of Molly’s hippy, Jesus-obsessed ex-boyfriend, Jeremiah Taylor. Molly had several boyfriends over the years, even a fiance, but, apart from Jonathan DeBerry, whom she had dated while they both attended Farragut High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, Martens had not warmed to any man she brought home, least of all Jason Corbett.

Hurd had experience of violent scenes but nothing like the one at 160 Panther Creek Court. There was blood everywhere – three of the four walls were blood-spattered. There were two large blood splashes on the south wall. To the right of the splashes, there were gouges in the wall, two or more inches in diameter, then multiple areas of blood spatter, in a descending pattern to the floor.

In better light, Hurd would have seen, just a few inches above the skirting board, a rectangle shape where something had hit the wall with such force, the plaster board had impressed and cracked the paint into the perfect facsimile of a brick.

There was “puddled” blood next to the body. There was dried blood on the chest, blood spattered across the underside of the quilt cover, and cast-off blood across the blinds on the small window to the right of the double bed, Molly’s side, where she kept the brick.

And then, there was the door. The handle was smeared red from a bloody hand, and higher up on the left-hand side of the white wood was a distinct set of red fingers, not a full handprint but the stains of fingers bridging the door and the architrave, searching for a grip, then slipping downwards.

Finally, Detective Smith returned with Martens’s coffee. He had been sitting there for 17 minutes. He picked up the styrofoam cup and the 65-year-old ensured the detectives noticed his hands. “I’m already shaking.”

Detective Smith: And the two children is their kids?

Martens: The two children are his kids by a former marriage. And perhaps it would be helpful if I just kind of launched into a story ... cause it will contribute to my state of mind. He’s an Irish citizen. He was married in Ireland. He had those two children and his first wife died in mysterious circumstances. The finding was that she had an asthma attack in his car. She died of asphyxiation. Molly saw an advertisement for a, um, what do you call ‘em, not a babysitter, my mind’s not too sure right now.

Detective Smith: A nanny.

Martens: A nanny. And so she answered that ad and she went to work for Jason in Ireland and they subsequently developed a romantic relationship. And he got transferred here to Winston-Salem to a packaging plant.

It had taken Martens scarcely a minute to point the finger at someone else. This was the first time anyone had heard of Jason’s first wife, Mags, dying in mysterious circumstances. No one, not Jason, his family or Mags’s family, had ever considered it anything other than a tragedy. Mags’s sister, Catherine Fitzpatrick, was in the house living with Jason and Mags on the night.

She saw Mags come into the kitchen, struggling to breathe. She kept telling Catherine: “I’m going to die.” Her home nebuliser wasn’t helping and neither was her Albuterol inhaler. They lived in the countryside, about 20 minutes’ drive from University Hospital Limerick. Jason called an ambulance, then put Mags in the car and drove to meet the ambulance halfway. Mags died in the car and, despite Jason’s attempts to revive her, and the ambulance crew’s best efforts, the 32-year-old Limerick childcare worker was declared dead on arrival.

Jason was left to raise their son, Jack (then two), and daughter, Sarah (12 weeks), alone.He attempted to keep updating Sarah’s baby book. Mags had filled Jack’s baby book with all the milestones from his first word to his first steps. Sarah’s baby book, though, is incomplete, the entries sporadic, then abandoned.

The detectives were intrigued by the news of Jason’s first wife choking to death. Thomas Martens had claimed on the 911 call at 3.02am that Jason was choking Molly, trying to kill her: “He was choking my daughter. I hit him in the head with a baseball bat. He’s bleeding all over and I may have killed him.”

Thomas Martens believed he had to save his only daughter. It wasn’t the first time. She had struggled since early adolescence with mental health and was diagnosed as bipolar in her teens. She took medication, and her schoolfriends noted long, unexplained absences from Farragut High. Martens and his wife, Sharon, were influential people and got her into Clemson University, a prestigious and expensive college, but she dropped out after less than a semester.

She drifted into retail and receptionist jobs, sometimes becoming depressed, other times spiralling towards chaos and an eventual crash. Martens and Sharon were at their wits’ end over Molly, who was engaged and pregnant. Martens didn’t hold out much hope for the guy either. Keith Maginn worked for a non-profit and didn’t have many financial prospects.

Then, when Molly had an apparent miscarriage she spiralled into a spell where she closed the curtains on the Berlin Street investment apartment that Martens and Sharon had bought in Knoxville. Martens charged Molly and Maginn rent, and refused to budge when Molly’s fiance said he could not pay the monthly rent without some input from Molly.

Molly was largely confined to sleeping late, then spending hours lying in the bath, drinking wine, until she was either delirious and hyper or morose and angry by the time Maginn,came home. She was taking 15 different medications a day. Her parents booked her into a psychiatric unit in Georgia.

About a month after leaving the psychiatric unit, Molly announced to her fiance that she was leaving to go to Ireland to take up a job as an au pair to two young kids who had lost their mother. Molly confided so much to one friend, Helen McCormac, that McCormac felt she knew Jack and Sarah personally before Molly had ever met them.

Sitting in the sheriff’s office, Thomas Martens knew there was only one way out. He would take the fall, and for that, Molly needed to stick to the script.

She was being interviewed by Lieut Wanda Thompson, the head of the criminal investigations division (CID) in Davidson County. Thompson had been woken around 3.20am by a phone call from Cpl Clayton Dagenhardt, the first officer at the scene. Thompson texted Smith and Hurd, who, like all 12 detectives in CID, were on call. Thompson’s unwritten rule was that you had to be up, showered and in your county car on your way to the scene within 20 minutes of getting her call. Hurd, Smith, Thompson and Lieut Frankie Young, who was in charge of crime scene investigations, all arrived at 160 Panther Creek Court at around 4am.

Young went inside the $350,000 home to shoot the scene. Afterwards, he photographed Thomas Martens and Molly Martens outside the house. His photograph of Molly, draped in a brown fur blanket over her paisley blue twin-set pyjamas, showed scarcely a mark on her. Just some dried blood around her forehead and hair.

Thompson went to emergency medical services van number six, the advanced life-support unit, to consult the paramedics. Jason Corbett was inside lying dead on a gurney, his bloodied and bruised left hand turned upwards, one fingernail broken, and, between his fingers, like the most perfect exhibit, a single long strand of Molly’s blonde hair.

Paramedics Amanda Hackworth and Barry Alphin reported that the body was cold to the touch. They declared Jason dead at 3.20am, but they were already curious about how long he’d been dead for before the 911 call was made.

Dagenhardt directed Thompson to his patrol car where Thomas Martens was sitting in the back seat. Thompson opened the door and detected a strong smell of alcohol. She introduced herself and asked Martens if he would be willing to come down to the station. The first thing Martens said was: “I’m a lawyer.”

It wasn’t until Smith and Hurd started the video-recorded interview at Davidson County Sheriff’s Office that Martens told them he was a retired FBI agent. Over in interview room number two, Wanda Thompson was in for her own surprise.

Between seemingly uncontrollable sobs, rubbing her neck, and cradling herself, Molly Martens told Lt Thompson in an anguished whisper that she and Jason had argued that night when Sarah (8) woke up from a nightmare, convinced that the ballerinas on her sheets were insects and fairies crawling over her. She came downstairs to the master bedroom on the ground floor. Sharon Martens’s two dogs started to bark. Molly took Sarah upstairs to change her sheets and when she came back down Jason was furious. He didn’t like her “coddling” Sarah. He didn’t like to be woken up in the middle of the night.

Molly said Jason started choking her, but Thompson noticed the 32-year-old seemed confused about where this started.“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 said, sobbing.

When Thompson asked why she kept rubbing her neck, she said it was sore, especially when she swallowed. She continued: “He grabbed my throat and then he put his arm around it when he heard me screaming. Then he let go for a second and I screamed really loud. I can’t remember next until my dad came in.”

Thomas Martens told detectives he was asleep in the basement bedroom, underneath the master bedroom. He heard loud noises and thumping sounds and grabbed a bat he’d brought with him to North Carolina, when he and Sharon had suddenly decided to cancel dinner plans in Knoxville and make an impromptu five-hour drive to Molly’s house in Winston-Salem. The bat was a present for his “grandson” Jack and he had also brought a tennis racket as a present for Sarah.

The bloodied baseball bat left the house in a police evidence bag. Police never could locate the tennis racket. Nor could they find Jason’s phone, wallet, computer hard drive or personal laptop – they all disappeared from the scene. A neighbour who lived directly across the street was up feeding their newborn child around 2.15am and he saw a car leaving Jason Corbett’s house. Detectives were never able to track this car down.

When Wanda Thompson was interviewing Molly Martens, she got a shock. Molly told her the children were not hers, that Jason’s first wife, mother of Jack and Sarah, had died. Thompson immediately registered that the police had made a significant error. If they had known at the house that Jack and Sarah were not Molly’s children, they would have put the children in to emergency foster care. They never would have allowed the children to stay with their father’s killers when they were not Molly’s flesh and blood.

This mistake gave the Martens time to prepare and coach the children, so that they would give evidence to corroborate Thomas Martens’s story: that Molly was a victim of domestic violence. The children were told exactly what to say when they were about to be interviewed by social workers on the afternoon of their father’s funeral, four days after his killing. Jack and Sarah were told they would never see Molly again if they didn’t say that Jason hit her, that Jason was angry, and that he would shout about minor things such as lights being left on. The children were on the other side of the world, orphaned by their stepmother killing their sole remaining parent. Sarah was eight and Jack was 10.

In court on the final day of the hearing, Sarah, now 17, and Jack, 19, delivered searing words to describe the impact on their lives of losing a father. It seemed from the judge’s face and his subsequent remarks that their words landed.

Just as Sarah’s baby book was stalled and never finished by a bereaved father who could no longer cope on his own, Sarah spoke of her life being on pause and how she would never enjoy the simple things like a father and daughter dance. Jack spoke of wanting to be free from the burden of a tragedy that sometimes left him contemplating suicide.

On Wednesday, in a North Carolina courtroom, Jack and Sarah got to write the final chapter of this story.