How an anonymous phone call helped convict Molly and Tom Martens of Jason Corbett's killing

Irish Times

10 hours ago

Sitting in Cagney's Kitchen, a classic American diner deep in the North Carolina countryside, retired sheriff David Grice pauses over his breakfast of pancakes with buttered syrup and bacon to reflect on a key moment in the
Jason Corbett
homicide investigation – an anonymous call to the detective unit.
The diner is just a few miles from the Meadowlands home where Corbett, from Limerick, was beaten to death in August 2015, aged 39, by his American wife,
Molly Martens
(31) and her father,
Thomas
(Tom), a former FBI agent.
Although convicted of second-degree murder in 2017 and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison, the Martenses' convictions were quashed on appeal in March 2021. Avoiding a retrial, they entered a plea deal in October 2023, which saw Tom plead guilty, and Molly plead 'no contest' to the charge of voluntary manslaughter. Handed seven-month sentences, they were freed in June 2024. Legally the case was over, but so many questions remained, not just for Corbett's family but for the detectives who had spent eight years investigating the killing.
For Grice it began on August 2nd, 2015, when he was awoken by a 5am phone call. He drove 80km to Meadowlands to view the scene. Jason's body had been removed and CSI officers had bagged a bloodied brick and baseball bat found in the master bedroom, but Grice instinctively knew the descending pattern of blood spatter on the south wall did not match the 'self-defence' story the Martenses had told detectives. The scene was so bloody, one of the first responders asked Molly where the gun was, as he assumed Jason had been shot.
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Sheriff Grice's instincts were shared by the three lead detectives on the case – Lieut Wanda Thompson and detectives Michael Hurd and Brandon Smith. To secure search warrants early in the investigation, all three filed supporting affidavits stating their suspicions about the Martenses' claims of self-defence.
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Fresh information in Netflix documentary sheds new light on the killing of Jason Corbett
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More than 10,000 pages of new documentation, released following a public records request, make clear that the assistant district attorney for Davidson County, Alan Martin, shared the detectives' concerns, particularly over the weapons used. A baseball bat and a brick were not typical weapons used in a crime of passion, he said, and were generally not items often found in someone's bedroom.
Tom Martens claimed, in his voluntary police interview with detectives Smith and Hurd hours after the killing, that he brought the baseball bat as a gift for his step-grandson, Jack, Jason's 10-year-old son from his first marriage.
Martens said he and his wife, Sharon, both 65, had spontaneously decided that Saturday to drive 4¾ hours from their Tennessee home to Meadowlands, the affluent neighbourhood where Molly lived with Jason, a manager of a paper packaging plant.
The detectives found it strange that any grandparent would bring a gift for one grandchild, but nothing for the other – they had not brought a gift for Jason's eight-year-old daughter,
Sarah
. Tom had met Jack that night, yet he did not give him the bat.
The caller told detective Hanna it would 'not be good for me in Tennessee' if he revealed his identity
Grice felt the 480km road trip was suspicious, especially as Tom said he was due at work in Tennessee on Monday. His was no ordinary job. He was a counterintelligence officer with the US Department of Energy, charged with protecting US energy secrets from hostile foreign spies. He had a Q Level security clearance at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – one of two sites where the atomic bomb was developed during the second World War – the highest security clearance issued by the department.
Martens would later be psychologically assessed – in court documents submitted to the sentencing hearing in 2023 – as a classic Type A personality, calm and unemotional, driven by rules and facts. He was not a spontaneous character.
Exhibit 124: Thomas Martens at police station
The prosecutors and the investigators all wondered whether Tom had in fact been summoned to North Carolina by Molly.
Then the anonymous call came.
Det Mark Hanna received the call at 6.50pm on Friday, August 14th, 2015, the same day Molly was in court testifying in a guardianship hearing, where she was battling Jason's sister, Tracey Lynch, for custody of Jack and Sarah. Lynch had been named as Jason's preferred guardian for Jack and Sarah in his will, but Molly wanted a US court to override this and grant her sole custody, as she had been the children's de-facto mother for seven years. She had joined the family as an au pair in March 2008, a year and four months after Jason's first wife, Mags Fitzpatrick, died aged 31. Molly and Jason moved to the United States and married in 2011.
The caller told detective Hanna it would 'not be good for me in Tennessee' if he revealed his identity, but he encouraged detectives to look at Tom's phone records. He said the Martenses were lying about their impromptu visit to Molly. In fact Tom had had dinner plans that evening with his boss, Selin Warnell, who was a former CIA station chief in Tokyo and Seoul, before becoming head of the counterintelligence unit at Oak Ridge.
The caller told Hanna that Tom had cancelled the dinner plans and sought Monday off work 'due to an issue with Molly'. The caller advised detective Hanna to interview all of Tom's 12 colleagues in the counterintelligence unit. 'The male subject on the phone asked if I was aware that Mr Martens hated his son-in-law. The male stated that Mr Martens made comments to his coworkers about hating his son-in-law.'
All the detectives met the following Monday, August 17th, to discuss interviewing Tom's coworkers. That Monday the judge in the guardianship hearing, Brian Shipwash, ruled that the children should be taken from Molly and raised in Ireland by Tracey Lynch. Shipwash later
told The Irish Times
he believed Molly felt a 'deranged entitlement' to the children, and he was worried about her mental health.
Exhibit 116: Molly Martens at police station
As Lynch was reunited with Jack and Sarah – bar a brief call with Jack lasting less than a minute, the Martenses had refused to allow her contact with the children for 15 days after the killing – detectives prepared to travel to Tennessee.
Tom and his boss were close – Warnell gave Molly and Jason two gifts at their 2011 wedding: a rocking chair and a crib. The crib was never used. Despite the couple spending $25,000 on fertility treatments, Molly could not have children of her own. Detectives believed Molly's burning desire to be a mother was at the root of what happened at 160 Panther Creek Court in Meadowlands.
Detectives suspected Molly found out Jason was leaving, panicked and summoned her parents. The anonymous tip-off only underscored their suspicions, according to Lieut Wanda Thompson, the head of the criminal investigations division in Davidson County.
Lieut Wanda Thompson and Sheriff David Grice on her retirement in May 2018
'It must have been a real family emergency for him to cancel dinner with his boss,' Thompson told me in 2023. 'You might let friends down, but when your boss is a former CIA chief, that dinner was important. Why did he drop everything?'
Detective case notes reveal how crucial the anonymous tip-off proved. It ultimately led detectives inside the counterintelligence unit where they learned that Tom 'hated' Jason and referred to him as 'that son-of-a-bitch son-in-law' and an 'asshole'.
One former FBI agent told detectives that Tom was 'manipulative, calculative and a planner' and 'uses things and people to his own advantage'. It was 'odd' for Tom to cancel dinner with Warnell, because Tom was not 'spontaneous', the FBI agent added.
Another colleague said Tom spoke of Molly's bipolar disorder and 'openly expressed his dislike for Jason'.
Armed with these insights, detectives executed search warrants for Tom, Sharon, Molly and Jason's phone records on the days immediately before and after the killing. These records heightened the detectives' suspicions.
Molly had 20 calls on her mobile phone on August 1st, beginning with a 2.21pm call from Tom. Fifteen minutes later Tom made the first of four calls to Jason, but Jason did not answer. On the fourth call, Tom was forwarded to Jason's messaging service, and he left a 37-second message.
Sarah Corbett Lynch, daughter of Jason Corbett, on her memoir A Time for Truth
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70:10
While Tom was trying to reach Jason, Molly had a two-minute call with Sharon. What did Molly tell her parents that Saturday to prompt the change in dinner plans and incite Tom to call Jason, the son-in-law he hated?
About an hour later the Martenses set off for North Carolina. During the journey, there were 11 calls between Sharon and Molly.
Jason's phone, laptop and home computer were all mysteriously missing from the crime scene and were never found. The detectives never discovered the content of Tom's 37-second message to Jason.
Journalist Brian Carroll was co-producer of the Netflix film A Deadly American Marriage. A Deadly Marriage by Brian Carroll is published by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and is available from August 21st