I hoped our pretty new nanny was the answer to our prayers after my mother's tragic death... then she killed my father and I discovered the horrifying truth
For as long as she could remember, Sarah Corbett Lynch knew that she mustn’t mention her birth mother in front of her stepmum Molly.
The one treasured photo she had of her mum Margaret, who had tragically died at the age of 31, was tucked away in a drawer in her bedroom to look at in secret.
A secret, that is, until one day, the then seven-year-old Sarah forgot to put the picture away.
‘Molly spotted it the minute she entered my room,’ Sarah recalls. ‘She snatched the photo and turned on me, her face contorted with rage screaming, “This woman is dead!”, as she jabbed the photo. She told me she was my mother.’
Molly then flung the photo frame down the stairs, shattering the glass. ‘It broke my heart,’ Sarah says. She could not know that within a year her heart would be broken all over again: in the small hours of August 2, 2015, Sarah’s father Jason Corbett was brutally killed by Molly and Molly’s father, retired FBI agent Tom, bludgeoned to death with a brick and a baseball bat.
His injuries were so severe the pathologist who examined him was unable to determine exactly how many times he had been hit. Sarah and her brother Jack were just eight and ten, and far worse was to come.
The devastating loss of their father was compounded by a custody battle and a protracted and heartbreaking series of court cases.
Initially convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years behind bars, Molly and Tom Martens subsequently had their convictions quashed on appeal before agreeing to a plea bargain, accepting charges of voluntary manslaughter which meant their sentences were reduced. Released in June last year, they had each spent less than five years in prison.
Sarah Corbett Lynch who has written a memoir, entitled A Time For Truth, about her tragic upbringing
Throughout, both insisted they acted in self-defence, portraying Jason as an aggressive domestic abuser who had left Molly in fear of her life.
‘Not content with killing him, they tried to take his reputation too,’ as Sarah puts it now. It is one reason she has written a powerful memoir, A Time For Truth, which is also a love letter to a ‘happy and loving’ father who was robbed of the chance to see his children grow up.
‘I felt like I never had a voice,’ Sarah says now. ‘I wasn’t allowed to testify in court, I wasn’t allowed to be a character witness. There’s some things I can never control, like the prison sentence. But now, at least, I can speak the truth. This is my chance to put my side of the story, and give my dad his voice, too.’
Such is Sarah’s maturity that it is astonishing to reflect she is still just 18. Composed and thoughtful, she has had extensive therapy to enable her to confront the horrors of her past.
‘I try to stay away from hearing about what the Martens are up to, and I try not to think about them,’ she says. ‘I think Molly is a really cruel, evil person who has a troubling relationship with the truth, and I really hope and pray nobody else falls for her lies.’
Molly, a pretty, blonde 24-year-old American from Tennessee, arrived in Sarah’s life when she was just 17 months old, hired as a nanny and an apparent answer to the prayers of Jason Corbett, a businessman from Limerick, Ireland.
Jason, then just 30, had been suddenly widowed when his first wife Margaret, known as Mags, died from an asthma attack in 2006.
‘Jack was two and I was 12 weeks old, so we never knew Mum,’ says Sarah. ‘But we know we were born into love and, after she’d gone, Dad did everything to try and fill the void.
‘There’s photos of me as a baby with my hair in five different pigtails, because my dad didn’t know what to do with it but wanted to try.’
Jason, Jack, Sarah and Molly Martens - the nanny turned stepmother
Molly Martens and Jason Corbett at their wedding in 2011 - four years before he was killed
Certainly, Molly initially seemed like good news for this grieving family. ‘I don’t remember much about that time, but from what everyone believed, it seemed a good fit. She seemed to really care about me and Jack, and my dad,’ Sarah says.
What the family didn’t know was that Molly had a history of mental health problems, and had been released from a psychiatric clinic in Georgia just a few weeks before travelling to Ireland.
Molly and Jason quickly became a couple, announcing their engagement three years later, following which, at Molly’s instigation, the family moved from Limerick to North Carolina. ‘I think Dad believed he was creating a new start for us all,’ says Sarah.
Only years later, once her father was dead, did Jack and Sarah learn that Molly had already told a series of lies to neighbours, among them that Sarah was her birth daughter.
She had also enquired about the chance of custody in the event of a divorce even before her June 2011 wedding. ‘I think her plan from the beginning was to make us her children. And I think that plan was in her head before she arrived in Ireland,’ Sarah says now.
Yet at the beginning at least, the move seemed like a slice of the American dream, the new family home a large house on a leafy estate with a swimming pool. ‘I loved it at first, it was so cool. All the houses were bigger. It was America, it was exciting,’ Sarah says.
Yet family dynamics quickly changed. Molly was mercurial and quick to anger, and an air of tension rapidly built behind the picture-postcard frontage of the Corbett home, particularly as Jason constantly dodged the issue of allowing Molly to formally adopt his children.
‘There were blow-ups over the tiniest things,’ Sarah says. ‘She often tried to pit me and Jack against each other.’
She recalls Molly going ‘ballistic’ when on one occasion she found Jack and Sarah happily playing together with their teddies.
‘I remember wondering what was wrong with that. I’d see all my friends hanging out with their siblings, but we weren’t even allowed to talk to each other most of the time,’ she recalls.
‘She wanted to be the most important person in both our lives.’
At just 18 Sarah has written a memoir chronicling her upbringing and the now high-profile trial
On one occasion, Sarah alleges that Molly held Jack’s head under a running kitchen faucet as a punishment for splashing her with water. On other occasions, Sarah claims that if Molly did not feel they had tried their best at swimming, a sport she loved, she would withhold their dinner.
‘I knew our situation at home was not normal, that something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t have the vocabulary, and I didn’t have anyone to tell,’ Sarah says now about the escalating tensions.
Mention of the siblings’ birth mother was expressly forbidden, other than when Molly accused their father of killing her.
‘She would whisper to me that Dad was a bad man who had suffocated her with a pillow,’ Sarah tells me.
‘I knew my dad could never hurt my mum, so it left me so conflicted and confused. I didn’t know how to handle it. I’d ask Dad what happened to my mum, and he’d say, “Oh, I’ll tell you when you’re older.” Of course, he was trying to protect me – he wasn’t going to relive the worst night of his life to his little daughter. It left me burdened by this terrible secret.’
It seems Jason was also increasingly unhappy: Sarah recalls how, a week before he died, he had asked both his children whether they wanted to move back to Ireland.
‘He said that he didn’t know whether it would be with Molly or not,’ she says. ‘I was confused, but I knew I wanted to be with Dad.’
Jason never got the chance to return home. In the small hours of August 2, Sarah was woken by a police officer who tenderly placed his hand over her eyes as he carried her downstairs so that she could not see the carnage that had unfolded while she slept.
Jason had been bludgeoned to death by Molly and Tom who, along with his wife Sharon, had unexpectedly arrived at the house that evening after cancelling their dinner plans.
Tom later told police he had discovered Jason choking his daughter and rushed to her rescue, hammering him repeatedly with an aluminium baseball bat.
During the ensuing struggle, Molly had come to her father’s aid by smashing his head with a concrete paving stone that had been sitting on her bedside table.
In the bewildering aftermath of learning about their father’s death, Sarah claims that a tearful Molly told them they had to back up her claim of self-defence.
‘Coaching basically,’ she says. ‘She and Sharon sat me down and said I’d be interviewed by the police and that if I don’t say Daddy was a bad man and Daddy hit Mommy, then I’d be separated from Jack and put into foster care and I’d never see them again.’
The children recanted their evidence just weeks later, but the Martens still tried to use their statements in their defence, although they were overruled.
Even as the children tried to digest the loss of their father, events moved with bewildering speed: within 40 hours of his death, Molly took legal action, filing for guardianship, custody and adoption rights, as well as claiming Jason’s life insurance.
But in his will, Jason had named his sister Tracey Lynch and her husband David as legal guardians to his children in the event of his death. After flying to the US, Tracey mounted a legal challenge to Molly’s claim, and on August 20, 2005 – 18 days after Jason’s death – a judge granted Tracey full custody.
She immediately flew Jack and Sarah back to Ireland and she and David – who both now call Mum and Dad – raised them alongside their children Dean and Adam. ‘It was the best thing that happened to us,’ Sarah says now.
Yet as they tried to settle back into their old lives, the spectre of Molly and Tom’s trial loomed.
On August 9, 2017, they were unanimously found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of 20 and a maximum of 25 years in prison.
Sarah, left middle, and Jack, second left top row, were put in their dad's sister's custody in Ireland
An accomplished diver, Sarah now lives by the sea and is thinking about university
The relief was enormous. ‘It felt like a big weight had been lifted and we could get on with our lives,’ Sarah says.
That feeling did not last long: it quickly emerged that the Martens were working on an appeal based on, among other things, the fact that the children’s evidence had been excluded – even though they had recanted.
Granted a retrial, Sarah recalls how, in 2022, she flew to the US for the first time in seven years for a pre-trial hearing, setting eyes on Molly for the first time since she had left America.
‘She came out of the lift laughing with three of her friends, head thrown back, without a care in the world,’ she says.
‘Then she looked me dead in the eye and stopped smiling and walked away.’
The following year, Molly and Tom both accepted plea bargains in which the District Attorney agreed to drop murder charges against them in return for them pleading no contest to a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter.
‘A no-contest plea meant that she did not admit guilt but also did not dispute the charges. Molly essentially accepted a conviction without admitting to the criminal act,’ says Sarah.
‘It made me very angry. There was nothing voluntary about Dad’s death. He didn’t choose to leave me and my brother. The people who were meant to love all three of us tore him from us.’
Nor was their ordeal over: at the subsequent sentencing hearing, evidence was presented of Jason’s alleged verbal and physical abuse of Molly, including excerpts from recordings made with small devices she had planted around the family home.
But Sarah claims clips played in the courtroom had been ‘orchestrated and selected’ from thousands of hours of footage in an attempt to portray her father in a negative light. In one, featured in a Netflix documentary focusing on the case, A Deadly American Marriage, Jason can be heard remonstrating with Molly over the fact that she had served his children dinner before he arrived home, robbing him of the chance to spend time with them.
‘Most of the courtroom time was spent portraying Molly and her parents as innocent victims of my “abusive” dad,’ Sarah says quietly.
The presence of recording devices around the home – including in the master bedroom – has also led Sarah to speculate as to whether her father’s death was captured on tape, saying her brother spotted a recording device in a zip-lock bag on a bedside table a few days after their father was killed.
‘Molly corroborates that there was a recording device in their bedroom on her nightstand,’ she says. ‘But that just begs the question: “Where is that recording device?”’
It was this, in part, that made Sarah vow to write her book. ‘I remember the moment so clearly. I was in the court toilets, having a panic attack after listening to the lies. And in that moment, I knew I couldn’t let people continue to use my voice for me, or have people twist my words.’
While Sarah and Jack were allowed to give victim impact statements – Molly sobbing loudly and theatrically throughout – the judge said it would not influence his sentencing decision.
Both Martens were sentenced to between 51 and 74 months in prison which, due to time already served, meant both would only serve an additional seven months in prison before being eligible for release. They were released last June. ‘I think the judge set a lot of store by the fact that Tom used to be FBI,’ Sarah says.
What really happened that night? Nobody will ever know for sure, although Alan Martin, who was the Assistant District Attorney in the region at the time of the murder, theorised that Molly, with her parents as witnesses, attempted to stage a domestic incident which she hoped would allow her to apply for a domestic violence protective order and file a legal application for emergency custody of Jack, now 20, and Sarah.
Whatever the truth, Sarah tries not to think about the Martens, instead focusing on her future. An accomplished diver, she lives by the sea and is currently deciding whether to go to university to study English and drama.
‘I know it sounds weird but I feel like I have a really good relationship with my birth parents now,’ she says. ‘If I’m having a bad day, a certain song will come on the radio, and I just know that my dad’s around.’
Together with Mags, Jason is buried in Castlemungret Cemetery in Limerick, his name inscribed below hers on their gravestone.
‘Their ages will remain 31 and 39 forever as Jack and I get older,’ says Sarah. ‘Ultimately, it’s just a really, really sad story.’
- A Time for Truth: My Father Jason and My Search for Justice and Healing by Sarah Corbett Lynch is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £16.99
