By Josh Shaffer
The tangled story of a widowed Irish businessman who married his children’s nanny in a storybook love affair will serve as the setting for a Netflix true-crime documentary, following them across the ocean to North Carolina and a fatal struggle in the family bedroom.
“A Deadly American Marriage” premieres on May 9, billed as a “tragic love story” in which an idyllic romance turns dark. Jason Corbett’s death in 2015 has long made international headlines, already chronicled in an episode of ABC’s “20/20.”
But much like “The Staircase” and its treatment of Kathleen Peterson’s death in Durham, the Netflix series promises new eyes and fresh attention on the case that caused heartache on both sides of the Atlantic.
“’A Deadly American Marriage’ asks viewers to reflect on the elusive truths beneath a once seemingly fairy-tale life that ended in tragedy,” a promotion teases on Tudum, a Netflix news site.
Bludgeoned in the bedroom
An executive in the packaging industry, Jason Corbett relocated from Ireland to Davidson County with his American wife, Molly, and his two children from his first wife, who died in 2006. Formerly the family’s nanny, Molly Corbett became romantically involved with her employer in Limerick and the two wed in 2011.
Molly Corbett’s father, Thomas Martens, a retired FBI agent, would later testify during their five-week trial that he woke during a visit in 2015 to find Jason Corbett choking his daughter and threatening to kill her.
He described beating his son-in-law with the bat he brought the young boy as a gift, and said Molly Corbett joined the bedroom melee with a brick paving stone. Jason Corbett died from blunt force trauma to the head, having suffered multiple skull fractures and brain bleeding in a bedroom with carpets and walls spattered with blood, The News & Record of Greensboro reported.
Jurors in the case were unconvinced by father and daughter’s self-defense argument and convicted them both of second-degree murder, sending them to prison with sentences of 20 to 25 years.
What the jury heard and didn’t hear
At trial, prosecutors offered Molly Corbett’s desire to adopt the children — Jack and Sarah — and a hefty insurance policy as motive to kill, according to the Independent in Ireland. “(Molly) Corbett had told a family friend that she wanted to leave him ‘because she did not love him any more and did not care what happened to him’ and that she had ‘reconnected with an old boyfriend on Facebook,’“ the Independent reported. “She would not leave Mr Corbett, however, because she had no legal rights to her husband’s two children, it was alleged.”
In 2021, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Corbett and Martens deserved a new trial because of evidence the jury never heard. In a 55-page opinion, Justice Anita Earls offered these omitted details that might have changed the verdict:
▪ First, jurors did not hear Jack Corbett, who was then 11, explain why his mother had a brick on her nightstand. In that interview, the opinion said, he explained that he and his mother had been working on a garden project and had wanted to paint the brick until rain stalled their plans.
▪ Second, Sarah Corbett, then 8, told DSS that she had a nightmare on the night of the killing, prompting her mother to rush to her bedroom and making Jason Corbett angry to have been awakened.
▪ Third, both children said their father had grown increasingly angry and physically abusive. “Without evidence supporting their account,” Earls wrote, “it was easier for the jury to conclude that Tom and Molly had invented their story in an effort to cover up their crime and falsely assert that they acted in self-defense.”
Father and daughter freed from prison
Molly Corbett and her father left prison last year after pleading no contest to manslaughter. They served roughly four years altogether, off-and-on.
But questions remain.
At a sentencing hearing in 2023, Superior Court Judge David Hall asked aloud why Martens hadn’t asked his wife to call 911 before he grabbed the baseball bat. He also questioned why Martens and his daughter came out of the struggle without injury while the deceased husband was so badly beaten.
“It makes no sense,” he said, according to the Winston-Salem Journal.
Both children undercut their earlier statements at the same hearing.
Sarah Corbett, as a teen, said defense attorneys and witnesses twisted her words, while Jack Corbett admitted lying to investigators when he was 10.
“My words were weaponized to help Molly and Thomas Martens get away with killing my dad,” he said, according to the Journal.
But in a statement to The N&O Thursday, Martens’ brother-in-law Michael Earnest said the NC Court of Appeals maintained that Corbett was the sole aggressor in the case and subjected his wife to domestic abuse, which was backed up by witness and expert testimony. He added that the children’s original statements were accurate and verified, and they only changed the narrative after moving to Ireland and experiencing “extreme parental alienation toward their mother figure.”
“Based on assurances made by the film producers,” he wrote in an email, “we hope the film relies on facts born out through the evidence presented in court.”
“A Deadly American Marriage” is produced and directed by Jessica Burgess, whose previous credits include “Rich & Shameless” and “American Monster,” along with Jenny Popplewell, whose credits include “What Jennifer Did.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 12:24 PM.
