A sheriff who attended the ‘gruesome’ Jason Corbett crime scene has said Molly and Tom Martens ‘got off with a slap’ and ‘wore down’ the US courts. David Grice, who served as North Carolina sheriff from 2009 to 2023, was speaking ahead of the pair’s release from jail in just two weeks’ time . He issued his first public statement since the father and daughter successfully challenged their second-degree murder convictions last November, having served just four years of their original 20-to-25-year sentence.
In August 2015, Limerick man Jason, 39, was beaten to death with a baseball bat and brick by his wife and father-in-law in the bedroom of his North Carolina home. The father-of-two – who met Molly when he hired her as his children’s nanny – sustained so many injuries during the attack that a coroner was unable to count them all. Molly, 40, and her former FBI agent father Tom, 73, were arrested and later found guilty of second-degree murder.
The pair claimed they acted in selfdefence but the second-degree murder charge meant the jury concluded Jason was killed out of malice. However, in 2020, an appeals court overturned the judge’s decision to block Jason’s children’s original statements from being read. In October 2023, the father and daughter entered plea deals to voluntary manslaughter: Molly pleaded no contest and her father pleaded guilty.
Following their pleas, Davidson Superior Court judge David Hall sentenced the father and daughter to spen.
