There are a number of things that stand out in Sarah Corbett Lynch’s new book, A Time for Truth. For a start, there’s not one photo of Molly Martens, the woman she considered her mother for over six years of her early childhood.
Another is the devastating description of trauma and abuse that Sarah and her brother Jack suffered at the hands of their stepmother, completely unbeknown to their father, Limerick man Jason Corbett.
Then there’s the manner in which the Martens family behaved towards the siblings in the aftermath of Jason’s killing in August 2015. Although just eight and ten years old, Sarah writes about how nobody made any attempt to comfort her or her older brother in the days after their dad died. Instead, they were whisked off to Molly’s brother’s house and told to ‘get over it’ whenever they showed any signs of grief or upset.
Along with a detailed, first-hand account of the sentence hearings in November 2023, after which Molly and her father, Tom Martens, were handed down just a few extra months each to serve for killing Jason, it makes for an infuriating and disturbing read.
Even those who have closely followed the shocking case of Jason's death at the hands of his wife and father-in-law will find Sarah’s book illuminating and frustrating in equal measure.
Sarah says she wanted people to ‘see the whole story’ and to understand how it got to the point that it did. ‘I want them to understand it wasn’t just about 2 August [the day Jason was killed] and what happened afterwards,’ she says. ‘This had been going on before we even moved to America.’
There’s something a little unsettling about interviewing Sarah in the glamorous surroundings of House bar and restaurant on Dublin’s Leeson Street. At just 18 years old, she’s particularly pretty with a steady gaze and self-assured presence. She considers all questions carefully and is articulate and thoughtful in her replies. In short, she is notably mature for her age.
‘It’s accelerated everything for me, definitely,’ she nods in agreement. ‘In some ways I’m lucky, I do have a certain drive that maybe others my age don’t have yet. But I know how precious life is and how lucky I am to be in the position I’m in. I also understand that death is a part of life, and how important it is to stay in contact with the people you care about.’
From the beginning, Sarah’s life was touched by tragedy. When she was just 12 weeks old, her mother Mags died of a severe asthma attack, leaving her shattered husband Jason to raise their two children alone. A couple of years later, a young American woman answered his ad for an au pair. Blonde, attractive and bright, Jason was quickly bowled over by Molly Martens, and by 2011 the couple had married, sold up the Limerick house, and moved to North Carolina.
From the outside, theirs was a life of privilege – living in a fine big house, Molly was a stay-at-home mom, seemingly devoted to her children. However, as Sarah recounts, behind the scenes was a very different affair. Unstable, with a long history of mental health issues she never divulged to her husband, Sarah says Molly was volatile and cruel, pitting her and Jack against each other in competition for her affection.
She also tried poisoning their minds against their father, telling them that he raped her regularly, was cheating on her and was violent. Perhaps most disturbingly of all, she told them Jason had killed their mother Mags. Sarah’s six-year-old brain could barely comprehend what her stepmother was alleging.
‘My trauma and Jack’s and dad’s and the abuse we endured at the hands of Molly wasn’t featured in any of the court cases,’ says Sarah. ‘It was never spoken about. I did eight hours of interviews with the Sheriff’s department and told them all about it. I’ve tried to reach out and press charges for the abuse, but I was never answered. Imagine a child is being abused and the system doesn’t recognise that as being abuse? Was it because mine wasn’t physical? Coercive control, that’s what she was doing to us and dad.’
For years, Molly’s behaviour had a detrimental effect on Sarah’s relationship with her brother. ‘She pitted us against each other, one day it was me who was the best in the world, the next day it was Jack, to the point we didn’t like being around each other,’ she explains. ‘We’d get punished for doing nothing and sometimes if I got into trouble, she’d take it out on Jack physically and tell him it was because I had done something. You can’t have a relationship with your sibling in those circumstances.’
She says her father was ‘100 per cent unaware’ of what was happening with his children. He was, however, very unhappy in his marriage in the last months of his life. Molly’s constant mood swings and vicious criticism of his weight were getting to him. Sarah and her family believe he planned to leave Molly and return to Ireland with his two children – he’d never followed through with an adoption process that would have made Molly one of their legal guardians.
‘He found out some of the things Molly was saying about him before he died,’ says Sarah. ‘A few days before he was killed, he asked us what we’d think about going back to Ireland. I asked him if it would be with Molly and he said, “I don’t know yet.”’
It’s one of the most high-profile murder cases involving an Irish person abroad in recent decades. On 2 August, 2015, Molly and her father, a former FBI agent, used a baseball bat and a paving slab to beat Jason to death in the bedroom of his home. Sarah and Jack were sleeping in their bedrooms, they’ve since said they remember Molly giving them two pills each before they went to bed that night.
Molly and her father subsequently claimed self-defence, stating that Jason had tried to strangle his wife that night and Tom came to her rescue. In 2017, they were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 and 25 years in prison. But in 2020, an appeal court quashed the verdict and ordered a retrial.
In a twist that has tortured both Sarah and Jack, they say they were both coached by Molly to tell investigators in the immediate aftermath of their father’s killing that he had been violent and abusive towards Molly.
Sarah points to how young they both were, just eight and ten years old, and how scared they were. Molly was the only parent they knew they had left. ‘I want to be absolutely clear,’ she says. ‘I never saw my dad hit Molly. I know the reason that narrative is out there is my fault. I recognise that I lied for Molly because I loved her, and I had to go home with her after that. She told me what to say and I think the book shows she’d been saying those things for years, they weren’t new for me.’
Both children recanted their statements and had hoped for a retrial but in 2023 Molly and Tom Martens agreed to a plea deal on a charge of voluntary manslaughter. Their new sentence hearing was held in early November 2023 and after serving just a few extra months, they were both released from prison in June last year.
The trauma and guilt Sarah felt could have sunk her and who knows what turn her life would have taken if she’d remained in Molly’s care. But, thankfully, Jason had the foresight to appoint his sister Tracey Corbett Lynch and her husband David as the legal guardians of his children before he died. Within a couple of weeks of his killing, they’d been taken back to Ireland, where they were raised alongside Tracey’s two older sons, Dean and Adam. Her new family made sure Sarah immediately got the help she so desperately needed to make sense of what had gone on.
‘As soon as I came back to Ireland, Tracey and David put me into therapy, it was just two weeks after my dad died,’ Sarah explains. ‘I have an amazing therapist, Mary. I went to her every single week for about three years, then every second week, then once a month. Now I dip into it, like if I have a difficult time coming up. Before we went to the sentencing, I went back to her.’
There has been a lot to unpick, for a start how Molly and her family behaved straight after Jason was killed. The children were brought to Molly’s brother’s house as their own home was now a crime scene.
‘It was almost like Molly had a new lease on life,’ says Sarah. ‘Not once did anyone ask if I was OK, no one gave me a hug. When I asked about my dad, I was told to get over it. Jack found a cornfield nearby and used to sit there for hours. No one wondered where he was, he was only ten.’
Thanks to the unconditional love, support and stability they received from their new parents, the siblings were able to heal.
‘Jack and I are very different,’ Sarah says. ‘He wants the truth to be out there, but he just doesn’t want to do interviews. He’s doing good, he’s studying music in college, he’s a songwriter and singer, his voice is so beautiful and he writes amazing lyrics. We’ve gotten a lot closer which is lovely, we didn’t have a relationship growing up. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve really spoken about what happened to us. We had very different experiences.’
Jack has read the new book, and Sarah says he’s proud of her work. ‘Anything that’s in there about Jack, he gave me specific things I could talk about,’ she says. ‘I think readers can read between the lines; his own victim impact statement spoke volumes.’
After doing her Leaving Cert last year – she did her first two exams in hospital while recovering from an abscess on her tonsils, it also happened to be the same time the Martens were both released from prison – Sarah was accepted to Mary Immaculate College in Limerick to study English and drama.
She took a year out and has been concentrating on her new passion in life, diving. She completed a commercial diving course last summer and plans to study to become an instructor. She starts college next September.
After several years of Molly trying to make contact with the children, including attempting to hire a plane to fly over their school with a message behind it for them, Sarah says they’ve heard nothing from her in recent times.
She doesn’t know where Molly is now and doesn’t care. She also believes any interviews Molly gave to American media, in which she painted Jason as a drunk Irishman who beat his wife, only serve to expose her disregard for the children she once claimed to love. ‘They showed she didn’t care about me,’ Sarah says. ‘It was all about Molly, she wouldn’t have posted pictures of me all over the internet, she wouldn’t have tried to fly a plane over my school, and she wouldn’t have tried to contact my friends when they were 10 and 11 years of age. She wouldn’t have put us through what she put us through.’
Her father, she says, never exposed his children to any of the misery he was feeling. ‘He was always telling Molly she looked beautiful and bringing home flowers, he tried to make it work,’ she says. ‘Looking back, I can see how much he tried.’
It was a very deliberate decision not to include any photographs of Molly in her book.
‘I wanted my dad to shine through,’ Sarah explains. ‘I understand why for media purposes you have to use photos of Molly, but this is my story, and I want it to be my family’s story. I’ve written my truth now. I’ve listened to Molly my entire life... I don’t have to listen to her lies any more.’
A Time For Truth – My Father Jason And My Search For Justice And Healing by Sarah Corbett Lynch is published by Hachette Books and available now, priced €16.99
