LEXINGTON, N.C. (AP) - The wife and father-in-law of a man beaten to death in 2015 at the couple’s North Carolina home are in court to face murder charges.
Local media outlets report the trial of 33-year-old Molly Corbett and her father, 67-year-old retired FBI agent Thomas Martens, begins Monday in Davidson County. Both are charged with second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter in the August 2015 death of Jason Corbett, a native of Ireland.
Molly Corbett and her father argue it’s a case of self-defense, saying Martens hit Jason Corbett on the head with a child-sized baseball bat and concrete landscaping paver because he was choking his daughter.
“I may have killed him,” Martens told a 911 dispatcher, who provided CPR instructions throughout the nearly 15-minute call.
Molly and Jason Corbett married and moved to North Carolina in 2011.
The couple met in 2008 when she moved to Ireland to work as an au pair for his two children. His first wife, Margaret, had died in 2006 of an asthma attack.
Court documents show Jason Corbett was planning to move back to Ireland later that month with his two children.
Defense attorneys David Freedman and Walter Holton argue that planned trip wasn’t permanent.
Weeks after his death, his sister Tracey Lynch, won custody of the children - then ages 10 and 8 - and took them to Ireland.
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