Molly Martens’ exit from the prison where she spent the final months of her conviction for the violent killing of her husband, Jason Corbett, took no longer than five seconds. But her short walk from the door to the corrections centre car raised once more the torrent of questions about the nature of someone capable of such violence.
On the surface, here was the most banal sight imaginable: a slender, dark-haired woman in a blue and white striped summer dress getting into a car on a sullen June morning. She did not speak. She gave a quick smile in the direction of the car and kept her eyes focused on the ground. Her demeanour matched the expression she had worn through the heavily publicised trial and sentence hearing in that she revealed precisely nothing other than a kind of reflected blankness of expression.
In many ways, it was just another morning in the secluded corner of the North Carolina Correctional Centre for Women where inmates enter and leave the prison. It’s a leafy and quiet enclosure, just a five-minute drive from the brunch spots of downtown Raleigh but a world removed. A correctional officer patrolled the interior fencing carrying a shotgun. All cars entering and exiting the enclosed area were swept with a metal detector. Birdsong, a vast building with few windows, an eerie feel: that was it.
In the hour between seven and eight in the morning, prison vans entered the fenced-off holding area in front of the release building to transport inmates arriving from another part of the prison. They were talking as they made the short walk from the van to the door and someone, noticing the media presence on the other side of the fence, called out, “Who’s all the cameras here for?”
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The vast majority of inmates leave upon their release date in perfect anonymity. Shortly after 7am, a woman left the prison for the final time, still in her prison uniform, got into a private car and was driven through the gates. Molly Martens’ departure was never going to be so low key.
After the original conviction of second-degree murder, she faced the prospect of incarceration for up to 20 years. Jason Corbett was killed by Martens and her father Tom Martens in 2015. Through the plea deal they accepted last year, they admitted their guilt in bludgeoning him with a baseball bat and paving brick. In the nine-year period since, they have served just four years in prison. Tom Martens was released from his low-security correction centre in Lenoir, about three hours from Raleigh. Once they complete their release-supervision terms over the next 12 months, their period of parole closes. The legal aspect of the killing of Jason Corbett will be done with.
[ Molly Martens is released from prison in North CarolinaOpens in new window ]
The North Carolina complex is home to a number of high-profile inmates, including Blanche Taylor Moore, a convicted murderer who has been on death row since being found guilty of fatally poisoning her boyfriend in a 1990 trial, and Barbara Stager, whose first-degree murder conviction of her husband in 1989 was commuted from death sentence to life imprisonment.
Molly Martens’ sentence did not match the gravity of the punishment for those deaths. But she has attained a state of notoriety that won’t easily be erased The leniency of the sentence hearing last November means that she exits prison having served just seven additional months of jail time, an outcome which has left the extended Corbett family bitterly disappointed and has also annoyed officials in the area who investigated the case.
“They got off with a slap,” recently retired sheriff David Grice was reported as saying recently. “I have had to bite my tongue for years for fear of saying something which could have affected the appeals.”
So the Martens have moved through the North Carolina judicial system and will face no further legal retribution. They have yet to show any contrition for the violence they inflicted not just on Jason Corbett but also for the emotional anguish visited on his children and wider family who continue to love and mourn him.
It remains to be seen whether they will speak out in future or whether they will attempt to ease into the anonymous everyday and get on with the most basic right they took away from Jason Corbett: to live. North Carolina is a big state with plenty of wilderness and America a vast country. The Martens have the freedom, now, to move on. But what a trail of sorrow and nightmarish violence and heartbreak they leave in their wake.
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