Excellent review of Tracey Corbett Lynch Book, My Brother Jason... and how we don't spot the monsters living among us. Will the prison system take the psychiatric report on Molly in to consideration during review, when considering to add on the 5 years of her 20-25 sentence?
Tom and Molly Martens: Trying and failing to spot the monsters in one’s midst | BusinessPost.ie
Book Review ~ Kevin Power
Sunday Business Post 10.06.18
“TRYING AND FAILING TO SPOT THE MONSTERS IN ONE’S MIDST”
MyBrotherJason: The Untold Story of
Jason Corbett’s Life and Brutal Murder by Tom and Molly Martens.
- Tracey Corbett-Lynch with Ralph Riegel ~ Gill Books
In 1941, an American psychiatrist named Hervey Cleckley published a book called The Mask of Sanity, in which he proposed a new theory of human evil. Living among us, Cleckley said, were psychopaths: people who, by any standard psychometric criteria, appeared perfectly normal, but who secretly lacked both empathy and guilt.
Cleckley’s belief in the existence of psychopaths has not been universally accepted. In lire Journalist and the Murderer (1990), her classic study of the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, Janet Mal colm pointed out that a diagnosis of psychopathy was still largely in the eye of the beholder. Malcolm has a point. Despite the popularization of clinical ideas about psychopathy, we are still left with the mystery of evil - the question of why certain human beings spread emotional and physical destruction wherever they go, often disguising their cruelties behind a facade of energy, charisma and glamour.
Tracey Corbett-Lynch’s family encountered such an enemy of happiness. Her name was Molly Martens. In August 2015, Molly and her father Tom murdered Corbett-Lynch’s brother Jason in cold blood, beating him to death with a baseball bat and a paving stone in the bedroom of his home in North Carolina. Molly was Jason’s wife. She had entered his life as a rescuer - arriving in Limerick in the aftermath of the tragically early death of Jason’s first wife, Margaret; trailing qualifications and warmth, Molly had worked as an au pair for Jason’s young children. Gradually, Jason and Molly fell in love. When Jason moved to Lexington, North Carolina, for work in 2011, Molly went with him.
But Molly was not what she appeared to be. Her qualifications (she had supposedly graduated from Clemson University and trained as a Montessori teacher) were fictional. “Initially,” Corbett-Lynch writes, Molly “came across as a very nice person, kind and considerate.”
Soon, however, Jason’s family and friends were beginning to track the warning signs: her stories “very often conflicted with things she had already told us”. If Jason didn’t pay her enough attention, she acted up.
According to a psychiatric report prepared in 2008, Molly was at one point taking 16 different medications daily for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Her behaviour at her wedding to Jason - at the ominously named Bleak House in Tennessee - was alarming. Jason’s family were, of course, unprepared for the storm of destruction that Molly would cause. Born and raised in Janesboro in Limerick, the Corbetts were happy in the way of all happy families - and Jason and his six siblings enjoyed “a childhood packed with happy memories” Jason had a good job at Field Boxmore (later MPS). He was hardworking and a bit of a romantic. When Margaret died of an asthma attack, aged 31, Jason struggled on, raising nearly €35,000 for the Irish Asthma Society.
It wasn’t just bad luck that brought Jason together with Molly Martens; she had been scouring the web for “a young, lonely widower with very young children” whom she could manipulate and deceive. At first, Molly and her father Tom (an ex-FBI agent) claimed that they had murdered Jason in self defence. The opening chapters of My Brother Jason, Corbett-Lynch’s compelling account of Jason’s life and death, show us Molly and Tom moving smoothly to cremate Jason’s remains, to prevent an autopsy; only the hard work of Jason’s family thwarted this plan. During an arduously prolonged investigation and trial, Molly’s true nature was exposed. She was, Corbett-Lynch writes, “capable of many things - lies, self-centered behavior, fantasies, manipulation and even drugging people without their knowledge”.
From the beginning, Tracey “knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jason had been murdered”. Tom and Molly’s behaviour in the aftermath of Jason’s death - attempting to fly a banner over Limerick city wishing his bereaved children a happy birthday, appearing on ABC’s 20/20 to tell lies about Jason’s alleged penchant for physical abuse - only confirmed Tracey’s suspicions.
In My Brother Jason, Tracey recounts the emotional and financial costs involved in exposing her brother’s murderers - the legal bills, the flights, the desperate uncertainties about the outcome of the trial. For anyone who followed the case, My Brother Jason will, of course, prove a fascinating read - but it is also a sobering testimony to the love and commitment of a single family coping with unimaginable tragedy.
Last August, Molly and Tom Martens were at last found guilty of Jason’s murder. They were each sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison. My Brother Jason is a moving act of commemoration, and a grippingly told story of justice finally done. But it also leads us to meditate on the questions that Hervey Cleckley left unanswered: where do they come from, these normal monsters? And how do we spot them, before it’s too late?