RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The wife of an Irish businessman who was beaten to death in 2015 and her father were released from separate North Carolina prisons Thursday after completing the final phase of their sentences resulting from guilty pleas to manslaughter charges.
Molly Martens Corbett left the North Carolina Correctional Facility for Women in Raleigh on Thursday morning, and her father, Thomas Martens, was released from Caldwell Correctional Center in Lenoir, the state Department of Adult Corrections said in an emailed statement.
The two received additional sentences in November shortly after striking the plea deals, and each served an additional seven months in prison.
They were scheduled to go on trial again late last year after the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2021 overturned their 2017 second-degree murder convictions and ordered new trials.
The two men will be placed on supervised release for a year and will serve their sentences in Tennessee, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Keith Ackley.
Corbett's husband, Jason Corbett, died in 2015 at the home he shared with his wife in a golf course community in Davidson County, about 110 miles west of Raleigh.
Investigators say Molly Corbett and Martens, a former FBI agent, used an aluminum baseball bat and a brick paving block to kill Jason Corbett, fracturing his skull and wounding his arms, legs and torso. The defense says the pair acted in self-defense and feared for their lives during the struggle. Corbett's death and the resulting legal battle attracted significant media attention in Ireland and was featured on a number of US true crime documentaries.
Both men were previously sentenced to 20 to 25 years in prison for murder and were released on bail a few weeks after the Supreme Court ruling.
Corbett pleaded not guilty to voluntary manslaughter on October 30, and his father pleaded guilty. A Davidson County judge sentenced the defendants to between 51 and 74 months in prison, though the terms were significantly reduced due to credits for time previously served.
Jason and Molly Corbett met in 2008 when she was working as an au pair for Jason Corbett's two children from his first marriage, after his first wife died of an asthma attack in 2006.
In ordering a new trial, the state Supreme Court noted that a medical evaluation conducted shortly after the deaths omitted statements made by the two children that suggested their father had been abusive at home. Prosecutors argued the statements were unreliable, and both children later recanted. The judge excluded the statements from the trial.
Jason Corbett's children testified at his sentencing hearing last year.