Helen Archer | On 01, Jul 2025

True crime documentaries featuring interviews with the perpetrator have enjoyed something of an upsurge recently, though it remains a controversial approach. The danger of allowing the criminal to speak over their victims – or of minimising the damage they have done – is every-present, as is the prospect of filmmakers themselves being manipulated by their own subjects’ protestations of innocence. The best of this format allows for the accused to expose themselves for what they are, in their own words. A Deadly American Marriage, directed by Jessica Burgess and Jenny Popplewell, is one of the more successful of such attempts.

The feature-length documentary tells the story of the death of Jason Corbett at the hands of his wife, Molly Martens, and her father, Tom, a retired FBI officer. The Martens are interviewed extensively, but so too are Jason’s two children Jack and Sarah, who were aged 10 and 8 respectively when their stepmother took a cinderblock to their father’s head. Between them – and the various police, lawyers, friends and family – the film untangles Jason’s violent end, what led up to it, and what followed.

Jason – a widower in Ireland with two young children – met Molly after she replied to his advertisement for an au pair. Coming from America to take the job, she inveigled her way into his life, soon enough making herself indispensable. Before long, Jason and Molly married, and the new family of four moved to the idyllic-looking Meadowlands of North Carolina, all vivid green lawns and landscaped gardens. Things seemed perfect on the outside, until 2nd August 2015, when Jason was beaten to death in his own bedroom, as his children slept. The crime scene photos only serve to highlight the violence of the attack, with blood-splattered walls and a sodden carpet, dotted with clumps of hair.

Molly and Tom’s claim was that Jason was the aggressor – despite neither of them having any kind of physical injury – and that this was an act of self-defence. Old letters and emails exchanged between the Jason and Molly point towards a breakdown of the marriage, and Jason’s plan to return, with his children, to Ireland. In the lead-up to Jason’s death, Molly was beginning to realise she would lose the children she claimed to love. Interviews with those who knew her, meanwhile, reveal Molly’s history of lying. She and her father paint Jason as drunk and abusive and, in the years following their father’s murder, Jack and Sarah would have to endure his second death – that of his name and reputation – as Tom and Molly’s defence relied on making him out to be a monster, responsible, even, for the death of his first wife, their mother Mags. For their part, the coldheartedness on display in the Martens’ interviews becomes increasingly apparent, reaching a crescendo as Jack and Sarah, in contrast, allow their tears to flow. Tom insists “I have no regrets”, while Molly now describes Jack and Sarah as “tools of evil”, taking no accountability for killing their surviving parent.

There is, too, an ever-present undercurrent of supremacy in the way the Martens talk about Jason – as an Irish man – and his family. The title of the documentary is telling – this was, specifically, an “American” marriage – one in which the Irish had to assimilate into American culture. Tom and Molly expose themselves throughout, speaking of the Corbett family as though they are bit part players in a narrative which revolves around the Martens, describing Jack and Sarah’s maternal grandfather as “an uneducated man” because of his thick accent, as though Ireland is some sort of backwater, the people in it inferior to them.

And yet it is their community in Ireland that ultimately saved Jack and Sarah, giving them back their sense of belonging and helping them come to terms with their terrible trauma. Jason’s sister Tracey and her husband David are the beating heart of this film, their gentle love and care bringing the siblings back to their roots, and to knowing and understanding their late parents. On their way to give their victim impact statements at the end of the documentary, and worried about seeing Tom and Molly in the court, they play a song their dad liked to listen to. Just before they disembark, David gives them a short pep talk: “Head up. Shoulders back. F*ck these people – they’re nothing to us.”

Killing their father was bad enough, but it was made so much worse by the Martens’ insistence that he was the perpetrator rather than the victim. But Jack and Sarah are so impressively dignified in this film – more than succeeding in their aim of reclaiming the good name of their father, and in setting the record straight once and for all.

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