On August 2nd, 2015, eight-year-old Sarah Corbett Lynch’s life was altered tragically and permanently, when her father, Jason, was killed in their North Carolina home by her stepmother, Molly Martens, and her father, Tom Martens.
The Martens were convicted of second-degree murder in November 2017, and received 20- and 25-year sentences, but had their convictions quashed on appeal in 2020. Rather than a retrial, however, the District Attorney’s office accepted a plea bargain for voluntary manslaughter. That decision, while dramatically cutting the amount of time the Martens would spend behind bars, also meant that Sarah and her brother, Jack, four years her elder, never got the chance to speak in court, having been deemed too young at the original trial.
Instead, at the Martenses’ November 2023 sentencing hearing, they were allowed to deliver a victim impact statement, “an emotionless term for someone who has seen her father’s bloody handprint trailing down his bedroom door”.
Now 18, Sarah proves a compelling narrator, recounting the traumas the siblings suffered even before their father’s violent death, painting her stepmother as a controlling and cruel woman with a “complicated relationship with the truth”. When the siblings didn’t live up to Molly’s high expectations, punishment followed, particularly when it came to her role as their swimming coach: “When I didn’t win, I didn’t eat”.
Sarah is candid about the terrible sense of guilt she and Jack feel at “the lies we had told to social workers about our father in the days following his killing, or why we had told them”.
She also reveals that Molly had visited a divorce lawyer to inquire about gaining custody of the children even before she and Jason were married. This isn’t even the most shocking revelation in the book, with the Martenses’ quest to save themselves from more jail time resorting to their questioning the untimely passing of the children’s birth mother, Mags Corbett, who died from an asthma attack when Sarah was just 12 weeks old. The Martenses tried to implicate Jason in Mags’s death, prompting the Corbett family to issue a statement denying all the Martenses’ claims.
A Time for Truth is a powerful, heartbreaking and justifiably angry read, from a young woman whose life has been irreparably damaged. As she admits, “Sadness tinges even the best days now”.
