A DOCTOR WITH with expertise in strangulation told a court yesterday that the death of Jason Corbett’s first wife in 2006 was “consistent with strangulation”, an assertion that could bolster second wife Molly Corbett’s claim that she was scared she would suffer the same fate.

Dr Bill Smock, testifying as an expert witness for the defence, also said that evidence collected by investigators after the death of Jason Corbett in 2015 showed that Molly Corbett had been choked the night her husband died.

Dr Smock is currently full-time police surgeon and directs the Clinical Forensic Medicine Program for the Louisville Metro Police Department in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2019, he became Medical Director of the San Diego-based Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention.

Molly Corbett and her father Thomas Martens are in Davidson County Superior Court for a hearing that will determine what remaining sentence, if any, they will serve for the 2015 killing of Jason Corbett. Molly Corbett has pleaded no contest to the charge, and Martens has pleaded guilty.

Thomas Martens struck Jason Corbett over and over again with an aluminum baseball bat on a night in August 2015, reacting, he said, to the sight of Corbett choking his daughter. Molly Corbett struck her husband with a concrete paver during the struggle between her husband and Martens.

Molly Corbett’s lawyer told the court when the hearing began on 30 October that his client had come to believe that Jason Corbett had murdered his first wife, Margaret “Mags” Corbett, whose official cause of death related to complications from an asthma attack.

“She did not die of asthma,” Smock flatly proclaimed yesterday, asserting that Margaret Corbett’s body did not show the tell-tale signs of an asthma attack.

Smock testified that he could not say with certainty that Jason Corbett’s first wife had died by strangulation. Smock said that ruling out other causes, the first wife most likely died from some injury to her upper airway, an injury he said was most commonly caused by strangulation.

Prosecution

The chief prosecutor, Davidson County Assistant District Attorney Alan Martin, attacked that as a “diagnosis by exclusion”, and drew Smock’s attention to the apparent failure of the Margaret Corbett autopsy to even examine the neck tissues said to be decisive in determining death by strangulation.

Martin suggested that the woman’s autopsy didn’t pay much attention to the condition of her heart, and in questioning another expert witness, appeared to suggest that maybe Margaret Corbett’s asthma medication had something to do with a heart problem that went undetected in the autopsy.

That witness, pathologist Thomas Sporn of Duke University, told the court that he didn’t accept asthma as Margaret Corbett’s cause of death, and that the lack of evidence for other causes of death “opens the door” for the possibility that the woman’s death was a homicide by choking.

Judge David Hall, stepping into the questioning, pointed out that Sporn essentially found the cause of death as “undetermined” from his analysis of the first wife’s autopsy.

“I don’t have any firm evidence,” Sporn confirmed.

Third doctor

A third expert doctor heard from yesterday, Dr William Bozeman, a professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest University, agreed with the other two that Margaret Corbett did not die of asthma. But he added that he did not agree with Smock that the woman’s death was a case of “undetected strangulation.”

Bozeman said he thinks strangulation “potentially” caused the woman’s death, “but can’t call it probable.” He said the woman could have had a heart condition that was not detected by the kind of autopsy performed on the woman’s body. He said he agrees with Sporn “that it is best described as an undetermined cause of death.”

Although the medical experts all talked about Molly Corbett’s claim that she was being choked during an attack by her husband that August night in 2015, prosecutors said most of the account was drawn from Corbett’s own statements after the death of her husband.

Martin used the occasion to highlight what he called Molly Corbett’s “complicated relationship with the truth”.

The plea agreement entered into by Molly Corbett and Thomas Martens gives prosecutors the ability to attack Molly Corbett’s credibility by pointing out any of a number of false statements allegedly made by Molly Corbett. Some of the ones mentioned by prosecutors yesterday included:

• Molly Corbett saying that Jason Corbett’s children by his first wife were her own biological children
• Saying she had once been a foster mother
• Telling a bridesmaid that she had been friends with Jason Corbett’s first wife
• Saying she had been a publisher and editor of a magazine in Ireland
• Saying she had been on the varsity swim team at Clemson University.

Thomas Martens and Molly Corbett were convicted of the second-degree murder of Jason Corbett in 2017.

They were sentenced to between 20 and 25 years in prison, and served almost four years behind bars before their convictions were overturned by the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

That court made the determination that decisions by the original trial judge had prevented the pair from getting a fair trial.