Whenever Sarah Corbett Lynch hears the whirring sirens of a police car or ambulance, it triggers a crippling panic attack. For it takes her back to the early hours of August 2, 2015, when she was eight years old. 

Sarah remembers staring out of the window of her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. ‘My brother, Jack, and I had no idea what was going on,’ Sarah, now 18, tells the Daily Mail. 

It was only later that she and Jack, then ten, learned that their father Jason Corbett had been killed — bludgeoned to death by their stepmother Molly and step-grandfather Thomas Martens. 

The killers claimed that they had been acting in self-defense, using a brick and a baseball bat to 'subdue' 39-year-old Jason. They were initially sentenced for up to 25 years in prison but were released as part of a plea deal last June. 

Despite the media frenzy surrounding the case over the past decade, Jason's children have remained silent  — until now.

In her new memoir, A Time For Truth, Sarah describes a traumatic childhood wrecked by the deaths of her birth mother when she was just 12 weeks old and, of course, her father. 

And, in a string of shocking claims, she alleges that her step-mother abused her, destroyed her father's memory, and even forced her to lie during the horrifying case.

'My father's name was dragged through the mud,' Sarah, now a music student in Ireland, tells the Daily Mail. 'He was a loving, decent man and they made him out to be a monster.' 

Sarah Corbett Lynch, 18, has now written a memoir about the death of her father Jason in 2015

The music student, pictured with her father and brother Jack in their native Ireland, remembers him as a 'loving decent man' 

The family's ordeal began back in 2008, in Sarah's native city of Limerick, Ireland. Jason, a widower of two years, had hired the then 24-year-old Molly to be his children's nanny. 

A former beauty queen from Tennessee, Molly was blonde, charismatic and stunningly beautiful. Despite the nine-year age gap, the couple soon fell in love.

A month before their wedding in June 2011, Jason was transferred to the US for his work at a packaging company and the family moved to their four-bedroom house in Winston-Salem.

To the outside world, it seemed like the perfect American dream. But, in the space of just four years, the illusion was brutally shattered.

Because, behind closed doors, Sarah claims that her stepmom had become increasingly controlling. 

For a start, she says that Molly, now 41, would tell people she was the children's birth mother. When they were in elementary school, she allegedly dyed their hair blond to look more like her but told Jason they were going through a 'phase'.

And the alleged abuse didn't end there. Sarah claims that Molly would punch and slap the children when they 'misbehaved' — and says she once had to 'drag' her stepmom off a battered Jack when he was curled up on the ground in pain.

But Molly's biggest flashpoint, Sarah says, was their birth mother, Margaret. ‘Molly hated Jack or me talking about her,’ Sarah recalls.

Molly allegedly taunted them with claims that Margaret, who had died of an asthma attack in 2006, had been murdered by their father. ‘Molly didn't have to warn us not to tell our dad,’ Sarah recalls. ‘We knew that, if we told him what she'd said, we’d get punished.’

But Sarah's most heartbreaking memory involves a photo of her birth mother which Jason had put in a pink, crown-adorned frame and given to her as a present. 

Molly Martens, pictured during her 2016 trial, began working as the family's nanny in Limerick in 2008

The couple, pictured on their wedding day, married three years later after moving to the US 

She says she used to hide the picture — a photo from their wedding day — in one of her bedroom drawers and study it in secret. ‘I wanted to see if I looked like my mom,’ Sarah tells me.

However, one time, she forgot to put it back. When Molly came into her bedroom and saw it on the bed, Sarah claims she shouted in her face: 'This woman is dead! I'm your mother, not her!'

A furious Molly allegedly seized the picture, ran into the hallway and threw it down the stairs. The frame smashed and the shards of glass scattered across the hall downstairs.

When Jason returned from work, Molly told him she'd dropped it by mistake. In a sweet gesture, he super-glued the frame, replaced the glass and gave it back to his daughter whom he called 'Princess'. 

‘I still have the photograph,’ Sarah says now. ‘I’ll treasure it forever. I always want to remember Mum and Dad as a beautiful, smiling couple, full of joy on their wedding day.’

The last time she saw her father was on the night of August 1, 2015. That evening Molly's parents, Thomas and Sharon Martens, who lived a four-hour drive away in Knoxville, Tennessee, had made an impromptu visit to stay the night. 

The eight-year-old went up to bed at around 8pm, saying: ‘Good night, Daddy. I love you.’ Those would be the final words she spoke to him.

The little girl dozed off but woke with a start about four hours later. She remembers staggering into the hallway where Molly gave her a drink, and went back to sleep. 

At around 3am, she woke up again — this time to find a police officer at the end of her bed. 

‘I felt ill, and everything around me seemed to be moving,’ she says. 'I remember the cop had a soft voice and asked, "Hey, would you like to walk backward down the stairs or for me to carry you?" I was so confused, I asked him to carry me.

'As we went downstairs, it felt like there were hundreds of people inside the house, all of them talking. I remember the fuzzing of the police walkie talkies and their boots on the hardwood floor.'

Thomas Martens, pictured, claimed he had acted in self-defense after he found Jason 'choking' his daughter

Sarah's birth mom Margaret with Jason at her christening in 2006, just one week before Margaret died of an asthma attack

Sarah’s head was pressed into the officer’s chest as he carried her into the guestroom downstairs. Mercifully, it meant she couldn't see her father’s bloodied corpse lying on a gurney by the front door.

She can't remember how many hours she and Jack stayed in the room with their step-grandmother who, she claims, was calmly reading a book on the bed.

‘Jack and I were too stunned to say anything,’ Sarah recalls. ‘I looked out of the window at the flashing lights in a daze.’

When Molly and Thomas returned from the police station later that morning, they told the children what had happened — a version of events they went on to repeat in court six months later. 

During their trial in February 2016, Molly claimed that it was Jason who had become 'controlling' during their marriage and had grown 'paranoid' she was going to cheat on him. 

She told Davidson Superior Court that, on the night in question, she had accidentally woken Jason after putting Sarah back to bed and he had accused her of 'coddling' the eight-year-old.

The two began to argue, disturbing Thomas in the guestroom below who claims that he picked up a metal baseball bat from downstairs and found Jason 'choking' Molly. He told the court that Jason then dragged Molly towards their ensuite bathroom and threatened to kill her. 

Claiming self-defense, the retired FBI agent said he started to hit Jason with the bat. When he tried to fight back, the pair crushed his skull with a concrete brick, which Molly claimed she'd been keeping on her night stand to use for an 'art project'. (To this day, Sarah says she is baffled by the excuse.)

In his 911 call that night, Thomas, now 74, said: ‘My son-in-law got in a fight with my daughter, I intervened and he’s in bad shape... He's bleeding all over, and I, I may have killed him.'

That, prosecutors said, was an understatement. 

Jason, an executive at a packing company, was bludgeoned to death with a brick and a baseball bat when he was 39

Sarah and Jack, pictured with her first book Noodle Loses Dad, returned to Ireland shortly after his death

Jason had so many injuries that night that a coroner was unable to count them all. Indeed, Greg Brown, the attorney representing the state, said the killing was so violent as to be ‘heinous, atrocious and cruel'. 

Juror Nancy Perez later said that she had vomited after being shown the gruesome photos of his corpse. 

Forensic experts argued that the physical evidence, including blood spatter patterns, proved that Jason received the fatal blows while lying on his bedroom floor — casting doubt on Thomas's testimony that Jason had been fighting back at the time.

The prosecution also disputed Thomas and Molly’s timeline ahead of calling 911, citing paramedics who described Jason's body as being 'cold to the touch' when they arrived. 

But the most controversial piece of 'evidence' involved the children themselves. 

In the days after their father's death, Sarah and Jack had made statements to police and social workers which upheld Molly's claims that Jason had been abusive.

Jack said that Jason 'would physically and verbally hurt her', saying: '[Molly] would cry and try to plug her ears. Sometimes she would just curl herself up in a ball.’

In a separate interview, Sarah said: ‘He would scream at [Molly] every day, or sometimes twice a day. He would fight with her. One time I saw him step on her foot. He called her bad names.’

Both children also said that their step-grandmother had told them to call her with 'code words' if their dad became violent.

However, following their return to Ireland in 2015 — where they were adopted by Jason’s sister, Tracey Lynch, and her husband, David — they recanted the statements, which were then deemed inadmissible in court. 

Sarah says her new book A Time For Truth, published by Mobius last month, is a 'tribute' to her dad

Sarah and her aunt Tracey Lynch who adopted her after her father's death

Thomas and Molly were found guilty of second-degree murder in 2017, and sentenced for up to 25 years in prison.

But, in 2020, an appeals court overturned the original judge’s decision to block Sarah and Jack’s statements from being read out. The killers were granted a retrial and took a plea deal for voluntary manslaughter in 2023, walking free from prison last June. 

Now, Sarah says, she is haunted by those statements — claiming that she had been 'coached' into lying as she was told she would otherwise be separated from her brother. 

‘We loved [Molly] and thought she was telling the truth,’ she says. ‘It was a combination of manipulation, gaslighting and coercive control.

‘We were abused, didn’t know it was abuse and were let down by a system that didn’t recognize it as abuse.'

For her part, Molly has denied all the allegations. Citing the 2023 retrial, a statement from her lawyer said: 'The court found that it was Jack and Sarah’s original statements about their abusive father that was “the truth,” not the later claims made after they came under the influence of Tracey Lynch. 

'The two forensic interviewers of the children, trained to spot lying and coaching, both said that the children had not been coached and told the truth.'

They added: 'The children’s original statements were corroborated by five brave women who came forward to testify about Jason’s physical and emotional abuse of Molly and by a tape recording of Jason’s abuse. 

'The court further found that Molly acted that night in response to Jason’s threat, duress, coercion and provocation.'

Sarah never did get a chance to appear in court. But she hopes that her new book, which was published by Mobius last month, will go some way to clearing Jason's name.

‘I wrote A Time For Truth as a tribute to our dad,’ she says. ‘He was a victim of abuse, but Jack and I survived it.

‘Despite what happened, we’re living our lives as fully as possible — in a way that would make Dad proud.’