Limerick, 2006: Jason Corbett's first wife Mags Fitzpatrick dies of an asthma attack. She is survived by Mr Corbett and their two children Sarah, now 17, and Jack, now 19.
2008: Molly Martens, from Tennessee, first meets Mr Corbett when she moves to Limerick to work as a nanny for his children. The two start a relationship soon after.
2011: Mr Corbett, from Limerick, marries Martens and move to Wallburg, North Carolina the following year.
2 August 2015: Business manager Mr Corbett, 39, is found beaten to death in the main bedroom of 160 Panther Creek Court in Lexington, North Carolina.
August 2017: Mr Corbett's wife Molly Martens Corbett and her father, former FBI agent Tom Martens, tried and convicted on charges of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to 20 and 25 years respectively.
They never deny killing Mr Corbett, but insist they acted in self-defence.
Tom Martens claimed he acted in self-defence, testifying that Mr Corbett was choking his daughter, and that he reacted to what he thought was some sort of disturbance.
Prosecutors told the trial that the pair beat Mr Corbett to death with a brick and a baseball bat, administering at least 12 blows to his head and crushing his skull.
Mr Corbett’s twin brother Wayne said he believes his brother was asleep when he was attacked.
May 2018: Mr Corbett's sister, Tracey Corbett-Lynch, tells The Late Late Show that she believed that Molly Martens Corbett had planned to kill her brother.
January 2019: Lawyers for Molly and Tom Martens tell the North Carolina Court of Appeal that they did not get a fair trial and that the trial judge had excluded critical evidence in their case.
They argued statements that Mr Corbett's children had given to social workers should have been allowed as evidence.
2020: In its ruling, the North Carolina Court of Appeal said both defendants were entitled to a new trial. A year later that decision is upheld by the state's Supreme Court.
The appeal court quashes the murder convictions and orders a retrial, stating that some evidence that had been excluded from the original trial should have been presented to the jury.
Molly Martens Corbett and Tom Martens have spent more than three years in prison.
October 2023: Sentencing hearing in Lexington County Superior Court following a plea deal where both entered guilty pleas to manslaughter charges, in return for the District Attorney dropping murder charges.
The plea deal avoids the need for a full retrial.
The court hears evidence and arguments from lawyers for both sides – the prosecutors from the District Attorney’s office, who are seeking prison time of six to nine years for the defendants; and Tom and Molly’s defence lawyers, who are trying to argue exceptional mitigating circumstances that could justify a sentence of supervised probation.
The prosecution and defence in the manslaughter hearing agreed a narrative of what happened in the early hours of 2 August 2015.
The prosecution’s key argument is that Mr Corbett was an angry, controlling, abusive and sometimes violent partner in marriage.
The hearing was at one point told by a medical expert that Mr Corbett's first wife Margaret did not die from asthma in Limerick in 2006.
This provoked outrage from the Fitzgerald family in Limerick, the relatives of the late Margaret Corbett, who had long suffered from asthma, and whose sister Catherine was present on the night of her death and saw her having a bad asthma attack.
November 2023: Davidson County Superior Court Judge David Hall to decide sentence at the end of manslaughter hearing.
An expert in domestic violence at the manslaughter hearing provoked outrage from the Corbett family after describing mortuary photographs of Mr Corbett as showing a "measure of the amount of fear" Molly Martens Corbett was living in.
This answer provoked comments of incredulity and gasps from the Corbett family, including Mr Corbett's two children, Sarah and Jack, who were sitting together in the front row of the court.
The Corbett family left the court visibly distressed.
