MANCHESTER – Molly Martel’s voice quivered sharply Thursday as she turned to face the family of the woman she killed. Even as she choked back tears, Martel’s sobs carried farther than her broken words.

“I’d like to say I’m sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen,” Martel, a former Merrimack resident, told the family of Stephanie Campbell, who Martel stabbed to death in November 2010. “If I could change it, I would.”

Martel was convicted four months ago of second-degree murder. The apology, issued Thursday at Martel’s sentencing hearing in Hillsborough County Superior Court, wasn’t enough for Campbell’s family.

“I believe she was sincere, but it doesn’t bring my daughter back,” Campbell’s mother, Bonny Walker, said as she left the court.

The words meant something more to Judge Gillian Abramson, who had some sympathy for Martel on Thursday when she sentenced her to 20 to 40 years in prison.

“I have never before this sentenced someone for murder who has any potential,” Abramson said, looking toward Martel, 23, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. “If there’s anybody that can be rehabilitated by a prison sentence, it’s possibly you.”

Martel, once a standout athlete at Merrimack High School, was convicted in November on second-degree murder charges for stabbing Campbell to death Nov. 2, 2010, outside a Manchester apartment building. The two worked together and had been friends.

Defense attorneys argued Campbell, 27 at the time of her death, wielded the knife and Martel stabbed her in self-defense. The Superior Court jury didn’t buy the argument, siding instead with state prosecutors, who maintained Martel stabbed Campbell in a dispute over a boyfriend.

Prosecutors argued for a longer sentence – 30 years to life in prison – saying that Martel not only stabbed Campbell to death, but also fled the state immediately afterwards, heading to New York. They further argued that Martel falsified evidence and even cut herself with a knife to support her self-defense argument.

“She manufactured injuries, she tampered with evidence and she conspired with another person,” Assistant Attorney General Peter Hinckley told the court. “In the end, she made choices in this case.”

Martel’s attorneys countered the argument, suggesting that a history of family sexual abuse, among other factors, led her to commit the crime.

Martel, who was a dominant pitcher for the Merrimack High softball team, was abused by her father through her early teenage years, her attorneys said.

“She wasn’t born to be defended in a murder case,” attorney Eric Wilson told the court. “You’ve got to wonder why, what happened in the last 23 years that put Molly Martel in that chair.”

The judge’s order fell somewhere between the prosecution’s request and the defense’s proposal. It will be enough, Abramson said, to make Martel pay for her actions.

“You will lose the best years of your life,” Abramson said. “You will also probably lose the opportunity to be a mother yourself.”

Still, the penalty does not bring Campbell back to her parents, her three children or her other friends and family, said Walker, the victim’s mother, wiping away tears.

“She was a wonderful mother. She cared so much for her children,” Walker said. “(The sentence) wasn’t the time I wanted for (Martel), but it will do. It’s justice for my daughter.”

Jake Berry can be reached at 594-6402 or jberry@nashuatelegraph.com.

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