She was the wife of Douglas Wayne Martin, a Harvard-educated lawyer, who died in the April 19, 1993, fire that destroyed Mount Carmel Center.
[7] Her African-American family attended services at an Episcopal Church, but she became interested in Seventh-day Adventism through boarders who rented rooms from her parents.
In 1985, she and Wayne Martin moved to Texas from Durham, North Carolina; they began living in the Mount Carmel Center in 1988.
[10][3] She testified in the trial of eleven Branch Davidians in San Antonio saying that the February 28 shootout was not planned and there was no conspiracy to murder federal agents.
[3] In 2000, she, among others, was represented in a wrongful death lawsuit of US$675 million by Michael Caddell along with former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark, but the jury ruled against the Branch Davidians on July 14, 2000.