Fugitive aristocrat ‘filled can with fuel to cremate her dead newborn girl’
A RUNAWAY aristocrat was seen on CCTV filling up a bottle with petrol as part of an alleged plan to cremate her dead baby daughter.
Jurors at the Old Bailey yesterday saw footage of Constance Marten, 36, entering a Texaco garage in Newhaven, East Sussex, alone on January 12 last year.
It was days after taking baby Victoria on to the South Downs in the middle of winter in an alleged attempt to hide from the authorities. She and lover Mark Gordon, 48, are accused of going on the run in a ‘desperately selfish’ bid to stop their baby – who was little more than two weeks old – being taken into care after losing custody of their four previous children.
Victoria was found dead under a pile of rubbish in a shed in Brighton in March last year following weeks of appeals for the pair. Jurors at the Old Bailey previously heard how Marten claimed to police that she fell asleep with baby Victoria zipped in her jacket while camping on the Downs and awoke to find her dead.
She claimed she bought petrol at the garage because she was considering cremating the remains. The prosecution believe the baby actually died much later.
In the footage, played to the couple’s trial yesterday, Marten had a hood up and concealed her face using a mask. Gordon, meanwhile, was seen walking several minutes behind her, carrying a supermarket bag-for-life in which it is alleged they carried the infant for much of her short life.
CCTV from inside the Texaco filling station also showed Marten buying cans of coke, milk, Skips and Maom sweets, as well as a plastic bottle which she is later
‘The crying woke me up’
seen filling with petrol in the forecourt. Jurors also heard from a witness who claimed to have been awoken by the ‘high-pitched’ cries of a baby during a stormy night on the South Downs at about the time the fugitive couple were allegedly living ‘off grid’.
Sarah Hidden, who lives in Seaford, East Sussex, said she heard the wailing on two consecutive nights last January, before allegedly spotting the couple on a coastal path days later.
‘I was asleep, but the crying woke me up,’ she told the jury.
‘ It was definitely a young baby crying. It’s a different sound to an older baby crying, more constant, a bit more high pitched, urgent sounding.’ When she saw the couple in the days that followed – at some point in mid to late January – she described the woman as being ‘ laden’ with bags and carrying something she instinctively thought might be a baby.
The two defendants deny Victoria’s manslaughter by gross negligence between January 4 and February 27 last year.
They also deny perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, child cruelty, and causing or allowing the death of a child. The case continues.