‘I did nothing but show love to my little baby’
Aristocrat’s tearful claim during trial over her daughter’s death
AN ARISTOCRAT accused of causing the death of her baby told a court she did ‘nothing but show love’ to the newborn.
Giving evidence in the Old Bailey for the first time yesterday, Constance Marten insisted that she did ‘the best that any mother would’ as she tearfully recounted the moment she realised the infant was dead.
The 36-year- old and her partner Mark Gordon, 49, are on trial over the death of baby Victoria while they were on the run in the depths of winter early last year.
The couple sparked a nationwide search after a placenta was found in the burned- out wreckage of their car on a motorway near Bolton on January 5.
They were arrested in Brighton on February 27. Victoria’s body was discovered two days later in a disused shed.
Asked whether she did anything to harm the child, Marten replied: ‘Definitely not. I did nothing but show her love’. Her voice trembling, she recalled the moment she woke to find her baby dead inside her jacket while the couple were hiding out in a tent.
‘I had her in my jacket and when I woke up my head was on the floor,’ she told the jury.
‘I took her out of my jacket. I believe I woke Mark up and said “something has gone wrong”.
‘But he didn’t believe me so he tried to resuscitate her but she wasn’t alive. We just didn’t accept that she wasn’t alive.’
She told jurors that Victoria died on January 9 last year, adding: ‘I do not think it is anything I will ever move on from. I feel guilty because she was in my arms. I feel like it’s not an easy thing to live with. I think initially it was disbelief, shock, intense grief.’ Victoria’s body was found on March 1 last year in a Lidl bag for life in the allotment shed, two days after their arrest.
When questioned about what they did with the baby’s body, Marten added: ‘I held on to her for a few hours and then I wrapped her in my black headscarf. I said some parting words to her and placed her in the bag for life.’ And when asked by her defence barrister Francis FitzGibbon KC whether she had given ‘anything less than the proper care you thought she deserved’, Marten said: ‘I gave her the best that any mother would.’
Marten told jurors that Victoria, died on January 9, 2023. Pathologists believe she died of hypothermia, exposure or co-sleeping.
The couple had been caught on CCTV buying a bottle of petrol and Marten said that they had ‘toyed with’ the idea of cremating their baby’s body.
She said: ‘At one point Mark said, “Why don’t we jump in with her” and call it quits. Let’s just all have a fire and say goodbye to life together”. We had just had enough at that point.’
Marten said they had been unable to go through with this and added: ‘ We kept her with us because I didn’t want to bury her and we didn’t know what to do.’
Marten, wearing a white blouse shirt and black trousers, said that even after her other four children had been taken into care or adopted she still intended to have a family with Gordon.
She said they had planned to go abroad to evade social services but had been unable to travel after a legal dispute with a relative. Marten described the family court decision to remove her first four children as ‘disgraceful’, adding: ‘From my perspective of going through things with social services I don’t believe they’re there to help parents or children.’
She became tearful when asked if she had ever harmed any of her five children, insisting: ‘Mark and I love our kids more than anything in the world so I’m pretty angry about the fact they had to go through this process.’
Challenged on the prosecution suggestion that she and Gordon put their interests ahead of the children, she said: ‘ No, there is literally nothing I would not do for my children.’
The pair met in around 2014 in a shop in London and they became friends, Marten said. They went travelling to Peru in around 2016 and were married there in an unofficial wedding ceremony.
The aristocrat admitted that she had benefited from a private education and had grown up in a wealthy family but said she had subsequently fallen out with them in a dispute over a will. She told the court that the pair had 34 mobile phones to try to avoid detection by investigators hired by her family, who she thought could ‘hack into anything’.
Marten and Gordon deny manslaughter by gross negligence, concealment of the birth of a child, cruelty to a person under 16 and perverting the course of justice. They also deny causing or allowing the death of a child.
The trial continues.
‘We didn’t accept she wasn’t alive’