Aristocrat: Why I left my baby’s body in a Lidl bag

AN ARISTOCRAT accused of killing her baby admitted yesterday that she left the body in a plastic bag as she feared being blamed ‘for being an evil parent’.

Constance Marten sobbed as she revealed she was ‘shocked’ by her own decision to leave her child’s body in a soiled nappy, hidden within a bag of rubbish containing a discarded can of beer and a sandwich wrapper.

The 36-year- old described how she lived ‘like a rat’ with her partner Mark Gordon, 49, after they went on the run from the authorities camping with their daughter Victoria in the freezing cold on the South Downs last winter.

The mother, who said she gave birth in secret to prevent her baby being taken into care on the orders of her ‘ embarrassed’ family, said she panicked on waking in the tent to find Victoria dead and resolved to ‘get rid of the evidence completely’. ‘When looked at objectively it looks awful, but we just panicked. I thought they were going to say I murdered my child, that I’d done something evil and sinister.’

Marten said she bought some petrol to cremate the corpse because she believed that no one could prove she had a baby without a body.

‘I thought maybe I should just have a pyre and get rid of the evidence completely so they would not know I ever had a baby,’ she said. But she later decided to leave the body in a Lidl bag for life in an allotment shed while she went off to scavenge in bins for food.

Police launched a nationwide hunt in January last year after discovering a placenta in the couple’s car when it exploded on a motorway. The pair camped for weeks before they were arrested near Brighton on February 27 last year.

Yesterday, prosecutor Joel Smith accused the couple of evading police to allow the body to decompose, hiding the cause of death. But Marten said: ‘I didn’t know anything about dead bodies and autopsies.’ Marten claims Victoria’s death was a ‘terrible accident’. Earlier, the court heard Marten accuse her family of conspiring with social services to remove four of her children out of embarrassment that they did not ‘come from an upper class, privileged background’.

Marten and Gordon deny manslaughter by gross negligence, concealment of the birth of a child, child cruelty and perverting the course of justice. They also deny causing or allowing the death of a child. The trial continues.