Aristocrat: Family took me to court after claiming I’d sell babies abroad
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AN ARISTOCRAT charged with killing her baby was accused by her family of ‘bearing children to sell on the black market’, a jury heard yesterday.
Constance Marten, 36, told the Old Bailey that her four older children had been ‘stolen’ by social workers at the request of her family, who enjoyed the ‘ backing of the state’ because they had ‘a lot of money, a lot of clout and connections’.
She claimed her relatives had taken her to the High Court over unfounded allegations that she was addicted to drugs and
‘They had state backing’
planned to sell her children. When Marten became pregnant with a fifth child, she and her partner Mark Gordon, 49, made a plan to have the baby in secret and pay someone on the classified ads website Gumtree to smuggle her abroad. This was to prevent the baby from being taken into care, the court heard.
But the scheme fell apart when the couple’s car was ‘detonated’ on a motorway after it was ‘tampered with by people working with my family’, Marten alleged.
Police launched a nationwide search for the pair after finding a placenta in the burned- out car, which was abandoned near Bolton on January 5 last year.
Marten and Gordon travelled across the country in taxis with their baby Victoria before resorting to camping in freezing conditions on the South Downs, where the infant died.
Marten told jurors that they had hoped to send Victoria to another country under a false name when she was a few months old. ‘I would have found someone on Gumtree. I would meet them and live with them,’ she said. ‘I would have given Victoria a carer who cares for other children, who would then have taken her abroad under another name.’
Marten said they were unable to travel abroad because Gordon’s passport had been seized and a travel ban imposed on her in 2019 during private proceedings brought by the Marten family.
She told the court: ‘My children were stolen from me by the state, there is no other way to say it. Our plan was to go abroad to get Victoria away from the services and my family. Unfortunately, there were preventatives to me
going abroad.’ Marten added: ‘I had spoken out about serious abuse by [a] family member, and as a way to get back at me they tried to take my children away from me. They had the full backing of the state…
‘They stated that I was bearing children to sell on the black market, that I was a drug addict. It was completely outrageous.’
Marten revealed that social services had previously stopped her at the border when she tried to take her older children to Ireland. She said she would have done anything to prevent Victoria being taken into care, adding her ‘number one concern’ was to ‘keep my baby with her mother’.
She added: ‘I’m a good mother. I’m an excellent mother in fact. She deserved to be with me.’
After two months on the run, the couple were arrested near Brighton in February 2023. Victoria’s body was found two days later in a bag inside a shed.
Marten and Gordon deny manslaughter by gross negligence, perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, child cruelty and causing or allowing the death of a child.
The trial continues.