Mum 'bought petrol to cremate baby in woods after finding her dead', trial hears
Constance Marten brought petrol to an allotment as she contemplated "cremating" her dead baby, a court heard.
The Old Bailey heard the 36-year-old gave differing accounts to police over when the baby died and eventually settled on January 11, initially offering no information until after her body was found on an allotment in Brighton on March 1 last year. The couple had been living "off-grid" in the weeks leading up to the discovery of her body in a plastic carrier bag, the jury was told.
The aristocrat is on trial alongside partner Mark Gordon charged with the manslaughter of their baby girl Victoria by gross negligence. Both parents deny the charge, alongside child cruelty and other charges.
The court heard how Marten told police she had fallen asleep holding her daughter, waking to find she was no longer alive. "I wanted to turn myself in at the time, I've been debating it, obviously it's two months later now," she told detectives.
The couple's baby was eventually found in a plastic carrier bag in a disused shed in Brighton (Adam Gerrard / Daily Mirror)Partner Mark Gordon, 49, claimed he had desperately tried to resuscitate the infant, giving her CPR. He told police: "I was trying to breathe into the baby trying to get her back to resuscitate and it was the most harrowing experience to see my child like that and it was one of the worst things that I ever saw in my life."
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Marten told police she kept the baby's body because she wanted to have a post-mortem examination done. "I don't know if you found, there's a bottle of petroleum in the bag because I debated whether to cremate her myself, get rid of the evidence, but I decided to keep her because I knew at some point in the future I was going to be asked about it, but I just didn't know what to do," she added.
Both deny manslaughter of their daughter by gross negligence (Getty Images)She told officers they ran away with the baby after their car "exploded" assuming that police would take their daughter away, and then decided to "remove ourselves from society" when people started to recognise them on the streets. The court heard it was difficult to determine a cause of death but that the pathology was consistent with death caused by hypothermia or exposure.
Opening the trial on Thursday, prosecutor Tom Little KC alleged how Marten and Gordon kept their baby in a Lidl bag before "dumping her like refuse". Addressing the jury, he said the baby “would still be alive if it was not for the reckless, utterly selfish, callous, cruel, arrogant and ultimately grossly negligent conduct of the two defendants on trial”.
Mr Little said: “That baby never stood a chance. After the baby had died, the defendants did not hand themselves in but instead remained off-grid and tried to hide, leaving the body of their dead baby in a shopping bag covered in rubbish, as if she was refuse, and left in a disused unlocked shed.”
The couple, of no fixed address, deny manslaughter by gross negligence of the girl between January 4 and February 27 last year. They are also charged with perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, child cruelty, and causing or allowing the death of a child.
The trial, expected to go on until March 8, continues on Friday.
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