Wealthy aristocrat Constance Marten and her partner exposed their newborn daughter to “utterly dangerous” conditions before she died in a tent on the South Downs, a court has heard.
Marten, 37, and Mark Gordon, 50, are accused of the gross negligence manslaughter of their baby in early 2023.
The couple kept the birth of their fifth child secret and went on the run on January 5 2023 after their four other children were taken into care, the Old Bailey was told.
When their car burst into flames on a motorway near Bolton, they abandoned their belongings and travelled by taxi to Essex and London and on to the South Downs where they slept with the young girl in a flimsy tent, jurors heard.
Having carried the child in a Lidl bag during her short life, the baby was abandoned amid rubbish in the same bag after she died, it is alleged.
Following a police search, her body was found in a disused shed near Brighton following the couple’s arrest on February 27 2023.
On Tuesday, prosecutor Tom Little KC asserted there were two possible ways the baby died – by exposure to the extreme cold or by smothering while co-sleeping while her parents, who would have been exhausted from days on the run.
He told jurors that the conditions the defendants lived in with their baby were “utterly reckless, utterly dangerous”.
The background of social services’ involvement with the family was important because the defendants had been warned “time and again” of the dangers of sleeping in a tent with a young child, he said.
Mr Little said: “They exposed her to the cold. They exposed her to the damp in winter conditions and they did so with woefully inadequate clothing.
“Any child that becomes hypothermic in those conditions, we say, must amount to a breach of duty of care. If death was caused by smothering or suffocation, one of the reasons for that must have been conditions in that tent.
“The second defendant (Marten) fell asleep with the baby underneath her jacket zipped up in that tent. If that is what occurred, it represents a breach of that duty of care by the parents because they were in that tent together.
“We say the risk of death by hyopthermia or suffocation was obvious, but also it was a serious risk of death.”
The defendants’ failure to report the child’s death was an attempt to “hide potential evidence and cause of death”, he asserted.
Jurors were told the defendants were convicted at an earlier trial of concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice.
The defendants, of no fixed address, have denied manslaughter and a second charge of causing or allowing the death of a child between January 4 and February 27 2023.
The Old Bailey retrial continues.
