A newborn baby was wearing no clothing and only a nappy as her parents took a long taxi ride allegedly to evade authorities in freezing winter conditions, a jury at the Old Bailey has heard.
Constance Marten, 36, and Mark Gordon, 49, who were allegedly motivated by a “selfish” desire to keep their daughter Victoria after four other children were taken into care, paid hundreds of pounds in taxi fares after their Peugeot 206 caught fire on the M61 on 5 January 2023.
Police attended the fire and discovered a placenta wrapped in a towel and the couple’s possessions nearby. Marten and Gordon had already fled, taking a taxi from Bolton to Liverpool and then another to Harwich in Essex, arriving at 2.30am the following day, the court heard.
On 1 March 2023, the baby was found dead in a carrier bag covered in rubbish inside a disused shed, the Old Bailey has heard.
A taxi driver, Ali Yaryar, told jurors Gordon paid £400 in £20 notes for the Harwich fare. He said he noticed the baby and said Marten was breastfeeding. When they stopped at a service station Marten handed the baby to Gordon while she went to buy snacks and soft drinks, he said.
He told the court via video link that he saw the baby. “I think the baby had no clothes except a nappy.”
John Femi-Ola KC, representing Marten, suggested “the baby had clothing and the baby was changed in the car”, which would explain why he only saw it in a nappy. Yaryar replied: “I think the baby had no clothing.”
A witness, Dale Gosling, told the court he was walking his dog in Harwich in the early morning on 7 January when he saw the couple sitting on a street planter. He thought they could be the missing couple mentioned in TV reports that morning after a nationwide alert.
It was “freezing cold, frost on the ground”, he said, and Marten had the baby under her coat, and with a towel or blanket wrapped around them both.
Gosling heard it cry. “A cry I couldn’t walk away from,” he said. The baby “most definitely” sounded distressed.
He asked if they were the couple on the news. Gordon replied with “something like ‘that’s not us’”.
He said he saw the baby’s head. “It was like a newborn baby’s head, stuff on it still, hair on the back matted with a bit of mucus type stuff. A brand new baby.”
The baby was wearing a white onesie, but had “no gloves or hat”, Gosling said.
He said he asked if the baby was all right, “if they had just given birth to it”, and offered them a lift to hospital, telling them the authorities were concerned for their child and offered to take them to his home for tea and to warm up, he said.
He said Gordon said something like “he was doing the best he could for his child and he wanted to keep his family together and do the right thing”. He said Gordon insisted they had plans, were heading to family and friends in London and that “they knew what they were doing”.
“I told him I was only interested in baby’s wellbeing. I wasn’t interested in what they had done.”
When he got home, he said, he contacted Essex police.
Gosling denied the suggestion from Gordon’s defence counsel that he had ”embellished” his evidence after listening to news reports.
The court heard that, while in Harwich, the couple checked into a Premier Inn hotel under false names and paid in cash at 3am. After they checked out the following day, a receptionist, Rae Robson, said she opened the door to their room and noticed “a really, really bad smell almost like rotting flesh”. They then checked into the nearby Fryatt hotel, also under a false name and paying in cash.
Marten, who the court has heard is from a wealthy family, and Gordon, both of no fixed address, deny manslaughter by gross negligence of the girl between 4 January and 27 February 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 prosecution has claimed the couple spent weeks from January until their arrest on 27 February 2023 camping in a “flimsy” tent in the freezing weather on the South Downs near Brighton.
The case continues.
