A wealthy aristocrat and her partner caused the “entirely avoidable” death of their baby daughter through their “reckless” and “grossly negligent” conduct while on the run to evade authorities, a retrial has heard.
Constance Marten, 37, and Mark Gordon, 50, of no fixed abode, deny manslaughter of their newborn by gross negligence and a second charge of causing or allowing the death of a child between 4 January and 27 February 2023.
The retrial at the Old Bailey in London was told the couple allegedly kept the birth secret after four older children were taken into care.
The prosecutor Tom Little KC told jurors the case “involves the entirely avoidable death of a young baby. A young baby girl who undoubtedly would still be alive if it was not for the reckless and ultimately grossly negligent conduct of the two defendants.
“They were the parents of that young baby girl, but they put their relationship and their views of life before the life of that little baby girl.”
The court heard that the pair went on the run with the baby after their car burst into flames on a motorway in Greater Manchester on 5 January 2023. They then travelled hundreds of miles across England in taxis at a cost of hundreds of pounds.
After travelling from Harwich to Colchester in Essex and on to east London, they made their way to the South Downs where they “essentially went off grid and lived in a tent with hardly any clothes, no means of keeping and remaining warm and dry and with scarcely any food”.
The “risk of hypothermia was blindingly obvious”, Little added.
Having dumped a buggy hours after purchasing it, the defendants had transferred the baby to a Lidl bag for life, it was claimed. Little said: “The need to try to keep warm in wet and damp and cold conditions in a small, thin and flimsy tent also created obvious suffocation risks, both with items and with themselves. So too, as I have said, the risk and reality of hypothermia. It was this grossly negligent and obviously dangerous conduct that caused the death of their baby daughter.”
Little added that, after the baby died, the defendants did not hand themselves in but instead remained off grid, “leaving the body of their dead baby in a shopping bag covered in rubbish, which they carried around and then left in a disused shed”.
Jurors were told the defendants were convicted at an earlier trial of concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice.
Little told jurors Marten came from a wealthy family. “She has not had a deprived upbringing. She has a trust fund.” He added she had “access to as much money as she wanted, had she chosen to do the right thing rather than make bad decision after bad decision”.
Judge Mark Lucraft KC, the recorder of London, told the jury that Gordon was not in the dock with Marten, but that he might join the proceedings later by video link.
In a police interview, Marten said the baby had died after Marten fell asleep with her tucked under her coat and claimed the child had “ample clothes”.
Little said: “We say that, having considered all of the evidence, you can be sure that death was caused by hypothermia or by smothering and suffocation whilst co-sleeping.”
Referring to the previous trial, Little told jurors: “At that trial the defendants were each convicted of the offence of concealing the birth of a child and the offence of perverting the course of justice.
“Those convictions involve overlapping conduct but in short they involve hiding the body in order to hide the existence of the birth of the baby, but also hiding the body and not reporting the death of the baby intending to pervert the course of justice, which would have been the inevitable investigation.”
The convictions were relevant, the prosecution says, in that they support the fact that the baby did not die by reason of an accident and support the prosecution case on the homicide offences.
The court was also told of the defendants’ history with social services, which led to a family court decision in February 2021 that their four other children should be adopted.
The retrial is expected to last for up to eight weeks.
