Constance Marten, whose daughter Victoria died after she and the baby’s father went off the grid in freezing winter weather to evade authorities, has denied ever harming her child, telling a jury she had shown her nothing but love during her short life.
Marten was giving evidence at the Old Bailey on Thursday, as she and her partner, Mark Gordon, stand trial for the manslaughter of the child in 2023. Gordon declined to give evidence earlier in the week.
“I did nothing but show her love,” Marten told jurors when asked if she had ever been cruel to baby Victoria. She also told the jury she had given her daughter “the best that any mother would” when defence barrister Francis FitzGibbon KC asked if she had offered “anything less than the proper care” the child deserved.
She told jurors Victoria died on 9 January 2023, aged 16 days, saying: “I do not think it is anything I will ever move on from. I feel guilty because she was in my arms. I feel like it’s not an easy thing to live with.” She added that she had felt “disbelief, shock, intense grief”.
The court has heard that Greater Manchester police launched a nationwide search after a placenta was found in Gordon and Marten’s burnt-out car by a motorway near Bolton last January.
It is alleged the defendants went on the run because they wanted to keep Victoria with them, after four other children had been taken into care. Days after their arrest on 27 February, the child’s badly decomposed body was found in a Lidl bag inside an allotment shed in Brighton, East Sussex. While the cause of Victoria’s death is “unascertained”, jurors have heard she could have died from the cold or from co-sleeping.
Marten told police Victoria had died when she fell asleep in the tent while holding the child under her jacket.
The court has heard Marten had previously been warned by social workers of the risks of falling asleep with the baby on her, and that a tent would be “wholly inappropriate for a baby to live in”. She told jurors she had been given advice around 2017 about the risk of falling asleep while breastfeeding a baby.
Marten said she had had a “bad experience” with the birth of her first child in the NHS, and felt she had made a “bet with the devil” in her dealings with social services.
She told the jury she had become distrustful after she was advised against giving birth to her second child at home because the baby was “huge”. She said: “I panicked and got a private scan. They said there is nothing wrong, of course you can have a home birth.”
Marten said she had also researched hypnobirthing, but added: “I do think that you should have scans to check the baby is in the right position and baby is OK, but I don’t think midwifery is necessary. Once you have had your first child, a woman is quite intuitive.”
Marten also told jurors that, in December 2022, she had been moving around the country to avoid social services taking her unborn baby away. “I wanted to keep Victoria with us so I did not want to tell anyone about the birth. I was in good health physically but I was in a high state of anxiety. I thought someone was going to bash down the door and take her away. I was joyful but at the same time anxious,” Marten said.
The defendants 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.
