Mother planned to have baby smuggled abroad to avoid her being taken into care, court told
On-the-run mother Constance Marten has told jurors that she and her partner planned to pay someone to smuggle their baby daughter abroad.
The aristocrat, 36, and her partner Mark Gordon (pictured), 49, are on trial after baby Victoria died while they were camping on the South Downs in wintry conditions last year.
Giving evidence on Monday, she insisted that there were “plenty of people” she could have found who would have been willing to help get her daughter abroad, naming advertising and community website Gumtree as one of the places to look.
Jurors have heard how the couple went on the run from authorities in a bid to keep their baby after their four other children were taken into care, who Marten claimed on Monday were “stolen from me by the state”.
Talking about baby Victoria, Marten said: “She deserves to be with me. I’m a good mother, I’m an excellent mother actually.”
Asked if she was not going to let social services near her child “whatever the consequences”, Marten became tearful, answering: “Not whatever the consequences. If I had foreseen what happened with Victoria of course … I would have preferred her to have gone into care and have her life but I wasn’t prepared to take that gamble.”
She denied that it was selfish to want to keep her baby with her, adding: “If I was a negligent parent I would have given her to the authorities.
“It was my love that kept her with me.”
She told the jury, that after finding out she was pregnant with her fifth child, the plan was to go abroad.
“Get away from this country and the services and my family but unfortunately there were preventatives from going abroad,” she said.
She believed there was a travel ban in place against her after a “private” High Court case in 2019, the court heard.
Asked how they were going to get abroad, Marten said: “We were going to find some people to smuggle us abroad illegally.”
Asked where she was going to go, she initially told the court she “would rather keep that private” but then said “anywhere in Europe away from here”.
Marten told jurors that “plan B” was to stay in the UK and “lay low”.
Asked to elaborate on the plan to remain in the UK, Marten said: “I probably would not have stayed over here.
“I wanted to keep her at least until she was three months old and then give her to a carer who could then try and get her abroad.”
She told the court she would have paid the person to get Victoria out of the UK.
“It would have been a carer, a nanny or something,” she added.
“If there is a will there is a way, you can always find someone to help.”
She insisted she would have “spent time with them” before entrusting them with her child.
Marten said the plan was to find someone prepared to register Victoria under their own name.
She told the court earlier that she would not have been able to register her daughter’s birth without alerting the authorities and that she planned to use private medical care on Harley Street if her daughter ever needed medical attention instead of registering her with the NHS.
Challenged on how getting someone else to register the baby’s birth may have been difficult, Marten said: “I am sure these things are doable. I will do anything to save my children.”
Marten also told the court she believed people were following them and tampering with their cars, saying that she found “GPS trackers” under the vehicles and “every single one of our cars has just stopped in the middle of the motorway”.
She later said she believed private investigators hired by her family were tampering with the vehicles.
The couple abandoned a car after it burst into flames near Bolton, Greater Manchester, on January 5 last year.
Asked by the prosecutor if she thought she was giving her daughter the best care at that point – being on the run from police, with a finite amount of cash, and “literally the clothes you have stood up in” – Marten said their plan was to lay low until they could figure out next steps.
“My gut reaction was to take her and get out of here as quickly as possible,” she told the jury. “But obviously our plan would not have been to live destitute in the middle of nowhere indefinitely.”
Marten and Gordon were finally arrested in Brighton a few weeks later on February 27.
The couple had refused to answer officers’ urgent questions about where their baby was and whether she was alive or dead.
Her remains were found by police in a Lidl bag inside a shed on a nearby allotment on March 1 2023.
Last week, Marten described how Victoria was born at a rental cottage on Christmas Eve 2022 and died last January 9.
On how Victoria died, she said: “I had her in my jacket and when I woke up my head was on the floor. And when I was sitting up and when I woke up she was not alive.”
She told jurors her children meant the world to her and she had done nothing to Victoria “but show her love”.
The defendants, of no fixed address, 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 will continue on Wednesday.
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