Jury retires in Constance Marten and Mark Gordon retrial

The jury has retired to consider its verdicts in the retrial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, who are both accused of the manslaughter by gross negligence of their newborn baby Victoria.

The couple became the subjects of a police manhunt in 2023 when officers found evidence of a recent birth in a burnt-out car near Bolton.

They were found on 27 February 2023 and the newborn was discovered dead two days later in a shopping bag in an allotment shed in the Hollingbury area of Brighton. She had died in a tent in the South Downs in January 2023.

Gordon, 51, and Marten, 38, both deny manslaughter by gross negligence and causing or allowing the death of a child.

Gordon and Marten were found guilty at an earlier trial of concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice by not reporting her death.

The jury in that case could not come to a verdict on the outstanding charges.

A retrial at the Old Bailey in London began in March.

During their evidence in the retrial, the couple both said their baby died on the second day of camping, with Marten having woken up to find she had slumped over Victoria, who was no longer breathing.

In his closing speech, prosecutor Tom Little KC said Victoria had been exposed to "cold, damp and windy conditions with wholly inadequate clothing inside that tent".

"It was simply too cold, she could not maintain her temperature and death was inevitable," he told the jury.

Last month, Gordon made his own closing speech because he was representing himself by that point.

He claimed the prosecution had "just made things up" during his retrial with Marten, and the case against him was "like a script from a movie".

Giving evidence in April, Marten told the jury that she "absolutely" loved her baby daughter and she and Gordon did everything they could to protect her.

The jury previously heard that because Marten and Gordon's four older children had been taken into care, the couple tried to hide Victoria's birth.

But when their car caught fire in January 2023, with a placenta found on its back seat, they became the subjects of a police manhunt.