Paris Mayo: Murder-accused mum tells jurors she loved newborn

A teenager accused of murdering her baby hours after giving birth has told a court she did not mean to hurt him.

Paris Mayo, now 19, was 15 when she gave birth in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, jurors at Worcestershire Crown Court heard.

Ms Mayo told the court she did not acknowledge her pregnancy until the day she went into labour on 23 March, 2019.

She said her son Stanley was silent and not moving when she gave birth alone in the living room of the family home.

Warning – this article contains distressing content.

Ms Mayo, who denies murder, said she was confused and scared after her labour and admitted putting the baby into a bin bag because “I knew my mum would find him. I didn’t know how else to tell someone.”

Giving evidence for the first time in her trial, she said: “I love him. I always think about what he would have been now, what he could have been.”

It is alleged Ms Mayo inflicted complex skull fractures to the baby and stuffed cotton wool into his mouth.

She was asked by Bernard Richmond, defending, whether she knew she was pregnant at any time before Stanley was born.

“No, I was always scared of the thought I might be. I had never taken a test and it telling me I was pregnant [sic],” she said.

“I was more suspicious I could have been, rather than actually knowing if I was or not.”

Worcester Crown Court heard the baby was conceived in the summer of 2018 when Ms Mayo was 14, with the teenager losing her virginity at 13.

By the autumn she was suffering from abdominal pain and sickness which she said would “go back and come away”.

“I thought it was a stomach bug that went away, or I had eaten something that disagreed with me,” said Ms Mayo, who now lives in Ruardean, Gloucestershire.

Jurors were told she had been taken to the GP by her mother in October 2018 and during the examination was asked if she was having sex.

“I told her no because at that time I wasn’t,” she said.

“I think I must have misunderstood how she was asking it. I felt like I could have told her if I felt comfortable enough, but I didn’t know how to go about it.”

Explaining why she started having sex at a young age, she said: “I just thought it was a way to get people to like me because I was quite insecure about the way I looked and the way I was made to feel about myself at home because my family situation was quite bad.

“I was always being patronised and belittled and told I was worthless. I just wanted to feel a bit more validated and the way I felt to get that was to have sex with people.”

She explained her father had been poor health, including heart problems and diabetes, and died in April 2019.

Miss Mayo said she helped care for him, but described him a “bully” who “thrived on us being scared of him”.

“He put a lot of pressure on us to be the kids he wanted us to be, rather than what we wanted to be,” she said.

Asked if she missed her father, the defendant fought back tears and said: “I loved my dad.”