Mum guilty of drowning daughter in bath after breakdown of her marriage

A former teacher has been found guilty of drowning her daughter in the bath following the breakdown of her marriage.

Claire Colebourn, 36, did not react as the jury foreman read out the unanimous verdict at Winchester Crown Court and there was silence in the public gallery.

The court heard she hit ‘rock bottom’ after her husband Michael ended their 16-year-relationship.

The ex-sixth form teacher initially denied all memory of the incident, but later recalled how Bethan agreed to have a bath in the middle of the night at her mother’s instruction, telling police: ‘Sadly, my little girl trusted me completely.’

Colebourn admitted she killed Bethan but said she only wanted to ‘save’ her from the little girl’s father.

She met Michael, now the chief executive of luxury marine interior company Trimline, at university.

The prosecutor said that just over a month before Bethan’s death, Colebourn and her husband separated and Mr Colebourn had moved out.

Miss Maylin said their relationship had been difficult and the defendant went on to make ‘unfounded accusations’ on Facebook and in an email sent to his work, that her husband was having an affair with the company’s finance director.

On October 19 2017, she woke their daughter Bethan at their home in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, led her to the bath and drowned her by holding her body down under the water, before making multiple suicide attempts.

Colebourn was discovered by her mother about 14 hours later, in a diabetic coma.

Kerry Maylin, prosecuting, said: ‘Bethan was three-years old, she was a much loved daughter of Claire and Michael Colebourn, but she was found dead at her home.

‘Bethan died because she had been put in the bath at home and held under the water, the act was completed by her mother.’

The prosecutor said a doctor described how she was ‘only emotional when discussing the fact Michael Colebourn had left her and her daughter and her father had done the same to her mother’.

She later wrote in a letter intercepted at a hospital she was staying in: ‘In my eyes I saved her, everything over those days is a blur.’

She later told police: ‘I am responsible for Bethan’s death because she drowned and I am responsible for it. Bethan drowned because I was there, I held her under the water.’

The five women and six men deliberated for around two-and-a-half hours on Friday after an eight-day trial.

She will be sentenced on Monday morning.

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