Constance Marten and Mark Gordon convicted of killing their baby after failed attempt to sabotage trial
Aristocrat Constance Marten and her convicted rapist boyfriend Mark Gordon are facing jail for killing their baby after they wasted at least £5 million in a failed attempt to derail justice.
Marten, 38, and Gordon, 51, took two month old Victoria to the South Downs in the middle of winter to escape social workers who had taken their four previous children into care.
The baby probably died from hypothermia and was dumped in a rubbish filled shed inside the Lidl ‘bag for life’ her parents had used as both as a carrycot and a coffin.
From the moment they were arrested the pair did everything they could to obstruct the criminal process, faking illness, sacking lawyers and constantly interrupting and haranguing the judge during the trial.
Their two trials ran to 42 weeks of court time at a cost of at least £10 million and their antics are thought to have doubled the length of the hearings.
Judge Mark Lucraft could barely contain his frustration as he repeatedly accused the couple of trying to sabotage the proceedings.
But one move backfired spectacularly when Marten deliberately revealed in the witness box that Marten boyfriend was a convicted rapist, hoping to collapse the trial.
Until that moment it had not been mentioned in court, but the judge later allowed the details of the case to go before the jury.
Marten and Gordon refused to stand up as they were convicted of manslaughter today.
Marten wore a purple blouse and a dock officer sat between her and Gordon who wore a blue shirt with a salmon coloured piece of cloth tied round his head.
They refused to stand up when asked to by the court clerk and looked to each other shaking their heads after the verdict was delivered.
The jury of eight men and four women found them guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence unanimously.
The couple were convicted of child cruelty, concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice at their first trial last year.
One of the jurors mouthed the words: ‘Sorry’ to Marten as the verdict was delivered.
The first jury could not reach a decision on the manslaughter charges after a five month trial.
A national manhunt began for the couple when the baby’s placenta was found inside the couple’s burning car on a Manchester motorway.
They claimed they were being chased by private eyes for Marten’s family who objected to her being with a black man and that 15 other cars had been destroyed by them.
Once the burning car was found, the couple believed that they would be traced by the police if they used bank or credit cards.
Despite Marten having taken £47,886 from her trust fund in the weeks before they went on the run, the couple lived like scavengers – sleeping in a tiny tent and foraging rotting food from bins.
Marten comes from a wealthy aristocratic family and her father was a page to Queen Elizabeth II.
Gordon, from Birmingham, moved to the USA as a child and was convicted of the brutal rape of a neighbour committed when he was just 14.
He was jailed for 40 years but deported back to the UK after serving 20 years of his sentence.
Marten has been through 15 different barristers since the case first came to court and sacked her lead barrister in the middle of both trials.
Gordon pretended to be paralysed in custody so police officers would have to push him around in a wheelchair.
He fired his barristers during the second trial and went on to represent himself in court, leaving the judge struggling to control his long rants from the dock.
The couple regularly pretended to be ill or refused to attend court and did their best to cause chaos when they did.
Judge Lucraft said they were the worst behaved defendants he had dealt with in his 13 years on the bench and said their antics were an outrage.
At one point he fumed: ‘To say I am very cross is somewhat of an understatement.’
The first trial was meant to last six weeks but went on for five months.
The jury deliberated for 72 hours but could not reach a verdict the manslaughter charges.
The second trial was due to last eight weeks but lasted 20 because of couple’s antics which they had plainly agreed beforehand.
The aristocrat gave birth to her first child in Wales in 2017 and used an Irish accent in labour to pretend to be an traveller called Isabella O’Brien in a bid to escape her family who have hired private investigators to find her.
Gordon assaulted two female police officers after they challenged him when he gave a fake name and date of birth and had to be held down in the postnatal ward by a man who had just become a father.
In 2019 when pregnant with her second child Marten fell from a window and a family court judge later ruled that Gordon had pushed her.
Despite his wife having a ruptured spleen, Gordon tried to keep the ambulance staff out when they arrived.
The couple told police she was trying to adjust the TV aerial outside the window but when police went inside they found the television had a blanket over it as if it was not being used.
After the birth of their fourth child, who the couple abandoned at hospital, all the children were put up for adoption.
When Marten became pregnant again the couple decided to keep the baby a secret.
Marten claimed Victoria was born in a Northumberland holiday cottage they rented just before midnight on Christmas Eve 2022.
The couple kept the baby hidden until their car dramatically caught fire on the M61 near Manchester on 5 January 2023.
They ran from the scene to avoid being found by authorities, abandoning their pet cat Sasha, who they had for three years.
The couple then took taxis across the country spending up to £400 in cash for journeys of up to 270 miles, going to Liverpool and Harwich trying to find a port to leave the UK.
In one taxi Marten claimed to be a Muslim wearing a hijab as she tried to hide her face.
She received nearly £19,000 in payments into her account from a trust fund while she was on the run.
Marten was caught on CCTV in London holding Victoria under her coat and putting her in a buggy without supporting her head.
The prosecution also said footage showed the couple carrying the baby alive in the Lidl bag for life.
Gordon purchased an Argos tent and sleeping bags and the couple travelled to Brighton before going ‘out into the wild’ pitching their tent in the South Downs.
Many witnesses claimed to see the couple but Marten disputed some of the accounts calling them ‘curtain twitchers’.
She claimed the baby died when she fell asleep on top of her after one night in the tent.
On the first night Marten said she slept with Victoria on her chest zipped up inside her coat inside the sleeping bag.
She said: ’She was on my lap, her head was on one of my forearms and I flopped forward- my forehead was on the floor of the tent and I woke up.
‘I sort of woke up and knew something wasn’t right. I felt it in my spirit.
‘I think Mark woke up at the same time and I brought her out of my jacket and she was completely limp.
‘She was completely limp and she was pale and her lips were a kind of purple-y colour.
‘I just knew she wasn’t alive and I felt very responsible because I was holding her so my assumption was that I had fallen asleep on her.’
From then on the couple carried on trying to elude the police with the baby’s body in a the Lidl bag for life which they filled with rubbish and beer cans.
On 12 January Marten bought a bottle of petrol from a Texaco garage saying she planned to cremate Victoria.
She later said she and Gordon planned to throw themselves into fire explaining: ‘I think at one point Mark said – why don’t we just jump in it with her and just call it quits, let’s just all, have a fire and say goodbye to life together.’
Prosecutor Tom Little, KC, said: ‘They decided that in the middle of a cold winter and in cruel and obviously dangerous weather conditions that they would deprive that baby of what it needed – warmth, shelter and food and ultimately safety.’
They scavenged for food in bins and shared pieces of bread they found.
On 27 February they went to a shop to steal food leaving Victoria’s body in a shed and were finally arrested.
Smelling ‘like homeless people’, they refused to tell the police where the baby was.
Gordon demanded the officers feed him slices of chicken and crisps while they held him on the floor.
In his police interview Gordon continued to demand sweets and chocolate and laid on the floor for much of the questioning while eating a bag of crisps.
Gordon insisted Marten had the police the truth about the baby’s death saying: ‘I never predicted that when you lose four children to the system, she wanted that child and she is my wife, I love her and want to support her.
‘One thing happened after another we never planned it.
‘The whole thing it was more, a mother’s love for her child, it was about wanting to be around that child it was never about- and things just got bad really quickly when the car blew up.’
He said they had more than enough clothes for Victoria and she was ‘an oversupplied baby’.
Gordon refused to answer most of the police questions saying the jury system was ‘what makes Great Britain great’ and that he trusted that he would be ‘released’ once the jury heard the evidence.
He said he would only give his account to the jury, referencing the Magna Carta but then chose not give evidence at the first trial.
Marten told the court she had given Victoria ‘nothing but love’ and ‘the best that any mother would.’
She said she will never get over the baby’s death and she had been filled with ‘disbelief, shock and intense grief.’
Breaking down in tears Marten told the jury: ‘I immediately panicked and thought I don’t know what to do, they’re going to have a field day out of this – the media, social services, everyone, because she was in my care and the next thing she wasn’t alive.
‘I just panicked and thought how am I going to get my four kids back now Victoria’s passed away – I’m not going get other kids back.
‘I think to a degree of course I feel responsible as her mum, I do feel responsible for her death but I have to at the same time love and forgive myself which is what I’m trying to do.
‘It was just an awful set of circumstances, I didn’t mean to fall asleep but obviously I live with that sadness because she died in my arms.’
She said the prosecution were looking at her living in a tent from a ‘Western perspective’.
She told the first trial: ‘There are children all around the world, in Mongolia kids live in tents, there are children who live in igloos, it doesn’t matter where you are as long as kids are loved and looked after.
‘You just have to look at Calais in France babies are in tents and they don’t die because their mother is looking after them.’
Asked again if she felt a baby was safe in a tent in January she said: ‘Jesus survived in a barn didn’t he?’
She said she didn’t think lying was ‘particularly bad’ saying ‘to save my family I’d do anything.’
The prosecutor asked Marten: ’Have you ever thought that in trying to prove social services wrong you proved them more right than ever?’
‘I wasn’t trying to prove anyone wrong, I was trying to bring up my daughter with the love she deserves,’ Marten replied.
Marten claimed her family had used their ‘huge connections’ to pressure social services to remove her children and that her first two children were abused in care.
She accused her wealthy family of prejudice, saying they had hired private investigators to tamper with their cars which she claimed caused the explosion on the M61.
Marten said one family member didn’t want her alive after she spoke up about their behaviour in the past.
She said her family trust had told her that ‘if you have still got that black boyfriend with you, you are never going to get a property’.
Marten also accused police of doctoring CCTV to cover up an assault on Gordon.
‘From my perspective of having gone through the system with social services I don’t believe they are there to help parents actually or children,’ she said.
‘Mark and I love our kids more than anything in the world.’
Marten stormed out of the witness box bringing her evidence in the second trial to and end after calling prosecutor Joel Smith ‘abhorrent’ and patronising’.
She began her evidence with Francis FitzGibbon, KC, as her barrister but fired him midway through.
Marten then informed jurors that Gordon had a ‘violent rape conviction’ which the prosecutor later described as ‘a deliberate attempt to take a wrecking ball to this trial’.
After sacking his barristers, Gordon was allowed another opportunity to give evidence.
He was only asked two questions but spoke for hours telling the jury: ‘The impact of having the kids removed – not being there – had an effect.
‘It was like a vacuum, a hole and emptiness. You try to fill it but you can never fill it.
‘This was the focal point. This was what we woke up and talked about. It was going through our heads the whole time.
‘She wanted some time with the baby and we never ever could have looked and seen what would have happened – how it unfolded.
‘The reality is you are dealing with two people under pressure being harassed by various forces, a woman that is going through situations, I am going through them too because I love children and this backdrop is a national manhunt.
‘We were not in the right state of mind and the fact is we have to have compassion in our system, there are plenty of criminals out on the street and they chased two parents.’
He said his mother ‘showed me empathy and taught me how to think for other people and feel for what people are experiencing and this is the kind of person I am.’
Because of this the prosecution were allowed to put evidence about his rape conviction before the jury which they had not heard about in either of the two trials other than when it was blurted out by Marten.
The couple sat down and refused to stand back up after they were convicted of child cruelty last year and held hands behind the dock officer between them.
Three of the women on the first jury held hands and were in tears looking over at Marten as the verdicts were delivered
Marten mouthed ‘thanks’ to them when the jury was alter discharged after failing to reach a verdict on manslaughter.
Marten and Gordon denied but were convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence, concealment of the birth of a child, child cruelty and perverting the course of justice.
ends
