Sitting in the dock, Constance Marten shook her head as jurors were shown the moment police reached into the rubbish-filled shopping bag where she had stashed her lifeless daughter in an abandoned shed.
By her side was the man she calls her “soulmate” – Briton Mark Gordon, a convicted rapist 13 years her senior, who had previously been jailed for two decades after carrying out a brutal attack in the US when he was just a teenager.
For many sitting in the packed Old Bailey courtroom, it was hard to fathom how any mother could choose this as the final resting place for her child – let alone a tiny newborn whose parents had risked everything to keep her.
But as officers continued pulling detritus from the tatty Lidl bag for life – an empty beer can, scraps of newspaper, nappies, a Coke can, an old egg mayonnaise sandwich packet, even old golf score cards – the abject chaos of their life on the run together was all too apparent.
Their child Victoria’s decomposed remains were discovered nestled at the bottom, hidden beneath a layer of soil and leaves. When the footage of the shocking discovery was replayed at their retrial, the mother left the courtroom.
After two drawn-out Old Bailey trials, the couple were found guilty in July of gross negligence manslaughter of the infant – their fifth child together – after they fled with the baby and starting camping “off-grid” in winter 2023 to stop her from being taken into care like their other children.
The parents were last year found guilty of child cruelty, perverting the course of justice by concealing the body and concealing the birth of a child, but the jury was discharged after they could not reach a verdict on the manslaughter charge.
Today, they were jailed for their crimes: Marten was sentenced to 14 years behind bars, while Gordon was given 18 years. For Gordon, who spent 22 years incarcerated in a Florida penitentiary, life inside is all too familiar.
But for Marten, the only daughter of a wealthy aristocrat with links to the uppermost echelons of society, including the royal family, the confines of a women’s prison HMP Bronzefield is a shocking downfall.
The heiress and the sex offender who met in an incense shop
The unlikeliest of pairings; Marten, 38, fell for Birmingham-born Gordon, 51, when they met by chance 11 years ago. He had been jailed in 1989 for rape after breaking in through a woman’s bathroom window in Florida, armed with a kitchen knife and garden shears.
According to court documents, Gordon – aged just 14 – wore a nylon stocking as he abused his victim for more than four hours while her two young children slept next door.
Within a month, he entered another property and carried out another offence involving “aggravated battery”.
The youngest of seven children to his mum Sylvia, a nurse, his family had relocated to Florida a few years earlier. He was jailed for 40 years for six charges – four of armed sexual battery, one of burglary with a deadly weapon and one of armed kidnapping – and served 22.
While he was locked up across the Atlantic, Marten was being raised at the £100 million family estate of Crichel House in Wimborne, Dorset.
Boasting eight dining rooms, a ballroom and overlooking a crescent-shaped lake, the majestic 17th century property was also the setting for a 1996 Hollywood adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow.
In social media posts, Marten reminisced about her idyllic childhood spent enjoying naked picnics and taking siestas in tractor scoops on the sprawling 5,000-acre estate with her three younger brothers – who called her ‘Toots’ because they struggled to pronounce her name.
She went on to be educated at £30,000-a-year St Mary’s Shaftesbury, a recently closed girls boarding school, before earning a 2:1 in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Leeds, including a year spent studying abroad in Cairo.
In 2008, aged 18, she graced the pages of society bible Tatler as their “babe of the month”, describing cider as “one of my five-a-day” and outlining a plan to have a tortoise tattooed on her foot.
Beautiful, funny and bursting with ambition, she travelled widely – spending time in India, Nepal, Uganda and South America, including several months spent living at a Christian cult in Nigeria, aged 19, where the Church’s charismatic leader has been accused of systematic abuse.
It was this unsettling and “damaging” experience that is feared to have prompted her gilded life to start to unravel.
Returning to the UK, Marten trained in journalism, spending a brief spell working as a researcher for Al Jazeera and interning at the Daily Mail, before she decamped to Essex to study drama at East 15 Acting School.
“She was just beautiful, full of life, full of kindness . . . and she was very, very talented,” one drama school friend recalled.
But this ambition didn’t last and she dropped out in 2016. By now she had changed and was in an erratic relationship with a man the course mate had never met – now understood to be Gordon, who had been deported back to Britain after he was released from US jail.
By the time the couple was arrested last February after a total of 53 days on the run, the bright, witty Marten looked a shadow of her former self, an intinerant character using furniture stuffing to line her clothes and keep her warm.
During her trial, Marten revealed the couple had met in Tottenham in 2014 in a shop selling incense before they were married in an unofficial ceremony in Peru two years later.
In police interviews she insisted the convicted sex offender was her “soulmate”, adding: “We met in a shop actually in London. Yeah, then we went for coffee and it just went from there. Got lots of similarities so, same perspectives on life, things like that.”
A former co-worker, who lost touch with Marten after she met Gordon, told The Independent she was caring and very smart but warned she had always been “gullible” with men.
The friend said Marten was popular when they worked together during a year abroad in Cairo, but revealed: “She’s really inexperienced in men and can fall for whoever shows her love or shows attraction to her.”
Noisette Tahoun said she had tried to warn her off a much older Egyptian man during her year abroad, but she “didn’t listen and followed her heart”.
Deep rift with the family she feared would ‘erase’ her children from family line
Marten’s relationship with Gordon helped drive a wedge firmly between her and her family as the couple became increasingly isolated from her former life.
A close friend revealed that Marten’s loved ones had expressed major concerns about his criminal past, but she had refused to listen and “battened down the hatches”, before dropping off the face of the earth.
Under questioning from her lawyer Francis FitzGibbon KC, Marten explained she wanted a normal life with Gordon, and finally broke all ties with her family after their relationship began.
“We have had a long history with issues in that regard,” she told the court in her first trial. “I stopped speaking to one of my family members two years before I met Mr Gordon.
“But I think when I met him I made a definite decision that was it for me – I didn’t want anything to do with them.”
Marten said that by the time their first child was born, the couple was trying to escape her past amid fears they were being followed by private investigators.
“I was trying to flee my family,” she told the court. “I had spoken about a childhood traumatic event against one of my family members and also the sale of my grandmother’s estate.
“Her will was gotten rid of and they used a letter of wishes to sell the estate which was against her will. I did an investigation into it and the fact that I thought it was wrong – and that’s when I noticed I was being trailed by private investigators very heavily.”
Crichel House and parkland was sold for a reported £34 million in 2013, following the death of Mary Anna Marten in 2010, while the rest of the vast estate was broken into lots.
Marten and Gordon retreated from conventional life, giving false names at hospital when their first child was born. Social services first became involved when it emerged the new parents were then sleeping in a small, festival-style tent pitched in woodland in a bid to live under the radar. They went on to have three more children in quick succession.
“I had to escape my family because my family are extremely oppressive and bigoted and they wouldn’t allow me to have children with my husband and would do anything to erase the child from the family line,” she insisted.
At one point her father Napier Marten, a former page to Queen Elizabeth II, made a legal bid for temporary wardship of his four grandchildren, who were eventually taken into care after a family court intervened amid concerns over their parents’ chaotic lifestyle.
The family court judge also concluded an incident of domestic violence had taken place between the couple, but Marten insisted Gordon had been wrongly blamed for her falling from a window.
She later told detectives: “I had a fall from a window. There were no bruises on me, no signs of domestic violence, so how they came to that conclusion [was] quite phenomenal to be honest.”
By the time they were on the run with Victoria, their fifth child, their paranoia about being trailed was so entrenched that police found a stash of burner phones in their burnt-out car because Marten feared her emails and messages were being hacked.
In the latter stages of the first trial it emerged her parents had used private investigators in the past, but they told police none were employed in 2022 or 2023 when the couple was on the run with Victoria.
The religious cult and her devotion to ‘Daddy bear’
The seeds for Marten’s doomed relationship with Gordon were sown years earlier when she spent several months living at a Christian cult in Lagos in 2006.
In September 2006, Marten decided to join her mother Virginie de Selliers on a Holy Trinity Brompton church trip to Lagos, where she opted to stay on. She is said to have stayed until December that year, when her mother became concerned.
Ms De Selliers is said to be a long standing parishioner at the high profile Anglican church in South Kensington, where so called ‘Alpha’ conversion courses were first developed.
During her weeks on the run with Gordon, as her father issued desperate appeals for her safe return, he publicly called for the police to investigate the time she spent as a teen “disciple” running the Synagogue, Church of All Nations (SCOAN).
Marten is said to have been left confused and traumatised after being forced to undergo intense work and frequent punishment aged 19 at the hands of the church’s controversial leader, TB Joshua – including being made to eat his leftovers.
Mr Marten told The Independent: “Constance’s time there at the hands of the so-called Rev TB Joshua was bizarre and damaging in the extreme.
“The stories of the abuse meted out by Joshua are shocking and heart-rending. These experiences appear to have been a trigger in so much of what has happened to harm Constance in recent years, setting up a pattern of behaviour exposing her to easy manipulation.”
In recent years she had reached out to author Matt McNaught, whose book on SCOAN ‘Immanuel’ explored the abuse handed out by TB Joshua, in a bid to reconnect with other survivors and to research a documentary.
At the time she visited Nigeria in 2006, he said large numbers of “western, articulate, BBC tourists” were selected as disciples and forced to live in cult-like conditions to promote the church.
Many found themselves trapped in a world led by TB Joshua, who was called “Daddy” by his followers, who starved them of any self worth and isolated them from friends and family while making them work to the bone and depriving them of sleep.
“For some it would involve being brought up to his room and being abused in various ways which creates a whole other level of shame and silence,” Mr McNaught told The Independent. “I don’t know anything of Constance’s journey but certainly it does seem plausible to me that she would be very vulnerable to toxic or controlling relationships.”
When she was finally arrested, police bodyworn camera footage captured the moment she called out to Gordon – calling him “Daddy bear”.
A friend agreed the “brainwashing” experience in her teens also was a pivotal moment in Marten’s life and marked the beginning of difficulties with her family as she returned feeling angry.
“She never told us what really happened. TB Joshua was a God-like figure. It was scary, and I believe it changed her. It was a huge part of her life,” the close friend told the Daily Mail.
“Toots used to travel a lot from a young age, but when she returned from Nigeria there were strained relations with her family.
“She was still exuberant in everything, but she found relationships very hard. She was more rebellious. She thought she had recovered, but it was difficult for her.”
The extraordinary manhunt and life on the run– before her baby died in her arms
Having had to surrender their four first children to the authorities, the couple decided in 2022 to carefully conceal her pregnancy with Victoria from friends and social services.
After amassing a considerable sum of cash from Marten’s trust fund, they bought a car, packed up their life – including their pet cat – and left London.
They spent Christmas at a holiday cottage in Northumberland, where Marten gave birth unaided. The cottage’s owner later told police the home had been left in a state of disarray, with cat litter scattered across the floor.
But a missing persons appeal was launched after their car burst into flames on the M61 near Bolton on 5 January last year, which they abandoned leaving a placenta left wrapped in a towel on the back seat, along with more than £2,000 in cash and Marten’s passport.
The cat, named Sasha, was rescued from the blaze and later found by police in a cat box near the burnt-out car, along with more than 30 burner mobile phones and a bible.
From there they travelled the country by taxi to evade capture, with the newborn concealed beneath Marten’s coat. First to Liverpool and Colchester, Essex, using fake names to book hotel rooms, and then to Harwich on the coast, before returning to East Ham, London, where Gordon bought an Argos tent and two sleeping bags.
Another taxi ride took them to Haringey in north London, before another journey to Newhaven in East Sussex, where they were last seen walking towards the South Downs National Park on 8 January.
In court, Marten insisted they were driven off-grid by high-profile media appeals to find them – arguing they only planned to stay in a tent for a few days away from “prying eyes” and hoped to find a cottage or a way to smuggle the child out of the country.
They sheltered in the Sussex countryside for several weeks in wintry conditions, while police issued desperate appeals for them to come forward and get their baby medical attention. They were finally arrested in February last year in Stanmer Villas, Brighton, after a member of the public recognised them.
Initially, the couple refused to tell officers what had happened to their daughter. But in an emotional interview once baby Victoria’s remains were found, Marten told police the child died after she fell asleep with her newborn zipped inside her jacket on 9 January, a few days after arriving in Sussex.
Instead of calling an ambulance, they carried the body around in the shopping bag in the hope of giving her a proper burial – even buying a bottle of petrol at one point as Marten briefly considered cremating her after seeing similar ceremonies in India. But they eventually abandoned the infant after the bag became too heavy and started to smell.
The child’s decomposing remains were found in a disused shed, hidden in the bag and covered in rubbish “as if she was refuse”, the court was told. Pathologists could not determine the cause of death.
Lead prosecutor Tom Little KC said their “reckless, utterly selfish, callous, cruel, arrogant and ultimately grossly negligent conduct” led inexorably to the death of Victoria as they went off-grid with scarcely any food, clothes or means of keeping warm.
“They put their relationship and their view of life before the life of a little baby girl,” he told the jury.
Marten was adamant she did “nothing but love” her daughter who she was trying to save from a social services system she believed to be corrupt, telling the court two of her other children had been abused in the care system.
In repeated clashes during cross-examination last year, she insisted prosecutors were looking at their time living in a tent on the South Downs from a “western perspective”, adding that Bedouin families walk through cold deserts with children while others live in shanty towns.
The mother admitted to neglecting her own care during their time on the run – to the point she keeled over in exhaustion holding the child. “I think Victoria passed away because she was so loved but I was actually neglecting myself,” said Marten. “I loved her so much I wasn’t thinking about myself.
“I gave birth but I didn’t even have time to rest myself, I got straight in a car and was up and down the country in different hotels. I didn’t allow myself to rest, I neglected myself and that’s why I fell asleep in that tent.”
Her deep distrust of the authorities was evident as she defended their actions from the witness box – repeatedly citing examples of parents wrongly jailed over the deaths of their babies or miscarriages of justice in the family courts.
Such was their fear that the parents had even stopped visiting their four other children in care amid concerns their visits were being misrepresented in social services reports.
“For me I believe that once the police have you in their sights they shoot and they shoot to kill. They pile up charges and they like to prosecute,” she told the court, adding she was terrified of handing herself in thanks to a media storm over the police manhunt.
However her heartbreak at losing yet another child was clear as she repeatedly choked back tears on the stand, even admitting they had briefly considered suicide in the wake of her death.
“I think to a degree of course, I feel responsible as her mum for her death but at the same time I have to love and forgive myself because it was a really awful set of circumstances but I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she said. “I live with that sadness because she died in my arms.”
The devoted odd couple and a retrial in chaos
Even facing years behind bars, the couple’s devotion to one another was unwavering as they were repeatedly told off for speaking in the dock and passing notes as they appeared determined to string out their trials for as long as possible.
After the first hearing was beset by delays and ended with a hung jury on the main charge, the retrial was plagued with yet more disruption which saw the case dramatically overrun.
Days of court time was lost as Marten complained of toothache and fatigue from her three-hour journey from the Surrey prison where she was held. But when the judge arranged for her to see a dentist, she refused treatment.
The retrial nearly collapsed entirely when she blurted out to the jury details of Gordon’s violent rape conviction. The prosecution later questioned whether the slip was an attempt to deliberately sabotage the proceedings as, having already stood trial once, she knew the importance of jurors not being privy to a defendant’s previous crimes.
Both parents gave evidence in their own defence but refused to be cross-examined by the prosecution, with Marten branding the crown’s Joel Smith KC as “diabolical” and “heartless” as he asked her whether leaving Victoria’s body in a bag filled with rubbish was a “despicable thing” to do.
“I understand that I am being prosecuted but I am just not going to sit here and be spoken to like that,” she retorted. Following the tense exchange, she refused to return to the witness box.
By the time the jury retired to consider their verdict, more than four months after the retrial had started, both Marten and Gordon had dispensed with their lead barristers. Marten, who has been through a string of top silks during the past two years, opted to allow her junior counsel Tom Godfrey to continue on her behalf.
Despite having received in excess of £70,000 worth of legal aid in the first trial, Gordon insisted he would represent himself for the second half of his retrial. The bizarre turn of events saw him cross examine his wife and co-defendant, reading a list of questions into a microphone from inside the dock.
It triggered yet more delays as he argued for extra time to prepare at every turn, before he told the jury they had been “dehumanised” and “vilified” in his closing speech, adding: “There are no laws in regard to how you should raise your children.”
However the tactic dramatically backfired when, giving evidence unrepresented, he painted a positive picture of his upbringing, telling the jury his mother was a hard-working nurse who had instilled compassion in him.
His testimony was so wide-ranging the prosecution successfully applied to introduce so-called “bad character” evidence against him, resulting in the jury learning the full details of his teenage rape conviction.
He also pleaded guilty to assaulting two police officers who had been called to a maternity ward in Wales in 2017 after Marten gave birth to one of Victoria’s older siblings, the jury were told.
The prosecution accused the couple of “picking and choosing what questions to answer” as they told the jury baby Victoria “never stood a chance”.
Of Marten, Mr Little said “lies fall from her mouth, we suggest, and have always done, like confetti floating in the wind”.
He argued the infant would still be alive if the defendants had not started camping on the South Downs, adding: “They are responsible for her death, not the police, not the social services and ultimately when you stand back and you consider what she says… about where the baby was sleeping, it was simply too cold, she could not maintain her temperature and death was inevitable.”