Constance Marten and Mark Gordon face sentencing over baby daughter Victoria’s death

Mark Gordon is led out Crawley Police Station after leaving Crawley Magistrates Court in March 2023 where he and Constance Marten appeared charged with manslaughter after the remains of a baby were found in an area of woodland. Photo / Getty Images

A British woman from an aristocratic family and her convicted rapist partner face sentencing on Monday (overnight NZT) over the manslaughter of their newborn daughter who died while they were living off-grid in freezing temperatures.

Constance Marten, 38, and Mark Gordon, 51, were arrested after a seven-week police hunt in January and February 2023 during which they spent time living in a tent.

The pair were convicted in July at London’s Old Bailey central criminal court, where they had faced a retrial after another jury had failed to reach a verdict on the manslaughter charge.

Marten and Gordon went on the run to try and keep their daughter Victoria after authorities took their four other children into care.

The couple were eventually arrested two months later, in Brighton on England’s southern coast.

Days afterwards, baby Victoria’s badly decomposed body was found in a shopping bag on a vegetable patch.

The couple also face sentencing for perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child and child cruelty.

Marten had told police Victoria died when she fell asleep in the tent while she was holding her under her jacket.

Speaking after the pair were convicted, Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford of the Metropolitan Police said their “selfish actions” had resulted in the death of a “newborn baby who should have had the rest of her life ahead of her”.

He said the conviction was a vindication of the authorities’ decision to take Marten’s four other children into care.

Born into a life of wealth and privilege, Marten grew up in a 25-room mansion on a vast estate in Dorset in southwest England.

Her aristocratic family had strong links to the royal family. Her grandmother was a childhood friend of the late Queen Elizabeth II, for whom Marten’s father also served as a page boy.

Gordon’s early life, by contrast, was far from privileged and marked by violence.

In 1989, at the age of 14, he held a woman against her will in Florida for more than four hours and raped her while armed with a “knife and hedge clippers”, prosecutors told the London court.

Within a month, he entered another property and carried out another offence involving aggravated battery.

He was sentenced to 40 years in jail but was released after serving 22 years.

In 2017, Gordon was also convicted of assaulting two female police officers at a maternity unit in Wales where Marten gave birth to their first child under a fake identity.

- Agence France-Presse