Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon have been found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter. Photo / Metropolitan Police via AFP
Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon have been found guilty of killing their baby daughter by going on the run with her and sleeping rough in freezing temperatures in January 2023.
The couple were convicted of the gross negligence manslaughter of baby Victoria after a retrial at the Old Bailey.
At a previous trial in 2024 they were found guilty of child cruelty, concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice. Both now face lengthy prison sentences.
Marten, 38, who is from an aristocratic background, gave birth to Victoria in secret in December 2022. Her four other children whom she shared with Gordon, a 51-year-old convicted rapist, were previously taken into care and put up for adoption.
The couple went off-grid in the lead-up to baby Victoria’s birth in a bid to keep her from being put up for adoption. She died while she and her parents were sleeping rough in a freezing-cold tent on the South Downs.
About 6pm on January 5, 2023, motorists on the busy M61 near Bolton spotted a Peugeot 205 in trouble.
Smoke was pouring from underneath the car. After veering onto the hard shoulder, it burst into flames. Those inside escaped without injuries.
But rather than hang around for help, the couple grabbed what possessions they could and headedacross playing fields towards Bolton.
When police arrived and examined the burned-out vehicle, they found among the bedding, clothes and other charred possessions, a placenta wrapped in a towel.
Near the car was a passport belonging to Marten, a wealthy and well-connected woman in her 30s, who was estranged from her family and known to be in a relationship with Gordon.
Realising she had given birth in secret, Greater Manchester Police began a high-risk missing person inquiry.
The 54-day manhunt ended in the arrest of the couple and the death of their newborn baby.
In their determination to keep their fifth baby from being put up for adoption, the couple had decided to effectively disappear.
After placing all their worldly possessions in a storage unit in Scunthorpe, they began driving around the country in a series of clapped-out cars, staying in holiday lets, cheap hotels and bed and breakfasts.
Convinced they were being tailed by private detectives working for her family, they had a large stash of pay-as-you-go mobile phones that they would dump after using.
On December 20, 2022, two weeks before the manhunt would begin and with Marten about to go into labour, the couple paid £367 ($824) to book a holiday cottage in one of the most remote parts of England, high in the North Pennines on the border between Cumbria and Northumberland.
When they checked out on December 26, the owners found the property in a “disgusting state”, with food, rubbish and cat litter everywhere. But oddly, the bedding had been freshly washed.
It is now believed Marten gave birth at the remote property – probably on Christmas Eve – without any medical assistance.
By Boxing Day, despite baby Victoria being 2 days old, they were on the move again, heading to Leeds. It was a city Marten knew well, having gone to university there.
But they ran into problems when their Suzuki car broke down on the M18 motorway near Doncaster and they had to be helped by a recovery service.
They asked to be dropped off at a branch of Sainsbury’s late on a freezing December night – hardly ideal for a newborn baby and a woman who had just given birth.
Little is known about their movements over the following few days but on January 4, 2023, they turned up at an Ibis hotel at Lymm services in Cheshire, early in the morning. After a few hours’ rest they were back on the road, this time heading to Manchester city centre where they took a room at the AC hotel.
Fearful they would be caught if they stayed in any one place for too long, the pair kept moving, transporting their newborn daughter like a piece of luggage.
Money was not an issue, thanks to Marten’s generous trust fund. But to avoid leaving a paper trail, the couple only used cash.
About £2000 ($4495) of the fund went up in smoke in the car fire, alongside most of their possessions.
They did manage to rescue the cat they had insisted on travelling with. However, they were forced to dump it at the side of the motorway after realising it would be impossible to carry it and the baby.
As the family made their way along the roadside in the freezing rain, a member of the public stopped and gave them a lift, dropping them, as requested, at a supermarket in Bolton.
From there they took a taxi about 65km to Liverpool – possibly with a view to catching a ferry to Ireland – even though Marten had left her passport in the car.
They did not stay in Liverpool long and after flagging down a taxi, asked to be taken 450km across the country to Harwich in Essex. The journey, which cost them several hundred pounds, took almost five hours and they arrived early in the morning.
It is hard to comprehend what the couple were thinking as they travelled the country in the depths of winter with their newborn infant, but their arrival in the port of Harwich suggested they were trying to get to the Continent.
Marten later revealed that they were hoping to become “reverse refugees” and find someone willing to smuggle them out of the UK.
They checked into a Premier Inn at 3am, but had to leave a few hours later because they were not willing to provide ID to extend the booking.
They shifted to a pub with rooms for the night and were spotted later that day close to the port, where ferries run to the Hook of Holland.
But with no documentation and details of their disappearance being widely circulated, there was no way they were going to be able to leave the country.
While hanging around near the port, they were recognised by a dog walker.
Dale Gosling said he asked the couple: “Are you the people on the telly, advertised as missing with a baby?”
Gordon denied it and said he must be confused.
Gosling was so concerned about their welfare that he offered to take them home and make them a warm drink. But while Marten appeared keen, Gordon insisted they were fine, saying they were going to London to stay with friends and family.
When Gosling got home, he rang Crimestoppers to report the sighting and was advised to contact his local Essex force. Officers were sent to search the area he had highlighted by 9.46am.
Conscious that the couple had indicated they were heading to London, the Essex force contacted the British Transport Police, but the pair had already vanished.
“He [Gordon] was a man with a plan,” Gosling would later tell the Old Bailey.
The couple spent more of their dwindling cash reserves on taxis, first from Harwich to Colchester and then, because there were no trains that day, to East Ham in London.
CCTV captured them walking along the high street, with baby Victoria wriggling under Marten’s coat.
At midday, they visited a kebab shop to get something to eat and Gordon went shopping, purchasing a baby buggy and a dummy.
Soon after they were on the move again, this time taking a cab a few miles across east London to Whitechapel, where Gordon bought a tent, pillows and sleeping bags from Argos.
It was cold and wet, but their plan now appeared to be to hide from the authorities by camping with the newborn baby.
That evening they ate at an Indian restaurant in Brick Lane before dumping the newly purchased buggy in a back street and transferring baby Victoria into a supermarket bag.
Tom Little KC, for the prosecution, would later tell jurors at the couple’s trial that the baby would spend the rest of her short life in that bag, which Marten vehemently denied.
Despite the late hour, the couple kept on moving, booking a cab to take them to a branch of Tesco in Enfield in north London.
But the journey was cut short by the driver who became suspicious about the couple, who appeared to be hiding their faces.
Marten told him she was a Muslim and was wearing a hijab, but the driver was uncomfortable and asked them to get out of the car at Green Lanes in Haringey.
He tried to report his concerns to nearby police officers close to Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, but they were too busy dealing with another incident.
It was now just after midnight on January 8, 2023, but rather than find somewhere to stay for the night, the couple took yet another taxi, this time almost 160km from north London to the port of Newhaven on the East Sussex coast.
They arrived just before 5am and the journey cost them £475 – the price of a luxury room in a top five-star London hotel.
It was cold, dark and wet when the cab driver dropped the pair off and they were last seen heading towards woodland on South Downs carrying camping equipment and baby Victoria in the bag that doubled as her carry cot.
The flimsy blue tent, bought at Argos a couple of days earlier, would be their home for more than a month.
Marten would later claim baby Victoria died on that first night in the tent, accidentally suffocating as she slept in her mother’s arms.
On January 12, 2023, Marten broke cover and visited a nearby Texaco service station, where she bought snacks and a small amount of petrol in a bottle.
She told police the petrol was intended to cremate her daughter’s body, but that she changed her mind because she wanted a post-mortem examination to understand why she had died.
The couple appeared to be so paranoid about getting caught, they continued to move regularly.
On January 16, 2023, a dog walker recalled seeing a tent in Stanmer Park nature reserve close to Brighton, at a different location to their original pitch in the woods near Newhaven. The temperature dipped that night to -4C and there was a bitterly cold wind.
Later that month, another witness spotted their tent near the Seven Sisters Cliffs at Seaford and by mid-February, they were back at the Stanmer nature reserve on the edge of Brighton, where they were beginning to draw the attention of locals.
On February 20, 2023, CCTV captured the couple trying to break into Hollingbury Golf Course, before rooting through the bins to scavenge waste food.
On February 27, they broke cover again and headed into the Hollingbury area of Brighton where they tried to shoplift some food before using a cash machine to withdraw money.
Gordon was carrying a stick and his feet were wrapped in plastic bags. With the manhunt having gained huge publicity, it was not long before the police were called to the scene.
They were arrested at 9.35pm on February 27, 2023 on suspicion of child neglect – but crucially, baby Victoria was not with them.
The arresting officers said the couple smelled as if they had not washed for weeks, which they had not.
Police body-worn camera footage of the moment they were arrested revealed how Marten insisted her name was Arabella and not Constance.
She then refused to answer questions about Victoria’s whereabouts, while Gordon simply demanded food, including a chicken sandwich with mayonnaise.
As the police pressed Gordon for answers, Marten could be heard in the background saying: “Oh my God, I can’t watch … leave him alone. Let him eat his food, he is starving.”
She was also heard to refer to Gordon as “Daddy Bear” and the couple repeatedly declared their love for each other.
Once in police custody, they refused to answer questions about their daughter’s whereabouts.
Two days later, on March 1, 2023, following a huge search of the areas where the couple had been camping, police made the grim discovery of baby Victoria’s body.
She was wrapped in a plastic bag, hidden under rubbish in a disused shed. A tragic end to the infant’s short life.
After the discovery of Victoria’s remains, Marten and Gordon agreed to answer police questions, claiming Victoria had been born on Christmas Eve at the Northumberland holiday let and had died on their first night in the tent on January 8, 2023.
Marten told detectives: “I had her in my jacket and I hadn’t slept properly in quite a few days and I fell asleep holding her sitting up and when I woke, she wasn’t alive. When I woke she wasn’t alive in my jacket, I believe I fell asleep on top of her.”
She told police she had been carrying her dead body around in the bag for life, unsure what to do.
“I didn’t want to bury her in a forest, some random place because I wanted her to have a proper burial but also I was concerned if an animal might eat her that would affect the autopsy,” Marten said.
Perhaps an indication of her state of mind came when she was asked about the placenta that was found in the car. She told officers she had intended to bury it, adding: “It’s a religious thing because you can bury it and grow a tree from it, it’s something we do.”
On March 2, 2023, the couple were charged with gross negligence manslaughter, perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, child cruelty and causing or allowing the death of a child.