Aristocrat Constance Marten’s partner is so dangerous that he should have been jailed for life as a child, a woman he raped 36 years ago has said.
When Mark Gordon was 14, he attacked a woman in her home in Florida, armed with a “knife and hedge clippers”, in an ordeal lasting more than four hours.
Gordon and Marten have been convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence, after their baby, Victoria, died while they were camping in a tent in wintry conditions while they were on the run.
Gordon, who moved with his mother from Birmingham, UK, to the US at the age of 12, attacked the woman two years later, in 1989.
US court records show he broke in through the bathroom window of a neighbour in Miami, according to the BBC.
The documents reportedly say: “The suspect was armed with a kitchen knife as well as a pair of hedge-clippers, and after the victim came out of her bedroom to investigate the dogs barking, came across the suspect lurking just outside her bedroom door.
“The victim was held for a period of approximately four-and-a-half hours against her will by the armed intruder.”
She recalled: “I was told to say goodbye to my children because this was the day I was going to die.”
Gordon was later found guilty of armed kidnap and armed sexual battery, and sentenced to 40 years in jail.
He was released after 22 years and extradited to the UK.
The victim told the BBC he was a psychopath and she was “floored” when she found out he was fleeing UK police in 2023.
Gordon should have been imprisoned in the US for life, she said, adding: “The four-and-a-half hours I spent with him was enough to know he is evil.”
In 1990, she told the court: “I'm plagued by nightmares, living with friends or relatives, afraid to be alone.”
She implored the US judge: “Please protect the innocent by keeping the guilty in prison for his life. Show him no mercy. Show him the guilty are punished and not merely chastised.”
Speaking to the BBC now, she said: “I wanted them to sentence him as an adult and not just let him out when he was 18. He showed me no mercy. So show him no mercy and save the other women out there.
“I think he's just evil.”
Jurors in Gordon’s first trial last year were not told about his violent past, which was only partly revealed in the second trial.
In 2017, he was convicted of assaulting two female police officers at a maternity unit where Marten gave birth to their first child under a fake identity.
He was also suspected of domestic violence in 2019 when Marten suffered a shattered spleen.
The defence's main witness was Gordon's mother, Sylvia Satchell, who said her son had been the victim of sexual abuse aged four at a nursery.
