Constance Marten is the aristocrat who killed her own baby when so consumed by her own self-importance that she came to believe the whole world was against her.
She was born to an aristocratic life that bestowed on her fabulous wealth, privilege, and the freedom to pursue her ambitions and dreams. But today she sits in a prison cell at HMP Bronzefield, contemplating years behind bars and a lifetime of public shame.
Marten and her partner, Mark Gordon, a convicted rapist, led the authorities on a nationwide manhunt in early 2023, fuelled by a deep-seated belief that only they knew what was best for their infant child.
But their fiercely egocentric view of the world – borne out of a warped sense of victimhood - led to a catalogue of atrocious decisions, sleeping in a tent on the freezing cold South Downs in the middle of winter, and tragically to the end of baby Victoria’s life after just days in the world.
At the Old Bailey on Monday, Marten and Gordon were convicted by a jury of gross negligence manslaughter, bringing an epic two-and-a-half year legal battle to a close. Marten’s early life - gallivanting around the fields of her family’s sprawling estate and travelling the world in search of adventure - has given way to a new grim reality within the confines of a British prison.
Who is Constance Marten?
Born in 1987 to a prominent aristocratic family, Marten grew up in the grand surroundings of the Grade I listed 18th Century Crichel House in Dorset with brothers Maximilian, Freddie, and Tobias.
Her grandmother was Mary Anna Marten, a goddaughter to the late Queen Mother and childhood friend of Princess Margaret, while her father Napier was a page to Queen Elizabeth II.
Mary was at the centre of a great scandal of the 20th Century known as the Crichel Down affair, when the government seized part of the family estate for the Second World War and broke a promise to return it when the war was over.
She fought successfully for the return of the land, in a saga that ultimately led to a government minister’s resignation.
Marten’s father lived a life of immense luxury until in 1996 when he disappeared during an extraordinary midlife “awakening”. Constance was just nine-years-old when her father disappeared, later declaring: “Everything in my life materially was a completely empty shell”.
Following voices in his head, he reportedly shaved his head and flew to Australia, leaving behind his family to live a life of whale-watching and spiritual discovery as a tree surgeon.
“I do recall having a recognition of myself that I was exhibiting some sort of courage, but of course, in many other people’s minds I was exhibiting some sort of cowardice”, he later confessed. In a YouTube interview, he described an out-of-body experience while joining a group of Aborigines on a cliff top and an encounter with whales that reportedly made him cry “almost nonstop” for seven days.
On his return to the UK, Napier lived in a lorry, worked as a chef and then trained in a form of head massage called craniosacral therapy. Napier has eschewed the family’s estimated £115m fortune, the Crichel estate was passed to his eldest son Maximilian, and in 2013 the mansion and 400 acres of land were sold to an American hedge fund billionaire for a reported £34 million.
So in Marten’s direct family history was a heady blend of privilege, challenges to authority, and a mystery disappearance.
Battle of wills
Marten and Gordon’s criminal trial was meant to last six weeks in the early part of 2024, but in the end ran for six months, racking up huge costs for the public purse.
The case, through to a second trial, has been marked by extreme rudeness and challenges to authority from within the dock, with Marten and Gordon seemingly taking it in turns to cause trouble.
Midway through the second trial, a magazine article titled 'Surviving Serco' emerged in which Marten moaned about “inhumane” conditions in prison and on the transport to court.
She complained about “disgusting” microwave meals and the temperature in her cell, adding: “I'm being made to survive these 17 to 19-hour days with little or no rest, no food”.
She and her partner walked in and out of the dock, seemingly at will, even when evidence was being heard. They frequently failed to attend court at all, and created a merry-go-round of lawyers who were hired and fired at extraordinary rates.
Gordon and Marten complained variously of headaches, a shoulder strain, back pain and toothache, and made a series of outlandish requests relating to their prison treatment.
At one point, Gordon asked for help getting a shave, and court proceedings were held up when he complained that his “court shirt” had been lost and his lawyer had been sent to the shops for a replacement.
The judge warned the couple their criminal trial was “not a game”, but at times they appeared to be treating it as such.
Marten made the suggestion that she would seek a public inquiry into her treatment in prison, complaining that a fellow inmate had repeatedly branded her a “baby killer” and told her she is “so fat I sat on my baby”.
“I'm not going to be abused in court or out of court”, she added.
Yet there were frequent moments during the trial when they were accused of being the abusers, with animosity among their long-suffering lawyers and Old Bailey security staff who were visibly thrilled to be away from the troublesome defendants, if only for a few minutes.
A family divided
Marten’s estrangement from her family is believed to have begun when she met Gordon, a man whose background could not be more different to her own.
In Florida in April 1989, when he was just 14 years old, Gordon – armed with a kitchen knife and garden shears – broke into his neighbour’s home and raped her in a four-and-a-half hour ordeal.
Birmingham-born Gordon, wearing a nylon stocking to try to hide his identity, forced the woman to undress, and held her as a prisoner after the rape. Less than a month later, Gordon attempted to burgle another neighbour’s home, arming himself at first with a shovel and picking up knives as the crime continued, culminating in him beating a sleeping man around the head and body.
Gordon was convicted of a slew of charges, and served a 22-year prison sentence before being deported back to the UK.
Marten told the trial she met Gordon in 2014 as she sold incense in a shop in Tottenham, north London, and after going for coffee they struck up a relationship. She described him as her “soulmate” and revealed they married in a ceremony – not legally recognised in Britain – in Peru around seven years ago.
They have the “same perspectives on life”, she insisted, but said members of her family did not approve of the relationship – a private tension that led to estrangement and a very different life for Marten from her aristocratic upbringing.
Nicknamed “Toots” by friends, Marten, a former pupil at £30,000-a-year Roman Catholic boarding school St Mary’s Shaftesbury, once reminisced on Facebook about “naked picnics, siestas amid [hay bales], and tractor scoops” at her childhood home.
She studied Arabic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Leeds and graduated with a 2:1, and in her student days appeared on the pages of Tatler where she described a decadent party at the home of Viscount Cranborne as “like a debauched feast from Ancient Greece”.
Marten travelled the world as a young woman, she qualified as a journalist and worked for TV news station Al Jazeera, and enrolled in an acting course in Essex. After her relationship with Gordon began, she says she was cut off from her family’s wealth and they began to live an erratic and transient life, facing rent arrears, evictions, bouncing from property to property, and increasingly living outside the boundaries of normal society.
On the run
The criminal case against Marten and Gordon centred on the death of baby Victoria, who is believed to have been born on Boxing Day 2022 in a rented Northumberland cottage.
The couple had kept news of the pregnancy entirely secret, from those close to them and also from Marten’s estranged family. Because looming large in the background was the fate of the other four children they had together – all previously taken from them after a bitter family court battle.
In 2017, Marten gave birth in hospital and went to extraordinary lengths to avoid revealing her true identity. She used an alias, Isabella O’Brien, and posed as a member of the travelling community, bizarrely putting on an Irish accent throughout labour.
But hospital staff continued to pose questions about the odd couple, and eventually police were called. Gordon made a bungled attempt to give a false identity, claiming that his birthday was 31 April, 1987, and then he assaulted two female police officers who were questioning him.
Later, social services found Marten living in a “festival style” tent in the woods, amid growing concern about the safety of their children. And it can now be revealed that the courts decided to step in definitively and take away their children when Gordon was suspected in 2019 of a incident of domestic violence against Marten when she suffered a shattered spleen.
Gordon had refused to allow paramedics into their London flat to treat her even though she was 14 weeks pregnant, the Old Bailey heard, in revelations that did not go before the jury.
She spent eight days in hospital then put her life and that of her unborn child at risk by attempting to discharge herself, with Gordon’s support, it was alleged.
The court-ordered decision to take away their four children into adoption was the fuel behind Marten and Gordon’s decision in late 2022 to try to stay “off grid”, knowing that baby Victoria would likely be taken from them also. But so strong was that belief and desire to evade the authorities, that the couple ended up sleeping in a tent on the freezing cold South Downs where baby Victoria is believed to have perished.
A God complex
During two trials at the Old Bailey trial, Marten was gripped at times by delusions of grandeur. When challenged over her decision to ditch suitable accommodation with their newborn baby in favour of a tent or makeshift shack, Marten appeared to liken herself to the Virgin Mary and her protection of the baby Jesus.
“Jesus survived in a barn”, she announced from the witness box in Court Six. “I would do anything for my child.”
Anything, that is, apart from providing her with food, warmth, proper clothing and safe accommodation while they scuttled around the country trying to avoid the authorities. Victoria was ultimately found dead in a shed near Brighton, having been dumped in a Lidl carrier bag-for-life and hidden under a pile of rubbish. It was a palpable and utterly tragic display of the couple’s lack of care for their infant child – cast aside while the parents continued to try to evade their fate.
Marten maintained a defiant and bombastic attitude throughout the legal proceedings, at times lashing out verbally at the journalists who were reporting on her case. In one outburst, she admonished reporters for not “telling truth to power”, and complained of a breach of privacy when she noticed the BBC’s Daniel Sandford simply looking at her over a court videolink to prison.
Manhunt
The extraordinary saga first entered the public consciousness on January 6, 2023, when Greater Manchester Police revealed the couple’s disappearance and made an impassioned appeal directly to Marten.
The couple had abandoned their car on the side of the M61 when it broke down and caught fire, and those on the scene realised that Marten had given birth to a child, after a pregnancy she concealed from the world.
“Constance, I know this is an exceptionally hard time for you and you are likely feeling scared but I promise that our number one priority is the same as yours – to keep your beautiful newborn safe”, said the force’s Head of Public Protection Chief Superintendent Michaela Kerr.
A nationwide manhunt was launched amid grave fears for the safety of the baby. The M61 roadside was strewn with abandoned baby clothes and personal possessions – signs of a couple willing to put their own freedom ahead of their daughter’s health.
They had hatched their plan to flee in the latter stages of 2022, and rented a cottage in Northumberland on December 20. The property was left in a “disgusting” state just after Christmas, the court heard, with food debris, rubbish and urine stains, and signs that the bed sheets had been laundered for a mystery reason.
The couple traversed the Pennines in the first days of 2023 and checked into an IBIS hotel near the Lymm Services in the early hours of January 4. The following day, Marten and Gordon were now travelling in a Peugeot 206 with their newborn baby when it broke down on the side of the M61 in Greater Manchester and then burst into flames.
Van driver Ken Hudson and his son pulled over to help when they saw the stricken car, and recognised the top of a baby’s head poking out of the bundle in Marten’s arms.
“I put my hand on the baby’s head and said ‘God bless, keep safe’ and we got into the van”, Mr Hudson told the Old Bailey, before adding that he is haunted by the thought that he could have done more.
“Throughout the year I have been cut up myself because I believe if I had stayed with that vehicle and the people, that baby may be still alive.”
The van driver saw Gordon “frantically” pulling their possessions from the burning car, and the couple then fled the scene. In their wake, they discarded bags of clothes and blankets, Marten’s passport, and a placenta was later identified in the vehicle. Police also discovered 34 so-called “burner” phones in the car, in a sign of the paranoid state the couple were living in.
They would later tell the court they believed the car breakdowns were not accidental, but rather signs of foul play from private detectives hired by Marten’s family to tail them.
The runaway couple drew from a trust fund pot of near £50,000 as they travelled across England “off grid”, leaving each county after a deliberately short period of time so that local authorities would not be able to seek to take over Victoria’s care.
On January 7, they were spied on CCTV attempting to blend into the crowds in east London. But the manhunt was now national news and their faces were too well-known.
Marten’s family had used private investigators in the past when they were at war over the fate of the other children. And she told the court she believed that level of surveillance was ongoing in early 2023. Consumed with the idea that courts, councils, and Marten’s own family were out to get them, they concluded that staying on the South Downs in a tent was their best option. In her evidence, Marten suggested their vehicles had been deliberately sabotaged – “detonated” – and she liberally spouted conspiracy theories that everyone in authority was working against her.
Destructive
Both criminal trials at the Old Bailey lasted months longer than intended, in large part due to the behaviour of the defendants themselves. The first trial culminated in a jury convicting Marten and Gordon of perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, and child cruelty, while the second jury found them guilty of gross negligence manslaughter.
When giving evidence for the first time, Marten was combative in the witness box and repeatedly ignored the warnings of Judge Mark Lucraft KC that she was damaging her own case by bringing up family court proceedings.
Those details had been carefully avoided by the lawyers in the case, to prevent unfair prejudice to the defendants.
But a repeated refrain of Marten’s evidence was that prosecutors were only looking at the couple’s actions while on the run from a Western perspective - that people live safely in tents and igloos in other parts of the world, there are migrants in France living in camps in Calais, and a couple with baby staying in a tent on the South Downs was “not ideal”, but not dangerous.
She believed she was a “lioness” looking after her cubs, rather than the “monster” or “murderess” that she had been painted as in the media.
And she wanted the jury to know that she felt wronged in the family courts as well, offering her own interpretation of those proceedings.
In the second trial, the defendants went completely rogue, apparently doing everything possible to disrupt proceedings.
Marten dropped a bombshell in the midst of her evidence that Gordon was a convicted sex offender, even though that fact had been assiduously held back from the jury.
“Mark has a violent rape conviction and spent 22 years in prison, so my fear was that they’d immediately scapegoat him, which is what they usually do,” she said, in front of a clearly startled jury.
She then stormed out of the witness box, accusing prosecutor Joel Smith KC of being “diabolical” and a “heartless human being”.
The judge ruled that Gordon would have to be discharged as a defendant in the trial because of the incident, but he was pulled back from the brink when Gordon himself – realising that he would then face another year-long wait for a trial - asked to continue.
Gordon sacked his legal team and opted to defend himself, and proceeded to present himself to the jury as a decent man of good character.
But this only sparked prosecutors applying successfully to introduce evidence of his past convictions into the trial. Gordon mounted a protracted effort to keep the evidence out, wasting court time as he complained repeatedly of not having enough time to prepare his own case.
Marten delayed the start of her own evidence with days of complaints about tooth ache, with suspicion high in the air that she was faking it. But eventually, after the judge made special arrangements for a prison dentist to see her, it turned out the complaint was real, and serious – root canal surgery was a possibility – but Marten had refused to be treated.
Gordon stayed silent in his first trial, but decided belatedly to give evidence to the second jury. But both he and Marten terminated their evidence early before the prosecution got a chance to ask any questions, while complaining loudly about the unfairness of the trial.
Their behaviour brought out bouts of frustration from the usually mild-mannered Judge Mark Lucraft KC.
During the second trial, when discussing legal directions, Marten sarcastically told the judge “I hope they will be better than the first ones”, prompting him to temporarily banish her from court.
“I have sat as a full time judge now for thirteen years and I have never had that sort of attitude shown to me by anybody,” he said, adding that two teenagers who had been in his dock earlier that day were “rather better behaved – and they pleaded guilty to murder”.
The wrecking ball approach to the second trial created an ugly picture of the couple – two people willing to do anything they could to avoid facing justice, and willing to bend the truth to their own particular view of the world.
When talking about the decision to take away her children, Marten suggested she had “accidentally” fallen from a window.
Prosecutor Tom Little KC delivered a savage destruction of Marten’s version of events, telling the Old Bailey it was riddled with half-truths and distortions of the very real peril in which baby Victoria had been placed.
“Lies fell from her mouth like confetti in the wind when she gave evidence,” he said.
“Jesus was born in a barn, yes, but Bethlehem is hardly a skiing destination.
“Tents in Calais are going to have fires next to them. All those attempts by Constance Marten to draw analogies all fail at the first hurdle.”
Stripping away Marten’s lies, delusions, and grand-standing, Victoria was a “freezing cold baby girl with just a single babygrow and one vest”, he said.
The prosecutor said Gordon, particularly, had “sought to mask reality”.
The couple face years behind bars after their convictions, to contemplate the choices that led them to kill the daughter they professed to care so much about.
There will be an inevitable appeal, and only time will tell whether Marten and Gordon can ever accept they made mistakes and may have been in the wrong.
