A RAPE victim of Constance Marten’s lover branded him a “monster” after the couple were convicted of killing their newborn baby.
The woman, aged 30 at the time of the assault in 1989, told how Mark Gordon “took everything from me” and “deserves the death penalty”.
She described the rapist and his aristocrat partner Marten, 38, as “two monsters who found each other”.
It comes after Gordon, 51, and Marten were yesterday convicted of gross negligence manslaughter in a chaotic retrial, after the decomposed body of their daughter Victoria was found in a shopping bag in March 2023 following a seven-week manhunt.
They were trying to evade authorities after social services had taken their other four children into care.
Marten and Gordon had previously been convicted of perverting the course of justice and concealment of a baby’s birth at their first trial last year, but it can now be reported they had also been found guilty of child cruelty.
The retrial was ordered after jurors in their first failed to reach a decision on manslaughter.
The two lengthy hearings are estimated to have cost taxpayers more than £10million after the pair’s attempts to “sabotage” and “derail” proceedings.
When they were found guilty at the Old Bailey yesterday, Gordon angrily shouted: “I’m not surprised by the verdict. It was faulty, it was unlawful.”
Judge Mark Lucraft KC slammed the pair for being worse behaved than teenage murderers.
‘You’re gonna die’
Marten is the daughter of a former page boy to Queen Elizabeth II, and is said to have had a troubled upbringing, which included spending months in an abusive cult in Nigeria.
Meanwhile, Gordon moved to the US from Birmingham with his nurse mother and siblings when he was 12.
Within two years he had carried out the brutal knifepoint rape of a neighbour in Miami.
Gordon put the woman through a four-and-half-hour ordeal while her two children were at home, running a knife up and down her body.
A court heard he callously told her: “I’ll say goodbye to your children for you because today you’re gonna die.”
He also threatened to kill the victim’s dog after it began to bark and scratch at the door.
The woman, now 66, told The Sun: “He took everything from me.
“We lost our house, our security and our friends. I couldn’t stay at the house after what happened there.
“We lost everything. I never feel safe, I don’t know what it’s like to feel safe and this case in the UK hasn’t helped.”
Gordon eventually allowed her to leave and she ran with her children to neighbours, who called police.
But it was only after Gordon attacked another neighbour with a shovel less than a month later that he was caught and brought to justice.
Describing how the ordeal continues to affect her family now, the victim said: “My daughter still lives with it. She’s scared all the time and feels like she should have protected me.
“I kept telling the kids to go get their breakfast and that everything was OK. I told them that I had a headache and I was sleeping late.
“My daughter says she knew something was wrong and blames herself. I think they both do. My son won’t speak about it, he never has. Not even to me.”
Due to the gravity of his crimes, Florida’s judicial system treated Gordon as an adult.
He pleaded not guilty to armed sexual battery, aggravated battery, armed kidnapping and burglary with a deadly weapon.
Baby Victoria can be seen inside a car as Marten carries a Lidl bag[/caption]
Marten and Gordon had previously been convicted of perverting the course of justice and concealment of a baby’s birth at their first trial last year[/caption]
After a jury found Gordon guilty in 1994, he was jailed for 40 years, but served just over half his sentence before being deported to the UK.
He is still on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Sexual Offenders and Predators registry.
The victim said that the judge who dealt with the case was shocked at how much thought and preparation had gone into the attack.
She said: “One day the judge walked him back to the cells and Gordon told him that the only mistake he made was that he should have killed me and then he wouldn’t be there.
“The judge said Mark was the most dangerous individual he had seen during his 25 years on the bench.”
The victim had campaigned for Gordon to be kept behind bars.
She said: “I didn’t want him to hurt anyone else. I believe he deserves the death penalty.
“But he’s not the only one to blame for what happened to baby Victoria.
“Constance was her mum, she should have protected her baby.
“Personally, I think they are two monsters who found each other.”
Violent rapist
Marten met Gordon by chance in a North London incense shop in 2014 and they had a marriage ceremony in Peru two years later. She soon cut ties with her family.
It was not until he assaulted two police officers in a hospital in Wales after Marten gave birth to their first child that she learned he was a violent rapist considered at “high risk” of re-offending.
For legal reasons, the jury at the first trial was not told about Gordon’s rape conviction.
But Marten disclosed the details while giving evidence at the retrial in a bid to derail the proceedings. Jurors appeared visibly shaken by the revelations.
They were also not told that Gordon was suspected of an incident of domestic violence in November 2019, which left Marten with a shattered spleen.
Gordon had refused to allow paramedics into their London flat to treat his partner even though she was 14 weeks pregnant, it emerged during legal argument.
She spent eight days in hospital then put her life and that of her unborn child at risk by attempting to discharge herself, it was alleged.
It was following that incident that a Family Court judge decided the couple’s other children should be taken into care.
When Marten became pregnant for a fifth time, she kept it secret, giving birth to Victoria in a hired cottage in Northumberland over Christmas 2022.
When police found a placenta, passport and 34 burner phones inside their abandoned car near Bolton on January 5, 2023, it prompted a high-risk missing persons alert.
The couple then spent hundreds of pounds on taxis to take them from the North West, to Harwich in Essex, East Ham in London and on to Newhaven.
GULLIBLE ‘IT GIRL’ WITH ROYAL LINKS
CONSTANCE MARTEN grew up in one of England’s finest stately homes, was a former Tatler “It Girl’ and hails from landed gentry whose family had close links to the royals.
Marten had an idyllic early childhood growing up with her three younger siblings at Grade II listed Crichel House, set on a 5,000-acre estate near Wimborne, Dorset.
But two key events left her traumatised and vulnerable before she fell for Gordon.
When Marten was nine, her father Napier, a former page boy to the Queen, left his wife Virginie de Selliers and children to become a nomadic hippie travelling the globe.
The family estate passed on to oldest son Maximillian, who sold the house and part of the estate to an American hedge fund owner for £34million in 2013, leaving Marten devastated.
During the trial, she broke down as she gave evidence about a “traumatic childhood event” and the sale of Crichel House.
The second disturbing experience came when Marten was 19 and she attended a Nigerian Christian sect in Lagos with her religious mother.
She and other white people at the sect’s compound were humiliated by the guru, televangelist Temitope Balogun “TB” Joshua. They were forced to eat his leftovers and call him “Daddy”.
After Marten returned to the UK, she attended Leeds University. Friends remember her as a vivacious, talented and charismatic globe-trotting party girl who loved festivals such as Burning Man.
In 2008, aged 22, she appeared on Tatler magazine’s Babe Of The Month page.
She spent her summer holidays in 2010 working for a film production company in Cairo.
One colleague described her as being “very decent, nice and friendly” and having “great potential” but said Constance sometimes chose the “wrong” type of man, adding: “She was somehow gullible.”
Constance graduated in June 2012 and moved to London but struggled to establish herself in any long-term jobs.
Then she met Gordon while studying at East 15 Acting School and dropped out to be with him.
At one point, the pair tried to rent flats in Llanelli, North Wales.
Landlady Guiseppine Allegri said of Gordon: “He was very possessive and controlling of Marten. It was him who spoke all the time. I told her to go back to her family. I couldn’t see why she was with him. He was so creepy. But she thought Mark was the best thing.
“He was very domineering. He was the boss. There was never a smile on him, never an honest smile. He had an angry smile.
“He would say to me, ‘Come and join me. Join me in my cult. You will find peace’.”
Victoria was only briefly glimpsed on CCTV footage in London wearing the same teddy bear motif babygrow later recovered with her body inside a Lidl bag. The couple were later spotted staying in a blue tent on the South Downs.
The prosecution asserted that Victoria had been carried under Marten’s jacket or in the bag.
After she died, Marten and Gordon were caught on CCTV scavenging in bins for food even though Marten had received thousands of pounds from a trust fund and had £19,000 in the bank.
They were arrested in Brighton on February 27, 2023, but refused to say where their baby was.
In a police interview, Marten said: “I had her in my jacket and I hadn’t slept properly in quite a few days and, erm, I fell asleep holding her sitting up and she, when I woke up, she wasn’t alive.”
Jurors were told Marten had been warned by social workers about the risk of falling asleep with a baby lying on her and that a tent was unsuitable housing.
Victoria was found dead in the Lidl bag in a disused shed, in an allotment, on March 1, 2023.
Her body was so badly decomposed no pathologist has been able to ascertain her cause of death.
Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford said yesterday the couple’s “selfish actions resulted in the death of a baby who should have had the rest of her life ahead of her”.
Marten broke down in tears during her police interview[/caption]
The remains of newborn Victoria were found in a disused shed in Brighton[/caption]
Police made the tragic find days after Marten and partner Mark Gordon refused to say where their baby was[/caption]
Scorched baby clothes were among the belongings found in the vehicle[/caption]
Police finally tracked the couple down to Brighton on February 27[/caption]
WORST DEFENDANTS
JUDGE Mark Lucraft KC described Constance Marten and Mark Gordon as the worst-behaved defendants in his 13 years on the bench.
The pair wasted millions of pounds in failed attempts to derail justice for the death of their baby daughter.
Their two trials ran to 42 weeks of court time at a cost of £10million – and their antics are thought to have doubled the length of the hearings.
Judge Lucraft could not contain his frustration as he repeatedly accused the couple of trying to sabotage proceedings.
Marten had tried to collapse the trial by deliberately disclosing in the witness box that Gordon was a convicted rapist. But the judge allowed the details of the case to go before the jury.
The couple were also rude to dock officers, would talk through proceedings, feign illness and refused to attend court.
Gordon fired his barristers during the second trial and went on to represent himself, leaving the judge struggling to control his long rants from the dock. Marten went through 15 different barristers and sacked her lead barrister in the middle of both trials.
In a final insult to the court, the pair refused to stand as the jury delivered its guilty verdict.
