A drama in the United Kingdom. A British from an aristocratic family and his companion, sentenced in the past for rape, were deemed guilty on Monday from the death of their baby whom they were trying to remove social services. A year ago, the jurors failed to agree after 72 hours of deliberations on the role played by this heiress of a family historically close to the royal family, aged 38, and his companion Mark Gordon, 51, in the death of their daughter Victoria.
Unanimity
At the end of a new trial before the Criminal Court of the Old Bailey in London, a jury found them guilty unanimously of manslaughter. They had already been condemned, at the end of the first trial, for infantile cruelty and for having hidden the birth of a child.
Both were kept in detention and will be fixed on their sentence on September 15. In January 2023, the run of this young woman and her companion, who had previously served a sentence of twenty years in prison for rape in the United States, had made the headlines of the British media.
As Constance Marten had told the court, the couple, who lived in marginality, had attempted to hide the birth of Victoria after being withdrawn from their four other children by social services.
Placenta in the car
The discovery of a placenta in their abandoned car on the edge of a highway near Manchester (North) had led the police to launch a wanted notice across the country. After weeks of a distraught leak, sleeping in hotels, in a tent in the middle of winter, and spending hundreds of books to travel by taxi across the country, the couple had finally been arrested on February 27, 2023 in Brighton, in the south of England.
The body of little Victoria, aged only a few days, had been found on March 1 in an abandoned supermarket bag in a hangar. The autopsy could not determine the exact causes of the baby’s death. The accusation said she was either died of hypothermia, or that her mother had stifled her down on her. It was this thesis of the accident that the couple has always defended, saying that their daughter had not been the victim of acts of cruelty.
Violent past
Unlike their first trial in 2024, the jurors had this time partially informed of the violent past of Mark Gordon. In addition to his conviction for rape in 1989 at the age of 14, he was found guilty of the assault of two police officers in a Welsh maternity hospital in 2017, and suspected of domestic violence on Constance Marten, causing her a break in the spleen while she was pregnant.
