NARRATIVE.- Born in the fold of the British crown, Constance Marten was promised to a brilliant future. This Monday, July 14, she and her husband, Mark Gordon were nevertheless found guilty of the death of their baby, whose remains were discovered in an abandoned plastic bag in the south of London.
“A relentlessness, a destructive energy.” At the start of the week, Constance Marten, 38, and Mark Gordon, 51, were found guilty of manslaughter on their infant, Victoria. A verdict fell after two years of legal battle around the heaviest accusation: the murder of a child. In January 2024, the couple – that The Guardian Then described as two teenagers sending kisses from afar under the gold of the court of Old Bailey, in London – had been sentenced for cruelty, hinders justice and birth concealment. But this Monday, July 14, after four months of hearings and deliberations, the two parents were found guilty of all the chiefs selected against them. They incur perpetuity prison. “Anything,” said Constance Marten, shaking his head. What then happened this January 5, 2023, when the police found their baby’s body? And how did this heiress born in the splendor end in a tent, searching the trash cans alongside a man with a heavy criminal past?
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A Christmas Eve
PA Photos/ABACA
It all starts, according to the account of the accused, the day before Christmas 2022. Constance Marten gives birth to his fifth child, Victoria, in a locked room, upstairs in a stone cottage in Northumberland, in northern England. Childbirth is done without any assistance, in the greatest secrecy. After a few days of rest, the mother puts on a down jacket, hugs the baby against her in a scarf and leaves the scene, hand in hand with her husband, Mark Gordon. Return to a wandering that they had been pursuing for months, but this time to three, “crossing stations and port cities, hotels and cafes, cities and fields, from north to south, west to east”, summarizes The Guardian.
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Pensions as unstable and paranoid, the two lovers flee. Yes, but what? After losing, in previous years, the custody of their four children – all placed by social services – they now reject any form of authority. Victoria, their fifth child, must escape the fate of her elders and stay with them, “protected”. Cold, hunger, precariousness becomes their daily life-and especially that of Victoria, who will have known only this life. About two weeks after his birth, on January 5, 2023, his body was then found lifeless in a Lidl plastic bag, near an abandoned hangar, buried under waste: cans, crumpled newspapers, soiled diapers, remains of mayonnaise sandwich and old golf cards. A few hours earlier, an abandoned car had been found in flames on the Road M61 Emergency Stop, near Bolton. Inside the wreckage: $ 2,000 in cash, 34 disposable phones, a Bible, the passport of Constance Marten – and above all, a placenta. Enough to trigger a national research notice and find the owners 53 days later.
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Have they set fire to their car to blur the tracks? Is this whole affair, as tragic as it is incredible, criminal or accidental? At its arrest, Constance confirms the second hypothesis. She fell asleep on her daughter, stifling her by accident. “I tried to revive it. I have not known for how long she had died, ”she told court. Rather than calling an ambulance, she and her companion place the body in a bag, with the idea, she will assure, to offer it a “decent burial”. “I think Victoria died because she was too loved. I liked him to forget to take care of myself. I fell asleep on her … I live with this sadness: she died in my arms. ” Distramed, she especially claims to have been betrayed by the system, forced to abandon her children and rejected by her family who, according to her, has never understood her choices. She accuses her relatives of having fueled latent racism towards her companion, Mark Gordon, a prejudice that would have precipitated their isolation. “I had to flee my family because she is extremely oppressive and intolerant. It did not allow me to have children with my husband and did everything to erase them from the family line. So I definitively broke the ties ”.
Un couple improbable
Because Constance Marten was not born in marginality. On the contrary. “I was extremely lucky,” she admitted, her eyes down, facing the Jury of the Court of Old Bailey. Daughter of Napier Marten, page of honor of Queen Elizabeth II in the 1970s, and granddaughter of Mary Anna Marten, goddaughter of the Queen Mother, she grew up in Crichel House, a sumptuous manor of neoclassical style from the south of England estimated at 100 million pounds. She sometimes plays there with the princes William and Harry, she likes to tell during her youth to her friends. Schooled in the best establishments, such as the Catholic boarding school St Mary’s Shaftesbury (30,000 euros per year), it also travels around the world: Egypt, India, South America … until its trajectory branches off at 19, when it joins a Christian sect in Nigeria, led by a guru accused of abuse. “She never told us what had happened there. But she came back changed, ”said a friend to Daily Mail . Back in the United Kingdom, she nevertheless tried to regain foot, registers in journalism school and works for a time for the media Al Jazerabased in Doha, in Qatar. But weakened, she crosses, in 2014, the road to Gordon, in a incense shop in Tottenham. And abandon everything.
He did not grow up in the same world. Originally from Jamaica by his two parents, he was born in the United Kingdom in 1974 before moving, a few years later, in Miami. “My mother was a nurse. She worked hard and succeeded well. She was a passionate woman, very empathetic and always ready to help others, “he said during her trial. If he was known, across the Channel, for his timid little boy temperament, his adolescence passed under the palm trees of Florida trains him in the margins, between dull anger and violent drift. At only 14 years old, he already commits an irreparable act by breaking into the house of his neighbor, 30 years old and mother of two children, equipped with a pair of garden scissors and a kitchen knife. He will violate her for more than four hours. “He told me to say goodbye to my children because it was the day I was going to die,” said his victim to investigators. In 1990, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. He will only serve 20. Released in 2010, he returned to England.
Three years after their meeting, in 2017, Mark and Constance marry informally in Peru. Back, the Marten family will refuse to see him. Several years of rejection, which will push them more to extract from the surface. The couple isolates themselves, sometimes lives under tents, and sees their children successively placed, remaining, welded in forfeiture. “Even in the face of years in prison, their dedication to each other remains unshakable,” noted The Independentin his rendering of trials. During the verdict, they still exchanged words in their box, looks and smiles. From this attitude, a bit provocative, a sentence, however resonated stronger than the others. “I have to love myself and forgive myself,” whispered Constance, his eyes fogged. Victoria will never have this chance.
