Constance Marten and Mark Gordon said they went on the run to avoid their newborn being removed after their four older children were taken into care.

“There was no way I was going to part with my child,” Marten told the jury at the Old Bailey. 

“We were hiding from the entire British public because I was worried about Victoria being taken.”

The couple said the death of baby Victoria was a tragic accident and denied wrongdoing, but were found guilty of perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, and child cruelty last year after an Old Bailey trial lasting almost five months.

The jury was discharged after failing to reach a verdict on other outstanding counts.

Gordon, 51, and Marten, 38, have now been found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence.

Prosecutors said as soon as Marten realised she was pregnant with her fifth child, she and Gordon started planning to “go dark” so they could conceal the birth from the authorities and keep the baby.

A national manhunt was launched in January 2023 when a placenta was found in their burnt-out car – a search that would end almost two months later in a disused shed where Victoria’s body was found in a carrier bag, two days after her parents were arrested.

Marten comes from a wealthy family of landowners with links to the Royal Family and met Gordon around 2014.

The couple had four children between 2017 and 2021 before Marten became pregnant with Victoria in 2022, and the couple decided to go on the run. Marten claimed her older children were “stolen by the state” and her “number one priority” was to protect Victoria.

Why were the couple’s older children taken into care?

Social services were involved with the family from Marten’s first pregnancy in the winter of 2017. Social workers were concerned the couple had been living in a “freezing” tent where they planned to take the newborn, despite it being “wholly inappropriate for a baby”.

Hours after the baby was born, Gordon attacked two female police officers who had been called to the maternity ward over concerns about the parents’ identity after the pair gave fake names.

An interim care order was made. This can only be issued if a child has suffered or is at risk of suffering significant harm, and gives the local authority shared parental responsibility so it can make decisions about the child’s welfare and where they live. 

Marten and her child were placed in several temporary mother and baby placements – the first in a series of care interventions throughout her children’s lives. 

She sought advice from an “expert” in evading social services about how to keep her children after a domestic violence incident between her and Gordon in 2019.

The expert told her to flee to Ireland, and she stayed there until a court order in December 2019 forced her to return. In January 2020, two children were taken into care, and an emergency protection order was made when their third child was born a few months later.

In January 2022, a family court judge ruled the couple’s four children should be adopted. 

An incident of domestic violence played a part in this decision, as the judge weighed up the risk to the children of being exposed to serious physical violence.

At that point, it had been four months since the parents had been to a contact session with their three older children.

‘Mummy and daddy cancelled again’

The judge said the quality of contact was “excellent” when they attended – but there were a “huge” number of missed sessions. 

One child was described as “inconsolable” when the parents failed to turn up at the contact centre, telling nursery staff: “Mummy and Daddy cancelled again.”

In ruling the children should be adopted, the judge found as well as “inconsistent” contact, arrangements for antenatal and postnatal care were not appropriate, and the children were put at risk by the potential for domestic violence and their parents’ decision to evade the local authority when it was investigating the children’s wellbeing in late 2019.

Would the older children being in care have automatically meant Victoria was removed?

Older children being in care does not automatically mean a newborn baby is removed – but it will often trigger a pre-birth assessment, explains Cathy Ashley, chief executive at the charity Family Rights Group.

“The assessment has to look at what the previous concerns were, why did those children go into care, why were they removed from their parents? It also has to look at the current situation,” she says.

If a local authority believes a newborn is at significant risk, it can apply for an interim care order. In reality, this is often on the day of birth (court orders cannot be sought before that because an unborn baby is not a legal entity). 

A family court judge must consider each case on merit to decide the best long-term care option, Lisa Harker, director of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, says. 

But if a significant risk of harm has meant older children have been removed, it will be a “challenge” for someone to prove they are now able to parent, she tells Sky News.

That is unless there has been a major change in their life such as a new partner, having had therapy, changing levels of addiction, or improvements in mental health.

But parents are often given little support to make those changes, Ms Harker says: “So how do you demonstrate your life has improved and you’re more able to parent than you were?

“People do demonstrate it, but it is difficult.”

What did the couple say about their children being taken into care?

Marten told the jury of the first trial she and Gordon were moving every one to three days while she was pregnant with Victoria “so she would not be taken”.

“I wanted Victoria with me for the first three to six months of her life so I could give her the love that she needs because I don’t think it’s fair for any children to be removed from her parents,” she said.

“A mother’s love for her child is incredibly strong,” she told the jury.

At the retrial, she explained they moved between places “because I didn’t want one single authority to have jurisdiction over my daughter, so if we kept moving, they couldn’t take her”.

Speaking to Sky News, senior crown prosecutor Samantha Yellend said the prosecution did not dispute the love the parents had for their children.

“It wasn’t our case that they didn’t love their children and there weren’t times where they were loving towards them.

“It was our case that when decisions had to be made in relation to them or the children they often pick themselves over that.”

After finding out she was pregnant with her fifth child, Marten’s plan was to go abroad, jurors were told.

She said: “Get away from this country and the services and my family but unfortunately there were preventatives from going abroad.”

Marten added that “Plan B” was to remain in the UK but “lay low”.

When asked to elaborate, Marten told the court she wanted to keep Victoria until she was three months old, then give her to a carer “who could then try and get her abroad”.

She told the court she would have paid the person to get Victoria out of the UK. She said: “It would have been a carer, a nanny or something. If there is a will there is a way, you can always find someone to help.”

What advice did Marten get about evading social services?

Marten told the jury she sought help from Ian Josephs, who advises parents on how to evade and oppose social services – including sometimes giving expectant mothers financial help to flee to Ireland, France and Northern Cyprus.

Mr Josephs says he has advised thousands of women since starting his website in 2003, and represented parents in court against local authorities as early as the 1960s (the former councillor is not a lawyer and a 1989 law prevents non-professionals from representing clients in court).

He tells Sky News he recalls talking to Marten when she had two children and was “desperate” to stop them being taken into care.

His advice to her at the time: “Get the hell out of there. Get to Ireland.”

This would not break any laws, he told her, and social services there would be more likely to let the family stay together than authorities in England.

Mr Josephs says Marten followed his advice and lived “successfully” in Ireland for a period, but had her children taken back into care when a court order meant she had to return to England.

She was acting out of desperation both when she called him and when she went on the run with Victoria, he says.

“If your child runs into the middle of the road when a lorry is coming and you’re trying to save it… that’s the sort of frame of mind she was in, to try and save a child from being taken, not run over by a lorry, but taken by social services, which is nearly as bad.”

While Mr Josephs’ website includes testimonials from mothers praising his approach, his methods are unpopular with those who believe social services should maintain oversight of children who could be at risk.

Can social services just take a child?

“There’s a misconception that social workers can just remove your children,” Ms Ashley of Family Rights Group says. 

“Of course they can’t.”

There are only three scenarios in which a child can be removed from their parents or a person with parental responsibility.

The first is if a parent voluntarily agrees to it, and the second is if police take them temporarily into police protection for a maximum of 72 hours. 

The third is the most common scenario and involves the court making a temporary order – either an interim care order or an emergency protection order. 

For this to be granted, the court must be satisfied a child has suffered or is at risk of suffering significant harm.

“It is not a decision taken lightly,” Ms Ashley says. 

Significant harm could mean the child being abused or neglected. In the case of an unborn baby, perhaps the mother hasn’t engaged with antenatal care or uses substances. 

It is a bit of a “grey area” where the worry is about future risk rather than immediate harm, Ms Harker adds. 

She gives examples of what that might look like: “This might not be an environment where a child will thrive, where there’s concerns about neglect, a chaotic lifestyle or the ability to provide a safe, warm, damp-free home for a child. 

“That child might not be at risk of immediate harm but the local authority fears for their future safety, their future wellbeing.”

The temporary orders last until the court makes a decision about longer-term care, which must be guided by the principle that – if it is safe – children are best cared for by their parents or within their family, Ms Ashley says. 

“If it wasn’t possible, legally, children’s services have to consider family and friends before they would look at unrelated carers.”

A social worker will provide a report assessing the parents’ capacity to care for their children, and a psychologist may also do the same. The judge will consider this in making their decision.

How were Marten’s family involved?

Marten’s father made an application for wardship in December 2019, when Marten and Gordon had two children. When this application was granted, it meant Marten had to return from Ireland.

These types of applications are “very rare”, retired social worker Andrew Reece tells Sky News.

It does not mean the children’s grandfather was applying to be their guardian. Rather, he was applying for them to become wards of the court.

This means the High Court can be appointed the child’s supreme legal guardian and must approve any significant step in the child’s life.

An application for wardship is different to kinship care, which is when a friend or relative who is not the parent cares for a child.

Wardship proceedings are only used when the usual processes of care orders are not sufficient.

In this case, the local authority initiated care proceedings for the children the month after the wardship application.

Marten told the jury her family considered her children an “embarrassment” because they don’t come from the same “upper class privileged background”.

She said her family would “try to get my children taken off me” and “refused to take them in when they were put up for adoption”.

She claimed she was “cut off overnight” while heavily pregnant with her first child and fled to Wales.

“I had to escape my family because my family are extremely oppressive and bigoted and wouldn’t allow me to have children with my husband,” Marten said.

“They would do anything to erase that child from the family line, which is what they did end up doing.”

In an audio appeal made while the couple were on the run, Marten’s father Napier Marten said the family had lived “in great concern”.

Her mother Virginie de Selliers, who attended the start of her daughter’s first trial, said in an open letter: “You have made choices in your personal adult life which have proven to be challenging, however I respect them, I know that you want to keep your precious newborn child at all costs.”

Is it common for parents to have recurrent children taken into care?

The “trauma and grief” of having a child removed at birth often leads to recurrent care proceedings, Ms Harker says.

“The chance of seeking solace from a future pregnancy is very high.

“We know from our research that 50% of newborn babies who are subject to care proceedings are the children of mothers who have previously had children subject to care proceedings.”

The risk is strongest in the first three years after the removal of a baby and it is more likely with young mothers and where the newborn has been adopted.

But there is a positive side, she says: “Where we know there are services that are able to support families who have had a child removed, you can see that there is a reduced risk of that happening.”

Warning: This article contains details readers may find distressing.

An “evil” postman who moaned about being lonely hours before he severed his girlfriend’s head and tried to dismember her body has been jailed for a minimum of 23 years.

Ewan Methven murdered 21-year-old Phoenix Spencer-Horn in the flat they shared in East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, in November last year.

The High Court in Glasgow heard the killer dumped his partner’s body parts in their hallway and failed to call emergency services for two days.

The 27-year-old then bought drugs, watched pornography and sent sickening texts to Phoenix’s worried mum pretending she was still alive.

Phoenix was stabbed 20 times – including 10 times in the face – using three knives in an attack that unfolded after she returned from her waitressing job in Lanarkshire.

The 21-year-old had described Methven as her “soulmate” on social media, saying in one TikTok video: “Life is so much more beautiful and full of colour with you.”

A few months later she was murdered by the same man she had been in a relationship with for two years.

Methven received a life sentence with at least 23 years behind bars when he retuned to the dock on Monday.

The judge, Lord Matthews, described it as a “dreadful crime”.

He told Methven: “You were a trusted member of her family, but you betrayed that trust and robbed her of life in the cruellest way.

“Not content with what you had done to her, you robbed her of all dignity in death by decapitating her and trying to dismember her in an attempt to defeat the ends of justice.”

Lord Matthews highlighted victim impact statements supplied by Phoenix’s family and said he had “rarely read such outpourings of grief”.

The judge said: “The way you treated this innocent young woman after her death meant that her family did not even have the comfort of saying goodbye to her.”

He added: “I have this morning seen a letter written by you, but it answers none of the questions which must be plaguing the family. You blame the effect of substances but that is no excuse.”

‘Personification of evil’

Sky News has interviewed the couple’s neighbour who lives directly next door.

Toni Brown, 25, described the horror of discovering what happened.

She said: “I think I stayed out of the house for about a week after that. I couldn’t even sit.

“It’s horrific. It gives me shivers thinking about it. It is crazy to think I stayed next door to a monster like that.

“What scares me the most is knowing she was lay there and I was in here oblivious.”

Asked whether she heard any noises or violence around the time of the murder, Ms Brown said: “There was a bad smell in my house in the early hours of the morning she was found.

“There was a bad smell in my kitchen basically where the walls join together.”

Methven’s own defence lawyer told the court that society will see the killer as the “personification of evil”.

When he eventually called 999, he claimed to have suffered a drug-induced blackout during the violent killing.

Another life lost to gender-based violence

The case has raised questions once again about the growing prevalence of gender-based violence.

Fiona Drouet’s daughter Emily was 18 when she took her own life at university in Aberdeen in 2016, days after being choked and slapped by her ex-boyfriend.

Angus Milligan was later convicted of physical and psychological abuse.

Ms Drouet, who now campaigns on violence against women across the UK and Ireland, has set up a charity called Emily’s Test in her daughter’s name.

Reacting to the death of Ms Spencer-Horn, Ms Drouet told Sky News: “There is another mother and father that have just been plunged into utter hell.

“Somebody once said to me that if God came to you and said, ‘I am going to give you this beautiful daughter, but you’ll only have her for 18 years and then we need to take her back, would you still want her?’ and I would take those 18 years and go through the pain rather than have nothing.

“Although just now that probably offers no words of comfort for Phoenix’s parents, maybe one day it can.”

If you suspect you are being abused and need to speak to someone, there are people who can help you, including The National Domestic Violence Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or Women’s Aid online.

Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon have been found guilty of killing their newborn baby.

Marten, 38, who is from a wealthy family, and Gordon, 51, went on the run with their daughter Victoria to get away from social services after their four other children were taken into care.

The baby’s body was found with rubbish inside a Lidl shopping bag, in the corner of a disused shed, in an allotment in Brighton on 1 March 2023 – two days after the couple were arrested following a 54-day nationwide police hunt.

The couple were found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence on Monday at the Old Bailey. They gave no response and refused to stand up as the verdict was read out.

Gordon leaned his head back with his eyes closed while Marten looked resigned.

Prosecutors had said Victoria’s death was “inevitable” when Marten and Gordon began camping on the South Downs in January 2023 in a “flimsy” tent.

The couple said it was a tragic accident and denied wrongdoing, but were found guilty of perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, and child cruelty last year after an Old Bailey trial lasting almost five months.

The jury – initially told the case would last six weeks – was discharged after failing to reach a verdict on other outstanding counts, having sent a total of almost 200 notes or questions to the judge.

Twists and turns in court

Marten and Gordon have now been found guilty of manslaughter following a retrial in front of a second jury at the same court.

Both trials were hampered by disruption and delays, taking up more than 33 weeks of court time, which at an estimated £30,000 per defendant a day could have cost in the region of £10m.

Judge Mark Lucraft KC suggested Marten may have made a “deliberate attempt” to “scupper” the retrial when she dramatically revealed Gordon’s “violent rape conviction” in the US after he attacked a woman when he was a teenager.

Gordon’s barrister said the evidence was so prejudicial the jury should be discharged only for his client to change his mind when he realised he would have to stand trial without his partner next year.

Marten then said she wanted to “sack” her KC, the 15th lawyer she had parted company with, but was still represented by a junior barrister, while Gordon’s lawyers withdrew and he represented himself.

He asked for a copy of the 3,500-page legal textbook Archbold, which covers the entirety of the criminal law in England and Wales, and at one point, the judge said: “Do you want me to adjourn for three years while you do a law degree?”

In an extraordinary courtroom cross-examination, Gordon was allowed to question his partner, who took the opportunity to attack her family, who have links to the Royal Family and who she said saw her as “an embarrassment”.

‘Such obvious risks’

After the verdict, the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) London Senior Crown Prosecutor Samantha Yelland said it was “shocking” that Marten and Gordon “could subject their newborn baby to such obvious risks”.

“Their reckless actions were driven by a selfish desire to keep their baby no matter the cost – resulting in her tragic death,” she added.

“These defendants did everything they could to evade the authorities – from avoiding the use of their bank cards to the point that they were starving, ditching their phones to avoid being traced and travelling hundreds of miles daily from place to place to dodge the police.”

Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector Joanna Yorke, who led the homicide investigation into Victoria’s death, also said that Marten and Gordon’s “selfish actions” resulted in “the death of an innocent newborn baby who would have recently had her second birthday and should have had the rest of her life ahead of her”.

She added: “We know today’s verdict won’t bring Victoria back, but I am pleased our investigation has resulted in the couple who caused her death finally being brought to justice.”

Read more:
Why did Constance Marten and Mark Gordon go on the run?

‘Stolen by the state’

Marten met Gordon around a decade ago and the pair married in an unofficial ceremony in Peru, where she later became pregnant with their first child.

She said her family didn’t approve of the relationship and her parents hired private investigators to track them.

“Some people who are privileged think they are above the rules,” she said.

“It is harrowing, you are up against these people who will stop at nothing, who have endless resources and connections.”

A search for Marten and Gordon was launched after a placenta was found in the couple’s burnt-out car on a motorway in Bolton in January 2023.

Marten said they went on the run so their fifth child would not be removed from them after her other children were “stolen by the state”.

The couple spent vast sums of cash from her family trust fund on taxi journeys as they travelled from Bolton, to Liverpool, to Harwich in Essex, to London and then to Newhaven on the south coast.

Prosecutors said the baby was inadequately clothed in a babygrow and that Marten had got wet as she carried the infant underneath her coat, alleging Victoria died from hypothermia or was smothered while co-sleeping.

The court heard how Marten had been warned against living in a tent with a baby and falling asleep with a child on her chest after she first gave birth in 2017.

Marten said that she was living in fear and that her “number one priority” was to protect Victoria.

But her evidence came to an abrupt end when she refused to answer any more questions after prosecutor Joel Smith KC asked her if leaving her daughter’s body in a bag of rubbish was a “despicable thing” to do.

‘Treated like monsters’

Gordon, who did not give evidence in the first trial and adopted the same tactic in the second before changing his mind, blamed the police manhunt for setting off a series of “calamitous” events which ended in Victoria’s death.

He wept in the witness box as he claimed the couple had been treated like “monsters” and dragged through mud like “scum” over what happened.

But he also pulled the plug before prosecutors could question his story, declaring: “All right, that’s it.”

In his closing speech, Gordon, wearing a pale orange head covering, told the jury the prosecution case was “like a script from a movie” and the conditions posed no threat to Victoria because they were “experienced campers”.

He said the tent was sheltered, they wore layered clothing and even mentioned his “wife’s excessive body fat”.

‘Complete madness’

During the retrial, Marten, who trained as a journalist, appeared on the front cover of a magazine written “by and for women in the justice system”, having written a three-page article under her own picture byline.

In the piece, accompanied by a podcast in which her words were read by an actor, she complained about the “disgusting and inadequate” court food, the “stone cold cells in the basement” and 17 to 19-hour days “when I decide to attend”.

“My life depends on the outcome of this trial,” she wrote. “How can I attend a highly emotionally charged case with my liberty on the line and remain alert and attentive for three months? With very little rest and no access to my legal team while my trial is ongoing, it’s just complete madness.”