"Sitting in the dock, Constance Marten shook her head as jurors were shown the moment police reached into the rubbish-filled shopping bag where she had stashed her lifeless daughter in an abandoned shed. By her side was the man she calls her soulmate Briton Mark Gordon, a convicted rapist 13 years her senior, who had previously been jailed for two decades after carrying out a brutal attack in the US when he was just a teenager."
"For many sitting in the packed Old Bailey courtroom, it was hard to fathom how any mother could choose this as the final resting place for her child let alone a tiny newborn whose parents had risked everything to keep her. But as officers continued pulling detritus from the tatty Lidl bag for life an empty beer can, scraps of newspaper, nappies, a Coke can, an old egg mayonnaise sandwich packet,"
Constance Marten and Mark Gordon fled with their newborn and lived off-grid in winter 2023 to prevent the child being taken into care. The infant, Victoria, was concealed in a tatty Lidl shopping bag and later found decomposed beneath soil and leaves in an abandoned shed. Police recovered detritus including cans, newspapers, nappies and a sandwich packet from the bag, illustrating the chaos of their life on the run. After two Old Bailey trials the couple were convicted of gross negligence manslaughter and previously found guilty of child cruelty, concealing the birth and concealing the body. Both were sentenced to 14 years in prison; Gordon had previously served 22 years in a Florida prison for a brutal teenage attack.
Read at www.independent.co.uk
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