In the early evening of 5 January 2023, police were called to a burning car abandoned on the hard shoulder of the M61, near Bolton. Inside the wreckage, officers discovered £2,000 in cash, 34 cheap mobile phones, and a woman’s passport.
A placenta wrapped in a towel was found on the back seat. It revealed to police the existence of a newborn baby.
The owner of the passport and her partner, it emerged, were well known to social services. A nationwide search was launched to find them, which quickly became front-page news.
But for the next two months, through a bitterly cold winter, the couple went to exceptional lengths to avoid being caught. Despite having access to plenty of money, they lived rough in a cheap tent and scavenged in bins.
When they were eventually arrested at the end of February, their baby was no longer with them – and they refused to tell police where she was.
The pair had been desperately trying to stay out of reach of authorities because this was not their first child. They had four others – all of whom had been taken into care.
Within days, police made a grim discovery in a shed in Brighton, close to where the man and woman had been arrested. Inside a Lidl “bag for life”, covered in soil and rubbish, the body of a baby girl – just a few weeks old and wrapped in a pink sheet – was found.
The BBC has been investigating the lives of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, and the events that led to the death of their fifth child, Victoria.
Marten is from a wealthy family with strong connections to royalty – she told friends she played with princes William and Harry as a child. Gordon is the son of a nurse who emigrated to the UK from the Caribbean.
As teenagers, one of them travelled to Nigeria to join a secretive evangelical church, while the other was sent to a Florida prison for rape.
The story of how Constance Marten and Mark Gordon’s lives became entwined, then descended into chaos, and ultimately led to a tragedy, begins soon after World War Two.
In late November 1949, a dazzling society wedding attended by the King and Queen took place at St James’s Palace.
The bride was the Queen’s goddaughter, a glamorous heiress who owned one of England’s most beautiful country homes, Crichel House.
A decade later, she gave birth to a son, Napier. Educated at Eton College, he served as a Page of Honour to Queen Elizabeth II – a distinction granted to the teenage sons of members of the nobility.
Napier married a socialite named Virginie Camu in 1986, and subsequently fathered three children. The eldest, a daughter named Constance, was born in May 1987 – and soon became known to almost everyone by the nickname “Toots”.
Mark Gordon’s mother, Sylvia, came to the UK as one of the Windrush generation. She married Luckel Satchell, also from Jamaica, with whom she had four children. But her marriage was over by the time she was pregnant with Gordon, her fifth child, who she gave birth to in 1974.
Karen Satchell, Gordon’s sister, told the BBC her younger brother was a shy boy who could be a “little mischievous”.
“I’ve never seen him have a fight,” she says. “Nothing at all, never.”
While Gordon was still young, Sylvia left her job as a nurse at the Chrysler car factory in the Midlands, and moved to the US, eventually settling in Florida. It was here, aged 14, while growing up not far from downtown Miami, that Gordon, pictured below, committed a brutal crime.
US court papers show in the early hours of an April morning in 1989, he broke into his 30-year-old neighbour’s home, armed with a pair of garden shears and a kitchen knife.
Dressed in black, with a stocking mask pulled over his face, the court heard Gordon told the woman not to scream or he would kill her son and daughter, who were sleeping in the room next door. For the next four and a half hours, he raped her at knifepoint.
“I was told to say goodbye to my children because this was the day I was going to die,” the victim told the courthouse during sentencing.
In the days that followed the attack, a police sheriff patrolling the neighbourhood found a nylon stocking with eye and nose holes outside Gordon’s house and he was taken in for questioning.
Gordon initially pleaded guilty, but later withdrew his plea and stood trial.
At his sentencing hearing in 1990, the woman he had raped implored the judge to impose a harsh term on Gordon, who was now aged 15.
“I ask you to make sure this man does not have the opportunity to destroy any more lives,” she said. “Show him no mercy.”
Mark Gordon was sentenced to 40 years in prison
