‘A relentless, destructive energy': inside the trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon

The Guardian

7 hours ago

If we believe her parents, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, a baby girl was born on Christmas Eve, 2022, in the upstairs bedroom of Woodcutters Cottage in Haltwhistle, Northumberland. Her mother knelt against the double bed and gave birth without assistance or complication. The baby spent the first days of her life in the small stone-terraced cottage and then began her travels, mostly carried by her mother in a sling, hidden under a burgundy puffer jacket. She travelled far for a newborn, passing through bus stations and port towns, hotels and cafes, cities and fields, from north to south, west to east. We know she lived for at least two weeks, but we don't know, and can never know, precisely how she died. She was called Victoria.
On 3 March 2025, the first day of the pre-trial hearing in the case of Marten and Gordon, neither defendant turned up to court. Among the huddle of journalists outside court six of the Old Bailey, no one seemed surprised. Last year, the couple had been tried on five counts in relation to the death of Victoria while they were camping on the South Downs in January 2023. During the original trial, Gordon and Marten's absences had been frequent. When they were both present, they'd embrace, still demonstrably a couple despite being held in different prisons – Marten in Bronzefield, Gordon in Belmarsh.
Eventually, in late June 2024, after a trial that was supposed to last three months ended up taking six, they were found guilty of three charges: child cruelty, perverting the course of justice and concealing the birth of a child. The jury had been unable to reach a verdict on the two most serious charges of gross negligence manslaughter and causing or allowing the death of a child, and so a retrial of those charges had been ordered.
Mark Lucraft KC, the most senior judge at the Old Bailey, would once again preside. Lucraft, whose official, 13th-century title is the recorder of London, is widely revered, not least because he is also the editor of Archbold: Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice, the definitive criminal law reference book. As he entered the court this spring, stately in his wig and flowing black and red robe, we rose to our feet. 'Constance Marten has refused to attend,' he said gravely. 'She says she's unwell, but has been declared fit.' Lucraft declared that he would continue with the trial whether the defendants were present or not. 'Those who are genuinely ill, I have great sympathy for,' he said in a stern, cool voice we would grow to know well. 'Those who do not feel like coming, I have very little sympathy for.'
And so the retrial of Gordon, 51, and Marten, 38, began as it meant to go on. Over the next four and a half months, two stories would unfold simultaneously in court six. One was the story of Gordon and Marten, their complex history and their crimes, and the other was of a battle for control between a married couple and a judge.
Marten and Gordon first came to public attention in January 2023. On the evening of 5 January, police found their burnt-out car on the side of the M61, near Bolton. Strewn nearby were bags of baby clothes, Marten's passport and a bag of 38 mobile phones. When the police found a placenta wrapped in a towel on the back seat of the car, they launched a national search for the couple, concerned for the welfare of the baby.
Quickly, the press began running stories: Marten is the daughter of Napier Marten, a former page to the queen. She had grown up at Crichel House, a vast stately home in Dorset, rebuilt after fire in the 18th century. Gordon, meanwhile, had spent 20 years in American prisons, having been charged with rape and battery at the age of 14. As the weeks passed and they weren't found, the nation became obsessed with this couple on the run. The acceptable face of this obsession was concern for the baby. Less openly stated, but quite obvious, was the fascination with this marriage of seeming contrast: an aristocratic white woman and a Black man with a violent criminal record.
On the second day of the pre-trial hearing, Marten entered the dock for the first time. Tall and striking, with dark tumbling hair and a wide, pale face, she brought with her a frisson of criminal celebrity. A female defendant is rare enough at the Old Bailey, but a woman born into privilege, a boarding-school girl known to her friends as 'Toots', who also happens to be the beneficiary of a large trust fund left by her grandmother is exceptional. Everyone in the packed courtroom wanted to understand the same thing, which was how a woman apparently born with everything ends up in prison with nothing, charged with the manslaughter of her child.
The court usher asked Marten if she'd like paper and a pen. Marten said thank you, a polite smile sweetening her expression, her eyes warm. 'Ms Marten would wish to apologise to the court for her non-attendance yesterday,' said her barrister, Francis Fitzgibbon KC. 'She said the prospect of having to go through this again became overwhelming. She couldn't face it. She's here now and she will be here for the trial.' In the dock, Marten looked tired and sullen. Her expression could transform quickly, moods rearranging her face in an instant.
The barristers spent the day debating the agreed facts of the case. Leading up to the death of Victoria was a long, dark history, much of which Lucraft wanted to keep out of the trial. Gordon's previous convictions from Florida were deemed so potentially prejudicial to his case that Lucraft had issued a reporting restriction preventing any mention of them. The couple's prolonged dealings with the family courts were also problematic. Gordon and Marten had four previous children, born between 2017 and 2022. The first two children had initially lived with the couple, but were placed in care after intervention from social services. The subsequent two children were removed at birth, and a family court order in January 2022 permanently removed all four children from their parents. Fitzgibbon argued the inclusion of these facts reflected badly on his client. It was easy to see why. There is no way of learning that a couple has had four children taken away without imagining the worst possible reasons.
Lucraft declared that the trial should not be a rehashing of the family court litigation but the family court order couldn't be completely excluded, as it was relevant. (The reasons cited for the children's removal in the 2022 order were the threat of them being exposed to violence after a reported domestic violence incident inflicted by Gordon on Marten in 2019, and the couple's refusal to engage with health and social services for their children.) The family court history also explained why the couple had gone on the run. In police interviews and evidence, Marten said they had begun travelling around England while she was pregnant to avoid the oversight of any single local authority. If social services knew of her pregnancy, she said, the baby would be automatically taken from her at birth.
In the dock, Marten had the charismatic presence of someone used to claiming an audience's attention. Her volatility was addictive to watch, as if you had to keep checking to see what mood she might be in now. Looking at her, it was difficult to compute her experience. Marten had given birth to five children within the past eight years. Four of these had been put up for adoption. One had died in her arms. Whatever her culpability, I wasn't sure how she was able to sit, or talk, or function at all.
Tom Little KC, the most senior criminal prosecutor in the country, is a bear-like man, wide and tall, who wears a pair of thick black-framed glasses and heavy shoes. During the trial, he appeared so settled in his confidence that I never heard him sigh or redden with stress, the way other barristers did. At most, he paced with a kind of upbeat, competitive impatience, like a horse before a race.
On 10 March, the first day of the trial, Little ran through his prosecution opening statement as if he were saying things so obvious that they hardly needed expressing. To tell the story of Gordon and Marten's frantic travels after their car burst into flames on the M61, he played CCTV footage tracking them round the country from Bolton in Greater Manchester to Harwich in Essex to east London to the south coast, near Newhaven, where they pitched their tent. Look at this couple, said Little: damp, tired, constantly on the move, with nothing like what they needed for themselves let alone their newborn daughter. 'Is that any way to look after a baby at that stage?'
Little made sure the jury were aware of Marten's background. She had access to plentiful funds through her family trust, and was regularly receiving these funds into her bank accounts and making substantial withdrawals. She had the means to rent a property and provide for her child. You might feel sympathy, but her version of events could not be trusted, he warned. The jury would need 'cool logic and common sense'.
Little knew what he was up against. The defendants were being blamed for causing the death of a child they loved. Little needed to show that the two things were not mutually exclusive, that you can love and harm simultaneously. This was, he concluded, a 'paradigm' case of gross negligence manslaughter, with two possible causes of death: either hypothermia or suffocation caused by dangerous co-sleeping in the tent.
Little was followed by Gordon's barrister, John Femi-Ola, who argued there was no evidence Victoria had died of hypothermia. The cause of death, according to two pathologists, was unascertained. Her body was so badly decomposed by the time it was discovered, in a Brighton allotment shed on 1 March 2023, that it was impossible to draw any certain conclusions. There was no evidence, either, of any harm or injury to her body, or that the defendants were consuming drink or drugs. The baby, Femi-Ola argued, was at all times kept warm, fed and close to her mother.
Finally, it was Fitzgibbon's turn. Gordon and Marten decided to camp with Victoria to escape the press attention after the police had launched their manhunt, he said. They had never intended to stay there long. Victoria's death was a tragic accident. Marten, exhausted, had fallen asleep over her baby after breastfeeding and compromised her breathing – something that could happen to any sleep-deprived mother of a newborn.
The jury now had two competing narratives to consider as they heard the evidence over the coming weeks. In the prosecution's account, Marten and Gordon were deceitful, negligent individuals who knew the risks they were taking and had caused their child's death. The defence painted the couple as parents in difficult circumstances whose daughter's accidental death had rendered them grief-stricken. In reaching a verdict, the jury would not establish the truth, but simply declare victory for one story over another.
The prosecution's first witness was a social worker from Wales, who had been called to show that Marten had been warned five years before Victoria's death about the dangers of camping with a newborn. The social worker explained that she'd met Marten in a hospital in Wales in 2017, when Marten was heavily pregnant with her first baby. Marten had put on an Irish accent, called herself Isabella and said she was from a Traveller community and needed help finding accommodation. The social worker had then accompanied Marten to a small tent where she and Gordon were living. Seeing it bowing with rainwater, she had told Marten how inappropriate the setting would be for a mother and a baby.
Throughout the witness's evidence, Marten fumed in the dock, either muttering in protest or staring at her with a cool half-smile, shaking her head in disbelief. Over the next three weeks, she responded in the same way to all the prosecution's evidence. Between witnesses, Marten would slump back in her seat, drop her head to her chest, or yawn and sigh so loudly that heads would turn in the courtroom, a place of such codified manners that when Femi-Ola's phone once went off mid-proceedings, the offence rippled through the room. To yawn was like a breach of the law itself.
On 12 March, the third day of the trial, Marten addressed the judge directly, another flouting of the code. She was exhausted, she said, and felt that this would damage her chance of having a fair hearing. 'You're a convicted prisoner,' Lucraft replied, as if to remind her that this might not be the strongest position from which to argue. Marten explained: her days were often 19 hours long because the Serco van arrived so early at HMP Bronzefield and took hours delivering female prisoners to the various London courts. (Marten had also made this point in an article in the View, a magazine about women in the criminal justice system. She would, she concluded, probably have to sue Serco.)
The issue arose again a week later. 'We're leaving Bronzefield at peak rush hour,' said Marten, her voice loud and indignant. 'And we're sitting there waiting from 5am.' Marten sounded like a holidaymaker complaining to a concierge about the hotel's service. Lucraft suggested that he could neither control the traffic or highlight her plight over the other 86,000 people in prison.
The exchange was minor, but it hinted at Marten's sense of exceptionalism. No part of her appeared cowed by being in prison, already convicted of three offences. Nor was she awed by the setting of the court or the authority of the judge. The moment revealed how she saw herself: not chastened by her situation, or likely to quietly surrender to the criminal justice system's demands and inefficiencies, but as someone who believed she could bend it to her will.
According to Marten and Gordon, they arrived in Newhaven on 8 January 2023 and walked until they found a wild area where they pitched their tent in the nook of a fallen tree. Victoria died the following day, they said. Afterwards, they spent weeks in hiding in a state of panic, not knowing what to do. To avoid detection, they stopped taking out cash or going to the shops. Grainy CCTV footage taken on 20 February shows them scavenging in bins outside Hollingbury golf course in Brighton and Hove. And then, on 27 February, Marten can be seen taking cash out of an ATM on the outskirts of the city. They must have known this would be the end.
Marten and Gordon were arrested later that evening. Footage taken from police officers' body-worn cameras shows the police taking hold of Gordon, who drops to the ground and repeatedly asks for food. Marten shouts at them to stop, that he isn't well. The officers arrest them on suspicion of child neglect and concealing the birth of a child. Marten counters this isn't an arrestable offence. Then the police start asking where their baby is, to which neither respond. As Marten is led away to a police car, she calls out to Gordon, 'Daddy bear! Daddy bear!' 'Love you, baby,' he shouts back.
Neither Marten nor Gordon answered any questions about the whereabouts of their baby until two days later, when Victoria's body was found by police in a Lidl bag in an allotment shed. Marten then gave three long interviews, one of which was shown to the jury. In a grey prison tracksuit, her legs crossed and face drawn and pale, Marten spoke with a quiet, unguarded frankness. For years, she said, she and Gordon had been trying to escape her family, who had employed private investigators to track them. She believed they had bugged their phones and meddled with their cars, including the one that burst into flames on the M61. (Later in the trial, it was confirmed that two private investigation firms had been employed by her parents to trace the couple. Both said they had not interfered with either their phones or vehicles.)
In the video, Marten explained that as her first four children had been taken away, she believed social services would have taken Victoria, too: 'I wanted to keep her with me.' As she described discovering her baby's lifeless body, Marten put her hands over her face. 'I tried to resuscitate her but there was no response,' she said, her voice cracking. 'I don't know how long she'd been dead.' They'd discussed handing themselves in, she said, and Gordon had told her to say it was cot death rather than revealing that she had fallen asleep on top of the baby. 'He may try to say that,' said Marten, 'but that isn't what happened.'
Watching Marten in the video was disarming. In contrast to her brazen confidence in court, she seemed vulnerable, her grief palpable. As the weeks of the trial passed, she would often switch between these modes, inviting sympathy and provoking intense frustration almost simultaneously. There was, I began to realise, no reliable version of her personality.
On 15 April, as the prosecution neared the end of their evidence, they hit their first major obstacle. In a printing error, an old version of a police interview with Gordon had been mistakenly placed before the jury in which reference had been made to his 'history'. In the jury's absence, Nina Crinian, the junior barrister representing Gordon, suggested that the reference was obviously to Gordon's previous convictions. The jury, she argued, might have to be discharged – that is, dismissed and replaced by a new group of 12 people, therefore requiring the trial to start again. 'Prejudice has crept into this trial.'
Lucraft decided that the high bar for discharging a jury had not been met, but said he would keep the matter under review, and – as if blessed with a premonition of the chaos that was about to unfold in his court – emphasised that it was not in anyone's interest for Gordon's previous convictions to be revealed to the jury. 'I suggest we say nothing about it for now,' he said. Two days later, on 17 April, the prosecution closed its case.
The air in court seemed to simmer with anticipation when the trial resumed after the Easter weekend, on 22 April. It was now the turn of the defence: Gordon was not giving evidence, so we would go straight to Marten. In the first trial, Marten's evidence had been emotionally fraught. Today, the press benches and gallery were full, the crowd curious about how she would perform this time.
Entering the dock, Gordon and Marten greeted each other with a hug and a kiss. When one of the dock officers tried to intervene, Gordon started shouting: 'Don't touch me!' Marten, flaring with anger, suggested he make a complaint. The atmosphere in the room stiffened.
Fitzgibbon rose. Marten was not feeling well, he said. She had a headache and toothache, and respectfully asked if she could start her evidence tomorrow and be seen by a doctor or nurse in prison. The judge agreed. 'I'm sure you can understand,' Lucraft said to the jury, sounding surprisingly sympathetic. 'There's almost nothing worse than a toothache.' Marten would begin her evidence the following morning, at 10.30am.
The following morning, Marten was not in the dock. The jury were sent home again. Lucraft looked tense. 'It would be rather different if this were a one off, but it's not,' he said. To refuse to turn up felt less like truancy and more an exertion of control. Absence was Marten's singular power: without her, nothing could happen.
The next day, Marten was present, but Fitzgibbon offered a pre-emptive excuse. She was in discomfort from her toothache and had still not been seen by a dentist. Lucraft resisted: they had already lost two days of court time and he was not going to delay again. She would begin her evidence today. Marten, temporarily vanquished, walked to the witness box, clutching files of papers in her arms.
In a white shirt, her hair half-clipped back, Marten looked tired and subdued. Fitzgibbon rolled back to the beginning: to Marten's childhood, growing up the eldest of four children of Napier Marten and Virginie de Selliers. (Napier left his family and moved to Australia when Marten was nine years old, and De Selliers remarried.) Marten's upbringing had been financially privileged, she said, but emotionally starved. She'd been sent to boarding school at the age of eight, and felt her family had never been loving. Later, she went to Leeds University, and travelled in India, Nepal and Central America. (She did not, however, mention the evangelical Christian cult in Lagos into which she was drawn after leaving school.) Marten then worked as a nanny in Switzerland and a journalist at Al Jazeera, before briefly attending drama school. She'd already fallen out with her family by the time she met Gordon by chance in a shop in east London in 2014. The shopkeeper had asked Marten to keep an eye on Gordon while she popped out, she said, and Gordon and Marten had bonded over this example of casual racism. Within three years the couple had married informally in Peru. (In the intervening time, Marten gradually stopped communicating with friends.) When they returned to England, Marten said her family had been unwilling to meet Gordon, an attitude she put down to bigotry.
Under Fitzgibbon's guidance, Marten's evidence unspooled calmly, punctuated by regular yawns. Once Fitzgibbon began asking about her children, however, an anger began to well in her voice. One of the reasons Marten didn't talk to her family any more was because they had been instrumental in having her four children taken away, she said. Fitzgibbon provided her with photographs of her first two children, copied from her Facebook page. Marten bent over the images, staring at her children's faces. They had been 'stolen by the state', she said.
Little, for the prosecution, stood in objection. Marten was treading a dangerous path. If she persisted in talking about the removal of her previous children, he would want to put more detailed evidence from the family courts before the jury. Lucraft tried to warn her that this would not help her case, but Marten seemed unperturbed. 'I think it needs to be re-litigated at some point,' she said, defiantly.
As Fitzgibbon led her through the journey across England after Victoria's birth, Marten's yawns became so frequent they took on a campaigning flavour, as if to demonstrate how unfit she was to be in the witness box. By the end of the day, Marten seemed low and snappy towards Fitzgibbon, as if forgetting that he was on her side.
The next day, Marten didn't turn up. It felt like a direct challenge to the judge, testing his resolve the way a child tests a parent's boundaries. The trial had become a tussle for control: Lucraft could demand Marten's compliance all he liked, but he couldn't force her to attend. The linear, rule-based system on which a trial depends had met its perfect enemy in Marten, who felt no deference to that system and who seemed to operate in a kind of swirl of impulsivity, knocking logic off its tracks at every turn.
When Lucraft entered, Fitzgibbon rose and the two men stared at each other in loaded silence.
'Mr Fitzgibbon,' said Lucraft, eventually.
'Well it's a conundrum isn't it,' said Fitzgibbon. 'There are two possibilities. One is that this is a sham and that she simply doesn't want to come to court. The other is that she's telling the truth and has a debilitating toothache.' Fitzgibbon suggested the judge should lean towards the second option.
Lucraft allowed his frustration to flow. He had bent over backwards for Marten already, he said. She was on trial for very serious offences. 'Constance Marten is not running this trial, I am,' he declared, his voice resonating round the room in an uncharacteristically dramatic pronouncement, as if he had to remind himself of his authority.
On Monday, Marten was present, but you could tell something was brewing. Shortly into her evidence, she asked if she could have a coffee as she was so tired. The yawns returned in earnest as she argued that the CPS and police should be held responsible for what had happened. If they hadn't launched the manhunt, she and Gordon would never have had to hide in a tent in the first place.
When Marten began describing how she'd discovered her daughter's lifeless body, she seemed flat, even disengaged. Fitzgibbon asked her if they had made any attempt to call the police afterwards. 'We were in a state of panic, shock and disbelief,' said Marten, calmly, before hurling a grenade into the proceedings. 'As Mr Smith told the jury last week, Mark has a violent rape conviction,' she said, in a tone so matter of fact it masked the explosive nature of the content. 'My fear was that they would immediately scapegoat him, which is what they usually do.'
The court froze, as if not believing what Marten had just said. No one interrupted her, no one objected. Marten, as if disappointed by the lack of reaction, repeated herself: 'He's got a conviction of violent rape.'
The judge intervened; the jury was sent out. Joel Smith, Little's junior for the prosecution, leapt to his feet and called Marten's statements a deliberate attempt to sabotage the trial. Femi-Ola argued that the jury would now unavoidably have to be discharged. Marten suggested that she'd done nothing wrong: Smith had already revealed all this to the jury, hadn't he? Lucraft corrected her. No details of Gordon's previous convictions had ever been revealed, only the vague mention of his 'history'.
Over the next two days, the trial seemed to waver on the verge of collapse as the barristers worked through the fallout of Marten's revelation. Femi-Ola still wanted the jury discharged but Fitzgibbon, to Marten's audible fury, said he felt the bar hadn't been met in her case. Fitzgibbon and Marten's relationship had often felt strained – his methodical approach at odds with Marten's cavalier tendencies. Now, she stared at him with blatant animosity.
Lucraft considered whether the defendants could be separated, with the trial of Marten continuing and Gordon being retried the following year. Gordon, who had been almost entirely silent for the last two months, called from the dock. He couldn't wait another year for a trial, he said in his surprisingly high, soft voice, with its light American accent. 'It's too much for me. I may withdraw the application and not worry about the prejudice.'
Sure enough, the following day, Femi-Ola announced that his client wanted to continue. Marten, still apparently incensed by Fitzgibbon, sacked him. Tom Godfrey, his junior, would take over as her lead barrister. In the midst of all this, there was news from the Bronzefield dentist who had seen Marten. She really did have toothache, Lucraft told the court, but had refused treatment. At this, Marten looked triumphant.
There was an atmospheric shift as Marten resumed her evidence to Godfrey, her new barrister, on 2 May. Whether she preferred Godfrey's gentler, more emollient approach, or felt a sense of victory over the judge with regards to her tooth, she was suddenly more convincing. Godfrey took her back to the death of Victoria. Marten described what happened in detail, her voice shaking. Victoria's body had been limp, her lips purple. Gordon had tried to do CPR, but nothing worked. Marten was crying now, her hands over her face. She held her baby for hours afterwards, she said, unwilling to let her body go.
After that, she said, they stayed in the tent for three days, unable to move from shock. Then followed the weeks of panic, as they tried to subsist on the little food they had, and carried Victoria's body around with them in a Lidl bag. This bag had become totemic in the coverage of the trial last year, a symbol of the couple's apparent neglect. Marten argued it was a vehicle for their grief: they hadn't want to leave their daughter alone and were too weak to bury her. They'd talked about handing themselves in, but didn't because Marten thought she would be branded 'an evil mother who had done it on purpose'. At one point, Gordon suggested they throw themselves in a fire. Marten's panic deepened as she realised how Victoria's death would appear to the police and press.
Finally, she reached the end of her evidence. She would now be cross-examined first by Femi-Ola, then the prosecution. 'Thank you, my lord,' Marten said to Lucraft, in a perfect portrayal of deference. 'You have been very, very patient.'
In revealing her husband's criminal past, Marten had planted a seed of disorder in the trial that now took root and spread. On 6 May, Femi-Ola rose and told the judge that there had been a breakdown in relations with Gordon: he was not able to continue to defend his client. 'I don't want another barrister,' Gordon declared. 'I'd like to represent myself.'
Gordon had been such a quiet presence in court until now, it was easy to forget he was there. He wore the same clothes every day: a blue shirt with a grey long-sleeved T-shirt beneath, and a pink wrap on his head, tied like a durag. To represent himself properly, he told Lucraft, he'd like time to go over the case and read the 600-page Criminal Justice Act. Gordon now had the right to cross-examine all the witnesses, to give evidence himself and to deliver a closing speech in his defence. A man who had spent two decades in American prisons, years in family court proceedings, then two more years in Belmarsh, was going to be heard unfiltered by lawyers who had routinely advised him to say nothing. You could almost see him grow with his sense of mission.
A trial is a grave process, but at times it resembles a game. Suddenly, there was a player who didn't know the rules. Lucraft explained to Gordon that he would need to submit all his questions for Marten in advance so that Lucraft could check they were relevant. Gordon wanted three days to prepare. 'I don't have three days, Mr Gordon,' said Lucraft. The trial was already set to overrun. Lucraft worked under pressure of the clock, but time seemed to have no meaning for the defendants, who felt none of the same obligations. Delaying had become one of their powers.
Lucraft gave Gordon the afternoon. Gordon complained: he was being rushed, it wasn't fair. 'I think the jury is quite unaware of our case,' he said, with passion. Newly voiced, Gordon began to take issue with various aspects of the proceedings.
'My lord, can I ask a question, please?'
'You can.'
'I was curious with regard to the evidence that has been submitted. The experts – it's not real evidence.'
He continued in this vein for some time, until Lucraft intervened. 'If you take a breath for 30 seconds,' he said, then attempted to explain why expert testimony was valid. But Gordon wasn't convinced. Their evidence didn't prove anything. 'You're entitled to that view,' said Lucraft, with tight politeness, as if realising the new force that had been unleashed into his court, 'but you're wrong.'
Chaos now seemed to engulf the trial with such regularity that it became the norm. The next day, Marten, having refused to come to court, appeared on a video link from Bronzefield, fizzing with self-righteous fury. 'Your honour, I'm sorry, but there needs to be an independent review into this prison,' she said. 'I'd like to subpoena seven officers.' Ignoring Lucraft's barely concealed fury, she insisted on being told the duty governor's name, as if plotting a campaign.
Gordon, meanwhile, told the judge he wanted to ask his wife 150 questions in his cross-examination. After a private afternoon session with Gordon in court, Lucraft whittled these down to 71. Lucraft's perseverance had a stubbornness to it now, as if to prove that the process of the law could not be easily dismantled.
The next day, the press benches were full of long-serving crime reporters eager to see something they had never witnessed before in court: a husband cross-examining his wife about the death of their child. Perhaps their exchange would finally shed light on a relationship that had long seemed contradictory. The assumption that it was abusive, given the reported domestic violence incident and Marten's isolation from family and friends, didn't seem to chime with her outspoken fearlessness. (In the family court judgment from 2022, Judge Reardon said she lacked evidence to say that Gordon controlled her and could only conclude that the couple put their relationship before everything else, including their children.)
As Gordon questioned Marten about their actions, the couple appeared to perform a kind of double act. Small in-jokes were shared, smiles exchanged. He was the positive one, she was more negative, she said. He was more practical, she was more emotional. Gordon asked Marten repeatedly to explain her state of mind in the weeks leading up to Victoria's death. In response, Marten spoke about being constantly watched and the relief she felt when someone from the CPS confirmed that her parents had employed private investigators. She wasn't paranoid, then: it was true. She hinted at something darker that had happened in her past, not specifying what. 'There are people in my biological family that see me as an embarrassment. They're scared that I'll speak out against them and will stop at nothing to get what they want. Some people from privilege work on a different set of rules,' she said, not seeming to realise the self-implicating resonance of her words. 'They think they're above the law.'
At one point, Gordon asked Marten whether the grief she'd felt after having her children taken away had affected her trust in the system.
'I never had any issues with the system,' she replied. 'I never had anything to do with social services until Wales, when I asked for a property.'
Growing up as she had, Marten had never had to encounter the system. Privilege allows you to sidestep the state and its services almost completely. But if you have never needed the state, you have never learned its lesson: that once you are in its care, you must accept its oversight. In 2017, when she asked the social worker in Wales for help finding a house, Marten saw the system as something that could give her something she wanted: a purely transactional relationship. In reality, she encountered a set of professionals and services bound by a duty of care, concerned about her welfare and that of her child, and with a right to intervene.
The family court judgment, which covered years of social services' involvement with their previous children, described Gordon and Marten avoiding social workers, failing to get standard health checks for their babies, not turning up to family court hearings and not attending multiple contact sessions with their children, who were often left confused and upset by their absence. 'The parents presented as if engaged in battle with a nonexistent enemy,' wrote the family judge, 'and this struggle absorbs the entirety of their attention.' But for Marten, the enemy wasn't nonexistent: it simply changed shape. It was her family first, then social services, police, prison, and now the judiciary. The enemy had become the state.
The next day, Smith began his cross-examination for the prosecution in a style that suggested he was unleashing weeks of frustration. 'It's not the first time you've been on trial, is it?' he asked Marten.
'No,' she replied, 'because you decided to retry me because you didn't get the result you wanted.'
Smith retaliated fast, and asked her about Victoria's body being kept after her death in the Lidl bag, covered with soil and a beer can, still wearing a dirty nappy.
'If you're going to go down that route,' said Marten, glowering, 'it shows the sort of person you are.'
Smith persisted: surely Victoria deserved dignity in death?
Marten said that she had organised a funeral for Victoria from prison but hadn't been allowed to go. She'd arranged the songs, the words.
'She was sitting in her own faeces,' said Smith.
'Mr Smith, you really are diabolical,' said Marten. 'I find the way you cross examine me really so uncouth. You really are a heartless human being.'
'Did you cover her up with a beer can?'
'No …' Marten paused, as if knowing she couldn't deny the pictures we had all seen. 'It wasn't because we didn't care.'
'Is that a caring act putting your dead baby in a plastic bag with sandwich wrappers and a beer can?'
'Of course it's not nice. Obviously we weren't going to keep her in a bag like that. We were trying to figure out what to do.'
Marten tried to explain that after Victoria died, they were in a state of shock. She no longer saw her body as her daughter, but more like her 'space suit'. Her spirit had gone.
Smith moved on, asking about the house in Greenwich which Marten had earlier described making lovely for their children. Smith suggested the court watched a video of the house's interior taken by the landlord. Marten panicked: she'd never seen this video, she said. The jury were sent out and Lucraft said the defence should watch the video before he decided whether the jury should see it. Every screen in court flashed with footage of a house in a terrible state: the kitchen barely visible under dirty dishes, full black bin bags in the corridors, clothes all over the floor, a sense of lives that had unravelled. 'The crown's case is that Ms Marten is an unreliable narrator,' said Smith. Lucraft decided that the video would not be shown – another attempt, it seemed, to shield the defendants from their past.
Smith resumed his attack. It didn't last long. By the end of the day, Marten had collapsed in tears. She was at breaking point, she said, and couldn't go on.
When Marten arrived in court on 13 May, due to continue cross-examination, she stood in the dock. 'I'm not going to give evidence any more,' she said. 'I've made a decision.' Godfrey, Marten's barrister, turned his head in surprise. After discussion with Marten, Godfrey confirmed her evidence was over.
Marten wiped tears from her eyes. She had no fervour today, no imperious fury. It was as if she had realised that the relentless forward motion of the trial would continue whatever she did. The last power she had was a refusal to take part, and now that had been deployed, she sat curled over herself as if crushed.
For the previous three weeks, I realised we had been in thrall to Marten, the centrifugal force around which the trial revolved. Now that she had relinquished her hold, it became Gordon's domain. Every day, he dragged a large sack of legal papers into the dock – a sack that became so heavy as the weeks went on that it took him longer and longer to come up to court from the cells.
At first, Lucraft appeared to develop an almost paternal working relationship with Gordon, as though he were coaching him in the law. The solicitor helped Gordon draft his questions and these were sent to Lucraft to check. But Gordon kept pressing for more time and resources: he wanted textbooks, a copy, even, of Archbold, Lucraft's own tome. Lucraft made small allowances but Gordon was unhappy, and declared he was going to make an application 'about issues affecting the fairness of this trial'. Three days later, Lucraft read Gordon's complaints aloud to the court. He had not been given enough time or even a desk, he said: the process was unfair.
'These are serious allegations about my conduct,' said Lucraft. 'I will have to give this serious consideration.'
Gordon appeared to panic a little. It was just his point of view, he said. This was a serious case and he was representing himself.
'You have chosen to represent yourself,' Lucraft reminded him. Did he want a new barrister?
'I don't want a new barrister,' said Gordon. 'What I would like is materials. If I had the Criminal Justice Act …'
At this, Lucraft could not contain himself. 'Do you want three years while you do a law degree?'
Lucraft suggested that he would again have to consider discharging the jury in Gordon's case so that he could represent himself in a different trial. Unlike Marten, who seemed to relish opportunities to challenge the judge's authority, Gordon backtracked rapidly: the trial should go ahead, he did not want to proceed with the application and would now give evidence. 'There will be no more disturbances and no more delays,' he promised. 'You are doing everything to make sure this trial is fair. I have no complaints about that. I am content with how you run this trial.'
Lucraft brought the jury back in and apologised. 'You've probably had a very frustrating day,' he said. 'You are not the only one.'
On 21 May, Lucraft suggested that, in the absence of barristers, he could ask Gordon some simple questions to prompt his evidence. Gordon would then be cross-examined by the prosecution. 'It would be nice to say my piece,' agreed Gordon.
For the rest of the day, Gordon spoke freely, retelling their whole story. He began with his childhood, growing up in England before moving to Florida. 'I come from a decent background,' he said. 'My mother was a nurse. She worked very hard and did well for herself. She was a very passionate woman, very empathetic, and always helping other people.' He described challenges in his life, but said he was never underprivileged. His mother had 'showed me empathy and taught me to feel what other people are experiencing. This is important for members of the jury and others observing my actions.'
As he talked through the events after Victoria's birth, he kept addressing the jury directly: What you need to know; What I want to tell you; You need to know the truth. Again, he emphasised his and Marten's state of mind. They were deranged, he said, an effect of having their children taken from them. 'We weren't normal,' he said. 'It's like a vacuum, a hole, an emptiness – you can never fill it.'
At the back of his mind, he said, he thought they would hand Victoria into social services. He had no problem with the system. 'But it's not a perfect system,' he said. 'I don't want to stand in the Old Bailey with my wife, and with my baby passed. I have to explain myself criminally for the loss of the baby I loved.' Gordon's voice began to tremble with emotion. He swayed in the witness box, his arms gesturing into the air. 'I will never forget the pain, the feeling of picking my baby up.' By now, Gordon was crying. 'We are the ones who have to live with what happened … You have to understand our perspective if you are judging us.'
Both Gordon and Marten made this point. You cannot understand someone, Marten liked to say, until you have walked a mile in their shoes. But to truly understand Gordon and Marten would require the kind of long rewinding the judge was so desperate to avoid – not only back to the removal of their previous children, or even to the beginning of their relationship, but to their childhoods. On one side there was English privilege and family acrimony; on the other, violent crime and years in American prisons. Both had grown up fighting authorities – a wealthy family and a criminal justice system – that they believed were working against them. The pattern was set separately and early. When they met it was as if they found common cause in each other: it was them against the world. The mix of their personalities was like nuclear fusion, unleashing a relentless, destructive energy.
At the end of Gordon's evidence, Little rose on behalf of the prosecution. Gordon's portrayal of himself as sympathetic had created a false impression of his character, he said. To counter this, the prosecution would like to bring his previous convictions before the jury: not just the American convictions of rape and battery, but his arrest for assaulting a police officer in a hospital in Wales in 2017 after Marten had given birth to their first child, and the reported domestic violence incident in 2019 in which Marten had fallen from a window. Marten had suffered a ruptured spleen and Gordon had not allowed paramedics to enter their property.
When the issue arose again the next morning, Marten yelled from the dock. 'It's not true! My husband never laid a finger on me!' Gordon said he would need the day to consider his response, and suggested the prosecution were distorting his words: he'd never claimed to be perfect. It wasn't fair, he said, the refrain sounding more childlike every time he repeated it. If he could take back what he'd said, he would. Lucraft reminded him that once something is said in court it cannot be unsaid. But Gordon persisted: he was without representation; he hadn't realised what he was doing.
'As I've pointed out,' said Lucraft, 'you have chosen to represent yourself. It was not forced upon you, that was your choice.'
'If I was aware that this was how self-representation was conducted,' said Gordon, 'I probably wouldn't have done it.'
If Gordon had imagined that representing himself was an opportunity for legal heroics, he was quickly disabused of the idea. When Gordon returned to the witness box on 23 May to be cross-examined by Little, he looked morose.
'That's it,' he said.
The court seemed to stop breathing.
'I will answer no questions,' said Gordon.
At times, a trial can move with devastating speed. Lucraft ruled that evidence from Gordon's American convictions and the arrest in Wales could be put before the jury. In response, Gordon tried to suggest that he didn't accept the convictions were real or valid, but he was rapidly outmanoeuvred. The prosecution dug up the relevant paperwork that proved his convictions, and Little announced that he was going to call one of the Welsh police officers who'd arrested Gordon in 2017 to give evidence. In the midst of all this, Gordon's solicitor resigned.
On 29 May, a police officer came into the witness box. Little led him through the details of Gordon's previous convictions by asking a series of questions, each answered with a simple 'yes'.
Did he break into the house of a nextdoor neighbour?
Before doing so had he placed a stocking over face to conceal his identity?
Was he armed with a knife and hedge clippers?
Did he attempt to vaginally rape her?
Then did he orally rape her?
Did he perform other sexual assault offences?
Was that female held against her will for four and a half hours?
Gordon was then allowed to cross-examine the officer.
'Are you aware that the American police interviewed a 14-year-old child without parent or adult supervision?' he asked, referring to himself.
The officer said he wasn't aware of the circumstances of the case.
'That's why I'm making you aware,' said Gordon. 'That was the case.'
When Gordon suggested he had been mistreated and advised to plead guilty, Little tried to intervene. Gordon said he only had one more question.
'Do you know that the American police in the south are racists and prejudiced against people?'
'That is not a question this officer is going to answer,' said Lucraft.
The defence closed its case at the end of May. Once, in a hearing for another case, I heard Lucraft joke that he might be running this trial for the rest of his life. But over three months of multiple near-collapses, he had somehow held its fragile structure together. In his directions to the jury, Lucraft told them to ignore the 'numerous delays and disruptions to the smooth running of this trial'. Nor should Gordon's previous convictions and the family court proceedings be seen as support for the prosecution case. If they wished, however, the jury could interpret Gordon and Marten's refusal to be cross-examined as the defendants having no answer to the prosecution case. But the jury could not convict either defendant because of their refusal.
In their closing speeches, Little, Gordon and Godfrey stuck to their well-established narratives. Little reminded the jury of the lies which fell from Marten's mouth 'like confetti'. Gordon, over a day and a half of circling oration, suggested that the prosecution's case was like a movie script. 'You will observe where the very keen and eager prosecution has just made things up and filled in the blanks in support of the plot.' Godfrey asked the jury to strip away the noise around the case and concentrate on what happened in the tent. 'How did the baby die? If you faithfully apply the oath to try this case on the basis of the evidence, then the only verdicts are not guilty.'
Just after 2.15pm on Monday 14 July, the jury delivered their verdict. Unanimously, they found Marten and Gordon guilty of manslaughter, the most serious charge. Neither Gordon nor Marten stood to hear the verdict, but quietly shook their heads. Marten was heard saying, 'It's a scam.' After the jury left court, Gordon began offering his views, until Lucraft cut him off. Sentencing, he announced, would take place in September.
In the hours after the verdict, stories filled the press about the couple. The BBC had tracked down Gordon's 1989 rape victim, who described him as a psychopath. The family court orders were also released in full, revealing how Marten and Gordon could be playful, caring parents when they did turn up to see their children, an observation the judge found difficult to reconcile with their inconsistency. 'Perhaps most hurtful, from the children's point of view, is their parents' baffling lack of commitment to them over the course of these lengthy proceedings and their inability, or unwillingness, to do what needed to be done in order to reclaim them,' wrote the judge.
Whatever time Gordon and Marten will now serve in their respective prisons seems tangential to the real pain and damage of this case. A child was born and lived too briefly. On their eventual release, Gordon and Marten will return to lives which are now shattered and yet, while entwined with each other, bound to create further chaos. The law, with all its weight and logic, can impose order temporarily, but it does not have the power to save people from themselves.
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