EXCLUSIVE Constance Marten's partner Mark Gordon spent 20 years in US prison for 'sadistic' rape before being freed and deported to the UK - when police asked him about his dead daughter, he just demanded mayo for his chicken sandwich

Daily Mail​

18 hours ago

Detained by officers on a freezing February night after spending two months on the run, police only had one question for Mark Gordon: 'Where's your child?'
His response says everything about the man.
'What's the big deal?' he answered, before complaining that he was hungry and demanding to be fed. Handed strips of chicken from a bag of shopping the couple had just bought, the 50-year-old said: 'Perfect, with mayonnaise please.'
'With mayonnaise?' the astonished officer replied. 'We are not going to make you a sandwich. We need to work out where your child is, mate...'
But still Gordon refused to say where the baby was, and it took police another two days before the infant's body was eventually found.
In subsequent interviews with detectives, Gordon insisted that he intended to say what had happened to the child when his case came to court.
'I want the jury to hear first-hand testimony and make the decision,' he said, going on to cite his rights under Magna Carta and claiming he would be 'released' once the jury heard the evidence.
As yesterday's verdicts demonstrated, that was something of a miscalculation – particularly given the fact that it's not the first time Gordon has come out on the wrong side of the judicial system.
Because today the Daily Mail, having spoken exclusively to his victims and obtained hundreds of pages of transcripts from the case, can reveal the full story of how Gordon spent more than 20 years in prison in America for a 'sociopathic, sadistic' rape.
The crime, committed when he was 14, was so serious that he was compared in court to Ted Bundy, a serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls in the US in the 1970s.
It meant that while Marten – 13 years his junior – was growing up with a silver spoon in her mouth, he was eating prison-issue meals with plastic cutlery and rubbing shoulders with death row inmates.
He was jailed for 40 years, but due to a change in sentencing rules in Florida he was released in 2010 and deported to Britain – the place of his birth – where, six years later, he met Marten. Today, in an interview with this newspaper, his American rape victim tells how she believes he should never have been released from prison.
'The judge said he was the most dangerous individual he'd ever seen in his time on the bench,' she said. 'He is evil. I think he should have been in jail for life. He's not fit to be around any other human beings.'
In stark contrast to Marten's stately-home start to life, Gordon was raised in Birmingham, one of five children born to Sylvia Satchell, a Windrush-era nurse who arrived in Britain from Jamaica.
He and his sister Karen were the youngest, and when Gordon was 11 they moved to America with their mother after she was granted a visa.
They first settled in New York, living in the Bronx, before purchasing a smallhouse in Hollywood, Florida, after visiting for a holiday.
For a special episode of the Mail's award-winning The Trial podcast breaking down the Constance Marten verdict, click here
'My mother worked really hard to make a better life,' said Karen Satchell, 53, who lives in London and has worked as a youth worker.
'She was granted residence and everything was good and we thought we were going to have a great life there. Then the dream turned into a nightmare.'
In the spring of 1989, Gordon's mother returned to New York from Florida to sit some nursing exams, leaving her youngest son in the care of an older brother, who was visiting from England.
But on the night of April 29, the teenaged Gordon attacked his first victim, a 30-year-old single mother of two whose house he broke into through a bathroom window.
'My dog woke me up barking,' she told the Mail. 'I go over to my bedroom door and stepped out and he was just right therein the living room. He was holding a knife and a big pair of hedge clippers. I started to yell and he said, 'Don't scream or I'll kill your kids'.'
Gordon, who was dressed all in black, wearing gloves and with a black stocking over his face, then ordered her back into her bedroom, locking the door behind him. He would hold her there for the next four and a half hours.
'He forced me to perform oral sex on him and there was penetrative sex,' she says, struggling to control her emotions. Gordon also threatened to inflict horrific wounds with his knife.
'He was mostly ordering me around,' she recalls. 'I just kept trying to talk to him... reason with him and try to find out if there was anything else I could give him to get him to leave.
'I offered him my car not realising he was so young. I was thinking I have to find a way to live because my kids were in that other room. It was survival.'
As first light broke, the victim's children woke up and started calling for their mother to give them breakfast.
'They kept wanting me to come out and I kept saying that I had a headache and was sleeping in,' she says. 'Eventually he got frustrated and tired and I didn't know what he was going to do.
'At one point I was able to get between him and the knife and I picked it up and put it behind my back. I said, 'It's getting late and my kids know something is going on. Let me put them in their room and you leave'. He finally gave in. I went out of the room. As soon as I did, I grabbed each of my kids and ran out of the front door screaming.'
She headed straight to a neighbour's house, telling him she had been attacked. He grabbed his gun and returned to the house but Gordon had fled.
Three weeks later Gordon broke into a second house, two doors away from his first victim. Both victims believe that Gordon had been watching their houses before breaking in. The second victim, Patrick Nash, lived with his wife and 15-month-old child.
His normal Saturday routine was to leave early to visit a flea market but he had decided not to go that day.
Gordon broke into the house, placing two 7in knives outside the bedroom doors before creeping into the couple's room armed with a 5ft shovel.
'Startled' to find Nash inside the room, he beat him about the head and body before fleeing.
Recalling the brutal attack, Mr Nash told the Mail: 'My wife wakes up and screams. I start to get up and I'm hit in the head with a shovel.
'I miraculously was able to chase him out of the house. It was just reflex. He had taken cutlery and placed it around the house so he would have access to weapons.
'Had I not been there, my wife would have been raped. That's my conviction and that was the police's theory.'
Mr Nash, whose head wounds required a number of staples, did not recognise his attacker. But some days later he found a black stocking in the garden, which led to police linking the two attacks.
Gordon was arrested soon after. Neighbours reportedly told police they had seen him sitting on a stepladder in the rear garden of his house during the night, looking towards the homes he later entered. A black stocking was also said to have been found nearby.
Detectives searched his home, and noticing Gordon's apparent agitation, suggested it would be in his interest to come clean.
'You're young,' one of the officers said to him. 'You've got a future ahead of you.'
He was charged with armed kidnapping, five counts of armed sexual battery – or rape – two counts of armed burglary and one count of aggravated burglary.
According to hundreds of pages of court transcripts seen by the Daily Mail, Gordon 'admitted to the crime and gave a sworn, taped statement out-lining the sequence of events as they occurred'.
His sentencing hearing in 1990 was addressed by clinical psychologist Glenn Caddy, who interviewed Gordon extensively and found him to be of a 'dull, normal' intellect.
He claimed Gordon told him he had had access to pornographic magazines and TV stations, including the Playboy channel, and had developed a 'distorted' sexual fantasy.
'It was his general belief that women would either welcome sexual advances or if they initially resisted sexual advances they were really only resisting so that they would be overcome and they actually wanted to have sex with him,' he told the court.
'He says that 'I guess that I knew that she [his victim] was scared initially', but ultimately he suspected that she might want to have sex with him.'
The psychologist said Gordon was similarly motivated when he entered the second property, 'presuming that he was going to have sex with the female resident of the apartment'.
Franklin Nooe, a mental-health practitioner who counselled Gordon's female victim, said that he was a sociopath who 'enjoyed telling her she was going to die'.
He said it put Gordon in the same category as Ted Bundy – 'a progressive kind of rapist, that would lead to, I would expect, going from just raping to raping and murdering'.
Gordon's mother also gave evidence at the sentencing hearing, revealing how she had split from his father when pregnant and that her son had met him only once, aged seven.
'He came and promised that he would come back and take him home, where he's got another family, and he never came back,' she said.
She also told how she discovered that Gordon had been abused as a four-year-old while at a day nursery in Birmingham when he refused to go on an outing with a male staff member.
Mrs Satchell said the police investigated the matter and the nursery worker was subsequently arrested and jailed after other children also came forward.
Having moved to Florida, her son, who dreamt of becoming a doctor, had started to miss school and misbehave. His mother added that he had no friends and would occasionally dress in his sister's clothes which she thought was 'sort of sexual'.
Pleading for the judge's 'mercy', she said that if he showed leniency to her 'misguided son' she would return to England with him.
But that was never an option, particularly given the testimony of his female victim, who told the court the ordeal had ruined her mental health and had forced her to move out of her home.
'I ask you to make sure that this man does not have the opportunity to destroy any more lives,' she said in a dramatic speech to the court. 'I ask you to make sure that he's never allowed to be free to run the streets looking for more victims, not in my life time, not in his.
'Someone who is capable of doing this, a cruel calculated act at this young age, is not going to get better. He's only going to do more harm to society.
'Please protect the innocent by keeping the guilty in prison for his life. Show him no mercy. Show him the guilty are punished severely, not just chastised.'
And punish him the judge did, handing down five life sentences and telling Gordon: 'We all have to be protected from you.'
But it was not the end of the case. Gordon and his family maintained – and, indeed, maintain to this day – that he confessed to the crimes only because he was scared and pressured to do so by police.
He lodged an appeal, and in 1993 successfully filed a motion to remove his confessions from the case. But his convictions were upheld, and at a re-sentencing hearing in 1994 his life sentence was replaced with one of 40 years, of which he would serve justover half.
Under new rules designed to encourage the rehabilitation of prisoners, he was released from Florida State Prison in 2010 and was immediately deported back to the UK.
The British authorities were informed and, as a convicted sex offender, he was obliged to report to them on a monthly basis.
Given his criminal past, settling back into a country he last knew during the 1980s cannot have been easy. Police say he was unemployed and claiming benefits.
Quite what the much younger Marten saw in him is impossible to say. But months after meeting him she became pregnant with the first of their five children.
As well as isolating themselves from friends and family, their interactions with the authorities were marked by deep distrust.
It is hard not to conclude that Gordon's experience in the US was behind that – and that his past record – coupled with allegations that he had been violent towards Marten – would have an impact on his ability to have access to his children.
The jury in both trials were not told of Gordon's previous conviction for rape by the prosecution.
But during evidence in the second trial, Marten revealed it to the court, saying: 'Mark has a violent rape conviction and spent 22 years in prison, so my fear was that the media would scapegoat him.'
As a result, further details were shared with the jury.
In his defence, Gordon suggested that Florida police had 'manipulated a 14-year-old child without parental or adult supervision' and had a history of 'racism and sometimes framing innocent people'.
He said he believed in British justice, but blamed police for forcing him and Marten on the run with their newborn by launching a national manhunt.
'When somebody chases you, what do you do?' he asked the jury. 'What does the public want from us? It's our baby. Our baby is dead. Our precious Victoria is dead. What more do you want? Our names have been dragged through the mud like we are scum, baby killers.'
He also praised his partner, describing her as a 'beautiful, noble' person.
And, it goes without saying, loyal to the end.
Because despite having seen her own life, and that of their children, ruined, Marten stood by her man – a violent, convicted rapist who cared more about a chicken sandwich than the dignity of their dead daughter.