Raised in luxury, jailed for her baby’s death: The fall of socialite Constance Marten

When Constance Marten was small, her younger brother struggled to pronounce her name. His mangled attempts came out as “Toots” – and the affectionate nickname stuck.

It was as Toots Marten that the 21-year-old was pictured in Tatler in 2009, posing confidently for its “Babe of the Month” feature as she described a carefree life of society parties and summer holidays.

The contrast with Marten’s next appearance in the press, 14 years later, could not have been more stark. She and her partner, Mark Gordon, were on newspaper front pages, the subject of a police hunt after absconding with their newborn baby, who was later found dead.

Gordon, once described as a “serial psychotic sociopath”, was a convicted rapist who had spent much of his early adult life in prison in the United States.

Having now been found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter of the infant one question remains. It is a question that has haunted Marten’s friends and family: How did a young woman, who once had such a gilded life, end up on the run with a criminal, living rough and allowing her child to die in such appalling conditions?

The early life of Marten

Constance Dorothea Marten was born in 1987, the eldest child of the aristocratic Napier Anthony Sturt Marten and his wife, Virginie.

Impeccably well-connected, Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Marten, was the god-daughter of the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and a playmate to Princess Margaret, while Napier himself was a page to the late Queen.

Marten’s childhood was one of wealth and privilege, with home being the palatial Crichel House in Dorset, a sprawling Georgian mansion in 5000 acres of parkland. Once described as being more like the “mansion of a prince than a country gentleman”, the wider estate includes four villages, a cricket club and an ornamental lake.

Marten’s brother Maximillian, the heir to the estate, was born when she was one, Tobias followed three years later, and Frederic (or Freddie) came along when she was six.

The siblings were close and their rural childhood was serene, with Marten later describing how they would enjoy naked picnics on the estate and afternoon naps in hay bales and tractor scoops.

She was educated in Dorset, first at Hanford prep school and then at St Mary’s boarding school in Shaftesbury, where Queen Camilla’s daughter, Laura Lopes, had previously been a pupil.

Warm and easy-going, Marten was popular with her peers, who regarded her as fun-loving if sometimes a little rebellious and mischievous. In one incident during preparations for a school photograph, she wore a pair of thick bottle-bottom joke spectacles, telling the photographer they were special glasses that prevented her from suffering an epileptic seizure when the camera flashed. The spectacles were eventually removed, but the resulting photograph shows Marten squinting Mr-Magoo-style at the camera while her friends stifle giggles. The headmistress, Mrs McSwiggan, was so furious she threatened to send Marten’s mother the bill for having her edited out of the class photo.

The strict Roman Catholic school placed a lot of emphasis on discipline and religion, with pupils required to obey a strict code of conduct and attend Mass regularly. But the endless list of school rules served only to fuel Marten’s rebellious streak, and she often clashed with the school authorities.

Arty rather than academic, she later told friends she had been diagnosed with narcolepsy, and despite her popularity, her school years were not always happy. She was also deeply affected at the age of nine when her father suddenly walked out on the family.

In 1996, claiming to be obeying voices in his head, Napier turned his back on his wife and young children – and his £115 million ($236 million) fortune – shaved his head and flew to Australia. He later explained: “Even with small children, I had to leave the house and go pretty much overnight.

“I do recall having a recognition of myself that I was exhibiting some sort of courage, but of course, in many other people’s minds, I was exhibiting some sort of cowardice.”

He was initially away for six months, during which time there was no contact with the children, and the resulting divorce was bitter.

Two years after Napier left, Marten’s mother married a Belgian banker, Guy de Selliers, and the family moved to London, though Marten remained at boarding school. Like many teenagers, she sometimes had a bumpy relationship with her mother and stepfather, but friends of the family insist it was mainly about trivial matters. Relations with her father were more fragile and there were long periods when they did not communicate.

Having completed her A-levels, Marten decided against applying to university, choosing instead to quench her thirst for adventure by going travelling. A keen mountaineer, she once described her favourite place as being at the top of the Matterhorn, and she was also a regular visitor to Verbier.

It was around this time that her deeply Christian mother took her along to the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) church in west London. The evangelical centre, which was the birthplace of the Alpha movement, had become popular with celebrities including Geri Halliwell and Bear Grylls. Marten became an enthusiastic member of the congregation and threw herself into the social side of the church, attending a Christian summer camp.

One friend she met through HTB said she was instantly popular and liked by everyone she met: “Toots was just the most lovely girl. We met through the church but then started hanging out and would often find ourselves at the same parties together,” they said. “She had such a huge smile that just lit up the whole room. She had this way of making everyone around her feel warm and happy. People were really drawn to her.”

But as time passed she found herself going down a dark path, as in the summer of 2006 she fell under the spell of the abusive Nigerian pastor TB Joshua. The Synagogue, Church of All Nations (SCOAN) had been founded in Lagos by Joshua in the late 1980s and, thanks to an aggressive overseas marketing campaign, grew rapidly until at its peak it was attracting more than two million visitors a year.

Excited by the energy of this charismatic pastor, Marten accompanied her mother on a trip to Nigeria, where they listened to Joshua preach. While there she was handpicked by him and persuaded to stay on in Lagos to help run the ministry alongside other white Western disciples.

In an interview she later gave about her experiences, she said: “The leader looked me in the eye and said, ‘Your family doesn’t matter anymore. I’m your father now.’”

Many of the female devotees subsequently alleged that Joshua had assaulted, abused and even raped them. While there is no suggestion Marten was ever sexually abused during her time in Nigeria, she later described how Joshua would humiliate her and the other white followers. They were disciplined for not standing up when Joshua walked into the room, often made to eat his leftover food and were forced to survive on just a few hours sleep a night – a particular problem for Marten, with her recurring issues with narcolepsy.

After three months in the compound, she managed to extricate herself from Joshua’s tentacles and, with the help of her mother, fled Nigeria. But the time there clearly had a deep impact on her mental wellbeing, with one friend later remarking: “All I can say is TB Joshua ruined her life.”

Another source close to the family said: “Constance was badly traumatised by the whole thing. Everyone talks about two Constances: the person she was before she went to Nigeria and the person who came home. She was profoundly and fundamentally changed.”

Marten claimed that after returning home she would periodically experience paranormal episodes. In one bizarre incident she described how she suddenly collapsed in a branch of Starbucks and started laughing uncontrollably. Some years later she floated the idea of making a documentary exposing some of the exploitative activities in SCOAN, but it never materialised.

Back in Britain, Marten reconnected with some of her old friends and tried to get her life back on track. Paid work was sporadic but she did some modelling, attending shoots in Hawaii, and worked as a nanny in Switzerland. Travelling remained her main passion, however, and there were trips to Uganda, India, South America and Nepal, where she volunteered with impoverished children.

Around this time, she was a regular fixture on the society circuit, attending lavish and hedonistic parties. In the Tatler interview, she described attending an event hosted by Viscount Cranborne in Dorset. “The theme was the feast of Bacchus. There was a gambling tent and bunches of grapes hanging from the wall. It was like a debauched feast from ancient Greece,” she said.

By 2008 she had applied for a place at Leeds University to read Arabic and Middle Eastern studies. She embraced university life from the start, joking in Tatler that she considered cider “one of [her] five a day”. She also described her ideal man as having red hair and a fiery temperament.

According to one university friend, she enjoyed life in “the gritty North” and appeared to revel in the relative poverty of student life compared with her upbringing. She spent her third year in Cairo, which in 2011 was boiling with unrest as the Arab Spring swept across the region. Excited to be at the centre of such world events, Marten began taking photographs of the mass protests in Tahrir Square and later won an award for her work.

In 2012, after graduating with a 2:1, she took up a role as a senior researcher at the London bureau of Al Jazeera media network, with aspirations of becoming a journalist. Fluent in classical and modern Arabic, she hoped she would get a chance to cover stories out in the field, but became increasingly frustrated that her ideas were not picked up by more senior colleagues.

One associate who knew her around that time said her “woeful timekeeping” played a part in her inability to be taken seriously. “She would pretty much keep her own hours and come and go as she pleased. She was well liked but just a bit unreliable, which is not the best way to get on when you are just starting out.”

During this period, friends also claim she had an unhappy relationship with a boyfriend that ended badly and left her emotionally vulnerable.

A year after graduating, Marten took a job as a project manager for Rich Mix, a creative charity in east London, but the role only lasted a matter of weeks. By January 2014 she had been accepted on a five-month National Council for the Training of Journalists course run by the Press Association in central London. At one stage her class paid a visit to the Old Bailey, where, 10 years later, she would find herself on trial.

She was described by others on the course as “sweet-natured but slightly eccentric”. But she quickly fell behind.

“She often didn’t turn up,” one of her fellow students recalled. “She would regularly drift off to sleep during shorthand lessons. You would look over and she would be slumped over the desk and the teacher would just plough on. But she was always very pleasant and approachable.”

Another said: “She was a bit older than us and was quite strange. You got that sense that she’d sort of dabbled in a lot of stuff but not really had a proper job. She was nice enough, but a bit dreamy and gave the impression that nothing really mattered.”

A third agreed that Marten was “sweet”, saying: “You could tell she had a really good heart, but she missed lots of days. I remember she missed her first work placement because she overslept and got into quite a lot of trouble.

“Initially she came across as a bit guileless and vulnerable, but then I discovered that she was fluent in Arabic and had been in Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring. She obviously had hidden depths.”

Marten began touting herself as a freelance photojournalist, but commissions were few and far between. But with a wide circle of friends and access to a generous trust fund that gave her a monthly allowance of £2,500, life was never dull.

By now in her late 20s, and with friends starting to settle down, Marten still appeared to be searching for something to give her life meaning. Moving into a house-share in the Leytonstone area of east London, she enrolled on a drama course at the East 15 Acting School in Loughton, Essex, and would drive there each day.

Antony Oshineye, 42, a writer who was also on the course, says she was down to Earth and friendly. “Toots was the total opposite of a stereotypical posh woman. She was very helpful and warm, always saying hello to cleaners and even to the handymen.

“I used to make fun of her a lot. She’s fond of breaking wind at spontaneous times – she has absolutely no shame – so I used to say, ‘Maybe that’s why they call you Toots’. She’s just very unlike any aristocratic person.”

But once again she fell behind in class, despite fellow students remarking on her natural acting talent. “I detected a lot of issues with her,” Oshineye gcontinues. “She said she had a lot of problems with her family and spoke of how her parents were not being supportive of her ambitions … She always felt like her parents didn’t quite understand her.”

While Marten did not hide her aristocratic roots, it appears that she carried a certain amount of guilt about them, especially a distant family connection to Oswald Mosley. (Her paternal aunt married one of Mosley’s sons.) Oshineye recalls: “She did tell me one time, ‘I hope you’re not going to be angry with me if I tell you this: I’m related to Oswald Mosley.’ I was like, ‘You can’t help who you’re related to.’”

She was due to graduate in July 2016, but around two months before the course ended, she dropped out. As well as having fallen behind in her coursework, something, or rather someone, else had entered her life.

Gordon: From schoolyard to jail cell

If there was a polar opposite to Constance Marten in terms of background, upbringing and life experience, Mark Gordon was it.

Born in London in 1974 to a single mother from Jamaica, Gordon grew up in inner-city Birmingham, where his childhood was fractured and full of disruption. The youngest of five children, he never knew his father, who refused to meet him or support him financially.

He had a traumatic start to life, including in his formative years. In August 1986, his mother, Sylvia Satchell, a registered nurse, decided to take Gordon and his older sister Karen to live in the United States. They initially settled in New York, moving into an apartment in the Bronx. Gordon was enrolled at the local middle school, where he was a grade-A student and expressed an ambition to become a doctor.

In the summer of 1988, Sylvia Satchell took her youngest son to visit her cousin in Florida. He was so enchanted by seeing orange trees for the first time, he begged his mother to move the family to the Sunshine State. Concerned by the crime rate in New York, she agreed and in early 1989 they relocated, renting a house on a quiet, palm-tree-lined street in the Broward County area of Miami.

Gordon, who was still fixed on becoming a doctor, was enrolled in the local Hallandale High School. But he struggled to make friends and began skipping class.

According to his mother he spent most of his time by himself in his bedroom and it was around this time he developed an obsession with pornography, reading magazines and watching the Playboy Channel.

Then, in April 1989, just two months after moving to the area, and when he was still just 14 years old, Gordon committed an unspeakable crime: armed with hedge clippers and a knife, he broke into his neighbour’s house and subjected her to a four-and-a-half-hour rape ordeal.

In the weeks leading up to the attack, he had used a ladder to spy on the victim, whose home was yards from his own backyard. At around 5.30am on April 29, dressed in dark clothing and with a pair of tights covering his face, Gordon climbed in through her bathroom window.

Alerted by the family dog, the victim, a single mother, went into the living room to be confronted by the armed attacker. She began screaming, but Gordon threatened to kill her young children, who were sleeping in the next room. After ordering her to go back into her bedroom, he subjected her to hours of rape and sexual abuse, threatening to slit her throat.

Speaking to The Telegraph, the victim, who is now 65, said: “He was so strange, so odd, that he couldn’t have been normal. The fact that he didn’t talk other than to order me around, he was almost not human, he was just an evil being.”

At around 8am, her seven-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son began knocking on her bedroom door, asking why she wasn’t up. Fearing what Gordon might do to them, she tried to keep them calm, saying she had a headache and would be up soon.

Eventually, she persuaded Gordon to let her go and he fled. But three weeks later, on May 21, he struck again, breaking into another house. After luring the family dog out of the house, he removed a window before climbing inside. This time he was armed with a spade and he also strategically placed kitchen knives around the house.

Creeping past a sleeping one-year-old, he made his way into the master bedroom. But his intended victim was not alone and her husband, Patrick Nash, leapt out of bed and confronted him.

Gordon, then two weeks shy of his 15th birthday, used the spade to batter Nash. Yet even with blood pouring from a gaping wound on his head, Nash was able to chase Gordon out.

Speaking from home in Florida, he said: “Everything was so fast … I just saw a figure and then I was bleeding. I wasn’t supposed to be there that morning, I was supposed to be going to a flea market with my dad but we decided not to go. Thank goodness I was home…”

Three days later, Florida detective Gary Celetti knocked on Gordon’s door after neighbours reported him acting suspiciously. The police officer described how the teenager was standing with his older brother, looking “very nervous”.

“I said, ’Mark, if you did something, you did something, you know; you have to deal with it. If you didn’t, you didn’t, but you have got the rest of your life. You are just a kid.

“I didn’t pressure him at all. I didn’t say a word after that. I just went about my business looking around and he looked at me and he said: ‘I did it… I went into her house.’”

During his initial police interview, Gordon had claimed someone called “Jerome” had forced him at gunpoint to commit the crimes, but he later relented and confessed. He was charged with multiple counts of armed sexual battery, armed kidnapping, armed burglary and aggravated battery, and because of the serious nature of the offences, he was dealt with in the adult rather than the juvenile court.

In a statement to the court, his first victim described him as “cruel and devious” and described how at one stage he told her to say goodbye to her children, telling her “this is the day you are going to die”.

She pleaded with the judge: “Someone who is capable of doing this, a cruel, calculated act, at this young age, is not going to get better. He is 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.”

In March 1990, he was found guilty of four charges of sexual battery. David Hodge, who prosecuted the case for the state, says: ‘I was just so offended by the brutality that this guy showed … he was a serial psychotic sociopath.’

During the sentencing hearing Gordon’s mother pleaded with the judge to show her son leniency, outlining his difficult upbringing and lack of a father figure. ‘I just don’t know where Mark went wrong,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why things went the way [they] did. I worked very hard as a nurse and I’ve tried to raise these kids to the best of my ability on my own.’

She continued: ‘The victims, I know they must have gone through hell if he did what he did. I’m speaking on behalf of him… I think he’s truly sorry for what he did.’

But her pleas for leniency fell on deaf ears. He was handed a life sentence.

Despite Gordon’s admission and subsequent conviction some of his family members remain sceptical of his guilt. His older half-sister, Karen Satchell, 54, has suggested she thinks Gordon was fitted up by the police in Florida.

In January last year, she posted a picture on social media showing her younger brother when he was aged around 13, shortly before he was convicted for rape. Alongside it, she wrote: ‘This is Mark Gordon at age 13, but couldn’t be much different at age 14 – not much of a monstrous rapist wielding a shovel… so stop [lying about] my bruv.’

In July last year, a few days after Gordon and Marten were charged with child cruelty and causing or allowing the death of a child, she wrote online: ‘My mind is heavy at this time with [the] burdens and injustices of life.’

On 23 March, several weeks into the Old Bailey proceedings, she posted a collage of photographs of mothers cradling their babies and wrote a heartfelt plea on the couple’s behalf: ‘Guilty or not guilty? Of bonding with ur newborn as she sleeps on ur chest only to wake up and find your angel has past [sic] away and now you must face the trauma of being sent to prison for manslaughter. What more can they expect [to] do? Free Gordon and Marten.‘

Gordon later successfully appealed to have his original plea withdrawn on the basis that he had received poor legal advice, also arguing that his sentence had been miscalculated. But before the case could go to trial, Gordon’s defence team persuaded him there was no chance of an acquittal and he again pleaded guilty. This time he was handed a 40-year prison sentence, of which he would serve half.

During his 20 years behind bars, Gordon was incarcerated at 18 different prisons across the state of Florida, including the notorious Dade Correctional Institution and Santa Rosa Correctional Institution.

In January 2010, aged 35, Gordon was released on parole and deported to the UK, where he was forced to sign the sex offenders register and keep the police informed of his movements.

Settling in east London, he began working as a labourer in the construction industry. Then, in 2016, a chance encounter in a London shop brought him and Marten together. “We went for a coffee and it went from there … he’s my soulmate,” she later explained.

Marten and Gordon: How they found each other

Friends said it was as if Marten had suddenly discovered something she had been looking for her whole life. Thoughts of a career in journalism or the arts were extinguished. Mark Gordon was her future now.

The couple quickly moved in together, taking advantage of Marten’s access to the Sturt family trust fund, which paid her a monthly stipend but also allowed her to apply for advances or one-off payments.

She introduced Gordon to members of her family, but they did not warm to him, and it appears that she took offence.

In 2017, the couple went to Peru, where according to one family member, they attended a retreat and took ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink made from vine stems and shrub leaves.

Traditionally used by indigenous cultures in South America, it has become popular with Western new-age travellers seeking answers to the complexities of modern life. But it can also have negative effects, with some users suffering long-term anxiety and panic attacks.

While in South America, the couple took part in a local marriage ceremony, though it is not regarded as legal in Britain. On their return home, Marten sent a message to her family and friends telling them she was effectively cutting off contact with them.

A source close to the family says: “Out of the blue she sent a text saying she had chosen to live her life in a different way. She told us this was her decision and hers alone, freely made, and she did not want any of us to try to contact her again, not to try to meet up with her, and she wanted everyone to respect that, for better or worse.”

Another source adds: “It may appear to those on the outside that her family cut her off when she got together with Mark, but it was the other way round. It was Marten saying she didn’t want anything to do with them.”

The extent of the self-imposed isolation was painfully illustrated in 2021, when Marten’s brother Max married jewellery designer Ruth Aymer, who had been one of her best friends. The lavish ceremony was attended by hundreds of guests and was featured in Vogue, but Marten was not there.

In 2017, members of the family, who had not known the full details of Gordon’s criminal past, applied to the US authorities for court papers, hoping to find out more. But by the time they discovered the full horror of his convictions, Marten was pregnant with their first child.

The couple, who were living in a campervan at the time, had not registered the pregnancy with a doctor and it was only when Marten went to hospital for another matter that medics expressed concern that she had not received any antenatal care. But Marten and Gordon disappeared, prompting the medics to put out a “national hospitals alert”, fearing that she might be in danger.

The pair had aspirations of living off-grid, but as a convicted rapist, Gordon was required to inform the police of his whereabouts. They had also managed to accumulate £6,000 worth of driving offences and parking fines and were being aggressively pursued by bailiffs, requiring her family to instruct a solicitor on their behalf. Her father hired private investigators to track them down and the fines were eventually settled by the trust fund.

In November 2017, Marten turned up unannounced at a hospital in Wales in the early stages of labour. Speaking in a fake Irish accent and giving the name Isabella O’Brien, she claimed to be a runaway from a traveller family in Leeds, adding that she had been born and raised in a caravan, had never attended school and was not registered with a GP. She introduced Gordon as a friend but insisted he was not the father of the baby.

Their cover story was blown, however, when social workers linked them to the national hospitals alert. A row ensued on the maternity ward and staff became so concerned that they called the police.

Gordon, who had failed to inform police of his whereabouts as required, continued to insist his name was James Amer, but he blew his cover when he told police his date of birth was April 31.

As the situation escalated, Gordon became violent and attacked two female police officers. He was arrested and on November 14, 2017 appeared at Llanelli magistrates’ court, where he pleaded guilty to two charges of assaulting a police officer and failing to comply with the requirements of the sex offenders register. He was jailed for 20 weeks and fined £415.

Soon after, social services got involved and discovered that despite it being winter, Marten was living in a tent in the woods with little, if any, provisions for a newborn baby. One social worker was shocked to find the “festival-style” tent was bowing under the weight of rainwater and full of bags of rubbish and bottles of urine. Deeply concerned about the child’s welfare, social workers successfully applied for a supervision order.

Social workers also expressed concern about the fact Marten would fall asleep with her baby and she was warned about the dangers of accidental suffocation. Perhaps because Gordon had spent most of his adult life in prison and Marten had been brought up in such privileged surroundings, neither appeared to have a clue how to care for a newborn baby.

In the spring of 2019 Marten gave birth to their second child in secret, failing to seek medical support nor register the birth as required by law. With two children to look after, the couple abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and moved to London, choosing to rent a series of run-down properties rather than accept an offer from the trust fund to buy them a house.

One family source said: “The trustees tried to help her as much as they could, but she was a nightmare for them to deal with. Difficult, contrary, unpredictable and entitled.”

The source claims that certain emails purporting to be from Marten requesting money were in fact, in their view, written by Gordon.

Within weeks of giving birth to their second child, Marten was expecting again, but in November 2019, when she was around four months pregnant, she suffered serious injuries after falling from a first-floor window.

When paramedics arrived at the house, Gordon initially refused to let them in, but when Marten was admitted to hospital it was discovered she had shattered her spleen. The unborn baby was unharmed, but she was kept in hospital for eight days.

The police were informed as it was suspected she had been pushed, but when asked what happened, Marten insisted she had fallen while trying to adjust a television aerial. She refused to give a statement to police, however, and attempted to discharge herself from hospital, ignoring warnings from the doctors about the risks of doing so to herself and to her baby.

A judge sitting in the family court later concluded that Marten had been a victim of domestic violence.

Marten’s eldest brother, Max, was informed of the incident and he contacted their father, who was in Australia at the time. Napier became so concerned about the welfare of the children that he decided to intervene and applied to the courts for temporary wardship of them.

Napier also offered to buy a house in Dorset and employ a nanny to look after the children until his daughter was able to join them. But when she got wind of the application, Marten fled to Ireland.

Paranoid about her family tracking her down, she used cash to rent a rural cottage near Dublin. The plan was for Gordon to join her later, but the courts seized his passport, meaning he was unable to travel. Reluctantly Marten returned to Britain to reunite with him, and in May 2020 gave birth to her third child.

The family began moving regularly from one run-down rented property to another – a far cry from the palatial surroundings of Crichel House, which by now had been sold by the Marten family to a US hedge fund billionaire for £34 million.

In May 2021, almost a year to the day after giving birth to their third child, Marten had a fourth baby. But by now social services had decided to intervene and in January 2022 a judge ordered that all four children be taken into care and put up for adoption.

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Within weeks of that order being made, Marten was pregnant again, with baby Victoria. This time she and Gordon were determined they would keep her at all costs.

In the weeks leading up to the birth they moved off-grid, travelling the country in a series of clapped-out cars, sleeping in cheap bed-and-breakfasts and holiday lets.

Marten gave birth to Victoria in an Airbnb cottage in a remote part of Northumberland on Christmas Eve 2022 but, appallingly, within weeks the baby was dead. After 54 days on the run the couple were arrested. They were both subsequently charged with manslaughter, child cruelty, concealing the birth of a child, allowing the death of a child and perverting the course of justice by concealing a body.

They spent a year on remand, Marten at HMP Brozefield in Surrey where killer nurse Lucy Letby is held – and Gordon at the maximum security HMP Belmarsh in south-east London, before their first trial began at the Old Bailey in January 2024.

Her mother Virginie attended court most days taking copious notes but her daughter rarely made eye contact with her.

Giving evidence, Marten repeatedly broke down as she spoke about losing her daughter and the void that had been left when her other children were taken into care.

Under cross examination she sought to blame her powerful well-connected family and social services for her situation, telling the court her children had been stolen by the state.

She even likened her case to that of the Post Office Horizon scandal and said she believed one day she and Gordon would receive a public apology for the way they had been treated.

The case had been scheduled to last for eight weeks but due to a string of frustrating delays – often the result of Marten and Gordon’s attempts to derail the proceedings – it ended up taking six months.

Even then, the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the substantial charges and the couple were remanded back into custody ahead of a retrial which began in March this year.

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Despite repeated attempts by the couple to again sabotage the trial, they were both eventually found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter and now face a substantial prison sentence.

And yet, whatever the future holds for Marten, despite everything, her family has let it be known they are still there for her.

One source close to her father said: “Life will be very difficult for Constance. Napier would prefer she goes to a secure mental establishment to get the psychiatric help she so obviously needs. But he will be there for her if she wants him to be. His door will always open.”

The Telegraph, London

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