History provides ample proof that blue blood offers no immunity from the failings of the ordinary man or woman. And yet Constance Marten’s descent from lady to tramp was as dramatic as it was sudden.

Her first 25 years comprised country pursuits and a private education, followed by foreign travels and the sort of champagne-fuelled antics that saw her crowned one of the society bible Tatler’s ‘Babes of the Month’.

Posing in a tasselled, 1920s-style flapper dress, the then 21-year-old looked every inch the trust-fund heiress. Fast forward to her arrest in 2023, and Marten was scavenging for food in bins, wearing a coat padded with stuffing ripped from an old sofa.

Police described her as smelling like a ‘homeless’ person.

At least she was still alive.

The corpse of her baby daughter, Victoria, whose grandfather was a page of honour to Queen Elizabeth II, had been dumped in a shed in a Lidl bag-for-life. On top of the body was an empty beer can and the discarded packaging of an egg mayonnaise and cress sandwich.

And, as was revealed during the court case, Victoria wasn’t the only child lost to the family. Since meeting Mark Gordon a decade ago, Marten has had four other children taken into care.

Mementoes of them were found among the belongings the couple abandoned when their Peugeot 206 caught fire on the M61 and they went on the run.

There, carefully packed in a Tupperware box, were four used babies’ dummies.

They were not the only possessions the couple left behind that night, and these provide an extraordinary insight into their shambolic life.

For example, hidden among piles of paperwork was a bailiff’s letter, stating that they owed more than £25,000. The pair had been evicted from multiple properties, leaving behind unpaid bills and piles of rubbish.

One rented home had a collapsed ceiling, holes punched through the walls and faeces on the floor. Empty takeaway boxes littered the place.

Such a chaotic lifestyle might, typically, be associated with substance abuse. But other than one suggestion by a social worker that cannabis was being smoked at the family home – Marten claimed it was ‘herbal sage’ – no evidence was heard of drug-taking or even excessive drinking.

And while both claimed benefits – during legal argument it was revealed this included benefits for a child Marten was no longer even caring for – they were not short of cash.

The beneficiary of a trust fund, Marten was worth £2.4million, receiving a stipend of up to £3,400 a month from C Hoare & Co, the UK’s oldest private bank.

Also in the car was a bag containing hats and a wig – disguises, one imagines, given that in the past Marten had posed as an Irish traveller when trying to throw the authorities off her scent.

On that occasion she had been pregnant with her first child, living with Gordon in a fetid tent littered with bin-bags of damp clothes and bottles filled with their own urine.

The authorities’ concerns about the new parents were heightened when Gordon assaulted two female police officers in hospital just hours after the birth of the child. They learned he was a convicted sex offender who had served 20 years in prison for a violent rape when living in America.

Their fears escalated further still when Marten was pregnant with their third child and ‘fell’ 18ft from the window of their first-floor flat, rupturing her spleen and having to spend eight days in hospital. The couple’s two other children were in the flat at the time.

Gordon, the court heard, would not let paramedics into the house and was suspected of pushing her out of the window. However, Marten insisted she had fallen while adjusting a television aerial.

A family judge would later rule that it represented an incident of domestic violence, a catalyst for proceedings that would eventually lead to all their children being put up for adoption.

One of the reasons for that decision was ‘the risk of harm to the children being exposed to serious physical violence between the parents’.

All of which begs a number of questions.

Why did Marten give up the life she was born into – isolating herself from friends and family – to set up home with a violent convicted criminal 13 years her senior?

And why, when with him, did she adopt a lifestyle that gave social services no option but to take her children into care?

Her family are in little doubt about where the blame lies – Mark Gordon.

While her parents are long divorced, both are said to hold him responsible for what happened to their daughter and their grandchildren, describing the moment she met him as a ‘cliff edge’.

‘Gordon is the most vile, vile individual,’ one family friend told me, describing him as both a ‘controlling predator’ and an ‘odious creep’.

He added: ‘Constance was the most beautiful, fun, lovely girl you could imagine. She was clearly quite a catch for him and he clearly got his claws into her.

‘She has had the money and the wherewithal to settle down to family life like anyone else. Instead, she has preferred what is effectively a life on the run.’

As we reveal elsewhere in this newspaper, some have suggested that Marten’s time spent as a teenager with an evangelical Christian church in Nigeria could have left her vulnerable to manipulation. Its controversial leader, TB Joshua, has since been accused of running a cult where he mentally and sexually abused his ‘disciples’.

That Marten and Gordon’s relationship was unusual there can be no doubt.

When the pair were arrested, the Mail has learned, police recovered a dictaphone with hours of recordings made by Marten.

On it she chanted phrases such as ‘I am a strong, powerful woman,’, ‘I love Mark’ and ‘Mark is my maje [South American slang for “man”]’.

Gordon’s family see things very differently. They say that Marten fell in love but that her relatives did not approve and tried to separate them.

‘They are making it like Mark has kidnapped her and taken her off and that is not the way,’ said a close relative. ‘I feel like they do not think he is the right class for her. She is sticking by her man and wants to be left alone.’

It was a point expanded upon by Marten in her own evidence.

During both trials she claimed that she had long-standing grievances with her family, who had cut off her funds and employed private detectives to track and harry them.

‘I had to escape my family because my family are extremely oppressive and bigoted and they wouldn’t allow me to have children with my husband,’ she told the court. ‘They’ll do anything to erase that child from the family line, which is what they ended up doing.’

She went on to say that having spoken out about ‘severe abuse’ by a family member, she had been accused of having children to ‘sell on the black market’ and of being a drug addict.

Her all-powerful family, she claimed, then colluded with social services to have her children taken into care. It all meant that when Marten had her fifth baby, she was determined the same fate would not befall the child.

What is also abundantly clear is that Marten is no pushover. She told police she was ‘strongminded’ and that Gordon was her ‘soulmate’.

Detectives who investigated the case admit to being baffled by the ‘power dynamic’ between the couple.

Marten, they say, was clearly the more intelligent and articulate of the two. In court, she seemed delighted to see Gordon, excitedly talking to him, exchanging notes and even hugging him in the dock. Further, sources say that the prison experience has left Marten largely unfazed.

Since her arrest, she has been held at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey, home to a number of high-profile prisoners including Lucy Letby and Islamic State supporter Safiyya Shaikh, who plotted to bomb St Paul’s Cathedral.

Soon after her arrival there, a fellow inmate asked Marten what she was ‘in’ for.

‘What the f*** has it got to do with you?’ she replied. She also stood out because of her ‘posh’ accent and frequent demands for crossword and colouring books.

In the midst of her latest trial Marten took the highly unusual step of authoring an article for an online publication dedicated to women prisoners.

In it she moaned that the daily transport arrangements to and from court were so poor she had been left tired and without time to consult her lawyers, denying her the right to a fair trial.

While inmates at Bronzefield have their own ensuite cells, complete with toilet and shower, the surroundings are a stark contrast to those of Marten’s upbringing.

She is the granddaughter of Toby Marten, a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy and equerry to George VI. His wife, Mary Anna, also had close links to the Royal Family, attending the Brownie pack at Buckingham Palace alongside Princess Margaret.

Her godmother was the late Queen Mother.

The couple lived at Crichel House, an 18th century Dorset manor house that featured in the 1996 film of Jane Austen’s Emma, starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

They had five daughters and one son, Napier Marten, who was a page to Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1986 Napier married Belgian-born Virginie Camu, daughter of the Marchesa d’Ayala-Valva, and the following year Constance, the first of four children, was born.

Photos from the time hint at an idyllic upbringing. In one a curly-haired Marten poses with her mother and a goose.

‘Those were the days of naked picnics, siestas amid hay bales and tractor scoops,’ she later wrote in a caption beside the picture on her Facebook page.

But in 1996, when Marten was just nine years old, her father left the family.

While recollections differ as to how long he was absent – six months or six years, according to conflicting versions – it signalled the start of a bitter matrimonial break-up which inevitably had an impact on the children.

‘It was like a guillotine coming down on his relationship with his family,’ is how one friend put it. Guided by a voice in his head, Napier had chosen to take himself to Australia.

‘Even with small children, I had to leave the house and go pretty much overnight,’ he would later say.

He added that, despite ‘great privilege’, he felt his life was ‘an empty shell’.

He first flew to the Hawaiian island of Maui where he shaved his head as ‘two fingers’ to his old existence.

An encounter with whales made him cry ‘almost non-stop’ for a week, and in Australia he said he had an out-of-body experience with indigenous people on a clifftop.

After eventually returning to Britain, Mr Marten worked as a chef before training in craniosacral therapy, a form of head massage. Now aged 66, he works as a tree surgeon and lives in a converted shipping container on a smallholding near Salisbury.

As for the family inheritance, that was split between him and his siblings following the death of their mother in 2010. A sale of the contents of the house raised £12.5million.

Then three years later they sold the house and its land to an American financier for an unknown price. It had originally been put on the market for £100million.

Discretionary trust funds were also set up for the grandchildren. These provided Marten with both a regular income and the potential for additional funds on request, something she was not shy of doing.

Indeed, almost £50,000 was paid into Marten’s bank in the five months leading up to her disappearance – including £13,500 for camera equipment and £15,500 for a new car, neither of which were ever purchased.

Sources close to the case have questioned why the trustees released the money, which she then used to fund her time on the run. Hundreds of pounds were spent on taxis alone as the pair criss-crossed the country.

Back to Marten’s childhood, and, in their father’s absence, she and her siblings were raised by their mother.

Two years after Napier left she married Guy de Selliers, a wealthy investment banker with homes in London and Dorset. Mrs de Selliers, 65, later trained as a psychotherapist.

She was present in court throughout her daughter’s first trial, but, like her ex-husband, she is said to have had little contact with her for years.

Constance, meanwhile, attended the £30,000-a-year former St Mary’s Roman Catholic boarding school for girls, near Shaftesbury.

Nicknamed ‘Toots’ after one of her younger brothers failed to properly pronounce her name, she posted a school photo on Facebook showing her pulling a face as more demure classmates looked on. She captioned it: ‘Mrs McSiggan said she was going to edit my face out and charge my mother for the editing! Furious!’

It was typical behaviour – friends say that from a young age Marten was one of life’s ‘rebels’, always challenging authority.

Other photos from the time show her enjoying country house dinner parties with family and friends, attending teenage parties and clay-pigeon shooting.

Having left school, Marten would travel extensively.

In 2006 this included months spent at a Nigerian church run by the self-proclaimed prophet TB Joshua. Some family members believe that the experience had a profound impact on her, creating vulnerabilities that could have left her open to manipulation later in life.

But after returning from Africa she quickly resumed her former life, graduating with a 2.1 in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies from Leeds University in 2012.

While there, she spent a year in Egypt and also featured in Tatler, posing under the name Toots Marten.

Her answers to a Q&A interview suggest her life of privilege continued unabated.

Asked to name her favourite place, she said it was the ‘top of the Matterhorn, which I climbed this summer’.

As for her ‘best party’, she replied: ‘Viscount Cranbourne’s party 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.’

Photos on social media showed her traversing the globe, from the Middle East to America, where she attended the week-long bacchanalian Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

Workwise, she showed an interest in photography and journalism, completing a journalism course in 2014 before deciding to train as an actor. Using her trust-fund money, she signed up with the East 15 drama school in Essex, commuting there by car from east London.

‘She was just beautiful, full of life, full of kindness … and she was very, very talented,’ a classmate said.

But in 2016, almost without warning, she dropped out of the course – and out of the lives of her friends and family.

The reason? Mark Gordon, whom Marten had met a year or so earlier.

To say it was a ‘sliding-doors moment’ is an understatement.

‘I met him in a shop in east London selling incense and stuff,’ Marten would say of the moment their paths crossed.

‘I knew the shopkeeper there and someone had left their handbag, and she said, “Can you watch that guy over there [Gordon] and make sure everything is all right?” while she ran to give it back.

‘We laughed about it and went for coffee. We were good friends at the start and then we went travelling.’

While it’s easy to see what might have attracted unemployed Gordon to this vivacious heiress, the reverse is harder to fathom.

One thing is now clear – at that point she had no knowledge of his dark past, only learning he was a convicted rapist after she gave birth to their first child.

The upshot of that fateful first meeting was that Marten’s life changed dramatically. Soon after, the pair travelled to Peru where they ‘married’ one another. In her evidence, Marten admitted the ceremony was not recognised in the UK.

Sources have told the Mail that while there, the couple are believed to have taken part in ceremonies involving the hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca.

 

The substance can be legally consumed in Peru. Traditionally used by indigenous cultures, ayahuasca has acquired a reputation amongst New Age individuals for its ability to provide insight and self-awareness in those who consume it.

Prince Harry revealed he had taken ayahuasca to treat mental-health issues that he traces back to the death of his mother.

Adverts for Peruvian ayahuasca marriage packages proliferate online and can cost as little as £1,500 per couple.

On returning to the UK, Marten made it very clear that everything had changed.

‘Completely out of the blue, everyone in Constance’s life, friends, family, everyone, suddenly got a text from her saying she had chosen to live her life in a different way,’ the family friend said.

‘She said that it was her decision and hers alone, freely made and she did not want anyone to try and contact her again, not to try and meet up with her, and she wanted everyone to respect that, for better or worse.’

The couple started to move between short-term rentals and Airbnbs, often failing to pay the rent and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

At one point they moved into a campervan, but even then managed to rack up some £6,000 in parking fines and summonses for driving offences.

 

‘They had been sent to her old home address,’ said a source. ‘There were hundreds of them. Some showed Constance claiming to be driving when Gordon, who I don’t think can drive, was clearly pictured at the wheel.’

Alerted to what was happening, the trust provided funds for a solicitor to handle the case while private detectives were hired to track her down.

While Marten would maintain that she was continually harried by private investigators, in fact her parents hired them on only a handful of occasions to locate their daughter, and not at all when she went on the run at the end, as she would claim in court.

A showdown in a cafe in East Anglia ensued, and allegedly ended with Gordon threatening Napier Marten before leaving abruptly with his lover.

By then Marten’s family had obtained the shocking details of Gordon’s criminal record in the United States. ‘No wonder he always wanted to keep her moving on,’ said the source.

Fears grew that Gordon was controlling every aspect of Marten’s life – including her phone and email communications. Message after message requested more money, or for possessions belonging to Marten to be sold.

Months after meeting, Marten became pregnant with the first of five children the couple would have together.

But what should have been the happiest of times for them would quickly turn into a bitter battle with the authorities.

Marten would later claim that the state ‘stole’ her children from them.

 

But documents released by the Family Court, details of which are published in the Daily Mail today, reveal that the couple’s behaviour left social services with no option but to intervene.

As a result, in early 2022 all four children were put up for adoption. Undeterred, within a matter of months Marten was pregnant again. And this time she was determined to evade social services.

The first the authorities knew of baby number five – Victoria – was when they found the couple’s car abandoned on a motorway with a placenta in the back of it.

Marten said they had intended to bury the bloody 1lb organ and grow a tree on top of it.

She also claimed that the vehicle, and others they owned, had been purposefully tampered with ‘on [the] order of her family’, who also, she said, placed GPS trackers on them.

According to Marten’s evidence from the first trial, the plan had been for her to nurture Victoria for up to six months and then hand her over to a carer who could ‘bring her up without social services’ involvement.

She would then move abroad with Gordon before the carer brought Victoria to them.

In essence, Marten would find a stranger on Gumtree to look after the baby and then smuggle her abroad. She somehow believed that she could get a fake passport for the child in the name of the ‘recruited’ nanny.

Instead, they ended up living in a tent in freezing conditions on the South Downs, an attempt to ‘lie low away from prying eyes’. And it was in that tent, on January 9, 2023, that Marten claims Victoria died after she fell asleep with the baby cocooned inside her jacket.

‘I took her out of my jacket. I believe I woke Mark up and said “Baby, something’s wrong”,’ she told the court. ‘He didn’t believe me and we tried to resuscitate her, but… she wasn’t alive.’

The corpse was placed in the bag-for-life, so that it could be taken with them when they moved camp.

Days later, Marten bought petrol from a garage with the apparent intention of cremating the body, something that ultimately she could not bring herself to do.

‘I did nothing but show her love,’

Marten would insist of her treatment of the child, refusing as ever to admit doing anything wrong.

Pushed on the wisdom of living in a tent with a newborn in the midst of a British winter, she argued that Bedouin children are raised in the outdoors.

‘Jesus survived in a barn, didn’t he?’ she added.

He did indeed. But, then, the South Downs in January are not Bethlehem. And Gordon was no Joseph, nor Marten anything like Mary.

 

 

 

 

 

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From the dock of the Old Bailey, Constance Marten repeatedly insisted that she and Mark Gordon were good parents.

‘There is literally nothing I would not do for my children,’ she said, adding: ‘Mark and I love our kids more than anything in the world.’

The fact that their first four children had all been taken into care and the fifth apparently died in a freezing tent was everyone’s fault but their own, she insisted.

Marten complained that her wealthy family didn’t like Gordon, and claimed they used their wealth and influence to get social services to intervene and that the state had ‘stolen’ her children.

But the official record of what actually happened paints a very different picture of Marten and Gordon’s parenting skills.

Because, following a legal application by this newspaper, the full story of why their children were taken into care can today be told for the first time after a judge in the Family Court ruled that key documents could be made public.

Jurors were not given access to the files because the manslaughter case centred on their fifth child, Victoria.

But laid out in black and white over more than 100 pages, they show how the authorities bent over backwards to accommodate a couple who failed to attend hearings, presented false information and accused witnesses of lying.

Marten and Gordon’s behaviour was also repeatedly called into question, with concerns raised that should the children be left in the couple’s care they would be exposed to domestic violence and even risk being injured themselves.

Following a hearing last year, Judge Madeleine Reardon ruled there was a strong public interest in allowing the Family Court’s decision-making to be understood.

She added that, regardless of the outcome of the criminal trial, the proceedings provided crucial background to the couple’s decision to live ‘off-grid’ to evade social services.

She also made it clear that the information about the proceedings that had emerged during the trial was ‘partial and incomplete’. Indeed, Judge Reardon said that ‘various accounts’ given by Marten of what happened were inaccurate ‘in a number of respects’.

These included claiming she had a minor ‘fall’ from a window when three months pregnant, emerging without even a bruise.

‘In fact, the [undisputed] evidence before the Family Court was that in this incident Ms Marten suffered very serious injuries, including a shattered spleen,’ the judge noted.

‘The court’s finding was that Mr Gordon had caused these injuries.’

Marten also claimed her family had colluded with social services to have her children removed, and ‘had alleged that she was bearing children to sell on the black market and was a drug addict’.

Judge Reardon wrote: ‘Allegations of this nature played no part in the Family Court proceedings.’

Equally informative is the picture that emerges from the hearings of the couple’s relationship – one that dominated and informed absolutely everything they did.

‘They see external agencies and third parties as posing a challenge to their relationship, and view all offers of support as hostile,’ observed the judge in one of the released Family Court judgments.

‘The strong impression given by the parents is that of two people who are fiercely united in an unrelenting struggle against a non-existent opponent.’

That relationship had begun with a chance meeting in a shop in London. By 2016 Marten and Gordon were a couple – taking part in a non-legally binding ‘marriage’ ceremony in Peru, then cutting off contact with Marten’s family.

Soon after she was pregnant with their first child.

Incredibly, according to details in the first of a series of Family Court judgments, when she became pregnant she was completely unaware of Gordon’s criminal past – namely that he had served 20 years in a US jail having been convicted of rape at 14. In June 2017, after returning to the UK from their travels in South America, Marten attended a maternity hospital in London. She had not sought any antenatal care before this point and told medics she was living in a campervan.

With no further contact from the couple and concern about missed follow-ups, social services in London issued a national hospital alert three months later. The NHS issues these when a pregnant woman is thought to require protection or support.

When Marten resurfaced in November she was in Wales. She was also in labour, using a fake Irish accent and claiming to be a traveller called Isabella O’Brien, on the run from her family who disapproved because the baby was being born out of wedlock.

She lied that Gordon, who was present, was just a friend. Marten managed to stay in character throughout the birth, but her deception was rumbled when a social worker recalled the nationwide alert and police were called, confirming Marten’s identity.

The new mum insisted she could care for her baby and would seek council housing and benefits.

But further concerns were raised when social workers found that the couple were living in a mouldy tent on wasteland by a dual carriageway near a Tesco. Their only preparation for the birth had been to buy five baby-grows. Marten dismissed social workers’ misgivings, saying: ‘Different people have different ways of living’.

She maintained that she was fully estranged from her family, with no financial support. However, it emerged that only a year earlier – in late 2016 – the family trust had been in the process of buying a house for her in London. Just before contracts were due to be exchanged, Marten instructed the trustees to pull out, telling them: ‘Due to a recent development in my career and progression, I can no longer live in London.’

Giving evidence, she claimed her change of heart was only due to her family’s continuing ‘surveillance’.

Her faith in alternative lifestyles proved futile, and an interim care order was made in relation to the baby who, together with Marten, was placed with foster carers.

Here, doubts continued to be expressed about her parenting. The carers told social workers they were concerned that Marten had left the baby alone in her flat on one occasion and would let the baby fall asleep on top of her, risking suffocation. This was a pertinent fact, the criminal trial would hear, given how Marten would claim her fifth child died.

The carers were also said to be ‘fearful’ of Marten because of allegations and complaints she made against them as a ‘tactic’ to end her supervision.

That first birth also saw Gordon jailed for assaulting a female police officer.

Police sources told the Mail that officers who attended the hospital spoke to Gordon, who gave them a fake name.

But the date of birth he provided – April 31 – was his undoing. April only has 30 days. When this was pointed out, a scuffle ensued and he assaulted two female officers in what was described as ‘an extremely unpleasant incident’.

Gordon had to be subdued with an incapacitating spray before being put in leg restraints.

He was jailed for 40 weeks for the assault and for breaching reporting requirements linked to being a registered sex offender. On his release he failed to attend ten out of 12 parenting assessments.

A forensic psychologist who spoke to him found him ‘extremely difficult to engage with’ and noted: ‘It must be borne in mind that stress could well trigger incidents of violence in the future. Father has the capacity to act in a violent manner.’

Interactions between the couple and social services culminated in a judgment dated July 2018, when District Judge Marjory Taylor ruled that a six-month supervision order should be imposed so social services could monitor them when they moved back to London from Wales.

But the Family Court had to intervene again in February 2021 when a local authority in the capital sought a ‘fact-finding’ ruling from the court, alleging that the parents had failed to provide for their children’s medical needs, that there had been domestic abuse in their relationship and that they had ‘evaded social services’ efforts to investigate and to safeguard the children’.

By then Marten and Gordon had three children, all of whom had already been placed in foster care. As with the first set of proceedings, hearings were frequently delayed by the couple. On one occasion Gordon claimed he needed to have a tooth extracted, forcing an adjournment.

‘It became clear over time… that the parents were deliberately evading putting themselves in a position where they would be required to challenge the local authority’s evidence, and that they were also desperately anxious to avoid giving evidence themselves,’ the judge wrote.

Of the background to the case, she noted that Marten had made ‘serious allegations’ of childhood abuse against both her parents.

But Judge Reardon said Marten’s parents disputed the accusations, saying their daughter had been ‘brainwashed’ into making them. She also heard how police classified Gordon as ‘high risk’ because he repeatedly refused to complete an annual risk assessment for convicted sex offenders. The court heard that their second child had been born at home in London in spring 2019 without the authorities’ knowledge.

Then, in November 2019, when 14 weeks pregnant with her third, Marten ‘fell’ out of the window of the couple’s rented flat. Her two children were present at the time.

In the criminal case, the jury heard her play down the incident in an interview with police following her arrest.

‘I had an accident and the Family Court were blaming Mark for it, absolutely no evidence, so that’s why my children were taken,’ she told the Old Bailey. ‘I had a fall from a window. There were no bruises on me, no signs of domestic violence, so how they came to that conclusion [was] quite phenomenal, to be honest. I was furious by it, because our children suffered massively.’ But the Family Court was told Marten was taken to hospital with a shattered spleen, damage to her kidney and internal bleeding and needed a blood transfusion. ‘It is fortunate that she made a full recovery,’ the judge observed.

She recorded how a neighbour called an ambulance at 3.35am, having heard screaming, and then saw a woman fall 18ft from the first-floor of a terraced house, hitting a car.

When the ambulance arrived, Marten was back inside the house shouting: ‘Help me!’ At no stage had Gordon rung for help.

Concerned by his behaviour, paramedics waited for police to arrive before entering the property.

The judgment records: ‘The father [Gordon] told PC Hennessy that both had fallen out of the window trying to fix an aerial. PC Hennessy said that he was suspicious of the circumstances, and put it to the father directly that he had pushed the mother.’

When Gordon was asked in hospital what had happened, he said: ‘I’m still in shock. Can you come back to me with more information, and we can talk then?’

However, from then on he refused to elaborate further.

Marten also claimed that it had been an accident, adding that Gordon had fallen, too, but ‘luckily he landed on his feet’.

‘Her response to questioning was to make increasingly serious allegations against the local authority, of evidence-tampering and perjury, which then extended to include similar allegations against the police and medical professions,’ the judge noted.

She also highlighted a pattern in the case whereby the couple gave ‘false information in a plausible and confident manner which can easily mislead professionals’.

She concluded: ‘I find on the balance of probabilities that the father caused the mother to fall out of the window. I am not able to find whether he pushed her or whether she fell during a struggle.

‘The former may be more likely because the bottom of the window is a few feet up from the floor, and it would have required some impetus to get the mother’s body up and over the sill.’

Gordon’s actions had, the judge said, ‘put her [Marten’s] life and the life of their unborn child at serious risk’.

Exposing children to domestic violence such as this, she went on, could cause them serious harm.

After Marten’s fall, the couple then deliberately evaded a safeguarding investigation by the local authority.

Marten fled to Ireland with the two children to avoid answering questions, claiming to have taken a holiday at a ‘wellness retreat for people that are unwell’.

The day after the fall, a social worker visited the family home, but Gordon refused to let him in. The social worker noticed a strong smell of cannabis – asked about this subsequently, Marten claimed it was ‘herbal sage’. She separately refused to submit a hair sample to be tested for cannabis use, something the judge said had no relevance to the proceedings.

Her father, Napier Marten, launched wardship proceedings, offering to care for his grandchildren, leading to a High Court order for her to return to the UK.

Marten took her children to a police station in Ireland but refused to return for weeks while the matter was dragged out in the Irish courts. When she did finally come back the children were placed in foster care, never again to be returned to their parents.

Ahead of their third child being born in London in May 2020 a plan was put in place for Marten and the baby to go straight to a residential assessment unit.

But after the birth the couple refused to do this and a court order was made to place this child into foster care, too.

Having made her findings of fact, Judge Reardon said the threshold for state intervention with the three children had been crossed, with a decision to be made on their long-term future, including the possibility of adoption.

This led to a third judgment being handed down by Judge Reardon in January 2022, by which time Gordon and Marten had had a fourth child.

Incredibly, it emerged that Marten had been pregnant during proceedings the year before, concealing it from the local authority and the court.

The day after the birth she discharged herself from hospital in London, leaving the baby in the care of nurses. When she tried to return to the ward the next day she was refused entry as she would not take a Covid test. This child was also fostered.

The court heard that while all four children were in care, their parents were allowed to have contact sessions with them during 2021. But their attendance became ‘sporadic’ and in October 2021 they ceased attending altogether.

The pair showed a ‘baffling lack of commitment’ to their children, missing 19 contact sessions, the judge said.

‘My mummy and daddy cancelled again,’ their children told staff. One had a nightmare that monsters had taken their parents away, while another began bed-wetting and developed a stammer.

The hearings were once again beset by delays and problems. On the first day of the one in January 2022, the pair claimed to have Covid – sending in photos of positive lateral flow tests and only attending remotely.

The documents also reveal that Marten’s mother, Virginie de Selliers, had offered to be a potential carer for the two older children, saying that she ‘felt desperately sad for her daughter and the children’.

But having been given access to all the files, she then withdrew her offer. Her lawyer told the court of her reasoning: ‘She saw the relationship between the parents as an enmeshed and abusive one, and was concerned that if any of the children were placed with her she would not be able safely to care for them.’

Marten’s next move was to claim she intended to separate from Gordon as soon as possible – telling the court she wanted to be considered as the children’s sole carer. But the judge said she did not believe this would happen.

Gordon, meanwhile, was his usual silent self. He gave no evidence during the hearings, not even a witness statement, leaving it to Marten to argue that the children could be safely cared for by them.

She claimed she had not taken part in expert assessments ahead of the hearing because ‘she had been sucked into internet advice groups run by other parents in which it was suggested that the best way to succeed in proceedings of this nature is to withdraw co-operation and challenge every step taken by the authority or court’.

Judge Reardon dismissed this as ‘wholly implausible’.

Marten also claimed that she had only missed contact meetings with her children because there was no CCTV at the contact centres and she was concerned her interactions with them would be misrepresented.

Again, Judge Reardon dismissed the explanation, describing it as ‘absurd’. She also noted that when Marten was told in court about her children’s ‘heartbreaking’ reaction to her no-shows, she showed little response.

The judge said that when one child’s reaction was put to Marten, ‘the mother said simply, and without emotion, that she had had to think about the bigger picture’. Judge Reardon added: ‘I was entirely unclear as to what she thought the bigger picture was.

‘I have to conclude there is something in the parents’ lives that is powerful enough to prevent them choosing time with their children, and even perhaps to dampen the emotional impact of recognising the harm that the children have suffered as a result. I have no idea what it is.

‘It is a tragedy for the children that the parents’ capacity to meet their needs, which in a number of respects is excellent, is so deeply compromised by the conduct which causes them harm.

‘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. It is a picture that I, as a reasonably experienced Family Court judge, find very difficult to comprehend. I have no doubt in future years all four children will struggle to come to terms with their history and are likely to experience powerful feelings of anger, loss and hurt.’

The hearing concluded with an order that all four children be put up for adoption.

Other options had been to leave them in their parents’ care or in foster care where the couple would have contact with them. But outlining the risk of continued parental contact, Judge Reardon said: ‘It is much more likely than not that in the foreseeable future the children will be exposed to serious physical violence between their parents.

‘It is quite possible they will be injured themselves, and virtually certain that they will suffer long-term psychological harm and impairment in all areas of their development.’

As we now know, that was not the end of Marten and Gordon’s parenthood. Within weeks of the adoption hearing Marten was pregnant – and determined to evade social services by going on the run.

According to Marten, baby number five – Victoria – was born in a rented cottage on Christmas Eve 2022.

The first authorities knew of it was when they found a placenta in the back of the couple’s abandoned car, along with four used babies’ dummies packed carefully in a Tupperware box – poignant mementos of the four previous children placed in care.

Within days, the matter was once again back before Judge Reardon, who imposed an interim care order on their baby allowing it to be taken into foster care once found.

Tragically for baby Victoria, that was never to happen.

For a special episode of the Mail’s award-winning The Trial series breaking down the Constance Marten verdict, search for ‘The Trial of Constance Marten & Mark Gordon’ now, wherever you get your podcasts.