Constance Marten and Mark Gordon said they went on the run to avoid their newborn being removed after their four older children were taken into care.
“There was no way I was going to part with my child,” Marten told the jury at the Old Bailey.
“We were hiding from the entire British public because I was worried about Victoria being taken.”
The couple said the death of baby Victoria was a tragic accident and denied wrongdoing, but were found guilty of perverting the course of justice, concealing the birth of a child, and child cruelty last year after an Old Bailey trial lasting almost five months.
The jury was discharged after failing to reach a verdict on other outstanding counts.
Gordon, 51, and Marten, 38, have now been found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence.
Prosecutors said as soon as Marten realised she was pregnant with her fifth child, she and Gordon started planning to “go dark” so they could conceal the birth from the authorities and keep the baby.
A national manhunt was launched in January 2023 when a placenta was found in their burnt-out car – a search that would end almost two months later in a disused shed where Victoria’s body was found in a carrier bag, two days after her parents were arrested.
Marten comes from a wealthy family of landowners with links to the Royal Family and met Gordon around 2014.
The couple had four children between 2017 and 2021 before Marten became pregnant with Victoria in 2022, and the couple decided to go on the run. Marten claimed her older children were “stolen by the state” and her “number one priority” was to protect Victoria.
Why were the couple’s older children taken into care?
Social services were involved with the family from Marten’s first pregnancy in the winter of 2017. Social workers were concerned the couple had been living in a “freezing” tent where they planned to take the newborn, despite it being “wholly inappropriate for a baby”.
Hours after the baby was born, Gordon attacked two female police officers who had been called to the maternity ward over concerns about the parents’ identity after the pair gave fake names.
An interim care order was made. This can only be issued if a child has suffered or is at risk of suffering significant harm, and gives the local authority shared parental responsibility so it can make decisions about the child’s welfare and where they live.
Marten and her child were placed in several temporary mother and baby placements – the first in a series of care interventions throughout her children’s lives.
She sought advice from an “expert” in evading social services about how to keep her children after a domestic violence incident between her and Gordon in 2019.
The expert told her to flee to Ireland, and she stayed there until a court order in December 2019 forced her to return. In January 2020, two children were taken into care, and an emergency protection order was made when their third child was born a few months later.
In January 2022, a family court judge ruled the couple’s four children should be adopted.
An incident of domestic violence played a part in this decision, as the judge weighed up the risk to the children of being exposed to serious physical violence.
At that point, it had been four months since the parents had been to a contact session with their three older children.
‘Mummy and daddy cancelled again’
The judge said the quality of contact was “excellent” when they attended – but there were a “huge” number of missed sessions.
One child was described as “inconsolable” when the parents failed to turn up at the contact centre, telling nursery staff: “Mummy and Daddy cancelled again.”
In ruling the children should be adopted, the judge found as well as “inconsistent” contact, arrangements for antenatal and postnatal care were not appropriate, and the children were put at risk by the potential for domestic violence and their parents’ decision to evade the local authority when it was investigating the children’s wellbeing in late 2019.
Would the older children being in care have automatically meant Victoria was removed?
Older children being in care does not automatically mean a newborn baby is removed – but it will often trigger a pre-birth assessment, explains Cathy Ashley, chief executive at the charity Family Rights Group.
“The assessment has to look at what the previous concerns were, why did those children go into care, why were they removed from their parents? It also has to look at the current situation,” she says.
If a local authority believes a newborn is at significant risk, it can apply for an interim care order. In reality, this is often on the day of birth (court orders cannot be sought before that because an unborn baby is not a legal entity).
A family court judge must consider each case on merit to decide the best long-term care option, Lisa Harker, director of the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, says.
But if a significant risk of harm has meant older children have been removed, it will be a “challenge” for someone to prove they are now able to parent, she tells Sky News.
That is unless there has been a major change in their life such as a new partner, having had therapy, changing levels of addiction, or improvements in mental health.
But parents are often given little support to make those changes, Ms Harker says: “So how do you demonstrate your life has improved and you’re more able to parent than you were?
“People do demonstrate it, but it is difficult.”
What did the couple say about their children being taken into care?
Marten told the jury of the first trial she and Gordon were moving every one to three days while she was pregnant with Victoria “so she would not be taken”.
“I wanted Victoria with me for the first three to six months of her life so I could give her the love that she needs because I don’t think it’s fair for any children to be removed from her parents,” she said.
“A mother’s love for her child is incredibly strong,” she told the jury.
At the retrial, she explained they moved between places “because I didn’t want one single authority to have jurisdiction over my daughter, so if we kept moving, they couldn’t take her”.
Speaking to Sky News, senior crown prosecutor Samantha Yellend said the prosecution did not dispute the love the parents had for their children.
“It wasn’t our case that they didn’t love their children and there weren’t times where they were loving towards them.
“It was our case that when decisions had to be made in relation to them or the children they often pick themselves over that.”
After finding out she was pregnant with her fifth child, Marten’s plan was to go abroad, jurors were told.
She said: “Get away from this country and the services and my family but unfortunately there were preventatives from going abroad.”
Marten added that “Plan B” was to remain in the UK but “lay low”.
When asked to elaborate, Marten told the court she wanted to keep Victoria until she was three months old, then give her to a carer “who could then try and get her abroad”.
She told the court she would have paid the person to get Victoria out of the UK. She said: “It would have been a carer, a nanny or something. If there is a will there is a way, you can always find someone to help.”
What advice did Marten get about evading social services?
Marten told the jury she sought help from Ian Josephs, who advises parents on how to evade and oppose social services – including sometimes giving expectant mothers financial help to flee to Ireland, France and Northern Cyprus.
Mr Josephs says he has advised thousands of women since starting his website in 2003, and represented parents in court against local authorities as early as the 1960s (the former councillor is not a lawyer and a 1989 law prevents non-professionals from representing clients in court).
He tells Sky News he recalls talking to Marten when she had two children and was “desperate” to stop them being taken into care.
His advice to her at the time: “Get the hell out of there. Get to Ireland.”
This would not break any laws, he told her, and social services there would be more likely to let the family stay together than authorities in England.
Mr Josephs says Marten followed his advice and lived “successfully” in Ireland for a period, but had her children taken back into care when a court order meant she had to return to England.
She was acting out of desperation both when she called him and when she went on the run with Victoria, he says.
“If your child runs into the middle of the road when a lorry is coming and you’re trying to save it… that’s the sort of frame of mind she was in, to try and save a child from being taken, not run over by a lorry, but taken by social services, which is nearly as bad.”
While Mr Josephs’ website includes testimonials from mothers praising his approach, his methods are unpopular with those who believe social services should maintain oversight of children who could be at risk.
Can social services just take a child?
“There’s a misconception that social workers can just remove your children,” Ms Ashley of Family Rights Group says.
“Of course they can’t.”
There are only three scenarios in which a child can be removed from their parents or a person with parental responsibility.
The first is if a parent voluntarily agrees to it, and the second is if police take them temporarily into police protection for a maximum of 72 hours.
The third is the most common scenario and involves the court making a temporary order – either an interim care order or an emergency protection order.
For this to be granted, the court must be satisfied a child has suffered or is at risk of suffering significant harm.
“It is not a decision taken lightly,” Ms Ashley says.
Significant harm could mean the child being abused or neglected. In the case of an unborn baby, perhaps the mother hasn’t engaged with antenatal care or uses substances.
It is a bit of a “grey area” where the worry is about future risk rather than immediate harm, Ms Harker adds.
She gives examples of what that might look like: “This might not be an environment where a child will thrive, where there’s concerns about neglect, a chaotic lifestyle or the ability to provide a safe, warm, damp-free home for a child.
“That child might not be at risk of immediate harm but the local authority fears for their future safety, their future wellbeing.”
The temporary orders last until the court makes a decision about longer-term care, which must be guided by the principle that – if it is safe – children are best cared for by their parents or within their family, Ms Ashley says.
“If it wasn’t possible, legally, children’s services have to consider family and friends before they would look at unrelated carers.”
A social worker will provide a report assessing the parents’ capacity to care for their children, and a psychologist may also do the same. The judge will consider this in making their decision.
How were Marten’s family involved?
Marten’s father made an application for wardship in December 2019, when Marten and Gordon had two children. When this application was granted, it meant Marten had to return from Ireland.
These types of applications are “very rare”, retired social worker Andrew Reece tells Sky News.
It does not mean the children’s grandfather was applying to be their guardian. Rather, he was applying for them to become wards of the court.
This means the High Court can be appointed the child’s supreme legal guardian and must approve any significant step in the child’s life.
An application for wardship is different to kinship care, which is when a friend or relative who is not the parent cares for a child.
Wardship proceedings are only used when the usual processes of care orders are not sufficient.
In this case, the local authority initiated care proceedings for the children the month after the wardship application.
Marten told the jury her family considered her children an “embarrassment” because they don’t come from the same “upper class privileged background”.
She said her family would “try to get my children taken off me” and “refused to take them in when they were put up for adoption”.
She claimed she was “cut off overnight” while heavily pregnant with her first child and fled to Wales.
“I had to escape my family because my family are extremely oppressive and bigoted and wouldn’t allow me to have children with my husband,” Marten said.
“They would do anything to erase that child from the family line, which is what they did end up doing.”
In an audio appeal made while the couple were on the run, Marten’s father Napier Marten said the family had lived “in great concern”.
Her mother Virginie de Selliers, who regularly attended her daughter’s first trial, said in an open letter: “You have made choices in your personal adult life which have proven to be challenging, however I respect them, I know that you want to keep your precious newborn child at all costs.”
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Is it common for parents to have recurrent children taken into care?
The “trauma and grief” of having a child removed at birth often leads to recurrent care proceedings, Ms Harker says.
“The chance of seeking solace from a future pregnancy is very high.
“We know from our research that 50% of newborn babies who are subject to care proceedings are the children of mothers who have previously had children subject to care proceedings.”
The risk is strongest in the first three years after the removal of a baby and it is more likely with young mothers and where the newborn has been adopted.
But there is a positive side, she says: “Where we know there are services that are able to support families who have had a child removed, you can see that there is a reduced risk of that happening.”
