A British from the aristocratic family and her partner were sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment on Monday for killing her newborn daughter. The girl died at a time when the family lived outside civilization at freezing temperatures. According to the AFP report, TASR reports this.
Judge Mark Lucraft told 38-year-old Constance Marten and 51-year-old Mark Gordon that the way they treated his child Victoria was “the most serious and coarsest case of neglecting”. Police arrested the couple after a seven -week search in January and February in 2023, during which they lived in the tent. In July, the jury recognized them guilty after the previous jury was unable to reach the verdict in case of charges of unintentional killing.
Mark Gordon and Constance Marten on painting from their court.
Source:
TASR/AP
Martenová and Gordon escaped with her daughter Victoria to keep her after the authorities took their four other children because of their unsuitable pair lifestyle. According to the information found, the behavior of the couple posed a “great risk” for children. Subsequently, two months later, they were arrested in Brighton on the south coast of England.
A few days later, the baby’s body was found in the shopping bag on the vegetable field at an advanced stage of decomposition. Marten told the police that Victoria had died in sleep, but according to the judge, she died of hypothermia.
Martenová grew up in a 25-room headquarters on an extensive estate in Dorset in southwestern England. Her aristocratic family had close ties to the royal family. Her grandmother was a child’s girlfriend of the late Queen Elizabeth II ..
The early childhood of Gordon, who was also born in Britain, was marked by poverty and violence. In 1989, at the age of 14, he held a woman against her will in Florida for more than four hours and raped her. He was armed with “a knife and scissors on a hedge,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Not even a month later, he committed another crime that included bodily harm with aggravating circumstances. He was sentenced to 40 years of imprisonment, but was released after serving 22 years. In 2017, Gordon was convicted of attacking two police officers at the obstetrics department in Wales, where Marten gave birth to their first child.
