Following Constance Marten and Mark Gordon’s convictions for gross negligence manslaughter, the Mail has released a series of exclusive podcasts revealing never-before-heard details about the couple.
The first episode of this Trial Plus series examines Gordon’s criminal past and includes exclusive interviews with victims of his violent crimes committed as a teenager in Florida.
In 1989, a 14-year-old Gordon was sentenced to life in prison for the rape of his neighbour at knifepoint while her two children slept next door, and for later attacking another neighbour with a shovel.
Gordon was charged with multiple serious offences including armed kidnapping, five counts of armed sexual battery, two counts of armed burglary, and one count of aggravated burglary.
Due to him being a minor, Gordon’s original life sentence was reduced to 40 years, of which he only served 20 before being deported to the UK. To this day, Gordon denies responsibility for the attacks, claiming his confession was forced.
Speaking to veteran crime journalists Caroline Cheetham and Jack Hardy, Gordon’s victim – whose identity remains anonymous – described her horrific ordeal.
She recounted: ‘My dog woke me up, barking. I go over to my bedroom door and stepped out, and he was standing right there in 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.
‘He forced me to perform oral sex on him and there was penetrative sex. He was mostly ordering me around.
‘I kept trying to talk to him, to reason with him, and to try and 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 kept thinking, I have to find a way to live, because my kids were in that other room. It was survival.’
After being deported to the UK in 2010, Gordon was required to register as a sex offender and report to police weekly until meeting Constance Marten in a London incense shop in 2015.
The couple went on to have five children together, but four were taken into care after a 2019 incident where a pregnant Marten fell from a first-floor window with a ruptured spleen – an incident the family court deemed domestic violence despite the couple’s denials.
On Monday, Gordon and Marten were convicted of killing their daughter, Victoria, after going on the run to stop her being taken into care. They will be sentenced on September 15.
Speaking exclusively to The Trial podcast, former Assistant District Attorney David Hodge described his experience prosecuting a 14-year-old Gordon for his sexually motivated attacks.
Hodge described it as ‘one of the most heinous crimes’ his team had ever prosecuted, stressing the lasting emotional damage inflicted on the mother-of-two.
‘I met the victim’, the lawyer said.
‘She described to me what had happened, and it was absolutely terrifying… the incident itself was brutal. How could somebody be that evil?
‘He was inside her house in the wee hours of the morning for hours while her children slept.
‘She was frightened the whole time that one of her kids would wake up and see what was going on with mummy, that they would be harmed, that they would get stabbed or in some other way come to harm.
‘That dominated her thoughts, and she couldn’t get it out of her head.’
The former District Attorney told the podcast that he had been the one that pushed for Gordon to receive a life sentence.
He remembered: ‘I determined that the plea offer would be nothing less than life.
‘The public defender’s office told me that I needed to grow up and give them a reasonable offer. I told them that was our offer – you don’t have to take it; you can go to trial.
‘The judge listened to the testimony of the victim and the testimony of the accused… I believe there was also an expert witness on my side who worked for the Child Protection team.
‘He drilled into me that, as far as the accused went, the greatest predictor of his future behaviour was his past behaviour, and that has stuck with me.’
To listen to full exclusive with David Hodge and hear a complete criminal history of child killer Mark Gordon, subscribe to The Crime Desk, the home of arresting podcasts from The Daily Mail.
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