Constance Marten and Mark Gordon Case #5

[InTheDollsHouse]

Belittling other people’s opinions when you expect your opinions to be accepted or listened to is serious double standards.

The whole point of tattle is a coming together of opinions, thoughts, wondering, in a respectful way. It’s be boring as hell if everyone though the same about everything in the world.

It’s not okay to belittle other people and their thoughts while simultaneously putting forward your thoughts - those of us on the ‘love but still neglect, driven by trauma, absolutely not cared for but not brutally murdered’ side of the fence haven’t once shot anyone else down for thinking something different.

 

[KatieMorag]

It's a massive stretch for them to expect anyone to believe that their fifth baby - after having the first four removed as they weren't fit to care for them - who they were on the run with and sleeping rough in the middle of freezing winter conditions just HAPPENED to pass away and it was all so unexpected. What a lot of utter shite - it's a marker of their arrogance that they'd even think for one minute anyone would believe that.

 

[Aberscot]

It’s not love in a ‘normal’ way.

Their running from SS with their baby was a chaotic, ultimately dangerous and devastating act of love in their eyes.

Sorry I disagree and can’t see any love from either of them.
even if they were on run from SS, staying in tent In freezing conditions trying to hide her from the world that could be plausible that they though they were doing what they though was best and out of love, but what I can’t see where loving their child comes into it is stuffing her dead body in a carrier bag that was filled with other rubbish. Also look at the way she was shoved in that pram, she was a newborn baby there was no way any caring parent handles their child like that.
They were able to purchase alcohol but not warm clothes eithe for her [ after the fire in the car) no sign of loving parents there either.
I just hope they get a long enough sentence that she can never procreate again.

 

[Emsie]

I'm way behind so apologies if this has been said but for me, I am seeing maternal instinct. Just the wrong instinct. Actually, parental instinct as it applies to both of them.
They feel that they were protecting their child from social services and removal and they are correct, all children should be with their birth families.
But they were not protecting her, they endangered her and ended her life. If Victoria was removed at birth the irony is that she would still be alive and CM and MG would probably be having some sort of contact with her.
They will never see that they are the problem. They are the unsafe people. And that, imo, at the root cause is nothing more the selfishness. Too selfish to put their child first as their need was greater.

 

[Haveyouanywool]

Do you source your own food as well?

We have a Polytunnel and allotment so grow a lot of food. We still have some potatoes and leeks left but most of our food is sourced from Morrisons at the moment!

 

[Emsie]

No, not all children should be with their birth families. There are situations where this is absolutely NOT in the best interests of the child. This situation being the obvious one.

You're misunderstanding what I mean. Children belong in their birth families, as in they should be because their birth family should be safe.
I'm a parent by adoption and it hurts my soul that his birth family is not safe as he is dealing with the consequences of that. No one else, just him. What I should have said is children DESERVE to be with their birth families.. my bad.
---

I have to agree here. I understand the sentiment and in an ideal world we should never need to separate a child from it’s birth parents as there should be support systems in place to help parents with their issues and keep families together. However, issues run far too deep sometimes and as has been said in this thread a few times already, some people are just callous and beyond help.

(Edited to amend grammar)

You explained it better than I did

 

[MedeaWho]

I have to agree that I’m yet to see any evidence she has a maternal instinct. Those videos of a baby zipped up in the jacket with NO CHECKING and then the way she plonks Victoria into a buggy makes he doubt there was any maternal love involved.

She is clearly infatuated with Gordon (‘I can’t bear it! Let him go! Daddy bear!’) but her children…? Not sure.

I hope we will here more from their background as parents further in the trial.

 

[missymunch]

I have been lurking on this thread and finally screwed up the courage to comment ! Thank you to @InTheDollsHouse for comments echoing my thoughts. I’m a therapist but mainly work with anxiety as that was my driver to train and study as I had an anxiety disorder. So I’m fascinated by people and looking beneath behaviours even abhorrent behaviour.
I have to offer empathy , non judgement and unconditional positive regard to my clients as that’s the foundation of the theory I trained under. I try ( mostly ) to look at non clients the same way . I can abhor the behaviour but I have a drive to understand it. If we can’t understand it how can we learn any lessons from anything . We are used to thinking poverty , abuse , addiction can set people off into criminal activities so I can understand those being flummoxed by CM who perhaps had everything materialistic wise. Which in a way means something more must have been going on in her family ?
I really think there’s a weird religious aspect to this. CM and her mother have some extreme Christian characters linked to their social media’s and mums LinkedIn.
I know it was briefly touched on before along with the cult stuff.
Aa a mum I admit I do focus on her . I’m trying to not excuse her at all and I hope justice is served . Victoria deserved safety , warmth and all her needs met. I would lay down my life for my child but I understand that’s not everyone’s thinking ( certainly wasn’t my daughters fathers ) . I also feel drawn to the folie a deux theory . Not sure if I’m contributing much but wanted to say what I’m thinking .

 

[heretoreaditall2019]

They are charged with the same offences, but at this point it’s almost as if she is being treated by the media, and to some degree this thread, as the main perpetrator and he is just an accomplice.

Agree with all of your comment but this is super interesting. I’ve written before that I’m surprised they didn’t take the very easy route and paint him as the abusive coercive controlling mastermind and her the weak little poor victim to it all. It would have been so easy with him being a man, black, and with a very serious offending history. The fact they haven’t makes it all the more interesting imo.

Society assumes women to be more maternal/caring, and dare I say sensible and measured? So when a woman fails at motherhood there’s a lot more scorn and questioning than when a man does at fatherhood, it’s far more normal for a man to leave a family dynamic than a mother for example? In fact it’s very commonplace for a man to leave his partner therefore his kids, still to this day if a mum left her childcare duties it’s a bit taboo? I know family courts are apparently trying to address the bias towards the mother but it’s historically really upheld the idea of mums as primary/resident parents only with men just picking up weekends (if that), so tl;dr I do think the expectations are higher for women. Also gonna assume most of us are women/if not mums so are going to question how someone similar to us could do this, I wonder if a group of men would speak more on MG? I wonder if we’d speak more on MG if he wasn’t a rapist so evidently fucking unhinged and beyond redemption anyway?

And yes her wealth/privilege is of massive interest. Also agree that she’d have had at least 4/5 months to make a plan and yet this is the shit one they came up with?! She’d have had at least £100k in. Choosing to live this unacceptable and lbr filthy lifestyle when you have such means is always going to pique a gossip site’s interest!

 

[InTheDollsHouse]

On police bodycam footage at the arrest

 

[FFS_stopit]

“Daddy bear”

From the bbc
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Constance Marten and Mark Gordon hid baby's location from police, court hears https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68218831

 

[InTheDollsHouse]

My opinion has always been that she is still mentally scarred from the cult. The dissociation, detachment and emotional numbness is a huge symptom of PTSD.

I’m absolutely not excusing what she’s done, or saying that it’s even a factor for consideration in sentencing - but it is likely to be something that has negatively affected and shaped her and so may have been part of why she seems so cold hearted. She is emotionally not there.

 

[FFS_stopit]

I do wonder why it is we (and the media) are so focused on CM and not MG…

Is it because of her privileged background and associated wealth or is it because she is a woman/mother or could it be because she is (and I hate to say this) white.

Why are there only a few comments on these threads speculating on what created the monster that is Mark Gordon? Something must have gone terribly terribly wrong in order for him to do what he did as a child and then to do this to poor Victoria. But for some reason (and I count myself in this too) we seem absolutely fixated on finding the why around Constance.

They are charged with the same offences, but at this point it’s almost as if she is being treated by the media, and to some degree this thread, as the main perpetrator and he is just an accomplice.

(Not pointing any fingers here, I absolutely include myself in this, it’s just something I’ve noticed and recognise is probably a result of the fact that I am a white mother born into privilege, and from the media perspective..almost certainly because her story generates more clicks, which generates money)

 

[aggytha]

I mainly only lurk here, but I do think it’s an interesting point to make about how differently people might look at things if Constance grew up in a rough area/on a council estate.

People often say the same about Madeleine McCann’s parents. They would’ve been absolutely slaughtered had they not been well off medical professionals.

All I do know is that the way baby Victoria spent her short life must’ve been so so awful and she desperately deserved to be safe and warm, with a full tummy.

 

[MedeaWho]

I suspect this case was assessed as ‘risk to life’ hence why they had to act quickly and involve publicity.
I also believe the parents were not able to care for this baby (hence lack of appropriate clothing in winter) so even without the chase they would quite likely have harmed her.

 

[MavisBeacon]

I’d love to know what changed in their heads from before the fire to afterwards.

It‘s evident from the items recovered from the car that they had bought the things a new baby would need; snowsuit, clothes, nappies etc, so at some point they must’ve expected to look after Victoria properly. If you really didn’t care about your baby, you just wouldn’t bother buying anything.

Something seems to have snapped in them after the fire and they couldn’t seem to get themselves together to replace all the baby items. I don’t believe it was just because the police were looking for them, I feel like there’s more to it than that. They went to shops that sold baby goods yet didn’t buy any. Why?

This. I think the car fire was a critical incident that exacerbated their paranoia and poor mental state/decision-making.* Before that, nobody knew they had a baby with them.
There was a 'sliding doors' moment when they could have stayed at the car, realised they were in an impossible situation and handed themselves in for help and support. Victoria would have been taken away, but she would have lived. The fact they didn't is damning.
Instead they ran, and everything unravelled from there. In my opinion, I think from that moment onwards they stopped thinking rationally about the baby as a human life, and instead just spiralled into an overwhelming paranoid delusion.

*WRT mental illness, you can't be mentally well and do what they did, even if you can't be diagnosed with something formally.

 

[Here2BNosey]

Yesterday it was 2 degrees where I am. After doing some shopping I waited 10 minutes outside a supermarket for a taxi. My hands were burning from the cold although I was wrapped up warm except for gloves. I had my baby with me, dressed in a fluffy hooded pramsuit, long sleeved vest and baby grow under it and a blanket double wrapped over them. They were sleeping and as I tucked the blanket into the sides of the carseat I was worried they wouldn't be warm enough. My baby isn't a newborn and it occurred to me then, just how cold -2 really is and there is absolutely no way you could keep a baby warm in that weather without lots of very warm clothing. My littles legs were cool, but not cold when we got home even though they were dressed for the weather and only outside for a short time.
The longer you are out the colder you get and they had literally no where warm to go to for any respite from the weather and to get a warm through, I don't think the baby could have survived very long in those conditions at all.

 

[usefullyuseless]

I don’t get the food outrage. He’s just avoiding their questions and he’s hungry and they’re giving him food. He’s like a kid giving cheek to a teacher. And they’re both quite mad.

For me, it's the callousness. The police don't know Victoria is dead, they're desperate to find her. All MG is concerned about is his food. It kills the narrative of two people who loved their baby and wanted to keep her. Neither of them cared about her in life or in death.

I still can't get my head around the pair of them. How does a 14 year old child become a rapist? How does a woman with all the privilege in the world end up homeless like this? Her family seem to blame everything on when she joined the cult. It's all so bizarre to me.

 

[Thegirlwhouk]

This. I think the car fire was a critical incident that exacerbated their paranoia and poor mental state/decision-making.* Before that, nobody knew they had a baby with them.
There was a 'sliding doors' moment when they could have stayed at the car, realised they were in an impossible situation and handed themselves in for help and support. Victoria would have been taken away, but she would have lived. The fact they didn't is damning.

I agree with this in spades and I also think that CM and MG did 'love' her but their understanding of love and care was hugely flawed. I don't believe they set out to kill her, I think they felt strongly that she was 'theirs' to own and that evil SS had no right to take her away. Then things spiralled and they were caught out, they underestimated what would happen. Then they made a series of awful decisions that no parent in their right mind would make. They put possessing her over caring for her and they were both so frantic and honestly such damaged individuals that they didn't stop to consider the harm baby Victoria was facing.

I don't think they are inherently evil - an inherently evil parent would intentionally torture and hurt a child. She did not care for Victoria and she neglected her hugely, causing all sorts of damage but I don't see her as 'evil'. I see her and him as very broken individuals who Victoria was unfortunate enough to be born to. Inherently evil is someone like Emma Tustin who tortured and clearly enjoyed torturing that poor darling Arthur Labinjo-Hughes.

I think if they hadn't cared for her in their own way, they'd have dumped her (alive or dead) before the car fire and fled the country. They obviously tried to keep her alive for some time and that's because in my opinion, they 'wanted' her.

Their care and 'love' is obviously shit but it doesn't mean it came from a place of evil.

Disagree if you will, I don't mind.

The important thing is they are absolutely guilty as sin and deserve to be punished for that and they do not ever deserve to have another chance at parenthood.

 

[Eltonjohnsflorist]

Are you talking about this thread, because I haven't seen a single person try to spin it that way.

This. I’m so fed up of posters on this thread whinging that any discussion about MG & CM that isn’t “evil baby killers string them up” is excuse making/ excusing them/ defending them/ justifying their behaviour. What’s the point in even the thread if that’s all you want to say.