Missing Couple Found Without Their Baby After 7-Week Search Across UK

Police are urgently searching for a missing baby after finding a couple who disappeared almost two months ago. 

Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon were spotted late on Monday evening by a member of the public outside a convenience store in Brighton, on England’s south coast. 

The couple had been the subject of an ongoing missing person’s search after Marten gave birth to a baby shortly after New Year’s Day. She is believed to have given birth in the couple’s car, which was found on fire on the side of the M61 motorway in Manchester on the 5th of January. 

Since then Marten, 35, who comes from a wealthy aristocratic background and Gordon, 48, a registered sex offender after raping a woman in the US when he was 14, have been sleeping rough in a tent with their child in sub zero temperatures across the south of England. 

In late January police offered a £10,000 reward for information about the whereabouts of the pair, who were spotted on CCTV in several parts of southeast England including in east London and in the port of Harwich. It was thought they had been in possession of a "considerable" amount of cash due to Marten’s inherited wealth and travelled around by taxi.

When police arrested the couple for child neglect last night, the baby was not with them, sparking an intensive search for the child across streets, allotments and woods involving a helicopter, drones and sniffer dogs. 

Det Supt Lewis Basford of the Met Police said: “We can’t say at this time if it’s a boy or a girl and we are still awaiting test results from the placenta found in their car on the M61.” He said the search is “now all about the baby” and that he remained hopeful that the child would be found alive. 

The couple reportedly became estranged from friends and family after meeting in 2016, and police said they have been living a nomadic lifestyle since leaving their home in London in September 2022. Marten, known to her friends as “Toots,” grew up in a mansion in Dorset, southwest England and her family had links to the Royal Family. Gordon was born in the UK but moved to Florida as a teenager. When he was a teenager he was jailed for 20 years for rape and deported to the UK in 2010. 

Earlier this month, one of Marten’s friends, who did not want to be named, told VICE World News that Marten was “close to his heart”. He said he was unhappy with “the sensationalist headlines” and the “aristocrat, sex offender narrative” about the pair since they had gone missing and that this could deter the family from seeking help.