Mark Gordon's sister lifts the lid on convicted rapist's darkest secrets as he's jailed

The sister of a convicted rapist has today shared his darkest secrets after he and his aristocrat girlfriend were jailed for the manslaughter of their baby daughter.

Mark Gordon, 51, and Constance Marten, 38, embarked on a toxic "Romeo and Juliet" romance and eventually went on the run to hide their secret newborn baby, Victoria, from social services. However, the infant died - likely of hypothermia - and Gordon and Marten were arrested, and each sentenced to 14 years behind bars this week for gross negligence manslaughter.

Speaking after the pair were sentenced at the Old Bailey in London, Gordon's half-sister Karen Satchell, 54, said the man dreamed of a new life following his previous jail term - and fathered another child before vanishing off-grid with Marten. Gordon's family never met Constance, nor did they know the gender of each of the two babies Gordon had with the aristocrat, or their battle with social services.

Gordon met Marten in an incense shop in Tottenham, north London, in 2014, some years after his first jail term. During this, Gordon's family regularly visited him and he became nicknamed by lags as "The Preacher", thought to have been because he was often quoting the bible to get through.

READ MORE: Constance Marten and rapist partner Mark Gordon jailed for killing baby

READ MORE: Constance Marten's cult experience with preacher she called 'daddy' before killing baby Victoria

Describing her sibling, Karen, who lives in north London, said: "He looks like somebody you don’t want to cross with. But when you get past that, he’s quite shy. I think that’s his defence mechanism."

But Gordon kept his first child - a daughter - a secret from his family until she was two. He then split with the toddler's mother for unknown reasons before he met Marten, after which Karen noticed he became noticeably more paranoid.

"I want to help like a big sister would. He just said 'it’s okay, I don't need it, I’m good'. They went travelling a lot. I asked him how he could go to all these places," added Karen, who never met Marten even after she and Gordon married in Peru, in a ceremony that is not recognised in the UK.

In order to escape Marten’s family and their private investigators, the couple lived in a tent in Wales and had their first baby in 2017, but Gordon was still shady with his family. Speaking to The Sun, Karen added: "He called me once from Wales and asked me to help him out, and if he could stay at my address.

"He called and said, 'What are you doing? ' but said he couldn’t talk right now because ‘they are listening’. It was weird. He said, ‘You can’t help me’. He said he had gone to see his wife. He was hiding out, whispering. He said I’m visiting my wife. I asked what was wrong, and he just said 'Long story, something to do with the baby’."

The pair had their first four children - including the one born in 2017 - taken into care and they went on the run, planning to stop their newborn "being taken by the state". They had been reported missing in early January 2023 and travelled around the UK to try and conceal their whereabouts.

The defendants were caught on CCTV scavenging in bins for food even though Marten had received thousands of pounds from a trust fund and had £19,000 in the bank. Days after the pair's arrest, Victoria's body was found by police at the bottom of a discarded Lidl bag, hidden under rubbish including a Budweiser can and an egg mayonnaise and cress sandwich package, which had been left in a shed on an allotment in Brighton, East Sussex.

Karen, who last spoke to Mark about a year before he went on the run, continued: "It went terribly wrong. They made a terrible mistake."