They were the kind of late night heart-to-hearts that young people often share together, discussing their hopes and ambitions for the future. But a decade on, the conversations Francis Abolo had with his on-off girlfriend Constance Marten have taken on a darker meaning, in particular her desire to find a ‘special person’ and to become a mum.
While arguably she achieved both these aims, it was to be in the most toxic and tragic way possible.
For the ‘special person’ she found was violent rapist Mark Gordon, now 50, and four of their children would be taken into care before the fifth, newborn Victoria, died in a freezing tent in early 2023, leading to their conviction for manslaughter at the Old Bailey last week. They were remanded in custody and will be sentenced in September.
‘Looking back, it’s all very sad,’ says Francis. ‘The scene we were in back then was all very fluid, there weren’t many people holding down relationships and I got the sense she was tired of that and wanted to simplify her life, to be with someone exclusively, find someone special.’
More poignant still are his recollections of Marten’s desire to be a mother.
‘It’s one of the things that came up in the first conversation we ever had, she had so much to say about wanting a family, wanting loads of children, which I found quite unusual. It’s very sad, tragic really. She seemed someone who viewed that [having a family] as an incredible thing – it wasn’t “I want a career and a couple of kids on the side”, no, she talked more about having kids than other things, it seemed really pivotal.’
Francis, who was romantically involved with Marten the year before her fateful encounter with Gordon, also recalls a woman utterly at ease in a drink and drug-infused social scene, providing fascinating insights into her psyche months before her life began to unravel.
Francis says when he knew her she was familiar with everything from cannabis to hallucinogens.
Constance Marten with pink-wigged boyfriend Francis Abolo at a festival in Cambridgeshire before her fateful meeting with Gordon in 2016
!['She seemed someone who viewed that [having a family] as an incredible thing,' says Francis (Marten pictured in 2012)](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/07/19/17/100455655-14921329-image-m-85_1752940872165.jpg)
‘She seemed someone who viewed that [having a family] as an incredible thing,’ says Francis (Marten pictured in 2012)


Gordon, 50, were charged alongside Marten, 37, with manslaughter by gross negligence over the death of their baby Victoria in 2023
Marten, now 38, was, says Francis, the ‘manifestation of a social butterfly’ – ever present at parties and festivals, always with friends, living in a shared warehouse apartment near to his in London’s bohemian east Hackney, fond of a gin and tonic and equally fond of her drug of choice: ketamine.
He also recalls a festival they attended that summer and a photograph he’s kept of the two of them at the Secret Garden Party in Abbots Ripton, Cambridgeshire, shows her wreathed in smiles, him in a pink wig.
They had started the festival as part of a group, taking hallucinogenic ‘magic’ mushrooms together, then got lost, spending 24 hours hanging out in the rain before the sun came out for the last day – and for the photograph.
Given Marten’s drug use, it is striking that it wasn’t a feature of hers and Gordon’s chaotic lives and catastrophic parenting, save for one occasion when a social worker said he could smell cannabis at their flat, which Marten claimed was ‘herbal sage’.
But back to July 2015, when Francis, then an events manager, first spotted the striking figure of the woman he would come to know as ‘Toots’ walk into the crowded room at a party at a friend’s warehouse flat in east London. ‘I definitely remember what struck me,’ he says, reflecting with sadness on all that has unfolded since.
‘She had an almost classical Greek look about her. Very tall, pretty eyes, very striking.’
She was trying to run from her aristocratic earlier life
He recalls fondly that he got talking to the new arrival at the tail end of the house party. She was a young woman whose height – 5ft 11in – and cut glass vowels set her apart from the crowd.
‘She had a warm personality, softly spoken, humble, but there was also something about her that didn’t really fit because she seemed so posh,’ recalls Francis.
There was a spark between them, ‘a kiss or two’, but what he remembers most is conversation.
‘She was well-travelled, very knowledgeable about the world, which was an attractive characteristic; we stayed up for hours, talking. We talked about everything – life, family, although there were some things that only came out later,’ he says.
‘It just felt really cool, we just enjoyed each other’s company.’
Francis, 46, is struggling to reconcile his memories of the then 28-year-old drama student he casually dated for several months with the woman who left her dead baby in a Lidl bag-for-life under an empty beer can and sandwich packaging. ‘How people see her in public and how she was then, it’s hard for me to connect the two together,’ he says. ‘It’s just heartbreaking. I have got a lot of very good memories of Toots. She never played on the fact that she was aristocratic. She was non-judgmental and got on with people of all backgrounds and classes.
‘She was very passionate about social justice, equality, she was a really big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, she just believed in the world being a better place.

Francis says when he knew Marten (pictured) she was familiar with everything from cannabis to hallucinogens
‘Weirdly enough, she hated corporate, capital stuff. She was a bit of a contrast.’ Francis grew up with his younger sister on a council estate in Hackney where his single parent mum worked in catering and he worked hard to go to art college and later university.
But the crowd in which they met was an eclectic mix of Europeans and bohemian Londoners, some well-to-do, but none quite as well-heeled as Marten.
As those who have followed the unravelling of this tragedy will know, Constance ‘Toots’ Marten was born into a life of privilege.
She was raised in the Georgian splendour of Crichel House, the vast stately home in Dorset that had been her family’s ancestral manor for generations.
Her grandfather Toby Marten was a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Navy and equerry to George VI, while his wife Mary was goddaughter to the late Queen Mother and friend to Princess Margaret.
Constance was sent to board at St Mary’s in Shaftesbury, a Catholic girls’ school, and once graced the pages of Tatler in a tasselled, 1920s style flapper dress as one of its ‘Babes of the Month’.
I had seen indications there was some trauma
But Marten’s childhood was indelibly marked by the end of her parents’ marriage. When she was nine, her father Napier Marten left the family, leaving his wife Virginie and four children. One might imagine Napier’s decision to flee to Australia, where he shaved his head and had an out-of-body experience with indigenous people on a clifftop, would foster resentment in his offspring.
While Napier became estranged from his daughter after she met Gordon in 2016, Francis recalls that when he knew her – just a year earlier – Marten always spoke warmly of her father.
‘Apart from her dad, she didn’t talk about her family with any sparkle in her eye,’ he recalls.
‘I remember asking, “What’s your family like, what are your brothers like?”
‘She had so much to say about her dad and her younger brother, but not so much about her mum and I sensed there were problems there. I got the feeling that she needed the escapism of the parties and stuff.
‘She was trying to run away from the rigid, aristocratic life and almost tried to hide her roots.’
Marten was at drama school but, says Francis, looking for work.
‘She was always talking about getting a job, wanting to work,’ he says. ‘She never seemed flush, but certainly wasn’t down on her luck.’
He assumed her family were helping her out.

The ‘special person’ she found was violent rapist Gordon (pictured) and their children would be taken into care before newborn Victoria died in a freezing tent in early 2023, leading to their conviction for manslaughter at the Old Bailey last week
As summer unfolded, the two struck up a relationship, something that could, he reflects sadly, have developed into something more had he been ready for commitment. As it was, the two would spend weekends hanging out – either at her warehouse or his.
From the outset, Francis had been open with Marten about his heritage – his parents are from Nigeria. But it was some time before she revealed that she too had spent time there. Marten’s journey to the Nigerian capital Lagos was vividly documented by the Daily Mail in its coverage of the trial last week.
Aged 19, Marten found herself flying to Lagos, with her mother, to visit the church of evangelical pastor Temitope Balogun ‘TB’ Joshua – known to followers as ‘The Prophet’.
Ten years ago, allegations emerged against Joshua and his Synagogue Church of All Nations, known as SCOAN. Since his death in June 2021 aged 57, the claims have multiplied.
Along with accusations of psychological torture and physical abuse, a number of former female ‘disciples’ have claimed that he repeatedly sexually assaulted and raped them – forcing some to have abortions.
Like others, Francis wonders whether Marten’s journey to Africa as a vulnerable teenager may hold some of the answers to the shape her later life took.
Precisely what happened while the teenage Marten was there is unclear. But she would later say that the experience left her character ‘completely broken apart’.
Francis got a glimpse of the impact the Nigeria trip had on her when he went to her flat one night.
‘There had been other things I had seen [indicating] there was some trauma, but this was the first time she had talked about Nigeria,’ he says.
As he smoked cannabis and she took ketamine, she became upset, discussing her mother, too.
‘She was crying a lot. It wasn’t an easy conversation,’ he says.
It’s horrific… but she used to be so very caring
Marten was too distressed to share every detail but what Francis gleaned was that she had been in Nigeria as part of a visit relating to a church, that she had been with her mum and that it ‘wasn’t a very nice experience’.
‘She got so upset, I didn’t want to start pressing her on the details but I figured that was the reason she wasn’t really talking to her mum.
‘She was not in a good place at all,’ he says.
He has thought about this conversation many times since. ‘I asked her a few times what happened in Nigeria but she would brush over it, so I never really got to understand what the trauma was, I didn’t press her…’
And then came Mark Gordon.
It was, says Francis, shortly after his intimacy with Marten fizzled out that he heard she had met the man who would turn her life upside down.
Gordon had spent more than 20 years in prison in America for a ‘sociopathic, sadistic’ rape, committed when he was 14.
Marten met him in an east London shop. It was a turning point. Francis’s contact with Marten had already dwindled but then she cut herself off from her wider circle of friends.
The spiral leading to five births, a death and an unfathomable tragedy was set in motion.
‘I didn’t know Gordon,’ says Francis. ‘Friends who met him said he was really quiet with them and kept himself to himself.
‘I definitely feel as if she was looking for love at that point in her life when she met him.
‘I don’t know what bonded them together but he seems to have replaced something she was missing because she became quite different when she met him.’
The last he heard of his former girlfriend’s whereabouts – prior to becoming a mother – was that she was living in a campervan outside a home in Hackney Wick, with Gordon, and had then left, owing rent money.
A decade on, Francis is left shocked by all that has unfolded, grappling with questions to which he has no answers.
‘It’s horrific what happened. But I do feel very sad for her because she did need help,’ he says.
‘She did like to have fun, she liked to go out – but I don’t think her drug use was in itself a big problem.
‘I saw more that it was something that, when she got to a very dark place in terms of whatever issues she hadn’t been able to resolve, was a crutch.’
What makes Francis sadder is the knowledge of who Marten once was.
‘There was a real, genuine human being there,’ he says. ‘She was very compassionate, very caring. I don’t see how that person could do what they did together…’