Huge Reward Offered to Solve ‘Runaway Family’ Mystery

It started when the abandoned car of a couple with a newborn baby was found burning on the side of a motorway near Manchester, northern England, on the 5th of January.

But almost a month after starting a missing persons investigation, police are still trying to track down Constance Marten, 35, her boyfriend Mark Gordon, 48, and her newborn baby. 

This week the Metropolitan Police, who said the couple appear to be trying to “evade the authorities”, offered a £10,000 reward to help in the search.

Officers believe Marten gave birth without medical assistance shortly after New Year's Day and only days before their car broke down and caught fire, burning most of their possessions. 

Since then police believe they have been moving around England living rough in a tent in sub-zero temperatures. They were last spotted in Newhaven, East Sussex, southeast England, on the 9th of January after they were seen buying a tent, sleeping bags and camping equipment from a branch of Argos in east London two days before. 

Previously, they were caught on CCTV in several parts of southeast England including in east London pushing a buggy and then in the port of Harwich, although police do not believe they have left the UK. 

Police have said the couple are likely to be in possession of a  "considerable" amount of cash due to Marten’s inherited wealth.

The couple reportedly became isolated from friends and family since 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,” is from a wealthy aristocratic background with links to the royal family and grew up in a mansion in Dorset, southwest England. In the late 2000s she studied Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at Leeds University including one year in Cairo and, according to a report in the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper, she “spent time volunteering at a football project with street children in Nepal, and was in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian uprising”.”

Gordon was born in the UK but moved to Florida in the US as a teenager. When he was 14 he was jailed for 20 years for rape, and so was put on the sex offenders register when he was deported to the UK in 2010. 

When the pair met, everything changed, according to police. "At that point the affluent, normal, social aspects of Constance's life, they stop. Then it is just Mark and Constance. They're estranged from family from what we can understand,” Det Ch Insp Stephen Payne told BBC News.

One of Marten’s friends, who did not want to be named, told VICE World News that “Toots” was “close to his heart”, but said he was unhappy with “the sensationalist headlines that have gone out already with the whole aristocrat, sex offender narrative” and thought they could deter the family from seeking help.

He said: “Would you want to get help if your partner is being highlighted for something he paid his dues for?” 

Last month Napier Marten, Constance’s father, made an appeal for her to return. "Even though we remain estranged at the moment, I stand by as I have always done, and as the family has always done, to do whatever is necessary for your safe return to us,” he said.

“I beseech you to find a way to turn yourself and your wee one into the police as soon as possible so you and he or she can be protected. Only then can a process of healing and recovery begin.”