More than seven weeks after their burning car was found abandoned at the roadside near Bolton, Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon have been arrested on England’s south coast.
The couple had spent weeks living off-grid in an apparent attempt to evade authorities concerned for the welfare of their newborn baby, which is yet to be found.
The couple, aged 35 and 48 respectively, were apprehended in Brighton’s Stanmer Villas on Monday night, police said, and a large-scale search is under way for their baby, the sex of which is not yet known.
While there were various sightings of the family in the days immediately after their car was discovered on the M61, police had since been left to scour hundreds of hours of CCTV footage as part of their efforts to track down the couple.
Officers were seeking the couple over concerns that their baby had not been seen by a medical professional since it was born in early January, with detectives finding signs that Ms Marten – who is from an aristocratic family – had given birth in the car which was left abandoned days later.
Shortly after the couple disappeared it transpired that Gordon was jailed in the late 1980s in Florida, US, after raping and assaulting a woman when he was 14.
The search began after the couple’s car was found near Junction 4 of the M61, just after 6:30pm on 5 January. They are believed to have fled on foot, before paying in cash to travel to Liverpool and then another 200 miles to Essex, likely by taxi.
The family were seen by a member of the public in Harwich at about 9am on 7 January, with a woman believed to be Ms Marten caught on CCTV outside Harwich International Port. Officers also received a number of confirmed sightings of the family in Colchester on 6 and 7 January.
Officers then believe the family were at East Ham Station between 10:30am and 12:30pm on 7 January, before taking a taxi later that day to Whitechapel Road, where Mr Gordon is thought to have purchased camping equipment from Argos.
At 11.46pm they got a taxi to Haringey, before taking another taxi to Newhaven, in East Sussex, where they were dropped off outside the port at 4.56am. They were later seen sheltering under an overpass at around 6am, before walking along Cantercrow Hill and into the fields beyond.
The couple were found some seven weeks later less than 15 kilometres away, at Brighton’s Stanmer Villas.
They have been arrested on suspicion of child neglect as authorities search for their baby, Detective Superintendent Lewis Bashford said on Tuesday.
“We are looking at open land, outbuildings where they may have placed the baby while they were in the local area before we arrested them,” said DSI Bashford.
