My rape ordeal, by the victim of attacker on run with aristocrat
THe victim of a rapist on the run with his aristocratic partner and their baby told yesterday how he threatened to kill her sleeping children.
The mother of two was held captive for four hours with a pair of garden shears and a kitchen knife during the burglary in 1989.
She has now urged police to find Mark Gordon, 48, and his partner Constance Marten, 35.
The couple fled two weeks ago with their day-old baby, but after their car burst into flames on the M61 near Bolton on January 5, they travelled to Liverpool, Harwich in essex, Colchester and east London.
Their baby is not thought to have received any medical attention.
Gordon, from Birmingham, was 14 at the time of the attack and 16 when he was jailed for 40 years for breaking into his neighbour’s home in Florida, where he was living with his family.
Wielding the hedge cutters and knife, he broke in through a bathroom window and pounced on the 30-yearold, threatening to kill her two chilan’s
‘He told me he’d kill my kids’
dren sleeping in the next room. The victim, now 64, told the Mail: ‘He told me not to scream or he’d kill my kids. He’d been watching me for months and he had it really well planned.’
Over the next four and a half hours, Gordon, wearing a nylon stocking to disguise his identity, forced her to carry out a series of sex acts.
She said: ‘I’ve had post-traumatic stress disorder my entire life. It was like my life stopped. I lost everything. I lost my home because I wasn’t able to do anything or sell it. I was emotionally just not even there. I couldn’t function. I couldn’t think.’
Gordon fled after the attack on April 29, 1989, but weeks later he broke into another neighbour’s home.
The first victim, who does not wish to be named, recalled: ‘Three weeks after he’d been in our house he went to their house and broke in.
‘He expected the man to be gone and he wasn’t, which saved the womlife.’ She said Gordon had put knives by each bedroom door so he would have access to weapons.
The homeowner in the second raid, Patrick Nash, told yesterday how he awoke to find Gordon standing in his bedroom armed with a shovel at around 7am on May 21, 1989.
He said: ‘I wasn’t supposed to be home when this happened. My wife wakes up and screams.
‘I start to get up and I’m hit in the head with a shovel. I miraculously was able to chase him out of the house. It was just reflex.’
Gordon left Mr Nash with serious head injuries. US police caught him a month later. He confessed to both raids and was jailed for 40 years.
In 2010, halfway into his sentence, he was deported to the UK and put on the sex offenders’ register.
He then began a relationship with Miss Marten who cut off all ties with friends and family. Her father Napier, a former page to the late Queen, said they were ‘deeply concerned’ for her.