The officer in charge of the search for baby Victoria has reflected on the investigation, saying he “winced” when he first saw CCTV of Constance Marten picking her up like a “rag doll”.
Detective Superintendent Lewis Basford, from Scotland Yard, recalled his reaction to the first sighting of the newborn child.
She was captured in a kebab shop in East Ham in London, two days after Marten and her partner Mark Gordon ditched their burning car near Bolton more than 200 miles away.
Mr Basford told PA news agency: “That’s the first image we know baby Victoria is there and she’s alive.
“But then to see the way they handled her, not as a precious little being that’s only days old, I hate to say it, almost as a rag doll-type approach picking her up.
“It makes you wince whilst watching it – and it does me.
“I remember picking up my little girl, when you first do it, you’re scared to death and there was none of that.”
While they were on the run, Victoria had been kept largely under wraps, beneath her mother’s jacket – or carried in a Lidl bag for life which Marten denied.
On March 1 2023, two Met officers discovered Victoria’s badly decomposed body inside the Lidl bag filled with rubbish on an allotment in Brighton.
Mr Basford said: “Whilst we always prepare for possible outcomes, it’s not ’til it happens, you really get the sucker punch in and it really kind of hits home.
“And it’s the days and weeks after that you sort of start to comprehend it.”
On the defendant’s behaviour, Mr Basford said: “The actions of Mark and Constance are the reason that Victoria is not here today.
“I think whatever day and whatever time baby Victoria passed away, they made the decision to discard her in a bag covered with rubbish, litter, mud, alcohol cans.
“They never wanted baby Victoria to be found by the police.
“They clearly kept baby Victoria close, throughout those weeks and months.
“But ultimately, Constance and Mark, they’re intelligent enough to know that as the decomposition of baby Victoria occurred, the likely outcome was that we would never know exactly how baby Victoria died.”
Scotland Yard became involved soon after Greater Manchester Police launched the initial missing person inquiry on January 5 2023.
Marten and Gordon had previously lived in London and the Met had “extensive background and interaction” with them, Mr Basford said.
The discovery of a placenta in the couple’s burnt-out car raised concerns because there were “clear indications” of domestic violence before their four older children were taken into care.
Tracing people on the move nationally – and possibly internationally – opened up “huge lines of inquiry”, the officer said.
Yet in this case police could not rely on traditional techniques through electronic devices or financial “footprints”.
When Scotland Yard took over the investigation on January 12 2023, Mr Basford always had the “feeling of playing catch-up”.
By then, Marten and Gordon had already left London to live in a tent on the South Downs where Victoria died.
More than 100 Met officers were involved in the initial stage of the investigation with more than 1,000 deployed in the search for baby Victoria after the defendants were arrested.
Mr Basford hailed the “fantastic” support from other forces and the media, which put Victoria “at the heart” of messages to the public.
It was a member of the public who recognised Marten and Gordon from the high-profile appeal and called 999, leading to their arrests in Brighton February 27 2023.
Ms Basford said there had been a “few emotional rollercoasters” in those last days.
The first came when he received a phone call from Sussex Police to say the defendants had been arrested, but the baby was not with them.
He said: “As a police officer, you take yourself down a route where you start to play the percentages and the outcome positions.
“Whilst we always remained positive – the reason we deployed so many hundreds of officers down there in Sussex was because we still felt baby Victoria could be alive – there’s always that position where you know what the possible outcome could be.”
The second “rollercoaster” moment came just after 2.30pm on March 1 2023.
Mr Basford said he had just told the media there would be no more updates that day when he received a call to say that a baby’s body had been found.
He said: “In the hours after that, to understand the conditions she was left in, you’re a father yourself, it really hits home.”
He went on: “The final piece for me was just how quiet it was, as I came out at about seven o’clock at night.
“I’m walking out of Sussex headquarters to do the briefing to the national media and to the members of the public to say that we’d found a body and you could hear a pin drop. I was quite taken aback by that.”
Considering how Victoria was left showed the defendants’ four other children were “lucky” to go into foster care, he suggested.
“Whilst we heard a narrative from them as a couple that they were a loving family, and they were always there to do best for baby Victoria, the reality is, if that was true, and even in trauma, that is not a dignified way to look after and put to rest a baby,” the officer said.
He added: “What Constance and Mark have shown throughout this investigation, throughout their initial interviews when we found them and they had the chance to tell us where baby Victoria was, to what they’ve said in court, shows that they’re living in their own world of lies, and beliefs, and that anything that they deem right is right.
“There was no acceptance of society and standards that we judge ourselves against….Everyone is wrong, apart from them.”
Even though Victoria’s body was too decomposed to establish a cause of death, Mr Basford said it was ultimately down to her parents’ “selfish actions”.
After a six-month Old Bailey retrial, Marten and Gordon were found guilty of manslaughter on Monday.
