Talk:Disappearance of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon

Update needed in January 2024
I have added a (future) update needed tag because this article will need to be updated in January 2024, once this couple go on trial. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 06:45, 25 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Proposing the immediate deletion of the following paragraph until after completion of the trial,
 * "In 1989, aged 14, he broke into a neighbour's property and raped her at knifepoint. He was found guilty of "one count of armed kidnapping, four separate counts of armed sexual battery and one count of burglary with a deadly weapon". He served 20 years in prison before being deported back to the UK in 2010."
 * In accordance with the CPS who have stated the defendants are entitled to a fair trial!
 * https://www.cps.gov.uk/london-north/news/authorises-charges-against-constance-marten-and-mark-gordon Jaymailsays (talk) 22:50, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
 * This is irrelevant to the current trial and does not affect its fairness. It is mentioned as it provides more information and some background/history on one of the subjects of the article. greyzxq  talk 00:41, 20 January 2024 (UTC)

not relevant???
the couple's four other children were taken into care. . . 70.26.172.188 (talk) 21:59, 7 March 2024 (UTC)


 * She is getting old, and the 5th one could be the last one she will ever have...
 * She will do anything to keep the baby by her side!
 * No matter the outcome New hordak from 2018 (talk) 16:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Sentence on Constance Marten's parents
The sentence describing Marten's family has a strange formation, along the lines of "Both her father and her mother had three sons, including her brother, Tobias." This implies uncertainty about the total number of siblings. Father had three sons. Mother had three sons. One son was named Tobias and was the brother of Marten. I believe the sentence creates an apparent logic puzzle out simple facts: Constance Marten's parents had three sons together as well as a daughter. The sentence should be rewritten to reflect this. Am I correct, or is the situation in fact more complex? Dettifoss (talk) 01:23, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Notability - depends on questions not answered
There is so much missing for this story to make sense. Why did they go off-grid? Why did the police start a man-hunt? People are allowed to go off by themselves without saying where they're going. After the baby was born, they were obliged to register the birth and get medical checks, so then they had committed an offence, but the police hunt began before the birth, so the baby was not the reason for it. The impression left by the news reporting was that her noble family didn't like her being with a black man and in some way forced them underground. What did the baby actually die of, and would it likely have lived if they had not been in hiding?

I'm struggling to be clear about why this story is notable at all. OK, it briefly got a lot of media attention, but if you leave out the sensatonalist stuff about her rich family and his race and criminal record, we're left with a sad but not particularly notable story about a cot death - unless the unanswered questions I just mentioned give the whole thing some bigger significance. Doric Loon (talk) 15:08, 23 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Notability, for wikipedia purposes, depends mostly on it receiving significant media coverage.
 * To you a woman from a rich family and her ex-convict boyfriend hiding their newborn child from authorities might not be notable news, but the media thinks otherwise.
 * The fact that the child was found deceased later, might suggest that the original attention this case has received was not entirely undue. 84.198.225.126 (talk) 09:36, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I think you have misunderstood the notability rules. An event which attracts a brief flash of media coverage, even in serious outlets, but has no longer-term significance, is NOT automatically notable for Wikipedia purposes. The fact that a topic is newsworthy does not make it notable (see WP:NOTNEWS), especially when the most intensive news coverage was in deprecated sources like the Daily Mail (see WP:RSDEPRECATED) and they mainly made their headlines from sensationalizing details as I mentioned before. Most murders get newspaper headlines but not Wikipedia articles. So for notability, I'm looking for this setting some precedent or having wider implications, and not just being a random sad story of a family drama with a tragic end.
 * I didn't say the police hunt was undue, I said it has not been shown that it was not undue - there are gaps in the story as it is told here, and since the case has now been heard in a public court, that information should be available. My point was that if the gaps were filled, a case for notability might be easier to make, but it has not yet been made. Doric Loon (talk) 10:31, 27 June 2024 (UTC)