The victim of a convicted rapist who is on the run with his aristocrat partner and their baby today told how he threatened to kill her sleeping children during a four-hour attack in 1989.
The mother-of-two was held captive during the burglary with a pair of garden shears and a kitchen knife.
And she has now urged police to track down Mark Gordon, 48, and his partner Constance Marten, 35, who fled two weeks ago with their secret one-day-old baby.
But their car exploded into flames on the M61 near Bolton on January 5 and since then they have travelled to Liverpool and then Harwich in Essex, Colchester and east London. The baby has not received any medical attention, it is understood.
Sex offender Mark Gordon and his aristocratic partner Constance Marten have been missing since January 5 after their car broke down and caught fire on the M61
A mugshot from 2010 of Gordon published by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
Gordon, from Birmingham, was 14 at the time of the attack and 16 when he was jailed for 40 years for breaking into his next-door neighbour’s home in Florida, where he was living with his family.
Wielding hedge cutters and a knife, he broke in through a bathroom window and pounced on the 30-year-old, threatening to kill her two children sleeping in the next room.
The victim, now aged 64, anonymously told the Mail: ‘I stepped out of my room and he told me not to scream or he’d kill my kids.
‘It was over four hours.
‘He’d been watching me for months from different places and he had it really well-planned.’
Over the next four and a half hours, Gordon forced her to carry out a series of sex acts while wearing a nylon stocking to disguise his identity.
She said: ‘I’ve had post-traumatic stress disorder my entire life.
‘After this happened 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 the scene following the attack on April 29, 1989, but within weeks he struck again, breaking into a second neighbour’s home.
She recalled: ‘There was another neighbour of ours and three weeks after he’d been in our house, he went to their house and broke in.
‘This time he expected the man to be gone and he wasn’t which saved the woman’s life.
‘He [had] taken a knife and put a knife on each bedroom door.’
The homeowner in the second raid, Patrick Nash, told today how he awoke to find Gordon standing in his bedroom armed with a shovel at around 7am on May 21, 1989.
Police released this picture of Mark Gordon and Constance Marten outside East Ham station at around 11.45am on January 7
Constance Marten – whose nickname was Toots – comes from an aristocratic family
He said: ‘I wasn’t supposed to be home in the morning when this happened, I was supposed to leave before dawn.
‘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. I always sleep in the position closest to the door.
‘He had taken cutlery and placed it around the house so he would have access to weapons. My son was an infant at the time and he was in the room next to us.’
Gordon battered Mr Nash around the head with the heavy shovel leaving him with serious head injuries before he fled the scene.
US police finally caught up with him a month later on June 13, 1989, when he confessed to both raids and was jailed for 40 years.
In 2010, having served half of his sentence, he was deported to the UK and put on the sex offenders register.
Gordon then struck up a relationship with Miss Marten who cut off all ties with her friends and aristocratic family, who are linked to the royals.
It comes as Miss Marten’s father Napier, a former page to the late Queen, said he and his family were ‘deeply concerned’ for the welfare of his ‘darling’ daughter and have urged her to come home.