Former teacher guilty of sexually abusing and murdering baby boy he wanted to adopt - CPS

I’ve just read the Guardian article.

This really jumped out at me: ‘Varley babysat nieces, nephews and the children of friends many times’.

You have to hope that the proper investigations have already been undertaken or at least begun to make sure those children now have any necessary support in place. In fact whole families may need it.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/15/jamie-varley-abused-murdered-baby-son-preston-davey

You mean articles like this?

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15902423/Russian-spy-orchestrated-arson-attacks-PM-started-wild-conspiracy-theory-revenge-two-Ukrainian-rent-boys.html

By the way, I intensely dislike the minimisation of the appalling scourge of human sex trafficking to terms such as ‘rent boys’ and ‘bum boys’.

No-one knows what agency these boys and young men really have, what threats they are under, and what harm they or their families are suffering.

I've been reading more, the DM has an interviewup with the maternal grandma and quotes from the birth mother. I just fail to see how pushing for adoption was in any way in Prestons best interests - he was thriving with the experienced foster carer and then very quickly introduced to these men who lived in a different city and handed over to them! With little contact with the foster mother who had basically raised him along with frequently visiting his sibling, grandma and birth mother. Could he not have stayed with the foster parents longer? The council have stated they didn't have any evidence of the maternal grandma formally asking for more time until she could take Preston in.. personally thinking the SS didn't note down that request from her and as she was so poorly from chemo she didn't push it as she probably was happy Preston was with the experienced foster carers. It sounds like they were all against him going for adoption. Again, the adoption is best mentality. I don't disagree that it probably usually is best - but clearly not in this case, with him having a birth family and a sibling who were willing to take him in. Don't SS usually want to keep bio families together- isn't that what we hear?

I've thankfully never had to raise concerns to SS about children so far in my work with teens and tweens or personal life. But I have experience with shitty NHS professionals being negligent to my elderly parent - their tune changes when you are pushy and follow up on things and ask for your concerns and opinions to be recorded in the notes and with other professionals. So my learning from poor Preston is to act the same if I have concerns about a child - keep following up and re raising concerns and CCing in police, higher levels of management in SS if I still think things aren't being put into place properly.

Thank you for this post, it's valuable to get insight from someone with experience of adopting.

Re this comment, can I ask: 'it has certainly changed since I adopted in 2001. Then, the focus was on the traditional family set up, with unusual set ups only being considered for the most hard to place children. Now they place babies in these families - it's a risk they are willing to take for their EDI stats.'

• is this necessarily a bad thing when it comes to lesbian couples? I feel personally that the issue is coming from lumping together lesbian and gay couples in one category by adoption services. 2 men adopting (or a lone man for that matter) pose an inflated risk of sexual abuse which 2 women don't.

Adoption policies re male adoption definitely sound dangerous...

I think the question is men specifically. A single male paedophile could also prey on children this way. A woman being present does dilute the danger at least somewhat. Ban adoption by men alone maybe- whether gay male couples or single men.

I don't think gay PEOPLE adopting should be stopped.

Imo the problem is men. I don't think all-male adoption should be allowed : meaning I'd exclude both gay men, and also single men

Child murderers don’t do well in prison.

Word will get out and retribution will be served!

Hopefully every single day of their miserable lives until the END.

Op must be a troll...surely???

As you say, even with the most benevolent mindset, if I believed the best of everyone and wasn't the hardened cynic that I am, if someone told you or made it clear to you with oddly worded negative language they were really badly struggling to the point of anger within the first few days of a young baby being placed with them, I think most people would be concerned about that child's welfare.

Sure, you'd probably not be thinking "and now obviously they're going to sexually abuse that baby" in those first few days but you'd likely be concerned enough that the baby's welfare may be at risk from something like shaken baby if someone who expressed they're feeling like that was to snap, yes. This isn't just "I'm really knackered". I think a lot of 'care' seems to have been centred more on JMF and JV themselves, not on Preston's needs.

I think JV had done his research and had indeed planned to pull out all the "PND" stops. He seems to have seeded a lot of false narratives ahead of what he actually did so he could explain them later. No doubt thought he was very clever, the vile little shit.

Reading that their home was often described as a ‘show house’ knocked me sick too - cold and sterile no doubt - controlling and soulless.
In God’s safekeeping beautiful baby Preston and bless all children living in hell behind closed doors 🙏🏼

It's insane, utterly insane, and throughout the trial, more and more warning signs turned out to have been ignored. This is how shaken baby syndrome happens, but no-one seems to have known. Had they never heard of it?
JV's abuse of Preston was sexually-motivated but it was also motivated by anger. He wasn't hiding it at all.

And why were they allowed to cut out the foster mother? How was this child-centred?

I wonder if people around JV were assuming he should be treated like a new mother with post-natal depression. In reality, the risk profile is completely different.

Yes, exactly. This was in the first few DAYS! Precisely when the professionals should have been on it.

And let's not forget, Preston had been cleared to live with them, but was not yet officially adopted. They were still in what should have been a monitoring period. They were approved after their 'training' in the Jan, only met him in I think the February,just over a month later he was living with two guys one of whom, the main carer, has made it very clear they didn't know how to look after him and nobody is stepping in.

The abuse and negative talk starts within days, they're doing things like having baths with Preston (a BIG no no, but not sure if any pics of that was sent to anyone but JMF), and they cut out the foster mother who could have helped with the transition super quickly, which she was rightly suspicious of. And nobody does anything, notices any of this, takes her fears seriously or takes a closer look or thinks "there's a massive problem here we need to flag ASAP?" Remember, they don't need proof to do that, only concern and curiosity.

Three months later, JV had r*ped and killed that baby boy after four months of tormenting him, with JMF pretending not to be complicit or "too busy at work" to notice anything? This baby's been to hospital several times during the placement but never before and nobody thinks "hmm, this is a child whose just been placed with these two and it's been quite frequent, best flag it"? (I think someone from the hospital did on the elbow injury).

He seems to have been very open via messaging apps about exactly how difficult he was finding it to friends and family.

I understand no-one wants to even consider the thought that their son or brother or friend could be a paedophile, but were no professionals involved? From those texts alone, this was a case of shaken baby syndrome waiting to happen.

Viewing this through as benign and naive lens as possible, you have two sleep-deprived men who seem totally unprepared for sleeplessness and these men are caring for a baby they factually have not had the time to bond with. This baby isn't sleeping well, because he is distressed about a new environment, so there is no end date on when the lack of sleep for the adoptive parents might end. This really should have had someone thinking about risk factors for shaken baby syndrome.

This syndrome is primarily seen in children younger than age two, with the majority of cases occurring before the baby’s first birthday. The average victim is between three and eight months old. However, children up to age four have been victims of this abuse. The perpetrator of the abuse is most often the father, boyfriend of the mother, female babysitter or the mother.

www.aans.org/patients/conditions-treatments/shaken-baby-syndrome/

But "dead meat"? And she didn't notice anything wrong with that phrasing? My alarm bells would be going off if it was any friend or family of mine, and I'm sure my friends and family would if I came out with something like that in that circumstance. I'd be instantly worried by that phrase, no matter how 'dark' our humour normally was. Wouldn't you?

There seems to be quite a few people who let Preston down by not questioning JV.

When he wasn't sexually abusing him, he was treating him cruelly in other ways. For example, spinning him aggressively in a teacup ride at a park, so hard that Preston's eyes were rolling and unable to focus, pushing him on a very rocky path in his pram shaking him viciously. He filmed and shared such videos with others and no one asked him what the fuck he thought he was playing at being so aggressive with a small baby.

He told a colleague that he was having dark thoughts about hurting or drowning Preston, but the colleague didnt report that until Preston had been murdered.

It's infuriating.

I mean, you'd kind of expect that of a baby wouldn't you? They know he has acid reflux, every adult knows that babies struggle to sleep, they know from the foster mother what his patterns are and he's in a new and unfamiliar place. And yes, it's going to be a shock to the system whoever you are.

But "dead meat"? And she didn't notice anything wrong with that phrasing? My alarm bells would be going off if it was any friend or family of mine, and I'm sure my friends and family would if I came out with something like that in that circumstance. I'd be instantly worried by that phrase, no matter how 'dark' our humour normally was. Wouldn't you? Sure, I might express that it was pissing me off or I was so tired or whateve, expressing normal frustrations, but "he's dead meat today?"

And nobody's flagging within days of them being placed that this guy doesn't know how to look after a baby AT ALL ,is already expressing odd sentiment and he's going to be doing it by himself when JMF goes back to work? And yet somehow they're in the 2% of adopters who get to adopt a child under one? Really? Something seems very off here.

Yes, the BBC say JV was commenting on Preston not sleeping within days of the boy being placed at their house.

After undergoing an assessment and familiarisation process Preston was adopted and began living with the defendants on 1 April 2023.

But just days later Varley, who took a year off work as head of year at high school to adopt a child, confessed he was struggling with a lack of sleep due to the baby constantly waking in the night, a jury heard.

On 6 April, he texted his sister, a baby sleep trainer: "He's dead meat today. Didn't sleep last night after 11.30. Up every, one and a half hours."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyv2p8ldzlyo

Agree 100% A book or a journalist.

Nobody expressing anger is going to go after these filthy specimens with a pitchfork.

But there is such a thing as righteous anger and there is no harm at all in expressing it. There is, however, harm in pleading the case that these two were once babies, etc.

As you say, there is a justice system to deal with them. It's not a mercy system that ignores the horrific crimes the convicted criminals committed.

Sentimentality about criminals is a waste of energy and offensive to the victims.

Yes, that's kind of what I'd always thought. So why would you place a young nonverbal baby like Preston in the care of two very inexperienced men? Did they give THAT good an account of themselves, really? JMF claimed in his testimony (yes, I know quite a bit of it is trying to blame everyone but themselves) that their adoption "training" was mostly online, and didn't mention safeguarding (obvious bollocks, esp as JV was meant to know all about it). But how true is that? What is the 'training' once the supposedly extensive vetting is completed?

I am sorry but you are mistaken. This is what one adoption agency has on it's website

To understand the scarcity of newborn adoption opportunities, it is essential to examine the statistics. In the past year, only 96 children under the age of one were adopted in the UK. This figure makes up just approximately 2% of the total number of over 4,000 adoptions that took place. It is worth noting that this number includes both international adoption and surrogacy arrangements, of which the split remains unknown but is likely to be a significant proportion within the 96 children.

Ah, I see. Okay. No, I don't agree with that in the sense of he box-ticking because "woke"as the reason for his being adopted in the first place, although I'd assumed it was more about adoption generally being seen as the most desired outcome rather than to fulfil some kind of quota.

I think most were talking more about the adoption placement itself though and what factors influence whether or not someone is deemed a 'good match' for the needs of the child and if that process is anywhere near good enough.

These two men clearly had very little experience of young babies in reality, the odd comments JV was making about him being "dead meat" and his rage over sleeping stuff was within a matter of days arriving I think, with the neighbour hearing Preston screaming. And nobody is keeping a closer eye on them all in this brand new placement?

I'd expect new adoptive parents to find his sleeping problems hard whoever they were, but the foster mother had made sure she on hand to help smooth the process as I'd expect (she was very experienced with fostering, after all). She was someone who would have known all about how to soothe Preston and they excluded her immediately instead of asking for her help and started 'punishing' Preston instead, within a matter of days.

Not enough people wanting to adopt babies? I've always heard the opposite: that there are almost no babies available for lots of would-be adopters, and that that's why a whole traffic developed in foreign adoptions.

But maybe the demand for adopted babies has collapsed with the availability of IVF and surrogates?

@hihelenhi sorry, meant to include you. This is the sort of comments I was referring to.

I know she wanted to see Preston, to see how he was getting on I suppose, and she felt they were blocking any contact, which worried her.

I do think that keeping a child out of sight of anyone who might report problems is a red flag. There have been so many cases where that's happened with a child who was being hurt by its carers - it seems like that is a huge factor in the abuse continuing and getting worse.