There's a major feature on him in the Daily Mail today, pasted below.
The two things that stand out are the surprise that they were adopting by people who knew them - a colleague said the couple didn't appear to be in a stable relationship, and that Varley kept videoing the abuse for social media likes. For example even playing Kylie Minogue songs as a soundtrack to the videos.
https://www.dailymail.com/crime-desk/article-15941837/Jamie-Varley-making-monster-Preston-Davey.html
Many words have been written and spoken about former schoolteacher Jamie Varley who sexually abused and murdered his adopted baby son.
The most common was ‘evil.’ Or rather ‘pure evil’, to quote the detective who led the investigation into the death of 13-month-old Preston Davey.
What Varley did, many believe, sets him apart from other paedophiles and even merciless killers.
It is an argument informed, not just by raw emotion – the visceral response to the horrific details of his son’s sustained torture which emerged in court – but also the findings of a widely respected academic study into the nature of evil, something that has occupied the minds of philosophers and psychiatrists down the ages.
One incident in the fleeting, wretched existence of baby Preston is especially relevant in this context.
The date is mid-June 2023, about a month before he was killed. Varley’s partner John McGowan-Fazakerley is away on a business trip when Varley decides to video a clearly exhausted Preston. He deliberately keeps him awake by playing the soundtrack of Moana, a Disney film, loudly in the background and keeping the bright lights on.
At one point, as Preston begins to drift off in his cot, Varley suddenly yells ‘Boo’ at him. Preston opens his eyes, startled, confused and frightened.
Here’s the point: back in 2013, research was carried out into the darkest sides of the human mind at the University of British Columbia in Canada in which a computer game was set up that allowed participants to ‘punish’ a competitor with a loud noise through their headphones.
Some volunteers choose to do so enthusiastically.
‘There wasn’t just a willingness to do it but a motivation to enjoy, to put in some extra effort to have the opportunity to hurt other individuals,’ revealed the Columbia team’s paper in the journal Psychological Science.
Isn’t this the equivalent of what Varley did to Preston in his cot?
Taking perverse pleasure in such behaviour, according to the Columbia team, was indicative of psychopathy, a ‘callous insensitivity and immunity to the feelings of others’. And when combined with two other unpleasant character traits - Machiavellianism ( ‘cooly manipulative’) and narcissism (‘selfish and vain’) - they formed a so-called ‘Dark Triad’, colloquially dubbed ‘a triple whammy of nastiness’.
Varley, 37, displayed all three character traits. In spades.
The wider tragedy of Preston Davey is that the role of social workers and medical professionals has once again been called into question.
Three times in the weeks before he died, Preston was taken to hospital with injuries including bruises and a fractured elbow.
Three times these injuries were explained away by Varley, raising suspicion that there might have been a reluctance on the part of medical staff to intervene for fear of being accused of homophobia.
But it is the behaviour of Varley that haunts us.
On the day he died, on July 27, 2023, Preston had been sexually assaulted twice by secondary school teacher Varley, 37, in an unspeakable manner, the details of which are unprintable in a family newspaper.
Sustaining unsurvivable internal injuries, doctors were immediately suspicious of Varley’s claims that Preston accidentally drowned in the bath while his back was turned. A post-mortem confirmed he had no water in his lungs and that he had been smothered – either by a hand over his nose or mouth, or, more likely, the insertion of an object or body part into his mouth.
The examination also found more than 30 visible bruises and other internal injuries, including an unusual bruise to the back of his throat and another to his bladder, plus a human bite mark to his bottom.
A whole life sentence is the most severe penalty available in the criminal justice system and is reserved for those who commit the most heinous crimes.
Varley has now joined around 70 other infamous figures (Wayne Couzens, Levi Bellfield, Jeremy Bamber and Lucy Letby to name but a few) who will never be released after being sentenced at Preston Crown Court last week.
He occupies his own special place on the sickening spectrum of paedophilia. Sexual abuse of infant babies is extremely rare. Statistics are not kept on such depravity.
This was accompanied by what the judge called ‘prolonged and multiple incidents of serious cruelty’ and ‘sadistic behaviour’, over and above the intrinsic wickedness present in all such cases, and is perhaps most disturbing element of the ‘Dark Triad’ identified in the Columbia study.
Yet there was nothing in his background that emerged in court to suggest the horror which would unfold at the ‘Instagram-perfect’ home in Blackpool he shared with McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, and where, to the outside world, at least, they led a respectable lifestyle with professional jobs.
Varley was a teacher, head of year and safeguarding lead (yes, safeguarding) at South Shore Academy. McGowan-Fazakerley, a former public schoolboy, was an accounts manager for a finance firm.
Almost always, though, there is something dark in the past of individuals like Jamie Varley. Usually, it comes to light during their formative years and recalled only with hindsight after something happens later in their life.
In fact there was something, even though it has gone unreported until today.
Varley, in contrast to his partner’s comfortable middle-class upbringing, was raised on a council estate in Newark, the second youngest in a family of six children, who moved to Blackpool when he was in his teens. No father is named on his birth certificate.
They were a ‘nightmare’, according to a neighbour who lived next door to their Victorian mid-terrace house in the Lancashire seaside town.
‘He [Varley] was horrible,’ said the woman, a mother of five who has fostered around a dozen children.
‘I had to report him to the police and to the housing association for anti-social behaviour and criminal damage but he was never arrested.’
But there were more sinister incidents which stuck in her mind after all these years, and made her fearful for the safety of her own kids at the time.
‘He started shouting nasty abuse and ended up throwing lit cigarettes at their toys, trying to set them on fire,’ she said.
'I wouldn’t let my children play in the front of the house because of him, not unless I was on the doorstep. When his family moved out [in 2014], we put the flags out. How on earth he got to be a secondary school teacher, I really don’t know.’
In fact, he started work at South Shore as a design and technology (DT) technician before going to university as a mature student and qualifying as a textiles teacher, where there were more red flags.
Varley was off work for about six weeks in around 2019. Colleagues were told his absence was related to mental health issues. A nervous breakdown was mentioned.
On another occasion, at the time of Covid, he couldn’t come in because he had apparently hurt his back falling from a ladder or drainpipe spying on his boyfriend (not McGowan-Fazakerley) whom he suspected of cheating on him.
The reason it became common knowledge, we have been told, was that Varley’s narcissistic personality, evident throughout the four months he was Preston’s adoptive father, compelled him to tell everyone.
It was on the weekend of March 31, when nine-month-old Preston Davey, curly-haired and adorable, was formally handed into the care of Jamie Varley and John McGowan-Fazakerley.
The couple had met at a night out in Canal Street, in Manchester’s gay village, and were now living together with their pet dog Maximus, a miniature Pinscher.
Hanging on the wall of their home was a sketch they had drawn of the three of them walking together from behind.
It was a charade.
‘Varley was a very skilled manipulator of a narrative,’ said criminologist David Wilson. ‘He was very cunning. He knew how to cover up. He knew how to hide.’
The trial judge, Mr Justice Turner, said he could not rule out ‘the possibility’ Preston’s abuse was ‘premeditated from the moment of adoption’.
There are certainly a number of things which, when viewed through the prism of the judge’s comment, could support that version of events.
You do not become a paedophile overnight, after all.
For example, few at his school knew he had even started an adoption process and only found out after it had been approved, one colleague told the Daily Mail.
‘I got the impression he wasn’t in a stable relationship, then all of a sudden he was adopting,’ said the colleague.
‘It all happened so quickly.’
Police believe he also manipulated his safeguarding role for his own ends which would, no doubt, have been an impressive entry on his application to the adoption agency, adding weight to the suspicion that Preston’s abuse was indeed ‘premeditated’ all along.
Surely it was no coincidence either that it was Varley who stayed at home to look after Preston, ostensibly because his partner earned more than him.
Almost from day one, Preston was used by Varley ‘as a plaything, as his property’, detectives said.
The ordeal he underwent during the next four months, some of it filmed, would test the faith of anyone who saw the footage.
We have already mentioned the sleep deprivation Preston was subjected to.
Other ‘deeply disturbing videos’ – the words of the judge – were also recovered from Varley’s phone.
One showed him spinning Preston full-throttle in a ‘teacup’ in the park, causing his eyes to roll in his head. The distressing scene was set to the Kylie Minogue hit Spinning Around.
On another occasion, he set up his phone to record Preston in the bath where he left him alone for nearly a quarter of an hour when he can be seen floundering about and losing his balance in the water without intervention.
In a third clip, Preston can be seen suspended by his neck over the cot rail with his ‘lips turning blue through a lack of oxygen’.
Varley clearly took pleasure in taking these haunting images and kept them like a serial killer keeps ‘trophies’ of his victims.
The last day of Preston’s life is described Mr Justice Turner in his sentencing remarks.
This is what he said: ‘That afternoon you, Varley, were again at home with
Preston. At about 4.45 pm, Preston was having a seizure. You videoed it. I am sure it was caused by your further abuse.'
‘Preston’s lips are again blue. He must have stopped breathing for probably 45 seconds before the video had started and he takes on breaths in the first 15 seconds thereafter. He was plainly in need of urgent medical attention. I am sure you did not seek it out of fear of what you had done.’
Instead, Varley casually returned to social media and messaged a man who wanted to buy a kayak he was selling.
Eventually, after his partner arrived home at 6.15 pm, Preston, who was on the floor being sick, was finally taken to hospital where he was in cardiac arrest.
‘Don’t let him die,’ wailed an ‘inconsolable’ Varley who had to be stopped trying to give Preston mouth-to-mouth, a narcissistic, attention-seeking display that was described as ‘pantomime’ by detectives.
Preston could not be resuscitated. He was pronounced dead at 7.18 pm.
After 13 hours of deliberations, the six women and four men of the jury, unanimously convicted him of murder and 24 other charges, including offences of GBH, sexual assault, cruelty and taking indecent images of a child.
McGowan-Fazakerley was found guilty of knowing Preston was at risk and doing nothing to prevent his death, cruelty and taking part in a joint sex attack on Preston. He was jailed for 25 years. Varley will die in prison.
‘I never had any suspicions that anything was wrong,’ said a female friend who knew Varley for more than two decades.
‘Everything he messaged me regarding Preston was all happy things, like going to the zoo and playing in the garden.’
She added: ‘You don’t want it to be true.’
Can she really doubt, after everything that has now come to light, that Jamie Varley is in fact the epitome of evil? That he possesses all the twisted ingredients of the ‘Dark Triad’?