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

[IwantToRetire]

Distressing content
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A former teacher has been found guilty of sexually abusing and murdering a baby boy that he planned to adopt.

Jamie Varley, 37, was convicted at Preston Crown Court of murder, child cruelty, sexual offences and indecent images relating to 13-month-old Preston Davey.

John McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, was convicted of allowing the death of a child, child cruelty and sexual assault.

Varley was in the process of adopting baby Preston (also known as Elijah) with his partner McGowan-Fazakerley. Just four months after being placed with the couple, Preston was taken to Blackpool Victoria Hospital unconscious and in cardiac arrest. Sadly, Preston could not be saved.

Varley tried falsely claiming that Preston had accidentally drowned in a bath, but prosecutors were able to prove that his injuries were consistent with his airways being obstructed.

The evidence presented by the prosecution proved that in the final months of Preston’s life, he was routinely ill-treated, sexually abused and physically assaulted – suffering more than 40 separate injuries.

CPS statement continues at https://www.cps.gov.uk/north-west/news/former-teacher-guilty-sexually-abusing-and-murdering-baby-boy-he-wanted-adopt

More from a BBC report - also distressing:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyp77l79e9o

I thought there was a thread about this, but cant find one. But sorry if a duplicate.

I really only wanted to post out of respect for this poor baby and the horror of his short life.

RIP

This is from an article written about the inquiry into Shayla's murder and why the injuries were overlooked.

The reason for this is given as that the adoptive parents would inevitably be seen through a positive lens, as adoption is inevitably seen as a positive thing for a child. Thus as the Review concedes there was a ‘lack of professional curiosity’ regarding S’s experiences.

'the child while still legally a child looked after, was considered an adopted child and so this shaped the way professionals shared information.’

I suspect what we are seeing here is the logical conclusion of the mantra that ‘adoption is best’ and that ‘children need to be rescued’.

childprotectionresource.online/if-a-parent-has-parental-responsibility-and-no-one-cares-what-remedies-do-they-have/

I do understand what you’re saying but I don’t think two cases in nine years (as horrific as they are individually) indicate that it’s a deep rooted problem prevailing amongst adoptive parents.

My worry with this case (and a lot of similar ones really) is that knee jerk reactions aren’t benign, they can cause harm. I’m not anti considering a female adopter has to be present for say under 3s (although I’m mindful that wouldn’t have saved Leiland-James) but I do think this case was a difficult one on the basis that Preston wasn’t hidden away, the opposite.

Should we be routinely checking children for internal injuries when admitted to A & E? Possibly, but that is unlikely to be practical on a national level so then we have to decide which children, and then it’s possible to miss some.

I really wish I had answers to this awful situation.

This is interesting. It seems clear there were biases involved in allowing and supervising the adoption, likely at different levels. When Preston was taken to A&E three times in the four months these two had him in their house, including with a broken arm, it triggered an automatic police notification and a review from Preston's and an independent social worker - both of whom noted unease in their write-ups but then decided all was well with Preston and his 'daddies'.

I can quite see the social workers simply not contemplating these men might set out to harm the baby in their care, whereas they might have been more alert to a birth family situation. I also agree as posted upthread that they would have been relieved to be dealing with the 'educated class' they themselves belonged to, so again didn't have enough critical distance.

A key factor throughout seems to have been that all professionals were willing to accept the accounts given by the men, more or less at face value.

How much the 'sassy gay dads' schtick was a factor, I don't know but I'm willing to bet there was an element of allowing them leeway - I think the idea of oppressed gay men has a long cultural tail, and some women are additionally weird about thinking they are lovely.

I didn't realise adoptions could be made by single men. I thought it was strange that JV and JMF were eligible to be in the adoption process having only been together around three years and with no formal commitment to each other. But it seems the bar is lower than I thought. It makes me uneasy - pre-verbal children adopted by single or unrelated males. I know that comment is hard on the nice men, great dads and decent gay men. 'Gay dads' seem to be a solution fallen on eagerly by an overwhelmed service.

One of the big problems is that as rigorous as the adoption process is there isn’t any room for ‘this doesn’t feel quite right to me.’

No idea how to address that.

Human beings of all shapes, sizes, genders, nationalities, sexual orientation and skin colour are capable of abusing other human beings. Some are more inclined to abuse than others but what will stop them or reduce possibility is getting caught, convicted and stiff penalties. And until recently the Christian concept of sin also held some perps back.
Unfortunately governments everywhere are reducing social service staff and budgets. Christian religion is dead. Also people's willingness to speak out either professionally or personally is reduced due to fear of being labelled homophobic/ far right / Karen / etc. Put those together and abusers can abuse freely like in this case. Sadly poor Preston wont be the last child to die a preventable death.

followtheswallow

It's a deep-seated problem prevailing amongst humans, not adoptive parents.
See the case of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, murdered in a matter of months of his father moving in with a new girlfriend. Or don't, because reading what he went through is just as gruelling as following the JV and JMF trial.

However, this deep-seated problem with humans is being paired with a deep-seated institutional blind spot about humans who have applied to be adoptive parents. As illustrated by the extracts from the child protection worker who wrote in the Guardian, quoted upthread, and Child Protection Rsource, an unthinking presumption has developed that the psychological phenomenon doesn't apply in adoptive parents. But it does, because they are human.

None of us know for certain how we will react to the stresses of sleeplessness while looking after the small child causing the sleeplessness until we do it. I personally did fine, but I had all the protective factors a human being can have. Given what I know of myself, I would probably also have coped fine with the tiredness if I'd been given a traumatised toddler evacuated from London during WWII, but there would have still been a greater risk that I could have got angry in my sleep deprivation. That's how being a human works, as opposed to being some kind of angel sent down from on high. It's not nice to think about, but safeguarding necessarily requires considering extremely unpleasant things.

It would thus have been in that evacuated toddler's best interests if someone external checked on the child's welfare and whether I was expressing anger at him or her for engaging in typical toddler behaviour.

We have decades of research identifying the risk factors for child abuse, and it serves no-one to pretend that it doesn't apply to any specific group. We say on MN all the time that there must be no sacred castes to child protection: not priests, not people wearing rainbow badges. Surely obviously not adoptive parents, either.

There's no need to engage in any knee-jerk reaction, as you put it, because that's not what's necessary. We just need Social Services departments to do the job they are already employed to do, which includes
a) remembering that child abusers are found in every single social stratum and,
b) being alert to signs of abuse, particularly when risk factors are already present.

The knowledge is there, so why wasn't it used? The attitude of professional curiosity was lacking, because the professionals had already decided JF and JMF couldn't be abusive. Just as they did in the case of Shayla/Elsie.

Even if the deaths of Shayla/Elsie and Preston were nine years apart, that is still too soon, and it demonstrates that the lessons were not learned from the case review after her death.

There have been other cases of abuse by married heterosexual adoptive couples.

Some professionals were swayed by "perceptions and assumptions" about the couple's class, professional status, and academic qualifications, the serious case review said.
The review's authors said this led to a "flawed" adoption process undertaken by Stoke social services.
Newcombe-Buley, 45, stamped on one child with a stiletto heel and hit one over the head with a dustbin lid.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-14230584

The review into the death of John Smith in 1999 in England at the hands of his prospective adoptive parents found, not only fundamental flaws in the assessment of John’s adoptive parents (with the result that procedures for assessing prospective adoptive parents subsequently have been strengthened) but also that professionals were too ready to accept the adopters’ explanations of events, with the result that the possibility of an objective assessment of John’s situation became increasingly unlikely.

A key finding was ‘J’s voice was rarely, if ever heard directly’

That transnationally adopted children with a history of orphanage care may be
particularly vulnerable to abuse or neglect by adoptive parent(s), is raised by USA data that 16 children adopted from Russia have been killed by one or both adoptive parents between 1996 and 2009.

The absence of voices of adopted adults who as children were
abused by adoptive family members constitutes a major silence in the research
literature.

Meeting the adoption support needs of adults who have been abused within their adoptive family
research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10909/1/SUBMITTED%20August%202013%20A%20and%20F%20Post%20Peer%20Review%20-%20Meeting%20the%20adoption%20support%20needs%20of%20adopted%20adults%20who%20have%20been%20abused%20within%20their%20adoptive%20family.pdf

I’ve read about social worker’s excess positivity about adoptions before. Essentially, the social worker keeping in touch with the family is the one who has recommended the adoption in the first place and so they have an unconscious bias towards them.

@AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment - I’m familiar with Arthur’s case and many others. Awful.

I don’t disagree with

a) remembering that child abusers are found in every single social stratum and,
b) being alert to signs of abuse, particularly when risk factors are already present

I’m not sure anybody could. My pondering is really if this would have saved Preston. After all, children and toddlers do break limbs, they do get unwell, they are taken to hospital. I haven’t followed the case as closely as some but my understanding is that Preston was twice admitted with illness and once with a broken arm and this doesn’t seem abnormal to me.

So then if we say that if there are risk factors (being an adoptive parent? being a man?) involved then extensive checks are carried out but this may lead to children not taken to hospital at all, either because their parents want to hide something or because they are anxious that a genuine accident would look sinister.

What this thread has made me think that the horrific case has put in the public domain the reality of the threat young children, babies even are under.

The majority of child abuse is carried out by family members or friends. So living with your biological family is not guarantee of safety.

This case shows that it can be the same with adoptive families.

And I am sure most of us have heard or read about terrible abuse in (some) children's homes.

All the people who carry out this abuse (primarily men) are products of our society.

Isn't it about time there was a conversation about how there are people living as though normal members of society taking every opportunity to abuse.

I cant find the words for what I want to write properly, but its frightening to think about.

Some stats:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/abuseduringchildhoodinenglandandwales/march2024#relationship-to-perpetrator
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/abuseduringchildhoodinenglandandwales/march2024#relationship-to-perpetrator

Up thread someone said something about not being able to read an article because it was behind a paywall. The link seemed to be to a DM article which I dont think is paywalled.

But if that was the article it can also be read hear https://archive.is/moRkr

I think you’re right. But I also think there’s a lot of yelling down about it - you probably have heard the there’s not a paedo round every corner you know! insistence - there bloody is!

Really wish some posters would educate themselves about the adoption process before posting about it.

This was never a 'choice' between Preston's grandmother or two gay men.
There was, first, a choice between placing Preston for adoption or opting for a special guardianship arrangement with his grandmother. From experience, SWs will almost always try to place children with birth family. But that is not always possible and there will be reasons for that that none of us are privy to. Do we know that the sibling didn't have any additional needs or was there certainty that Preston wouldn't have additional needs, for example, that might render a 60+ year old woman with cancer unable to cope with parenting a child until she was nearly 80. That is a decision not just made by Social Workers - it was a decision by a judge.

We don't know there was a 'choice' between gay adopters and straight adopters. We simply don't know what the matching process was like for Preston. The notion that because he was a baby there would have been lots of prospective adopters just isn't reflective of individual circumstances. Our son was in foster care from birth until he was 2. Lots of initial interest but then that came to nothing because of some uncertainties about his health. We were the first and only adoption applicants that weren't put off by that. We have no idea what specific uncertainties or needs Preston may have had that will have impacted the pool of adopters that felt able to pursue a match.

All of those saying that gay men and single men should not be permitted to adopt children need to explain what that would have meant for the nearly 4,000 children adopted by gay couples and single men over the last twenty years.

At the end of 2025, there were 2,060 children in active family finding stages of adoption, but only 680 adoptive families also in active family finding.

We know that adoption provides much better outcomes for children that years of instability in the care system. Exacerbating that shortage because of extreme and heinous cases like this is a dreadful approach to protecting children.

If you read the Office of National Statistics annual homicide reports, each report finds that the highest risk age group for homicide is babies under one year old. It is the same for the most recent report: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025

The problem is that when you have social services as stretched as they are after 16 years of local authority budgets being absolutely eviscerated, then of course social workers are going to have to weigh up risk factors when deciding what they need to prioritise.

I don't know enough to know if they missed those risk factors in this case - but those saying that struggling with sleeplessness and using weird language should be a red flag don't, I think, get the reality that lots of adoptive families live in every day. LOADS of adoptive families are in crisis. There simply isn't the support available to deal with the complex needs of adopted children. Social workers investigating every adoptive family who is struggling, or has expressed that struggle to friends, would mean investigating about a quarter of adoptive families.

So yeah - if you're a social worker and you're faced with a case list as long as your arm, and it includes a couple who have been through vetting who have expressed that they're struggling with sleep or twenty families with a history of violence and neglect, you probably are going to focus your efforts elsewhere.

The answer of course is to reverse the massive slashing of council budgets and put in place a genuine and well funded post-adoption support service. But I wonder how many Daily Mail quoting posters on here voted Tory/will vote Reform and contributed to the pressure social services are under.

Other risk factors, by the way, that people mentioned upthread are not actually risk factors.

For example, an adoptive parent getting in the bath with their young child. Not only is that in itself not considered inappropriate, it is a pretty common way to encourage bonding and attachment.

The suggestion that something that would be perfectly normal when biological parents do it become a red flag when adoptive parents do it is to misunderstand what adoption is. We are not babysitters on behalf of the state.

These people were not baby rapists because they were sleep deprived though. They brought an entirely new layer of depravity to the process of adopting a baby.

Incidentally, I wonder if they even had the most rudimentary knowledge of how to care for a baby?

Sorry, that was supposed to be answering @AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment ’s post.

I think so too.

Absolutely. Which is why people suggesting that the fact that they were complaining about being sleep deprived should have been a red flag for social workers are wide of the mark.

Lots of adopters struggle. Lots of adopters express that struggle. Lots of adopters express that struggle in terms we're not particularly proud of. My argument is not that that makes us child rapists or murderers, it is that it is impossible to treat that as a red flag.

Of course, a well funded post-adoption support service could actually spend time supporting the 99.99% of us who will struggle on while doing the best for our children, and in the process may well uncover some of the 0.01% who will go further (whether out of tragic cases of desperation, or heinous cases of evil).

But I wonder how many Daily Mail quoting posters on here voted Tory/will vote Reform and contributed to the pressure social services are under.

What a flippantly stupid "gotcha" comment.

As has often been the case on FWR right wing papers are quoted because the so called left liberal papers edit their commentry.

The DM link I posted is because, whether you think it appropriate or not, the DM and other red tops do more "personal story" coverage and many are struggling to understand why the apparent request of a 2 month delay for the grandmother to recover from her cancer treatment wasn't allowed. Especially as Preston's sister was already in her care.

And please, do you really think posted on FWR aren't aware of how cuts are impacting us all.

And as the anarchists always used to say, whoever you vote for the Government gets in.

We have had cuts dating back decades. Only recently we are being told the welfare budget will have to be cut to pay for defence.

The problem is we all want Scandinavian welfare and health provision but aren't prepared to pay the taxes that these cost.

If anyone is to blame it is the MSM that stops any sort of rational discussion and just goes for screaming headlines. A bit like your comment.

I don't think it's unreasonable to discuss what might be done after Preston, in changing professional practice or screening / monitoring adoptive parents - it's not about attacking either group, it's about supporting as much as anything. Adoptive parents should not be being left to struggle.

The context is the services' understaffing and funding issues which are big, structural problems. The unspoken context is that it is, and always has been, hard to get people to take on others' children. People like the idea that society looks after them, but in a more abstract way, hence the historic catastrophic failures in children's homes and children's charities. People in general don't feel the same way about others' children as they do about their own and are glad to be told someone else is taking care of things.

I do think Preston's case will impact the future though. Screening is one area, how challenging is it, is it tailored or standard? Do any criteria need changing? Does the hospital warnings procedure work the same way in every case? - what weight is given to different professionals, to timescale etc? Do you need to change the nature of monitoring of a pre-verbal child, should monitoring and help be arranged differently? Does the brief of the child's soc worker versus the parents' sw need looking at? Just examples.

Certainly the case should add something to professional awareness: two professional financially sound men, one with safeguarding accreditations who worked with kids, super 'gay daddies' adopted a baby and did this - their believability shouldn't have rested on any of these factors, professionals should have been actively enquiring, pushing if needed. Also, the pattern of injuries to Preston that failed to flag more than parent-controlled visits should now be in professional memory-banks and there should be discussion about what triggers a full medical exam in a pre-verbal child.

It's reasonable to ask if anything more could have been done, catastrophies should shake up professional ideas, but there are of course two degenerate people who are on the hook in Preston's case.

Isn’t a broken arm in a child of Preston’s age extremely unusual?

It’s not a gotcha comment. It is a reflection that a great many people most vocal about how this is all the result of some awful wokeness will have voted for the cuts that make failures much more likely.

I do think Preston's case will impact the future though. Screening is one area, how challenging is it, is it tailored or standard? Do any criteria need changing? Does the hospital warnings procedure work the same way in every case? - what weight is given to different professionals, to timescale etc? Do you need to change the nature of monitoring of a pre-verbal child, should monitoring and help be arranged differently? Does the brief of the child's soc worker versus the parents' sw need looking at? Just examples.

Certainly the case should add something to professional awareness: two professional financially sound men, one with safeguarding accreditations who worked with kids, super 'gay daddies' adopted a baby and did this - their believability shouldn't have rested on any of these factors, professionals should have been actively enquiring, pushing if needed. Also, the pattern of injuries to Preston that failed to flag more than parent-controlled visits should now be in professional memory-banks and there should be discussion about what triggers a full medical exam in a pre-verbal child.

Yes, it absolutely should. As @AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment has pointed out, there's been DECADES of research on not only shaken baby syndrome but other risk factors and things to watch out for, it has long been known and it has long been a feature of good safeguarding protocol. Whether it's being followed or people who should be aware of it are aware of it and why they aren't or it isn't is another matter. Literally none of this is "new".

Nobody was saying, btw, that merely mentioning sleep deprivation in itself was a "red flag". That's normal in new parents and not the smoking gun in those text messages. The red flag to me is "dead meat". As well as basic red flag and pattern recognition, which a great many of us are familiar with, even if it seems that sadly a number of the professionals in Preston's case were not.

It's quite useful, for those not familiar with the detail, to look at the timeline (warning: it is pretty stark and upsetting).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c621ky4e52xo

It should be fairly obvious to most, I'd have thought, where some of the gaps were. Remember also, that the professionals are SUPPOSED to be trained to recognise this stuff. Being able to spot red flags is really nothing new, and again, you don't need proof that something definitely IS wrong, just enough concern and curiosity to look deeper.