Sentencing looms for two men convicted in a British court of crimes against an 11-month-old boy they had adopted, with a hearing set for June 18th to determine their punishment.
A jury reached its verdicts following a trial that exposed months of hidden abuse inside a home meant to offer the child safety and stability.
Jamie Varley, 37, a schoolteacher, faces the gravest charges: murder, two counts of assault by penetration, five counts of cruelty to a child, grievous bodily harm, sexual assault of a child, and a string of more than a dozen offenses connected to indecent images and footage.
Standing trial beside him was his partner, 32-year-old salesman John McGowan-Fazakerley, whom jurors convicted of allowing the death of a child, child cruelty, and sexual assault of a child.
Prosecutors established that McGowan-Fazakerley was not in the home on the night the baby died, yet argued he had long been aware of the abuse occurring there and chose silence over intervention.
The victim, Preston Davey, had already endured a turbulent start before reaching the two men. Oldham Council removed him from his birth mother—a woman with a murder conviction of her own—when he was only five days old.
A foster placement followed, giving the infant a period of stability before Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley cleared the adoption approval process and took him into their Blackpool home.
By the time of his death in July 2023, Preston was 11 months old. Varley initially told investigators the baby had drowned after being left alone in the bath, an account that quickly fell apart under medical scrutiny.
A post-mortem painted a starkly different picture, cataloguing 40 “traumatic” injuries across the infant’s small body, including a perforated bowel and damage to his rectum, mouth, throat, bladder, and bowels, according to the BBC.
Pathology findings pointed investigators toward “forcible penetration” as the true cause of the trauma, while the absence of any water on the child’s body or in his airways told police the bathtub story had been invented from nothing.
Officers further uncovered signs that Varley had subjected the baby to sustained psychological cruelty in the months before his death, conduct described by police as carried out for “sordid amusement.”
Although detectives stopped short of proving that the adoption itself had been pursued as a means of accessing a child to harm, a police spokesman noted simply that members of the public would “come to their own conclusions.”
Evidence pulled from Varley’s mobile phone painted a chilling portrait of his attitude toward the child, including private messages in which he complained the baby was “annoying,” alongside a video of the infant that he circulated through Snapchat.
Footage recovered by detectives showed that Varley filmed the baby on the same day he died, capturing Preston on a bed visibly fighting for breath.
Police laid out the sequence of that final day in a formal statement: “…on 27th July 2023 Varley recorded a video of Preston [left] on a bed struggling to breathe and in obvious discomfort. It was the prosecution’s case that earlier in the day, Preston had been the victim of a sexual assault at the hands of Jamie Varley. There was then a second assault on Preston which caused an obstruction to Preston’s airways… He was sadly pronounced deceased at 7.20pm.”
In remarks issued once the verdicts were announced, police offered a blunt assessment of Varley’s conduct throughout the case: “I think Jamie Varley has sought to deceive right from day one… He is a serial manipulator and a serial liar, and his defence has basically been everybody else is wrong… I don’t see any evidence of regret, remorse, or actually sorrow for Preston Davey.”
The verdicts close out a trial that forced a courtroom to confront how thoroughly a vetted adoptive household concealed sustained abuse from outside view.
Both men remain in custody as they await the formal sentencing hearing scheduled for next week.
