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Reader advisory: I’m not kidding, this is a shocker.
There are some sights I wish I’d never seen and some stories I wish I’d never read. I’ll warn readers now: this is one of the latter. Reader discretion is advised, and believe me, I don’t say that lightly.
One of my longest-held convictions has been to adamantly oppose the death penalty. In recent years, too many crimes have demonstrated such appalling depths of depravity that that conviction has been shaken to the core. This story is so unremittingly evil that my anti-death penalty conviction has been completely overturned. While I don’t advocate routinely executing people for even some typically capital crimes, there are some crimes so evil, with no room for doubt, that the perpetrators simply don’t deserve to live.
This is one such case.
As I reported some months ago, two homosexual men were on trial over the death of the baby boy they’d adopted. The trial has concluded. What it heard was so horrific that the jurors will be exempt from jury service for the rest of their lives.
A teacher has been found guilty of sexually abusing and murdering the 13-month-old baby boy he adopted with his partner.
Preston Davey died in July 2023 at the hands of Jamie Varley, 37, who took a year off work to adopt him […]
His partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, has been found guilty of sexual assault, child cruelty and allowing the death of a child. The pair will be sentenced on Thursday.
In a saner world, the sentence would be death. With extreme prejudice.
Preston Davey was adopted in April 2023 by the two men in Blackpool. Less than four months later he was dead.
Preston arrived in their care a happy, healthy baby who had spent his first nine months with foster parents. By the time he died he had suffered more than 40 injuries, including fractures, bruises, abrasions on his anus and internal trauma, including “unnatural” injuries to his pelvic organs. A post-mortem found a perforated bowel. The cause of death was acute upper airways obstruction after “objects” were forced into his mouth. He had also been sexually abused in other ways and used as a prop to produce child pornography.
Nothing could equal the suffering inflicted on little Preston in the short time he was placed in the clutches of these two evil – and I do not use the word lightly – men. But the BBC’s anodyne reporting certainly heaps insult on his memory.
Its report on the convictions is a masterclass in institutional euphemism. It refers to the killers as “adoptive parents” and “his partner” and “two men”. It mentions three visits to Blackpool Victoria Hospital in the months before his death for suspicious bruises that were “explained away”. Although how they explained away the bite mark on his bottom, noted six weeks before his death, defies comprehension. It notes that Preston had been seen by several social workers. It does not dwell on what those explanations were or why no one acted.
Det Ch Insp Andy Fallows said the two men were “pure evil”.
“Almost from day one, they set about abusing Preston and making his short life a harrowing tale of misery and pain,” he said.
“For the first nine months of his life Preston was a happy and healthy child but by the end he was a broken shell.
“This was due to the sordid and wicked acts of Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley.”
Karen Tonge for the Crown Prosecution Service said it was one of the “most shocking and horrific cases I have dealt with in my career”.
Yet the BBC’s account is strangely bloodless. It warns that the article contains distressing information, then carefully avoids spelling out the worst of it. The public is left to fill in the blanks from the bare facts of 40 injuries, sexual abuse and a dead toddler.
This case raises obvious and urgent questions about the adoption process itself. Three hospital visits in four months with visible injuries should have triggered immediate action. Social workers were involved. The adoptive couple had been through the usual checks. Either the checks were inadequate or someone chose not to see what was in front of them.
The comparison with the Muslim Child-Rape gangs scandal is unavoidable. In those cases, authorities repeatedly failed to act because they feared being labelled racist. Here the fear may have been different, but the result was the same: warnings were ignored and a child was left in the hands of predators. Political correctness, or simple institutional cowardice, appears to have operated as a shield once again.
Oldham Council and the regional adoption agency have announced the inevitable reviews. They will no doubt discover that procedures were followed and lessons will be learned. They always are. Preston Davey is still dead.
The men who destroyed him will be sentenced this week. The rest of us are left wondering how a system supposedly designed to protect the most vulnerable could have placed a defenceless baby into their care and then looked the other way while he was systematically tortured to death.
Some crimes are so evil that the usual arguments against capital punishment lose all force. This is one of them.
