‘They were an ordinary couple,” said one neighbour. Their baby “was happy, he was smiley, he was beautiful,” said a friend. There were nobig concerns about the teacher and the sales manager who were doing what thousands do every year – adopting a child.

In reality, Jamie Varley and his partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, were child abusers and Varley murdered the baby boy they adopted, Preston Davey, when he was 13 months old.

Preston’s start in life was difficult. His mother was Sarah Davey who, it can now be reported, was jailed as a child for murdering a 71-year-old woman.

He was placed with foster carers when he was just five days old and at the age of nine months he began living with Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley. Over four months he was “routinely ill-treated, sexually abused and physically assaulted,” the prosecutor Peter Wright KC told a trial at Preston crown court.

On 27 July 2023 the baby was taken to hospital after Varley said there was an accident in the bath. He died soon after.

No evidence was found to support Varley’s account but a postmortem did find 40 external and internal trauma injuries to Preston consistent with “forcible penetration” and sexual abuse.

Varley, described by one police officer as an “arrogant, self-centred liar”, had a sexual interest in the baby, using Preston for his own gratification which led to murder, a jury decided.

Wright suggested to Varley he had used Preston as a “plaything” and routinely abused him “for your own amusement and gratification”.

Jurors at the eight-week trial heard and viewed horrific, distressing evidence of the two men’s crimes, which raise wider questions about local authority adoption processes across the UK.

Varley, 37, was a teacher at South Shore academy in Blackpool. He started as a technician in the design and technology department and by 2023 he was a qualified teacher, promoted to head of year.

McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, was northern sales manager for an asset finance company who regularly commuted to Manchester. “I lived on the M6,” he said. They lived in a semi-detached house in Staining, a village just outside Blackpool.

Varley told the court he had dreamed of having children. From a young age he wanted to be “a teacher, a daddy with a Jeep who lived on a farm”.

As a gay man he “just never thought it was a possibility”. He told jurors: “I never thought I would find someone to be in a relationship with that would be stable enough to have kids.”

That changed when he met McGowan-Fazakerley who pretty much moved in with Varley from day one of their relationship, the court heard. “My whole life just changed when I met John,” Varley said.

They earned similar salaries, the trial heard, but because McGowan-Fazakerley could get bonuses, friends were told it made more sense for Varley to take a year off work to bring up any baby they adopted.

Varley was described in court as outgoing, sassy, theatrical and something of a “drama queen”. McGowan-Fazakerley was more quiet and reserved.

The couple began the adoption process during the Covid pandemic in December 2021 and completed the first stage in March 2022. Because Varley was a teacher and there were GCSEs coming up, the couple delayed the second stage by six months.

Stage two began in September 2022 and they were approved by an adoption panel in January 2023.

The baby allocated to the couple was Preston, who had been fostered from the age of five days by Sandra and Paul Cooper who had fostered many newborn babies over the course of 24 years.

They had Preston for nine months and he was, Sandra Cooper said, “a very happy baby”.

McGowan-Fazakerley had no experience of babies but Varley babysat nieces, nephews and the children of friends many times. “I felt it was going to be a breeze,” he told the court. “But it wasn’t.”

Preston was not a good sleeper. “Sometimes he would be up 10 times in a night,” Sandra Cooper said. But all he needed was “soothing by having his head stroked”.

There was a gradual familiarisation with the adoptive parents before Preston moved into Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley’s home on 3 April 2023.

From the start, the couple struggled. The trial saw details of dozens of messages to and from Varley. Many were the message of any new parent: “exhausting”; “not having a decent night’s sleep”; “we’ve just been cleaning up projectile vomit”.

Others were more worrying: “we are struggling”; “we are questioning every choice”; “he’s just annoying”; “he’s very needy, screams all the time like he’s being killed”.

On 6 April, Varley 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.”

Varley, by his own admission, was prolific in taking photographs and videos of Preston.

Many were innocuous, like one of Preston in his baby bouncer listening to Wheels on the Bus on the TV.

But others were disturbing and used as evidence that Varley must have been physically, psychologically and sexually abusing his child.

They included photographs showing Preston with his head and arms over the top horizontal bar of his cot and his neck resting on the bar. His lips were blue and he had liquid in his mouth. It was “unsafe” and “dangerous”, the court heard. Rather than help, Varley took pictures for more than three minutes.

Another showed an obviously tired Preston being kept awake, deliberately, with music from Moana blaring in the background. A video showed Preston being spun too hard in spinning cups.

The court heard that Preston was “no stranger” to Blackpool Victoria hospital, having been taken there three times before his death.

The first was on 25 May when he was diagnosed with a chest infection. The second was on 30 June with a fever. On 10 July Preston was back with a fractured elbow – an apparent accident for which Varley took the blame.

Varley’s friend and colleague Janet Gee recalled him arriving very flustered at her house with the baby who had a blue plaster cast on his arm.

She told the jury: “He told me how he was having harmful thoughts towards the baby in terms of drowning or suffocation.

“He was still agitated at this point.

“He was very quick to say this was something he was not going to act upon.

“I believed him, I have children of my own and sometimes your thoughts go to dark places.”

The direct neighbours of the couple said they heard the baby crying more than was usual, with McGowan-Fazakerley coming round to apologise on one occasion.

Jasmine Nuttall said the walls were thin and she remembered thinking: “Why is the baby crying so much?”

A central part of the trial was about precisely how Preston died.

Varley told his friend Gee that he had put the baby in the bath while he had a shower then realised he did not have a towel.

“So he went out and when he came back in the baby had fallen out of the bath seat and was face down in the water,” Gee said.

She remembered Varley was distressed and crying and said straight away: “I promise you, I didn’t do anything.”

The jury heard that at the hospital the child was dry, had dry hair and did not appear to have swallowed any water.

The medical evidence showed that Preston’s death had nothing to do with an accident in a bath but during police interviews, a strained, dishevelled Varley stuck to his lies.

A Home Office postmortem examination found multiple non-accidental, internal and external injuries.

There were bruises and grazes to his head, face and mouth, upper limbs, chest, back and left thigh. Baby Preston also had injuries to his mouth, throat and bottom.

There was no evidence to support drowning, the court heard, and a pathologist gave the cause of death as acute upper airways obstruction by either smothering or an object or objects inserted into his mouth.

In cross-examination, Wright suggested Varley had provided a “wholly false account” and said his evidence was “all rehearsed”.

“It is all made up by you to conceal what you really did,” he said.

Varley maintained his innocence throughout. On the witness stand, he was emotional as he categorically denied harming baby Preston. He insisted: “That little boy, our little boy, had a brilliant life with us.”

He said he made so many videos because he wanted to be able to show them to Preston in later life. He talked about the amount of dancing he and the baby did, with weekly “dancing Fridays” where the family would dance and make each other laugh and “be silly”.

But the medical evidence was overwhelming. It took three years to get the case to court and the pair were convicted after their second trial. The first had to be aborted on its fourth day.

At that first trial Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley were casually dressed. Varley had long hair. In a court sketch they looked dishevelled.

At the second trial they were much smarter – each wore a shirt and tie and Varley’s hair had been cut. He took notes throughout. He was, one police officer said, “a bit like a chameleon”.

DCI Andy Fallows of Lancashire police, the senior investigating officer, said hundreds of officers and support staff had been involved in the complex, harrowing case.

“Any investigation involving the death of a child is harrowing enough, but when you see the circumstances behind this and what’s happened to that little boy over that four-month period, it’s really difficult not to be affected by that,” he said. “This child has been cruelly treated and it’s wicked. There’s no other word for it.”

In the witness box, Varley presented himself as a loving, doting dad. But there was another side to him.

“I think Jamie Varley has sought to deceive right from day one,” Fallows said. “I think Jamie Varley has tried to control the narrative and it’s only through working through these events and piecing them together and looking at them side by side do you really see that he is a manipulative character.

“I think even in his evidence under cross-examination, you saw more of an obtuse, spiky side to him. He’s a man that has claimed to have tried to assist the investigation and give the investigation answers in relation to what happened to Preston, but the reality is far different.”

Varley was, Fallows said, “an arrogant, self-centred liar”.

McGowan-Fazakerley did not murder Preston but was, the jury decided, complicit in the crime.

Fallows said: “They’ve tried to present as the perfect family, living in the perfect home, having the perfect lives. Instagram ready, aren’t they? Everything’s on social media, everything is brilliant and I think if you scrape away the veneer of that you come to something that is entirely different.”