As someone who has worked with pedophiles, they never change. They are hard wired to find children sexually attractive and nothing else will do. It's like if your thing is oral or anal or vanilla missionary then nothing else will really do.
They need to be killed as quickly as they can be found.
David Shipley
Jamie Varley was found guilty of murder and sexual abuse (Credit: Lancashire Police)
David Shipley
18 June 2026
11:27 PM
The details of the case are horrific. Preston was a healthy, thriving baby when he was adopted by the two men. In the four months he lived with them he was taken to hospital three times before he was killed by Varley. On one occasion, he had breathing difficulties and had suffered a seizure; on another, he had a broken arm. For reasons which must be discovered by an inquiry, no one in authority intervened. Baby Preston was left with the men who tortured and raped him, one of whom would murder him. The post-mortem showed that on the day Preston died he had likely been anally and orally sexually assaulted by Varley.
No prison sentence could be enough for such men. A civilised society would send them swiftly to the gallows. But instead they are in prison. What can they expect there? I understand that up until now Varley has been held at high security HMP Wakefield, where he will begin his sentence. Wakefield has historically held a large proportion of child killers and child abusers, and is the jail where former Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins was stabbed to death in October 2025. Wakefield, and jails like it, are full of very violent men who often feel they have nothing to lose. These prisons are increasingly dangerous places. Even surrounded by other paedophiles and child killers, Varley will be at risk.
Wakefield’s most recent inspection, last June, described a prison ‘grappling with significant operational pressures’ in part due to ‘a shifting prisoner dynamic’. This jargon refers to a recent influx of ‘postcode gang’ inmates, who particularly loathe the child killers and abusers who comprise much of the rest of the population. As a result, ‘violence had increased markedly’. Serious assaults are up 72 per cent. ‘Older men convicted of sexual offences’ feel particularly unsafe. Inspectors found ‘no coherent strategy to reduce violence or bullying’. A child rapist and killer will feel afraid every day in a place like this. Perhaps it is no wonder then that when Varley heard the guilty verdict he collapsed to his knees, retching and vomiting. In reality it probably made little difference whether he got a whole life order or a very long tariff. Varley will almost certainly die prematurely, either by his own hands or another prisoner’s.
As for McGowan-Fazakerley, hoping for release by, at the earliest, 2042, he will probably be held in a high security jail initially, followed eventually, if he survives, by a succession of lower security prisons. Even in those lower security jails, he will almost certainly be held on the Vulnerable Prisoners (VPs) wings, alongside other sex offenders whose crimes would make them targets in the rest of the jail. VP wings are necessary; one of our newest jails, HMP Fosse Way, trialled a ‘mixed wings’ approach under which sex offenders were housed alongside the general prisoner population. This policy was ended after a sex offender, Mahir Abdulrahman, was kicked and stamped to death.
Many will ask why prisons should make such an effort to avoid violence and death being done to men who have killed and raped children. Many will hope that evil men like Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley suffer ‘prison justice’ – serious violence or death at the hands of other prisoners. While such a desire is entirely understandable, it is deeply flawed. Jails in which such lethal violence is a regular occurrence are terrible places for any kind of rehabilitation and very dangerous environments for prison officers who have to work there. It is not fair or reasonable to hope to engineer some kind of rough, random justice by creating an environment in which the staff are also at risk of serious injury or death.
If we as a society believe (as I do) that men like Varley, who tortured, violated and killed a baby, should be put to death, then we need to be honest about that. Let us change the law, and all take moral responsibility for their lawful executions, with justice applied in a swift, civilised and consistent manner. Hoping that other men who have done terrible things will execute the guilty for us is a position of profound moral cowardice. Justice should be honest and should be at the hands of the state, on behalf of us all.
