Two Toddlers Murdered in Blackpool, Both Failed by Same Hospital. Calls Mount to Merge the Reviews.

Two Dead Toddlers, One Hospital, Zero Excuses

Jamie Varley received a whole life prison term last week after a jury at Preston Crown Court found him guilty of murdering 13-month-old Preston Davey, along with rape and a series of other charges. His partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, was sentenced to 25 years for allowing the child's death and sexual offences, according to The Guardian.

Prosecutor Peter Wright KC told the court that over four months, Preston was "routinely ill-treated, sexually abused and physically assaulted." A postmortem found 40 external and internal trauma injuries consistent with "forcible penetration." Varley had told medics at Blackpool Victoria Hospital's A&E that Preston was injured in a bath accident. He showed staff a video on his phone to support that account. The video, it later emerged, was recorded 12 days before the visit and could NOT explain fresh bruising.

Preston visited the A&E three times in his final weeks. He died on July 27, 2023.

The Second Child Nobody Is Talking About

One day before Preston's last A&E visit, a different toddler was seen at the same Blackpool Victoria Hospital. That was Damion Russell, two years old. Medics spotted a bruise on his head and did not ask his father, Daniel Hardcastle, what caused it. According to the BBC, a safeguarding practice review completed in November 2024 by the Blackpool Safeguarding Children Partnership found this fell short of "expected practice."

Hardcastle was jailed for life in July 2024 with a minimum term of 22 years after murdering Damion in August 2023, just weeks after Preston died. A judge at the sentencing hearing described the boy as "covered in injuries, top to toe and front to back," including an adult bite mark. Damion died of a brain injury in what the court called a "horrifically violent" attack, the BBC reported.

Hardcastle had only recently been granted sole custody of his son.

One Pattern, Two Cases

Both children were toddlers murdered by a parent. Both had contact with Blackpool Victoria Hospital in the weeks before they died. In both cases, warning signs were present and went unaddressed.

Both children had also recently been removed from foster families and placed with the adults who killed them. That transition point, from foster care to a new placement, now sits at the center of the safeguarding questions being raised.

An independent review into the agencies involved in Preston's case is already under way. But that review does not currently cover Damion.

The Push for a Combined Inquiry

Blackpool South's Labour MP Chris Webb and Fylde MP Andrew Snowden have both called for a public inquiry into safeguarding failures connected to Preston Davey, according to the BBC. Webb told the Blackpool Lead: "We need to do better, and we know that the state has been failing these young kids, young babies."

Hannah Joy Hocking, a friend of Damion's biological mother who has been helping her navigate the process, is now pushing for Damion's case to be included in any inquiry. The BBC reported her argument directly: the same hospital, the same time period, the same type of failure.

Blackpool's coroners' service has the authority to look at whether there were wider causes in each death. It confirmed Damion's case is closed. A decision on Preston's case has not been made as of June 25, 2026.

The Strongest Case for Keeping the Reviews Separate

There is a legitimate procedural argument against automatically merging the two cases. Safeguarding reviews are typically scoped tightly so they can produce actionable findings rather than sprawling reports that stall for years. Damion's case already went through a Blackpool Safeguarding Children Partnership review, which identified the failure about the bruise and named it explicitly. Expanding an ongoing review mid-process can delay accountability for the case already under examination. Critics of merger proposals are not wrong to raise that risk.

A tight procedural argument does not resolve the underlying question: if two toddlers died within weeks of each other, both seen at the same hospital, both placed recently with parents who then killed them, a review that only examines one of them will produce an incomplete picture of how Blackpool's child protection system was functioning in the summer of 2023.

What the Trial Revealed About the Adoption Process

The Guardian reported that the case raises "wider questions about local authority adoption processes across the UK." Varley, 37, was a teacher at South Shore Academy in Blackpool, promoted to head of year by 2023. He and McGowan-Fazakerley, 32, presented publicly as a stable couple. Neighbors described them as ordinary. A friend said Preston "was happy, he was smiley, he was beautiful."

The vetting process that cleared Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley to adopt is now under scrutiny alongside the hospital's failures. Preston was placed with foster carers five days after birth and moved to Varley and McGowan-Fazakerley at nine months old. He was dead four months later.

The unresolved question heading into any public inquiry: whether the failures identified in both cases reflect individual errors or a systemic breakdown in how Blackpool's agencies share information about children flagged during A&E visits. The Blackpool Safeguarding Children Partnership's own review in Damion's case identified a concrete gap in practice. Whether that gap existed in Preston's case as well, and whether it connects to how both placements were supervised after the children left foster care, is exactly what a combined inquiry would need to answer.