"How the Deceptive Killer of Missing 8-Year-Old Gained Trust by Helping Search and Moving In—Before the Shocking Truth Emerged"

WHEN eight-year-old Jamie Lavis disappeared on a Bank Holiday Monday in 1997, bus driver Darren Vickers came forward to help in the search.

He told Jamie’s distraught parents he had been the last person to see the little boy, before he disappeared, so felt compelled to get involved.

Jamie Lavis was eight years old when he was sexually assaulted and murdered before his body was dumped at a local beauty spot Credit: PA:Press Association Brazen bus driver Darren Vickers fronted appeals to find Jamie… but detectives became suspicious of his bizarre behaviour and he was arrested Credit: PA:Press Association Scheming killer Vickers poses shirtless with Jamie’s parents Karen and John after he abused and murdered their boy Credit: Cavendish For forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes, the murder of Jamie Lavis is personal Credit: supplied

He said he had befriended little Jamie, from Openshaw, Manchester, letting him climb into the bus cab, change the gears and hand out tickets.

Jamie had spent most of the day in that cab and nobody on the bus had registered anything more unusual than a friendly bus driver and a happy kid.

Desperate to find their son, the Lavis family welcomed into their home as he pledged to help them find little Jamie.

Brazen Vickers fronted media appeals for the shattered family, going on TV to urge the public to help find missing Jamie and spare them the ordeal of speaking to the cameras.

But it would be five months before they would learn the chilling truth.

Far from being the innocent bus driver haunted by the fact that he was the last person to see Jamie before he went missing, Vickers had sexually assaulted and murdered him before dumping his naked body at a local beauty spot.

And he even took part in searches that he knew were going nowhere.

Incredibly, Vickers moved in with Mr and Mrs Lavis and slept in their bed, with the couple offering to move onto the settee to accommodate him.

It meant that the twisted killer could revel in his at the heart of the family for months whilst getting the inside track on the investigation.

Now, in the first episode of her new podcast The Profiler, one of Britain’s leading Kerry Daynes takes an in-depth look at the tragic case of Jamie Lavis to answer one burning question.

Speaking exclusively to The Sun, Kerry says: “I want to hold one question up to the light, because it is one that forensic psychologists and investigators have spent decades trying to answer properly. Why kill him?

“The public understanding of stranger child murder is, in my experience, almost entirely shaped by what is most emotionally bearable to imagine. The monster. The predator who kills for the pleasure of it. The sadist who planned the whole thing, murder included. That figure exists. But it is not the most common explanation.”

Jamie Lavis seen at the bus station before he was murdered Credit: Manchester Evening News Jamie with Darren Vickers at the bus station, the last time he was seen alive Credit: Cavendish – Granada TV

For Kerry, the murder of Jamie Lavis is personal. Five months after he disappeared some of his bones were found in Reddish Vale, just a few miles from Kerry’s Stockport home and somewhere she used to play as a child.

She says: “It’s a local case and the community is local to me. But it is also a deeply shocking case because this is somebody who groomed an eight-year-old over six hours on the bus in plain sight of all the other passengers.

“Then he took the very unusual step of going and knocking on the family’s door – talk about bare-faced cheek – and inserting himself into the family unit and the family home. It wasn’t long before he took over the parents’ bedroom and then attempted to groom the other children in the Lavis family.

“He was very intrusive and this was somebody who was trying to control the narrative. It is very interesting from a psychological point of view. Grooming does not always stop with the victim, sometimes it can widen out and whole families can be subject to grooming.”

Detectives soon became suspicious of Vickers’ bizarre behaviour and, five months after Jamie disappeared, he was arrested on suspicion of abduction.

When some of Jamie’s remains were found, in dense woodland, he was charged with murder. He was found guilty and jailed for life in 1999 with a minimum term of 25 years. But he remains behind bars after he was denied parole.

According to statistics, of a child is rare. In the UK around 12 per cent of all child homicides involve a stranger as the perpetrator, but the overwhelming majority are committed by parents, step-parents, or people well known to the family.

Kerry says: “It is the crime parents fear most and the crime least likely to be the one that actually kills a child.”

Brazen Vickers fronted media appeals for the shattered family Credit: Manchester Evening News Jamie Lavis’ mum Karen, pictured middle, offered to let Vickers move into their home Credit: Manchester Evening News

Research shows that sexual motivation drives the vast majority of stranger child abductions, and while Darren Vickers did not have a known history of child abuse, Kerry says the typical child killer has offended before but for some reason has not been caught.

And she believes Vickers’ motive for murder was to ‘silence the witness’ in a bid to save himself from arrest.

She explains: “I imagine Jamie died within just a few short hours of getting into Vickers’ car at the end of his shift.

“It was the end point of someone who spotted an opportunity, reacted accordingly, committed the sexual assault, and then immediately faced the decision of what to do about the child who is now a witness.

“I believe that the murder of Jamie Lavis was Vickers making a calculation about his own survival. Jamie was well able to talk, and a child who can talk is a problem with only one solution to the child abductor who has decided he is not going to be caught.

“The killing is not, in the primary sense, about violence. It is about self-preservation. The child has survived an assault. The child can describe what happened, describe the offender, give a location, identify a vehicle. The offender’s primary drive was sexual. The murder is the solution to the problem created by the assault.”

She believes this is why Vickers then went one step further and ingratiated himself into the Lavis family in a further twisted bid to avoid detection.

She says: “It changes what the offender looks like before the crime. It changes how they present afterwards. It changes what they do next. And we know that Vickers went to extreme lengths to deflect attention away from himself, and even in the years post his conviction denied any sexual interest in children.

“The period after the murder is forensically rich territory. The ‘silence the witness’ offender has a specific post-offence profile. They are managing information, inserting themselves into the investigation. Monitoring what is known and what is not.

“Darren Vickers moved into the Lavis family home. He appeared on . He joined the search parties. He used a police scanner to monitor radio communications.

“Roy Rainford, the detective who led the investigation, called him a total control addict. What he was, more precisely, was a man who had committed a reactive killing to protect himself, and who spent the following months trying to control every variable of the situation he had created.

“Jamie Lavis would have been thirty-six years old this year.

Police digging for Jamie’s body during their search Credit: Cavendish Jamie, pictured at four years old, would’ve turned 36 this year Credit: Cavendish

“His grandmother said he was streetwise but a lovely little boy. He was both of those things, but they were not sufficient protection against a man whose skill was making himself appear safe.”

And while Kerry hasn’t assessed Vickers personally, she believes the Parole Board have made the right decision in keeping him behind bars.

She explains: “The are only interested in answering the question of whether he remains a risk, that I do not know, but I think the only right and proper prison sentence for somebody who takes a child and sexually assaults them before killing them is life.”

• Kerry Daynes podcast The Profiler is out on Monday 26 May is http://www.theprofiler.co.uk and links to her Substack for more in-depth analysis.