Simon Levy
Introduction
Simon Levy is a 40-year-old man from Tottenham in north London who was given a whole life order at the Old Bailey on August 12, 2026, meaning he will never be released from prison. A jury had found him guilty of murdering two women, Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, and Sheryl Wilkins, 39, and of raping a third woman, all within the space of eight months in 2025. Every one of the attacks was carried out while Levy was on bail and being monitored by the Metropolitan Police, and three agencies β the Met, British Transport Police and the Crown Prosecution Service β have publicly admitted failings in how he was handled.
Background Information
Levy had a string of convictions for attacking women dating back to July 2018, including an assault on a prison officer at HMP Brixton in 2022, and was a registered sex offender under active police management. In February 2026, while the murder case was pending, a jury at Inner London Crown Court found him guilty of 11 counts of indecent assault β groping ten women on London’s Tube and trains between October 2023 and May 2025, plus the prison officer β for which he received an extended sentence of six years plus three on licence. His method on crowded trains was to tie a jumper around his waist, strap his arm down, and press backward against victims with his hand covered, playing on the partial blindness he suffered in a May 2024 attack to claim contact was accidental.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Convicted of double murder and rape; sentenced to a whole life order. Levy was found guilty of murdering Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins and of raping a third woman, and Judge Mark Lucraft KC imposed a whole life order on August 12, 2026.
The court heard that Levy targeted three vulnerable women, all of whom carried out street sex work to fund drug addictions. In January 2025 he raped a woman in a Tottenham car park; she told police where he lived, but she was not formally interviewed until after Levy had killed twice more. In March 2025 he killed Valencia-Trujillo, leaving her body in a largely abandoned block of flats on the Aylesbury estate in south-east London; the Met failed to treat her death as a murder despite arresting Levy soon afterwards and finding his DNA on her body. Five months later he killed Wilkins, a 39-year-old mother-of-four whose body was found behind a car park wall near Tottenham High Road; both killings were sexually motivated suffocations. Levy denied the two murders, two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm with intent and non-fatal suffocation, declined to give evidence, and was convicted on all charges after 13 hours of deliberation.
Sentencing him, Judge Mark Lucraft KC said Levy was “clearly someone who ruthlessly exploits others for your own personal sexual satisfaction” and, noting his disturbing internet history and collection of press cuttings about sexual crimes, “someone who appears to have a morbid fascination with sex, rape, and crime”. Lucraft said the offences reflected “a series of attacks by you upon vulnerable women”, that “the starting point has to be a whole life order” because aggravating features outweighed any mitigation, and that the case “cannot be described in any way as a borderline case”.
Public Reaction and Consequences
Families faced Levy with victim impact statements. Wilkins’ sister Lindsey Hicks told him: “I hope you rot in prison for the rest of your life,” adding “You, Simon Levy, have destroyed our lives and we will never get over this” and ending “Know this, you lose.” Wilkins’ mother Mary Wilkins said she took a “small measure of comfort” that Levy would never be free again. Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley called the handling a “whole system failing”, saying police had repeatedly asked courts to remand Levy in custody as too dangerous for the streets but “between the CPS and the courts, they kept bailing him”. Mayor Sadiq Khan said he was “appalled by his crimes and the failures across multiple agencies”, Victims’ Commissioner Andrea Simon said she was “appalled by the litany of failures to manage a prolific offender like Levy”, and former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips said “an idiot could have seen that” Levy was a risk. Two Met officers were placed under IOPC investigation over an August 2024 decision to downgrade Levy from high- to medium-risk, and two BTP officers were moved to other roles over “incompetence” in handling the case.
Current Status
Levy, 40, is serving a whole life order at the Old Bailey’s sentence, meaning he will die in prison. The IOPC is examining how he was managed by police from his first conviction in September 2021 to his final arrest in September 2025, including whether action could or should have prevented reoffending. CPS chief crown prosecutor Lisa Ramsarran admitted the service “could and should have taken a more robust approach to representations about bail” and apologised for the shortcomings. Detectives have exhausted numerous lines of enquiry into whether Levy was responsible for other unsolved incidents, including deaths.
Impact on Their Career/Life
Levy’s life sentence is among the most severe available in English law: a whole life order with no possibility of release or review. His earlier extended six-year sentence for the Tube and prison assaults runs consecutively within that term. Beyond his own imprisonment, the case forced three public admissions of failure β from the Met, BTP and CPS β disciplinary investigations into four officers, and commitments to strengthen bail handling and risk assessment in serious sexual offence cases.