A screengrab from bodyworn video footage of Simon Levy being arrested in September 2025. Photograph: Metropolitan police/PA A screengrab from bodyworn video footage of Simon Levy being arrested in September 2025. Photograph: Metropolitan police/PA Crime Police and prosecution errors left proven sex offender free to murder two women in London Delays to sexual assault charges and failures to report past convictions in court hearings gave Simon Levy chance to attack more women
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Prefer the Guardian on Google Catastrophic errors left a persistent and proven sex offender free before he murdered two women in London, it can be revealed.
On Friday, an Old Bailey jury found Simon Levy, 40, guilty of murdering Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo in March 2025 and Sheryl Wilkins five months later.
Levy was on bail as a suspect for the first murder when he committed the second, after police said they lacked sufficient evidence to charge him.
Months before the first killing, police arrested Levy for sexual assaults of women on trains but made errors that delayed charging him. While on bail, he carried out further attacks, taking the total to 10 across London. Although charged with most of the offences, Levy remained free and went on to commit his second murder.
Prosecutors also admitted to bungling efforts to have Levy remanded in custody, by failing to provide three court hearings with key information demonstrating the full extent of the danger he posed to women.
Read more Yet even before the attacks on women travelling by train, police and prosecutors knew Levy posed a serious risk.
He was first jailed for a sexual offence in 2021. While in prison, he sexually assaulted a female prison officer.
After his release, he carried out a series of sexual assaults on trains across London between 2023 and 2025. He was also the prime suspect in a rape investigation.
In January, March and August 2025, Levy, from Tottenham in north London, savagely attacked three women who provided sexual services, killing two and leaving one seriously injured.
The jury convicted him by an 11-1 majority of the murder of Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in a partly disused tower block on 17 March 2025. The scene was close to where Levy had lived after his release from prison following his first convictions for sexual offences.
The jury was unanimous on all other verdicts and found him guilty of the murder of Wilkins, 39, in a Tottenham car park on 24 August 2025.
View image in fullscreen Sheryl Wilkins (left) and Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo. Photograph: Metropolitan police He was convicted of raping and attacking a third woman, 35, in January 2025, who survived. She was attacked in the same Tottenham car park, eight minutes’ walk from the home Levy shared with his mother and sister.
Levy was impassive, wearing dark glasses because of an eye injury, as the jury delivered its verdicts, which condemned him to the mandatory life sentence for murder. He will be sentenced on Wednesday.
The Crown Prosecution Service, the Metropolitan police and British Transport Police have admitted making errors.
Kevin Southworth, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met, which investigated the killings, described Levy as a “predatory monster”. He said Wilkins, the second woman murdered by Levy, would probably have been alive were it not for what he described as “collective system failures”.
The litany of failings ca…