Simon Levy Gets Whole-Life Order for Two Murders After Courts Repeatedly Bailed Him

Simon Levy, 40, received a whole-life order at the Old Bailey on Wednesday for murdering two women and raping a third. A jury convicted him on Friday, August 7. The sentence means he dies in prison.

Levy's offending goes back to 2018, when he groped two women, one at Notting Hill Carnival, one at a party in Camden, according to The Independent. He was jailed for that in 2021. While behind bars, he sexually assaulted a female prison officer, according to The Guardian.

After release, he attacked women on London trains between 2023 and 2025. British Transport Police arrested him in November 2024. Then came a delay: officers didn't organize an identification parade until April 2025, according to The Independent. That gap let Levy stay on the street.

While out on bail, he murdered Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in March 2025, in a mostly empty tower block on the Aylesbury estate. Police arrested him on suspicion of her murder. He was bailed again, according to the Guardian and the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW).

Still on bail, Levy raped and nearly killed a third woman in January 2026, breaking her collarbone. She reported it. She told police she knew where he lived. She wasn't formally interviewed until after he'd already killed twice, according to The Independent. Instead of getting help, the survivor was arrested for breaching a community order when she went to police, according to EVAW.

In August 2025, Levy murdered Sheryl Wilkins, 39, a mother of four, behind a car park wall near Tottenham High Road, eight minutes from the home he shared with his mother and sister.

By the time it was over, Levy had ten reported sexual assaults tied to him across London, according to EVAW. He was charged with most of them. He kept getting bail anyway.

Where the system admits it broke

The Crown Prosecution Service admitted it failed to give three separate court hearings the full picture: that Levy had been arrested for Valencia-Trujillo's murder, that he was a suspect in a 2024 rape, and that he had prior sexual assault convictions, according to The Guardian and EVAW.

Kevin Southworth, deputy assistant commissioner at the Met, called Levy a "predatory monster" and said Wilkins would probably still be alive if not for "collective system failures," according to The Guardian.

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley went further on Wednesday, telling broadcasters that "far too many" dangerous offenders, knife carriers and sex offenders included, are being bailed when a few years ago they'd have been remanded, according to The Independent. He said the force had "already apologised" over Levy specifically, but argued the justice system as a whole "needs to do its job better" instead of dumping risk onto communities and then blaming police when it goes wrong.

Police can flag a suspect as dangerous, request custody, and still watch a court release him. If courts and the CPS keep waving through bail applications on cases like this, officers on the street are the ones left managing a threat the justice system chose not to contain. Rowley isn't wrong that the load isn't evenly shared.

But the Met's own hands weren't clean here. Southworth's "collective system failures" line includes his own organization. The identification parade delay was a police failure, not a court one. So was whatever happened that led officers to arrest a rape survivor instead of her attacker.

Reactions and what's unresolved

Claire Waxman, the Victims' Commissioner, called the case "one of the most shocking examples of systemic failure in recent years" and said she's "gravely concerned" it won't be a one-off, given how much pressure the criminal justice system is under, according to The Independent.

Deniz Uğur of EVAW said "clear patterns of offending appear to have been minimised or missed entirely by criminal justice agencies" and demanded urgent action.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating the Met's handling of the case. No individual officer, prosecutor, or judge has been named as facing disciplinary action or charges over the bail decisions, and none of the sources indicate any have been identified. Whether that investigation results in accountability for specific decision-makers, or just another report about "systemic" failure with nobody held responsible, is the open question hanging over this case.