A serial sex attacker is facing a whole-life prison sentence for murdering two women and raping a third after being left free to kill amid a string of blunders.
Jobless Simon Levy’s crime spree spanned from 2018 to 2025 and included myriad sex attacks and two killings, as the Metropolitan Police, the British Transport Police (BTP) and the courts failed to stop him.
On Friday, Levy, of Beaufoy Road, Tottenham, north London, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of murdering grandmother Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in March 2025 and mother-of-four Sheryl Wilkins, 39, in August that year.
The 40-year-old suffocated both women in sexually motivated attacks, with Ms Valencia-Trujillo found in a largely abandoned block of flats on the Aylesbury estate in south-east London, and Ms Wilkins behind a car park wall near Tottenham High Road, north London.
The killings came after he subjected a third woman to a brutal sex attack in the same car park where Ms Wilkins’ body was later found.
The jury found Levy guilty of two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm with intent and the non-fatal smothering of the third woman whose collarbone was broken.
Members of the victims’ families burst into tears as the verdict was delivered after the jury deliberated for 13 hours.
The defendant, sporting a pointed beard and sunglasses, gave no reaction in court as he was convicted of all the charges against him.
Judge Mark Lucraft KC adjourned sentencing until Wednesday August 12 and remanded Levy into custody.
Speaking outside the Old Bailey, Detective Chief Inspector Neil John, from Scotland Yard, said: “Simon Levy is a dangerous and predatory offender. His crimes were calculated, cruel and deeply disturbing.
“Throughout the trial, he has shown complete disregard for the victims and victim-survivor, despite being fully aware of the lasting and devastating impact of his actions.”
Flanked by Ms Wilkins’s two sisters and the daughter of Ms Valencia-Trujillo, he appealed for any more victim-survivors of Levy to come forward.
Ms Valencia-Trujillo’s children described her as a “big character” and “full of life”. She became a grandmother in 2024 and was said to be a “much-loved” member of the community with a love of salsa dancing.
Ms Wilkins’ family said she was a much-loved woman and was missed every day by those who knew her.
During the trial, prosecutor Tom Little KC said “predatory” Levy had targeted the three vulnerable women, all of whom carried out street sex work in order to fund drug addictions.
The surviving victim told police at the time that she had been raped and knew where her attacker lived, but she was not formally interviewed until after he had killed twice.
Levy declined to give evidence at his trial but his legal team questioned whether the victims had been smothered, since both were drug users and the cause of their deaths was “unascertained”.
The Met, BTP and Crown Prosecution Service have all admitted failings in how they dealt with Levy, who was on bail as his attacks on women escalated to double murder.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said it had served a gross misconduct notice on a Met police constable and a misconduct notice on a detective sergeant.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth, from the Met, said failures to remand Levy in custody at hearings at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court in May and June 2025 had left him free to kill a second time.
He told the Press Association: “There’s a collective system failure here, which has left Levy free to go on offending in this awful manner and left these victims at risk from his prolific offending, and that’s something which ourselves and colleagues across the criminal justice system will need to reflect on.
“His behaviour is self-evidently that of a very prolific serial sexual predator who seeks his sexual gratification in a number of ways, whether it’s opportunistically offending against strangers on the Underground system, or whether it’s targeting sex workers in the most horrific and harrowing fashion.
“Ultimately what we’re talking about here is a serial sexual predator who’s finally been brought to justice, but ultimately too late to help the victims of his tragic acts.”
Levy was previously jailed in 2021 for groping two women in the summer of 2018, one at Notting Hill Carnival and the other at a party in Camden.
He sexually assaulted a prison guard while behind bars in 2022 but was still released the following year, going on to sexually assault a woman on the Tube in October 2023 and allegedly rape another in May 2024, for which he was recalled to prison and released again in August that year.
Levy was arrested by BTP in November 2024 for four sexual assaults on the Tube, for which he has since been separately convicted, but delays in organising an identification parade until the following April left him free to carry out the rape and first murder.
When they took details of his Oyster card, BTP officers did not realise that it had been stolen from a bus driver, meaning Levy had a free travel pass that he used on the day he murdered Ms Valencia-Trujillo.
Following her death, he was released on bail at two magistrates’ court hearings in May and June 2025, with the CPS admitting that it had not opposed bail at the first hearing, and the prosecutor had not given the court all the relevant information for consideration at the second hearing.
There were another three crown court hearings that he failed to attend for various reasons, yet no arrest warrant was requested.
Less than two weeks after a hearing on August 11, he murdered Ms Wilkins.
The murders of Ms Valencia-Trujillo in March and Ms Wilkins in August were interspersed with sexual assaults on six women on the Tube and Overground.
As a convicted sex offender, Levy was being monitored by the probation service and police but repeatedly lied to officers who visited him at the home he shared with his mother in March and July 2025, claiming he did not go out and watched YouTube and films instead.
He played on the fact he was partially sighted – Levy lost the sight in one eye in an attack in May 2024 – claiming that it made him unsteady on his feet.
He previously tried to claim that his partial sight and wobbly, crowded trains led him to grope 10 women using London’s transport network between October 2023 and May 2025.
But jurors at a trial at Inner London Crown Court earlier this year saw through his claims and he was convicted of 11 counts of indecent assault, including grabbing the prison guard in 2022, and given an extended sentence consisting of a six-year jail term plus a three-year period on licence.
His victims spoke of their shock at learning of his other crimes, with one, who cannot be named for legal reasons, telling the court: “After reporting the sexual assaults, it wasn’t long before I learned that my attacker was already known to the police for sexual violence and is a convicted sex offender.
“You could not begin to understand the horror I felt at hearing this.”
London’s Victims’ Commissioner Andrea Simon said she was “appalled by the litany of failures to manage a prolific offender like Levy”.
She told BBC News: “I’m keen now to see how we can uncover every single key moment that there was to assess the harm that Levy posed to women by every justice agency involved, not just the police, but every critical opportunity there was to intervene.”
There should have been “a far more robust assessment of risk” at potential key moments such as when he was reported to prison and was released on licence, she suggested.
She told the BBC: “Practitioners are trained to identify this and recognise when offenders need to be managed under a higher level.
“Multi-agency public protection arrangements are meant to bring organisations such as the police, probation and prison service together so they are all working closely to manage the risk of offenders.”
