Serial sex offender Simon Levy, 40, has been found guilty of murdering two women and raping a third, after a string of police and court failures allowed him to remain free. The verdict, delivered at the Old Bailey on Friday, brings an end to a crime spree that spanned from 2018 to 2025 and included numerous sexual assaults on women in public places.
Convictions and background
Levy, of Beaufoy Road, Tottenham, north London, was convicted of murdering Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in March 2025, and Sheryl Wilkins, 39, in August of the same year. He suffocated both women in sexually motivated attacks. Ms Valencia-Trujillo was found in a largely abandoned block of flats on the Aylesbury estate in south-east London, while Ms Wilkins was discovered behind a car park wall near Tottenham High Road.
In addition to the murders, Levy was found guilty of two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm with intent, and the non-fatal smothering of a third woman whose collarbone was broken during a brutal sexual assault in January 2025, in the same car park where Ms Wilkins was later found dead.
Court proceedings and reaction
Members of the victims' families burst into tears as the verdict was delivered after the jury deliberated for 13 hours. Levy, sporting a pointed beard and sunglasses, gave no reaction in court as he was convicted of all charges. Judge Mark Lucraft KC adjourned sentencing until Wednesday, August 12, and remanded Levy into custody.
Following the verdict, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said it had served a gross misconduct notice on a police constable and a misconduct notice on a detective sergeant. The actions of both officers are under investigation, but it is not inevitable that disciplinary proceedings will follow.
Police and system failures
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."
Prosecutor Tom Little KC called Levy "a predatory serial sexual attacker", who targeted three vulnerable women, all of whom carried out street sex work to fund drug addictions. The surviving victim had 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.
The Metropolitan Police, British Transport Police (BTP), and Crown Prosecution Service have all admitted failings in how they dealt with Levy, who was on bail as his attacks escalated to double murder. 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."
History of offending
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 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.
Monitoring and deception
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 ten 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. Judge Michael Evans told Levy: "You were on the Tube for one purpose only, to sexually assault women."
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."
