The Director of Public Prosecutions has apologised for failures that left sexual predator Simon Levy free to kill two women, saying the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is "deeply sorry" for its part in the case.
Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, made the apology six days after CPS errors first emerged, following criticism from Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who blasted the justice system for releasing Levy.
Apology and acknowledgement of failures
Mr Parkinson said: "I think the Metropolitan Police Commissioner is absolutely right to recognise that there have been failures across the criminal justice system and we are responsible for part of that so I do want to acknowledge our failures and apologise."
He added: "I would like to say that in my thoughts are the victims in this case, their families and indeed all women or victims who look to the criminal justice system for protection. There were failures, we were responsible for some of those failures, and I'm deeply sorry."
Prosecution errors before killings
Prosecutors did not request an arrest warrant for Levy 13 days before he killed Sheryl Wilkins, and they failed to tell the judge he was being investigated for the murder of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, as well as a separate alleged rape.
Levy, 40, killed grandmother Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo, 53, in March 2025 and mother-of-four Sheryl Wilkins, 39, in August that year. He had already subjected a third vulnerable woman to a rape in the same car park where Sheryl's body was later found, and the surviving victim had told police where her attacker lived.
Met Commissioner criticises justice system
Sir Mark Rowley had earlier criticised the justice system for releasing Levy while defending his force's role in the catalogue of failings. He told the BBC's Today programme: "There's no-one from the court service, no-one from CPS, no-one from probation stepping forward and talking about their failures."
The Met "will always be publicly accountable, we're the agency closest to the public", he added. "The reason we're really worried and concerned by what's going on is we're the ones who see victims day in and day out … we had a case the other day of a sex offender who should have been remanded in custody, bailed to an address two doors down from his victim. These things are happening routinely and it really worries us because we're close to those victims."
His officers regularly handle cases of "prolific knife offenders" who are repeatedly charged with carrying the weapons, and sometimes using them, but bailed back onto the streets, he said. "It's harder and harder to get these cases through the courts. We've got cases in London, assaulting emergency worker cases, domestic violence triangulation cases, being listed for 2029, 2030 – those risks are carried in the community," Sir Mark added.
Nothing happens when offenders are arrested for breaching their electronic tags "so it becomes a pointless endeavour" if it is "zero jeopardy", he added.
Sex offender numbers and police resources
There are currently 10,800 registered sex offenders in London and the number grows by 100 every three months, Sir Mark told the programme. "Meanwhile, the Met that I lead today is 4,000 people smaller than it was four years ago, this is a systemic disinvestment by successive governments in the agencies that keep people safe: police, prisons, courts, etc. The whole system is struggling and because the risk eventually lands in communities, then people say, 'well, the police need to deal with this' – we need to be realistic about what's achievable. A lot of those 10,800 people are dangerous, that is far more than our counter-terrorism colleagues are monitoring on a daily basis closely."
Dozens of women have come forward to say they may have been victims of Levy, a source has revealed. The Metropolitan Police is understood to be considering forming a special team to deal with the flood of reports following a series of disastrous decisions that previously left Levy free to kill. He was given a rare whole-life order, meaning he will never be released, at the Old Bailey on Wednesday.
Mina Smallman, whose daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were killed in a north London park in 2020, claimed on Thursday that Britain's biggest police force is incapable of change. Two police officers were jailed in 2021 after taking photographs of the dead bodies of her daughters and sharing the images in WhatsApp groups, referring to them as "dead birds". Commenting on the Levy case, she said: "One of the women that was murdered, because she was a sex worker, she wasn't taken seriously. They didn't look into her murder until he murdered a mother-of-four, and then they joined the two cases together. How ridiculous is that. Once again, the Met is deciding who matters. Both those women's lives were important to their families, how dare they decide that they weren't going to look into that case."
The Ministry of Justice and the CPS have been approached for comment.
