A serial sex attacker has been jailed for life for murdering two women and raping a third after being left free to kill by a string of police failings.
Simon Levy, 40, was on Friday 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.
At the Old Bailey on Wednesday, Levy was given a whole-life prison tariff, meaning he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
He suffocated both women in sexually motivated attacks, with Ms Valencia-Trujillo found in a largely abandoned block of flats on the Aylesbury estate in southeast 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 January last year in the same car park where Ms Wilkins’ body was later found.
The surviving victim, who suffered a broken collarbone, told police at the time that she had been raped and knew where her attacker lived, but she was not formally interviewed until after Levy had killed twice.
The jury also found Levy guilty of two counts of rape, grievous bodily harm (GBH) with intent and the non-fatal smothering of the third woman.
Judge Mark Lucraft KC sentenced Levy to a life sentence with a whole-life tariff for the two murders.
He handed him two further life sentences, with minimum terms of 12 years, for the two rapes, to be served alongside the whole-life orders.
The judge said the GBH offence warranted a four-year jail term, and it would have been a two-and-a-half-year term for intentional smothering.
However, he imposed no separate penalty for those crimes because the actions had been taken into account when deciding the sentences for the rapes.
Levy displayed no emotion as he was led away from the dock flanked by prison guards.
Delivering the sentence, Judge Lucraft KC told Levy he was being sentenced for a series of attacks upon “vulnerable women”.
“You are clearly someone who ruthlessly exploits others for your own personal sexual satisfaction,” he said.
He added: “You are someone who appears to have a morbid fascination with sex, rape and crime.”
Nazly Fuenmayor Valencia – Ms Valencia-Trujillo’s daughter – earlier told the court of the trauma of the loss of her mother.
Ms Valencia said: “There’s an emptiness that can’t be filled. I have been ripped apart… we will never be the same again.”
She described her mother as a “beautiful woman”, adding: “She was a truly special person who gave so much love to others. Her kindness, her smile and the love she shared so freely will stay with us forever.”
Ms Wilkins’s sister Lindsey Hicks told the court that Levy “destroyed our lives”.
“Sheryl was a beautiful soul who was cruelly taken away”, she said. “This last year has been the worst year of our lives, and the pain you have put us through has been unbearable.”
Following the verdicts on Friday, the Metropolitan Police, British Transport Police and Crown Prosecution Service 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. Scotland Yard has also issued a plea for any more survivors of sex attacks by Levy to come forward to police.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan on Wednesday said that Levy’s victims “deserved a system that believed and protected them”.
He added: “Time and time again, opportunities to stop him were missed. I am appalled by his crimes and the failures across multiple agencies that could have prevented him from harming, and ultimately killing, more women.
“Multi-agency failings need a multi-agency review and alongside London’s deputy mayor for policing and crime and London’s victims’ Commissioner, I’ll continue to work with the Met Police, the government and partner agencies to ensure that all steps are being taken to understand, learn from and act on lessons learned to ensure this never happens again.”
Levy’s prolific sexual offending spanned the period between 2018 and 2025.
He was 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. Earlier this year, he was convicted of 11 counts of sexual assault in a separate trial at Inner London Crown Court.
Levy was arrested by BTP in November 2024 for sexual assaults on the Tube, but delays in organising an identification parade until the following April left him free to carry out the rape and first murder.
Following Ms Valencia-Trujillo’s death, Levy was released on bail at two magistrates’ court hearings in May and June 2025.
The Crown Prosecution Service admitted 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 11 August, he murdered Ms Wilkins.
The murders of Ms Valencia-Trujillo and Ms Wilkins over eight months in 2025 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, claiming he did not go out and watched YouTube and films instead.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth, from the Met, said: “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.”
