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Simon Levy Is Given a Whole-Life Order for Murdering Two Women in London

An Old Bailey judge ruled that Levy, 40, will never be released for killing Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins in 2025 and raping a third woman.

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Illustration: multi-tier prison cellblock seen from the floor

Simon Levy stood when the judge asked him to, and did not react when he heard the sentence. On August 12, 2026, at the Old Bailey in London, Judge Mark Lucraft KC imposed a whole-life order on the 40-year-old from Tottenham for the murders of Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo and Sheryl Wilkins, which means he will never be released. "You will be in prison for life," the judge told him.

A jury had convicted Levy the previous Friday, after a five-week trial, of killing both women in 2025 and of raping a third woman in January of that year. The judge called him someone who "ruthlessly exploits others for your own personal sexual satisfaction" and "appears to have a morbid fascination with sex, rape and crime." For the two rapes he added two life sentences with minimum terms of twelve years, to run alongside the whole-life order. The Guardian reported that he joins a group of only 76 people in Britain's prisons who are never to be let out.

Three women

Carmenza Valencia-Trujillo was 53. She came to Britain, her daughter said, "to give her children a better life and for safety." She became a grandmother in 2024 and loved salsa dancing, and her children remembered her as a big character, full of life. She was found dead on March 17, 2025, in a largely abandoned block of flats on the Aylesbury Estate in south-east London. "There's an emptiness that can't be filled," her daughter, Nazly Johana Fuenmayor Valencia, told the court.

Sheryl Wilkins was a mother of four, a day short of her 40th birthday when she was killed in August 2025. Her body was found behind a car park wall near Tottenham High Road. "You, Simon Levy, have destroyed our lives," her sister, Lindsey Hicks, said in a statement read to the court. Her mother, Mary, told Levy that her daughter had stopped him: "Our Sheryl has ended your chances of hurting anyone else."

Levy suffocated both women in sexually motivated attacks. The prosecutor, Tom Little KC, told the jury that all three of the women he attacked did street sex work to pay for drug addictions, and that he had targeted them because they were vulnerable. The third woman, who cannot be identified, was raped and beaten in January 2025 in the same Tottenham car park where Wilkins would later be found. She survived with a broken collarbone. She 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. Her evidence at trial, the judge and the lead detective both said, was crucial.

Free on bail

Levy was no stranger to the police. He had been jailed in 2021 for sexually assaulting two women in 2018 and was on the sex offender register. In November 2024, British Transport Police arrested him over sexual assaults on the London Underground, but delays in arranging an identification parade until the following April left him free. Earlier in 2026, at a separate trial at Inner London Crown Court, he was convicted of eleven counts of sexual assault.

After Valencia-Trujillo's death he was arrested as a suspect, then released because police said they lacked the evidence to charge him. Magistrates bailed him at hearings in May and June 2025. The Crown Prosecution Service has admitted it did not oppose bail at the first hearing and did not give the court all the relevant information at the second, and he missed three later Crown Court hearings without an arrest warrant being sought. Less than two weeks after a hearing on August 11, 2025, he killed Sheryl Wilkins.

The Metropolitan Police, British Transport Police and the CPS have all admitted failings, and the Met has said it is likely that Wilkins could have been saved. "There's a collective system failure here," said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Kevin Southworth. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has served a gross misconduct notice on a Met constable and a misconduct notice on a detective sergeant.

Levy was convicted by a jury of two murders and of two rapes, grievous bodily harm and non-fatal suffocation of a third woman, and the whole-life order is the court's sentence. The surviving woman has lifelong anonymity under English law and is not identified here. The Metropolitan Police and CPS statements on the case could not be opened for this story; it rests on ITV News and The Guardian's reports of August 12, 2026, both written from the courtroom.

Sources